The Little Demon

New puzzler time.

This one is old. Short and old. But also quite good. Here we go.

A long time ago, when I was a younger man, around 1980 or so, this happened to me in the winter.

I pulled into the supermarket parking lot and parked beside a huge beast of a GM station wagon with a 400 cubic inch V eight engine. As I got out of my pickup, I noticed a young boy in the station wagon, pretending that he was driving like a maniac sitting behind the wheel. His parents were not in the car. The kid was in the car alone, windows rolled up. This would never happen these days. You can't leave kids alone for any reason these days. But it was the 1980s. Things were different then.

So, he's behind the wheel, pretending to drive. It looked like he was pretending to drive a race car or something. He was having a great time pretending. The car was off completely, he was just behind the wheel pretending to drive.

When I returned from the store, the kid's mother was there, and the hood was up. I asked if I could help. The car wouldn't start. The engine wouldn't even turn over. But the mother tells me that everything had been just fine before they got to the store.

What was the problem?

There was nothing wrong with the starter. There was nothing wrong with the battery. And there was nothing wrong with the engine. There was no mechanical failure. The car had run perfectly fine when she parked it. She goes into the store. She's gone for 20 minutes, she comes back and the little demon has wrecked her car. The kid did not have the key to the car, she had that the whole time.

What happened?

Hint. The little kid is not a red herring but an essential piece of the puzzle.

I'll give you another hint. This good samaritan was able to solve the problem by removing something.

Good luck.

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

Low Gear

This one is not that great, but it is what we have. Might be the worst one. But it is what we have.

So, here we go.

A while back, we were driving in the mountains, down those long twisty mountain passes. And while were driving there, we saw signs that said, "Caution. 6% grade next three miles. Trucks use low gear."

Now, they must consider a 6% grade to be a serious grade for a motor vehicle. And the way a grade is defined is this. On a 6% grade, the elevation drops or rises six feet vertically for every 100 feet of road. So if you were driving horizontally for 100 feet, you would have gone up or down by six feet.

I know that doesn't seem like much. But if you think about it, 60 miles per hour means you're going 88 feet per second. So if we round up to 100, at a 6% grade, that means you are dropping 6 feet, every second or so, if you're going about 60 miles per hour. When you put it that way, it does seem like a lot.

So, knowing this information, what would you guess is the steepest grade and percent of a drivable street in the city of San Francisco?

The city of San Francisco has some of the steepest streets that we know of.

So, the question is, what's the steepest grade of a drivable street in the city of San Francisco?

And for extra credit, what is the name of the steepest street?