This "puzzle" is based on a real story that I heard form an amazing food chemist, Irwin Taub, who died a few years ago. Irwin was one of those people you could ask any "food question" and get an hour long lecture on the subtleties of biophysics.

Beef is red because of the oxygen carrier myoglobin that is present in the muscle tissue. Chicken has ( Read more... )

Plant Liberation Front aims to free photosynthesizing organisms from their terrible plight: to be eaten by people. Its chapter strictly forbids PLF members from consuming anything that uses sunlight for synthesis of biomolecules and all life forms that subsist on such organisms and their metabolic products. Curiously, their annual lunch features ( Read more... )

The US Army has to feed its soldiers fighting in the desert where food is rapidly spoiled. It desides to sterilize food using radiation. The food is prepackaged, and there is no indication of how it was treated. The soldiers like chicken but refuse to eat beef.

Why?

The case of the heretical teapot is hopeless. No amount of evidence - though it is all before them - would convince his peers that there was an external agent for the evolution of their kin upon Earth. To the teapots, the idea that unidentified non-teapot beings were in charge of teapot evolution and constantly meddled in the meaningful life of the ( Read more... )

Dr. Evil ( Read more... )

The race of intelligent teapots is exploring the dead world sterilized by the explosion of a nearby Supernova: our own Earth in the distant future. They began the excavations and realized that they were not alone in the Universe, as they always believed: the Earth has been inhabited! There are fossilized teapots to be found everywhere. The soft ( Read more... )

After years of unscrupulous machinations, Dr. Evil succeeded in getting his hands on a 10 kt A-bomb. His plan is to inflict the maximum damage on the Great Satan: the degenerate West. But the yield appears to be too small for such an ambitious goal. Also, his ethical principles forbid him from killing people, at least directly. He cannot, say, ( Read more... )

The perfect murderMr. Pill can kill his wife using “water” in several ways ( Read more... )

Finally, people invented the time machine. For technical reasons, it can go only 500 Myrs in the past and back. It has another unfortunate limitation: one can go back in time only to the same point in space. However, the Solar system moves through the Galaxy, and there is also cosmic expansion. Because the trajectory is somewhat chaotic, finding ( Read more... )

For something completely different, a few puzzles. These are my own, so do not bother to look up the solutions. Here is the first one.

In the late 1930s, there lived a druggist in London called Mr. Pill. Mr. Pill had a wife who was a woman of stormy temperament and forbidding appearance. They lived together for many years, but one day Mrs. Pill ( Read more... )