There are two riddles that I have never seen solutions for in print. I believe I have an answer to both of them.
The first riddle is from the story of Alice in Wonderland. One of the characters in the story asks the following question:
Riddle Number 1:
“Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?”
My answer might be considered to be a palindromic homonym, as there are two ways to say this where the numbers are homonyms and their order is palindromic.
A Reven is a 2 legged 4 warning. A Writing Desk is 4 legged 2 write on.
Or
A Writing Desk is 2 write on with 4 legs. A Raven is a 4 warning with 2 legs.
That is the answer I came up with.
Riddle Number 2:
The second riddle is from the long shaggy dog story called “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. The starting point of the story is that the answer to “Life, the Universe, and everything” is 42. This answer, produced by a massive computer, which was not able to determine what the question, creates the goal of the story. The story is the search for that question. At the end of the tail, our two intrepid travelers ask a Ouija Board what the question is. The board tells them the question is: “What is 6 times 9?” and the characters throw the Ouija Board away.
Six times nine equals 54, not 42. Every grade school graduate knows this.
To understand my answer you have to know something about something called the base of the number system. Probably because we have 10 fingers, our number system is base 10. You write the number using only the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. When we get to the count of Ten, we have no character for that, so a one in the second column and a zero in the first is the way our number system handles limited characters. These characters could be replaced by a single mark for each count, but size and reading problems make this impractical. So we use these number and the values assigned to successive columns to write down large numbers without requiring large amounts of writing material. Well base 10 is not the only number system we use. Binary (also known as base 2) is the number system used in computer hardware because on, or off, are the only two states available to memory. So, 11010 in binary is 26 in base 10. Another computer used number system is Hexadecimal (base 16) which extends the number space by using a, b, c, d, e, and f as the numerals for ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. There are others used, but I bring this one up because it is larger than base 10 and uses letters to extend the character set.
The purpose of that discussion was to bring up the point that six times nine is only 54 in base ten. In base ten the second column is multiplied times 10, and this number system makes it clear that five zero (the correct way to “read” this) is five tens, or fifty.
But fifty four in base thirteen is 42. This is four thirteens, plus two. Four thirteens is fifty two, plus two is fifty four which we represent in base ten as 54 but in base thirteen would be written as four two, or 42 in that number system.
So the solution for life, the universe, and everything is to use base thirteen!
The reason is because in base thirteen there is no systemic round off error. In base ten the midpoint between 1.0 and 2.0 is 1.5. In base thirteen 1.6 is less than half way to 2.0 and 1.7 is greater than half way. Base ten gives an inflate value when the midpoint always equals a round off value greater than the average value of all the numbers. In base thirteen all the decimal digits are either closer to 1.0 or closer to 2.0. None of the digits are equal distant requiring biased round off.
So, we should all start thinking in base thirteen, whatever that means…