M i n d s p O r T Cloven In Clover
E4 Goats are wonderful l i ttle horned ruminants. They function well as literary devices, like in idioms such as “he really gets my goat”; or fairy tales such as Three Billy Goats Gruff; or acronyms like GOAT, meaning ‘ Greatest Of All Time’. They’re also useful in naming constellations ( l i ke Capricorn!); super for thousands of recipes; and totally bizarre because some of them can even climb trees. And, of course, needless to say, they’re absolutely indispensable when it comes to puzzles and problems where, if they’re not trying to evade becoming a tiger’s meal, they’re always tied down to something or the other.
Take this goat, for instance. It is tied by a long rope to one corner of a square house whose sides are 30 metres long. The length of the rope is 60 metres — long enough to allow the animal to graze over a large part of the property surrounding the house on the back, front and sides. What is the maximum number of square metres of this property that the goat can graze? For those who think this is too easy, consider the following spinoffs: ( a) Where on the perimeter of the house would the goat have to be tied for maximum grazing? ( b) Where for minimum?
DEAR MS ( The leftover puzzle concerned what you could attribute to six sets of alphabets that had been broken up seemingly arbitrarily. — MS)
All- GREEK- To- US- DEPT: ( 1) Letters that resemble their corresponding Greek letters/ Letters that do not; ( 2) No endpoint/ One end- point/ Two end- points/ Three end- points; ( 3) No enclosed area/ One enclosed area/ Two enclosed areas; ( 4) Letters that can be written without lifting pen off the paper/ Letters that cannot be written so; ( 5) Letters, which in Morse code, consist of only dots/ only dashes/ both dots and dashes; ( 6) Capital letters that look like their corresponding lower cases/ those that do not.
— Saifuddin Khomosi, saif_ sfk@ hotmail. com
( The second problem — lucky for me — can be succinctly explained by the writer of the following email which saves me the bother of repeating the whole thing all over again and taking up more space. — MS)
NAME- of- THE- ROSE- DEPT: Dear Rose, I have pleasure in inviting you to my 21st birthday party. Ironically, despite being your friend, I neither know your sur-