24. If you said 12 for January 2nd, February 2nd, etc that’s close, but you forgot about January 22nd, February 22nd and so on. If you are a math whiz and didn’t need a calculator to perform 60 x 60 x 24 x 365, then 31,536,000 works too. If you used 365.25 to account for leap year, then you are a human calculator, but even that’s not entirely accurate due to the leap second. And even accounting for that, it’s only an approximation that there are 365.2422 days in a year.
As a result of temporary magical powers, you have made it to the Wimbledon finals and are playing Roger Federer for all the marbles. However, your powers cannot last the whole match. What score do you want it to be when they disappear, to maximize your chances of hanging on for a win?
It sounds obvious that you should ask to be ahead two sets to love (it takes 3 out of 5 sets to win the men’s), and in the third set, ahead 5-0 in games and 40-love in the sixth game. (Probably you want to be serving, but if your serve is like mine, you might prefer Roger to be serving the sixth game down 0-40 so that you can pray for a double fault.)
Not so fast! These solutions give you essentially 3 chances to get lucky and win, but you can get six chances—with three services by you and three by Roger. You still want to be up two sets to none, but let the game score be 6-6 in the third set and 6-0—in your favor, of course—in the tiebreaker.
A circular island with a diameter of 30 feet has a 30 foot tree stands at the center. A man cuts the tree down with his chainsaw, making the cut a foot up from the ground. The tree comes crashing down and hits the water but doesn’t splash. Why not?