measureless space
during widescreen
establishing shots
noiseless grey invader
observe this late 1970s future
in which astronaut miners
foul rare air
with absurd cigarettes
(we patiently await
NASA’s smoking phase)
give in to unassailable attraction
hold fast to strobing brightness
and ride roughshod
over bright smothering nightmare
until slow credits
trigger houselight-rise
Benjamin Dodds
(previously appeared at VerityLa.com in September 2015.)
Parabolic Puzzles
Paul Holmes
Carlotta’s Number Puzzle
Shortly after my encounter with the Trellians (see the last edition of Shoreline), my friend Captain Ricardus arrived at the spaceport’s Strangers Bar armed with a number puzzle which his daughter Carlotta had brought home from school. The challenge was simple: arrange the following pieces of paper into a grid which makes sense.
Firstly there were the criteria:
And then there were all the numbers from 1 to 16 inclusive, each on a small scrap of paper.
All we had to do was layout the criteria, in a logically consistent way, as labels on a 4 by 4 grid, and then fill in the grid with the numbers 1 to 16. By the way, F60 means ‘Factors of 60’, such as …5, 6, 12… and so on.
PRIZE DRAW - if you have the answer, send us a message through the Contact form on our website, explaining your reasoning. We will draw a winner, and a small prize will come your way.
The solution will be published in Shoreline of Infinity 5, so answers before 21st September please.
Answer to Puzzle: Many fingered aliens
The exact number of fingers, somewhere between 300 and 400, has to uniquely reveal the number of aliens. If it was 350, for example, there could be 50 aliens, each sporting 7 fingers, or perhaps 25 aliens each with a total of 14 fingers, or many other possibilities.
Even if we took the product of two primes, which would certainly narrow down the possibilities, you could still not be sure which was the number of aliens and which was the number of fingers per alien.
The only way to do it is to have the same prime number of aliens as there are fingers on each alien. The only prime number whose square lies in the range 300 to 400 is 19.
Therefore there are 19 aliens, and each poor blighter has to manage with an inconvenient prime number of fingers, which will make counting interesting on the planet Trellia.
Puzzles by Paul Holmes is published by The New Curiosity Shop and is available from bookshops or online.
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