Most speedrunners know about the glitch in Beethoven’s 9th where if you have the entire brass section make a quarter turn to the left at just the right moment of the open fifths the whole symphony freezes for a second and then drops you straight into the Ode to Joy.
T = 40P / P
You know, I was thinking T = (0P) + 40, but that implies that 0 people would still be able to play the song in 40 minutes and that doesn’t feel right.
Yours also implies that any number of negative people could play the song in the same amount of time, and that also feels correct.
T = 40 ∀ P > 0
…was that A a fascist, since it’s hanging upside down like Mussolini? 🤔
Was Mussolini a bat?
Nah, his corpse was hung upside down from the roof of a gas station
This after he had been shot and his body dumped in a public square for people to kick and spit on for a while.
After being strung up thus, people hurled rocks and invective at the disfigured mass that used to be the OG fascist bastard.
A fitting end, if you ask me. One can only hope a certain orange American meets a similar fate.
How many players does it take to play Beethoven’s 36th symphony in 60 minutes?
Undefined
Gives these vibes
That doesn’t sound like giving it 110% and being a team player. We are a family here. We need go getters. We gotta make it happen.
I was looking for someone to reference Brooks’ Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law). Thank you for fighting the good fight.
For anyone who hasn’t read The Mythical Man-Month, it is a timeless, compelling, relevant book on software engineering and project management. It is also accessible to non-technical audiences with lessons that apply across much of modern workforces.
Why couldn’t 9 women deliver a baby in one month? That’s perfectly reasonable. Put the baby in a vehicle. Drive. Maybe stop at some hotels or just sleep in the vehicle with all 9 women. Then eventually you reach your destination in 1 month. Deliver baby. Profit.
Well, nine women could produce a baby once a month (recovery period aside)
You’re the one feeding managers bad information.
With something like a baby, people know what’s going on and what’s meant. That’s why it’s the example. But when it comes to esoteric things, playing word games just confuses the issue and will lead to a manager thinking that indeed 9 woman can give you a baby in 1 month (I’m not jumping through your word games, you know what’s meant).
Making assumptions about what’s meant, and expecting people to make assumptions about what you mean, is how problems happen. Thorough communication is the cornerstone of understanding.
I think it refers to producing a single baby, rather than just a baby every month
Yes, which is why I phrased my statement as “Well, … could…” to indicate an alternative perspective. This was to illustrate that sometimes pithy reductive quips can be based on overly reductive assumptions. Maybe it is the case that a single baby is all that’s required, but maybe the author misunderstood the goal.
In this fictional scenario of the author’s creation? That just demonstrates the converse - that sometimes simple ideas will be deliberately misinterpreted in a convoluted way, to prove someone else’s point.
In this fictional scenario of the author’s creation?
So a straw man? Or are we supposed to infer that this is an illustrative example of actual behavior?
Pretty sure the answer is just “40 minutes” and it is a question to make someone think about what they are doing rather than automatically solve every task.
Or 80 and it’s a question to learn extracting information
Like saying “let pi = 3” the point isn’t that pi is equal to 3. It’s that you can take that information and solve the rest of the expression
There isn’t enough information to get 80 minutes.
Yeah, this seems like an obvious trick question.
I remember something similar from a kids riddle book like 30 years ago about cooking stuff in an oven
But it’s still wrong, though, as the 9th is about 70 minutes.
There’s even a myth saying that the 9th was the determinant for the length of the original CD.
I’d like to think it’s a really clever question about making people verify what’s written before them, rather than taking everything at face value and absolute fact.
Exactly
That’s how long it usually takes since usually it’s played with about 200 players
IIRC the speed of the 9th symphony is somewhat controversial because what markings we have on original sheetmusic are significantly faster than it’s normally played.
Symphony music in general is going to vary a decent bit depending on what bpm(s) the conductor is choosing.
Any decent conductor is going to to vary the beat based on how long it takes for sound to fill the venue in question. Beethoven’s choices for the music halls in Vienna might have made sense then, but not so much today.
One of the things that’s always annoyed the conductors that I’ve worked with is that we always ignore the dynamics in his music. Beethoven’s markings are expressive, subtle. And we always play his stuff louder than indicated.
Yeah, I’m glad we got the length handled. Those CDs that looked like a sub sandwich were so awkward to handle…
This is similar to something I assumed right before I had a long argument with a high school physics teacher. We ended up agreeing that he just didn’t really care.
Did you nominate him for teacher of the year?
Yes but he didn’t really care.
Assume a spherical oboist…
I see you’ve met my oboist
We need a player for every note in the score(tied notes can be played by a single musician). On the conductor’s downstroke everyone plays their note. Every note of the 9th played simultaneously. I want to hear this, but I don’t think that my poor old computer would function if I opened that many individual instruments in Reason.
40 minutes, unless they play really fast.
I would just write, like…
40 minutes,
P != TT = 40P⁰
(P=120 ∧ T=40 ∧ ¬(P∝T))⇒(P=60 ⇒ T=40)
20 minutes, because the symphony only needs to be played by half as many players
Maybe a trick question.
It’s a great question that reinforces critical thinking.
Having the tools is one thing, learning to apply them correctly to a problem is another.
It is. The original worksheet it’s cropped from says “beware, one of these is a trick question!”, but obviously that was cropped out because someone really wanted to create an opportunity to feel superior to someone.
Let’s say you put like 1000 violinists all in a big, long row. Then, have the first violinist play a note, then the second plays the very same note, then the third, and so on. Let’s say you could also time it so that at the very moment the sound wave from one violinist hits the next is when that one plays the note. Brrrrrrump! All the way across. Let’s also say you could time it perfectly so that the waves don’t cancel each other out. What would happen?
Like when Bart taped all those megaphones together?
I think eventually you reach a point where previously played notes would lose all of their energy, meaning there’s probably an upper limit on how loud it would get for an observer at the end. Something something Doppler effect.
Not the Doppler effect, as that only applies to moving objects, but instead the inverse square law, where the energy of the sound wave decreases by the square of the distance from the origin, since it spreads in a sphere with the energy being spread across the surface of the sphere, resulting in a very quick dropoff in the loudness.
I think this is supposed to be a trick question.
Based on my kids math questions… I’m not so sure…
I feel like a lot of the puzzles in Professor Layton games are like this. Any time you find yourself starting some complex algebra or multiplication, you need to consider rereading the problem and seeing if you just need to pick a number that’s there.
For example: A bus can travel 100 miles on a full tank with its full passenger load of 80 people. If everyone gets off the bus, then how far can it travel?
The answer
0 miles. With everyone off, there’s no one to drive it.
