Hanging Around

Time for the new puzzler! We had a mechanic named crusty about a police detective that was summoned to the scene of a crime. This crime took place in a locked gymnasium. A very large room, maybe 200 feet by 200 feet. The room was locked and deadbolted from the inside.

In the room is the victim who has been hanged by a rope hanging from the middle of the room. And there's no way for him to have gotten there because he is dangling with his feet about three feet from the floor. It's a rope hanging from the middle of the ceiling, in the middle of the room about 50 or 100 feet from any of the walls.

So the police detective, Lieutenant Columbo, was summoned to the scene of the crime of course they have to break the door. And this took place during Spring Break, so nobody was there. The students all come back after Spring Break, and they see this guy hanging from the ceiling.

I might add that in addition to the person, the victim, and the rope, the only other thing in the room? Three basketballs.

So, the dead guy hanging from the rope, the only other thing in the room, three basketballs.

The police detective comes in. He looks around and says, "This is suicide."

How did he know? And how was it done? Good luck!

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

Person Hole Covers

Without further ado, it's time for the new puzzler. I have a plethora of lousy puzzles in front of me, a good plethora of poor puzzles. So I want to just pick one from among them, at random.

This was sent in by somebody whose name I can't read. So I will just claim authorship myself.

A long time ago, we had a puzzle about why manhole covers were round. It's so the cover won't fall through the hole.
That one has nothing to do with this puzzle whatsoever. I just wanted to introduce it because this one is also about manhole covers. Or person hole covers. Whatever you wanna call them.

If you tie a string snugly around the outside of a manhole, one that's two feet in diameter... You have a two-foot diameter manhole cover with a string around it.
And then, you decide that you want the string to have a one-foot space all around the cover. Would you want to lengthen the string? Yeah. You want to lengthen the string so that the space between the person hole cover and the string will be a foot, all the way around.

You would add how much string? You want to add 6.28 feet of string to the original string.
Now, armed with that piece of information, we can now get into the puzzler.

If you take the Earth? What's the diameter of the Earth? 25,000 miles or something like that... You take the Earth and you did the same thing. You put a string all around it.

Now, I untie it and want a one-foot space between the Earth in the string, all the way around.

How much string do you have to add in this instance?