The Pilot Who Wore a Dress: And Other Dastardly Lateral Thinking Mysteries. Tom Cutler
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unlikely heels, topping people up by the pool, putting little umbrellas in their glasses, and doling out to each of them at least eleven seconds of her white-urinal smile. And it’s at the barbie that Stu always does his party piece.
Someone hands him one of the company’s famous plastic buckets – he prefers to use a red one. He then hands back the lid, which he doesn’t need, and fills the bucket to the very brim with warmish water. He now asks for silence while he slowly turns the bucket upside down. It remains full. Not a drop spills out. He doesn’t swing it round his head, add anything to it, or put anything on the top – it’s an open bucket full of nothing but water. To prove the point, he puts his hand into the upside-down bucket and brings it out wet, shaking and flicking a few drops at his friends.
After a couple of seconds, or longer if people ask, he turns the bucket right-way up again. It contains just as much water as it did at the start. He hands it to Laverne, who can barely hold it because it’s still full to the brim.
Stu’s audience are so astonished by his performance that many laugh in sheer disbelief, and, if they didn’t know it before, realise that Irish Stu is one of the best showmen going.
Finally, with the help of someone else, because it’s heavy, Laverne empties the water out of the bucket onto Stu’s head, producing a round of applause and shouts of glee. Stu then dries himself off and goes in to change.
If people want, they can examine the bucket at any time (Stu has been known to sell a couple during this procedure).
The problem
How on earth can Irish Stu turn a full, lidless bucket of water upside-down in his back garden without the water pouring out?
The mystery
Bob and Jim are brothers. Bob was born in Hastane Maternity Hospital, near Drumroos in Scotland, at 8.15 a.m. on April Fools’ Day 1976. Jim was born in the same place, just seven minutes later.
Their mum remembers the day not only because of the happy occasion of their births but because of the Jovian–Plutonian gravitational effect that astronomer Patrick Moore reported would happen that day.
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, with a mass of about two and a half times that of all the other planets glued together. Pluto on the other hand is so small that in 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.
Moore told listeners to BBC radio that as Pluto passed behind Jupiter at 9.47 that morning, a powerful combination of the two planets’ gravitation would decrease the gravity on Earth. People were told that if they jumped in the air at exactly the right time they would stay up longer than normal and briefly feel as if they were floating.
Shortly after the appointed time hundreds of listeners telephoned the BBC to report that they had indeed felt the effect. One woman said that she and some friends had been ‘wafted’ from their chairs and ‘orbited gently around the room’. Not that you can orbit around a room when you’re inside it, but never mind. (These people actually vote.)
Of course, the whole thing was an April Fools’ hoax by the mischievous Patrick Moore. Although Jupiter is very massive, it is also a very long long way away. At its closest to Earth the planet has a gravitational pull only about the same as that of a Renault Twizy on an old man standing a couple of feet away. The gravitational attraction of Pluto is even less. It’s about the same as a marble 100 yards away from you. Which means that even the combined gravity of the two distant planets is far too small to cause a person to become lighter or float while jumping. It’s a good job that gravity is such a weak force, or the gravitational pull of Bob and Jim’s obstetrician would have caused the tide to go out in their mum’s cup of tea.
The problem
Jim and Bob were born at the same place in the same hour of the same day of the same month of the same year, and to the same mother. Yet they are not twins. How can this be?
The mystery
Jenny Brown and Margaret Green are lifelong friends. They grew up together, they went to the same school together, and they graduated from teacher-training college together. Both of them applied for a teaching post at their local village primary and they were appointed at the same time, in the same September of the same year.
Jenny and Margaret now teach in that school, in adjacent classrooms. The school is a charming Victorian building with a steep tiled roof, and roses round the door. It smells, as many schools do, of shepherd’s pie and pine disinfectant. It has about 120 children each year and at the end of their four years most of them feed into the large secondary school in the town.
Jenny and Margaret’s school is a happy place, with a good head, good staff, generous playgrounds, a large sports field and plenty of trees. Not so long ago a local supermarket offered a great deal of money to buy the bottom end of the cricket pitch, but the headmistress, Miss Jean Piaget, had other ideas. The parents carried her in triumph on the day the supermarket abandoned its scheme (they carried her metaphorically, that is).
One day the two young teachers were sipping tea in the staffroom and discussing mathematics. They decided to teach their pupils that maths is not just for passing exams but is a useful and fascinating subject in the real world. They devised a lesson plan in which the children in their classes would measure the length of every child’s arms and deal with the numbers in different ways, to arrive at the three different sorts of average: the mean (got by adding up all the different lengths of the children’s arms and dividing this figure by the number of children in the class), the median (arrived at by listing in order the different lengths of the children’s arms and finding which arm length falls in the middle of the list) and the mode (found by seeing which arm length occurs most often).
On Monday morning Jenny and Margaret called their respective registers. There were 28 children present in each class, with no absences.
They then explained the task to their classes and allowed them to decide who would be in charge of the tape measure, who would take down all the measurements and who would check the figures before handing in the final calculations. The children got to work, and by lunchtime the numbers were all written down.
In the staffroom Jenny and Margaret compared lists and checked the maths. Miss Tijdelijk, a temporary supply teacher, was passing through with a sandwich and asked Margaret and Jenny what they were doing. They showed her the numbers and to her utter astonishment she discovered that, although everything had been done in exactly the same way in both classrooms, and although all the measurements were correct and all the mathematics properly done, the average (mean) arm length of the children in Jenny’s class was three inches greater than the mean arm length of the children in Margaret’s class.
The problem
The children in both classes are all physically normal, and nobody in either class has extraordinarily short