Derzeit ist der e-Mail-Club in erster Linie englischsprachig. Der Wunsch nach deutschsprachigen Mitgliedern, die in ihrer Muttersprache schreiben, ist aber groß, und immer mehr deutschsprachige Kinder und Jugendliche melden sich auch schon an. Lasst euch daher nicht abschrecken davon, dass die Beispiele, die ihr hier findet, alle auf Englisch sind!

Generell kann man sagen, dass bisher sowohl Rätsel als auch philosophisch-wissenschaftliche Fragen erörtert wurden. Es ist wirklich spannend, was sich hier so abspielt und es ist mit Sicherheit für jeden etwas dabei.

Derzeit sind Kinder und Jugendliche aus Australien, Kanada, Frankreich, Malaysien und den USA dabei - aber von Woche zu Woche kommen neue Mitglieder dazu.

Viel Spaß beim Schmökern all jenen, die Englisch können, sich mit dem Wörterbuch davor setzen oder sich die Texte von anderen übersetzen lassen.

1. August 2000, ein Rätsel für alle:
Good puzzle for all ages. You are imprisoned by an evil king. He offers you a deal so that if you pull a white marble from his bag of 2 marbles you live. If you pull a black you die. However, the evil king, being evil and all, will obvious put 2 black marbles in. How do you thwart him and walk out with your head?

31. Juli 2000, an alle:
Andrew on this list has xtra strong synaesthesia. its that the brain associates some of each of the 5 senses to anything we think about, but the one humans notice most is colour bcos our sight is our strongest sense. Andrew sees colours when he hears music. with a dog smell is their strongest sense, maybe dogs smell things when they hear music.

anyway here is a basic test to see how strong your sunaesthesia is:

relax and think of each of the days of the week one at a time. if you think about, say tuesday, does it begin to seem to you after a while that it has a sort of colour about it, even in a really faint way? Not any sort of association like I do gym on tuesday & my gym uniform's blue, so i'll say blue - go past any ideas like that.

everybody who wants, try this and email to the club what colours you feel in your mind for every day of the week, but don't anybody read emails with synaesthesia in the subject till all the emails have come in. Then we can compare everyone's colours. they don't have to be the same for different people but sometimes they are.

also email, did you see or feel your colours in your mind, on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is zilch and 10 is it blew your mind it was so strong.

29. Juli 2000, an alle:
There are some people who can determine square roots in their heads. For the rest of us, there is the Maxam Method.
NB - this only works for numbers with integer square roots less than one hundred
For example, we'll work with 9801

1- Range
Everyone should know the first ten squares, so they should also know the squares of 10, 20, ... 90. Determine which two your number is between. The lower is the first digit. :. The first digit is 9, because 9801 is between 8100 and 10000.

2- The fives
Determine if the second digit is bigger or smaller than five. 'x'ty-five is always x*(x+1)*100 + 25. ie, x times x+1 followed by 25. So 95^2 is 9025, and because 9025 is below 9801, 9801's second digit is larger than five.

3- Final digit
The final digit of x is indicated by the final digit od x^2. For example, when you multiple a number, say 23, you can determine the final digit of 23^2 is 9, and with 58, you know the last digit is four. The system is as follows 1 - 1 2 - 4 3 - 9 4 - 6 5 - 5 6 - 6 7 - 9 8 - 4 9 - 1 As you can see, the same numbers are often used twice, so in the example we know the sq. root of 9801 is either 91 or 99, but we checked if it is above or below 95, so we know it must be 99.

I hope some of you appreciate this - it makes a good party trick ... if somebody brings a calculator to the party.

29. Juli 2000, eine Frage an alle Mitglieder:
I developed this question a few years back. It's short, succinct and has baffled almost everyone I've tried it on.
But never before have I tried it on a gifted kids group. Will you answer this question 'no'?
Many people give it a few tries first. Most just call me an idiot and say it's impossible. The question remains, is it possible to correctly answer this and if so, what is the answer?

29. Juli 2000, eine Frage an alle Mitglieder:
When I was walking to the bus stop from uni, I came up with a very efficient system for couting on my fingers. With a bit of mental arithmetic, I worked out that if I used all 10 of my fingers I could count from 0 to 59048. I later found out that my fingers were too rigidly locked together to count in this way, but that can change, and it might not be true of all of you.

In any case, can any of you work out where I got the number 59048 from, my system of counting, or even a better system than simply going from 0 to 10, by counting the number of fingers sticking up?

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