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?

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

The Strings and the Newspaper

Okay, I promised two crummy little puzzlers for today. But these are not crummy. Doug didn't get either one of them actually. So they passed the test.

But you know, I realized the other day that we have a lot of kids that listen to our show, and the puzzles never give the kids an opportunity to participate. So for this one, you have to be under 15 years old.
These two puzzlers are for kids ages 8 and up, let's say. And adults, who think like 8-year-olds...
The beauty of these two puzzles is they can be as challenging for an adult as they are for a child and yet they are solvable by a child.

Here's the first of them.

You were in a room where you have two strings hanging from the ceiling. The strings run from the ceiling all the way down to the floor. And your assignment is to attach the two ends of the string that are at the floor to each other, to tie them together. However, you notice that if you grab one string, and you begin to walk toward the other string, you can't make it because you can't reach the other string. It's too far away. So you put down the first string and try to grab the other one. But it won't reach either.

But if you had both ends in your hand, you would be able to fasten the strings together over your head. On your tippy toes, you could stand there with your hands over your head and you would just be able to tie them together.

All you have at your disposal is a pair of scissors.

So the question is, how do you do this? That is puzzler number 1, the strings.

Puzzle number two!

You have a piece of newspaper. How big is a piece of old newspaper? A full-size newspaper is about three feet by two feet, let's say.
How is it possible that you and a friend can stand on the same piece of paper and yet not be able to touch each other? You put the paper on the floor, and both you and your friend are standing on the same sheet and you can't touch each other. So that's the second puzzler.

The strings and the newspaper.

These are not easy little puzzlers. These are beauties!