Silly Puzzles

Antarctic Ice Desintegration Rate

tegirinenashi — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:32:06 +0000

Ross Ice Shelf in the Antarctic expands with the average speed 2.5 meters a day . Assuming no iceberg breakage how long would it take to reach New Zealand?

The tipping point

tegirinenashi — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:32:01 +0000

Measuring global temperature trend is not easy. First, almost every weather station is subject to daily temperature variation (which adds a lot of noise to the signal), second there is ubiqutous UHI effect. There are perhaps only two stations in the world that aren’t affected by these problems. They are Amundsen-Scott and Vostok located in Antarctica. They both have a similar historic temperature graphs, covering almost half a century:

http://www.nerc-bas.ac.uk/icd/gjma/amundsen-scott.ann.trend.pdf

http://www.nerc-bas.ac.uk/public/icd/gjma/vostok.ann.trend.pdf

Based on these trends calculate how long it would take for the average temperature to increase a puny one degree Celcius.

Nature effect

tegirinenashi — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:14:21 +0000

Dr. Toad stidied extinction of certain frog species somewhere in a fogotten African jungle. She suggested some other causal mechanism rather than global warming. As a result, the only venue she was able to publish her results was Journal of Coloured Amphibia (or some such). Calculate how many links to climate change Dr. Toad has to introduce in order for the article to be featured in Nature magazine.

Widescreen — see more with less

tegirinenashi — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:58:17 +0000

The widescreen format aspect ratio is 16:9, the standard screen is 4:3. After visiting widescreen advocacy website Xander decided to sew off the top and bottom his standard television box to widescreen aspect ratio. Calculate the percentage of additional cinematic
material Xander can watch on augmented TV set which was hidden from his view before.