itachi-san

"What's the password?" asked Cerberus with a snarl. Hercules was confused for a moment. Then he realized he had received a strange dream from Hermes about this encounter weeks before. What Hermes said to him in his dream might help Hercules find the password so he doesn't have to battle Cerberus. Hermes left an eternal memory of his words in Hercules' mind. He said: Diomedes was just expelled. He is worth his weight in gold pennies. Wouldn't you agree? He may be a big talker. But he's rarely in the wrong. And he shows a lot of toughness. And remember Hercules! Invalid Nestor: Near Odysseus' boats lying east. Gives a sage equal standing.

What kind of poem am I? (12 + 144 + 20 + (3 x (4^.5)))/7 + 5 x 11 = (9 ^2) + 0

You are on your way to rocket space camp for junior mathematicians on planet Funkotron when your shuttle alters it's destination due to heavy space traffic. So you wind up going to math systems camp for junior rocket scientists on planet Mellowsphere. You are only prepared for a visit to Funkotron though and have no clue how Mellowspherians calculate. Luckily your camp buddy had a little cheat sheet. In Mellowspherian Math the following are true: 2+2=12 5-3=62 3x4=61 6/3=83 So, in Mellowspherian math, what is 1-3?

Six words have had their meteorological parts removed. The weather terms have been placed into Set A. The remaining letters of each word have been placed into Set B. Your task is to reconstitute the words by merging each weather term with the proper set of letters. Other than merging the two sets together, there is no rearranging of the letters. Example: sand + pne = spanned (SpANneD) Set A: cloud, hail, rain, sleet, storm, wind Set B: arngg, astba, atage, bevora, diabmn, higa

Sure. I was thinking along the lines of souls being resurrected and put into new vessels. Since those vessels failed, does that imply God or God's system has made a mistake? Does the same reason of existence for the two of us apply to kids who have SIDS?

The same thing as if he'd been born on February 7th 1828 at 18:28:45

Good guess, but no

I believe there is a relationship between things that had commonly been given divine attributes and things that have been discovered or solved through scientific means. Think about the Greek and Roman Gods for example. Everyone praised them as whole-heartedly as people today praise whichever religious icon they worship. So why is it that those believers (among many other religions as well) have almost all vanished? My theory is that it is mostly because of science. There is no need to offer sacrifices to Apollo so he can pull the sun over the land, no need to pray to Atlas to keep holding the world up, etc... because science has unveiled such mysteries. So, to see it like I see it, picture a black mist covering the universe so nothing is visible. Call that mist religion or the divine. Now as time passes and our intelligence grows with our knowledge of the Earth, picture a hole in the mist that reveals Earth, but nothing else. The sun, stars, space and planets are still in the mist. Then as time passes, picture that hole in the mist expanding to at least the edges of our solar system, etc... I see a correlation between the increase in scientific knowledge and the decrease in existences given divine attributes. Today, I would say the mist is gone from our universe entirely. Most of the universe, though obviously not nearly fully known to us, has now been secularized from the divine realm. Almost no matter what we discover, we are not expecting anything divine in nature, only that which can expand or be incorporated into science. The proverbial mist of religion has been pushed into another dimension or a place that 'can never be proven to not exist' and I believe this has been deliberately done by religious efforts over the past centuries because the leaders realized they could not win people over scientific fact.

Here's a math puzzle for you. They are few and far between with me I agree, maybe because math was one of my majors, if that makes any sense. It does to me at least. English was the other one, so I kind of bounce back and forth between both interests. Lately, I've had a poetry and prose kind of mind. 6 months on off maybe, who knows?? Couple of nice plays on words in this thread LIS. Forgotten gets an e-high-five!

The rats eat the alligators I've never been to London so I can't compare

If you ever go to NYC, sometimes you can see the rats flowing down by the subway tracks. I wouldn't say the sewers need them though. Not that subways need them either.

You got it! I was ready to type something really sarcastic until I read your second spoiler Well done.

also Q how far can you throw it vertically? and does that matter?

You may be seeing double, but it didn't help No dice for ThunderChicken either. Is that name from ATHF Ultra Mega Chicken?

Personally, I don't see any problem using reference material. This isn't a closed book test; it's a puzzle website. For example, if someone writes a lengthy riddle about the Bible, should I then not even bother trying to solve it since I will have to look up what and who the references are? I think not. I feel free to look up whatever I want. If the puzzle is original, like this one, then the internet isn't going to have the methodology or the answer so what's the worry? In this puzzle's case, I agree with rc, in that the whole challenge was figuring out that they are sudoku puzzles and that they contained an anagram of the answer.

If this has been posted ...sorry. I have a quick question for the theists out there: How do you explain infant death?

Yep. Good job

This is a surprisingly great answer. I'll need some clarification on the needle part though. My understanding is that a pendulum can be attached to a needle, but it's usually secured with more substantial means like giant nails. I'd say that a pendulum doesn't need what a sewer needs in this case. Good guess though.

Usually hand-written stars are drawn in connected, but not repeated, line segments. For example, a 5-point star is drawn as such - line segments AC, CE, EB, BD, DA. The segments must always alternate a constant number of points (in the above case, skipping 1 point in between). Given the following info: 1)there is only 1 way to draw a 5-point star 2)there is NO way to draw a 6-point star (in continuous lines, that is) 3)there are 2 ways to draw a 7-point star how many different ways are there to draw a 1000-point star?

Nope, here's a hint:

I'll post this hint to get bonanova et al fired up about this one

It's not though. The toast one is tricky because toast doesn't go into a toaster. All ducks walk on 2 legs, making this not tricky at all, which is why I suggested a variation to the writing.

OK, then