Another Silly puzzle

Chris Losinger

ugh. i hated series summations in school. hated them almost as much as i hated statistics. for the candle..i'll guess that blowing on it removes a pocket of very hot gas at the base of the flame. without that, the heat of the ember at the top of the wick just isn't hot enough. Cleek | Image Toolkits | Thumbnail maker

Nish Nishant

Quartz... wrote:

Why does a candle extinguishes when we blow on it?

We blow the air away creating a small vacuum pocket and a fire cannot burn in a vacuum. That's my guess anyway :-) Regards, Nish

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Smitha Nishant

Nishant Sivakumar wrote:

blow the air away creating a small vacuum pocket

:omg::omg::omg: Every problem has a gift for you in its hands. -- Richard Bach

Nish Nishant

Quartz... wrote:

1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + 1/6 + 1/7 + 1/8 ......

Tried it till INT_MAX and only got just past 21 :-( Regards, Nish

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Jon Sagara

Quartz... wrote:

When will the sum of this series exceed 100 ?

e100? Jon Sagara When I grow up, I'm changing my name to Joe Kickass! My Site | My Blog | My Articles -- modified at 15:12 Tuesday 9th May, 2006

QuiJohn

After 5 billion it's only up to about 21.9. It could be a while. :)

Chris Losinger

do you know how airplane wings work? Cleek | Image Toolkits | Thumbnail maker

Nish Nishant

Chris Losinger wrote:

do you know how airplane wings work?

That works on the vacuum principle too, eh? Regards, Nish

Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
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Russell Morris

The series for e^x is more complicated than that: e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2! + x^3/3! + ... + x^n/n! + ... where n is an integer and goes from 0 to infinity If you differentiate term n of this series, you find that you get term n-1 as a result. That's why the derivative of e^x is still e^x :) I always liked that for some reason.

Richard Andrew x64

The sum will never even reach the number 1, much less exceed 100. And the candle gets extinguished from the carbon dioxide in our breath. Rich ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸

Chris Losinger

Nishant Sivakumar wrote:

That works on the vacuum principle too, eh?

a wing will create small pockets of (partial) vacuum as air moves around it. it's under debate as to whether this is the actual source of lift or not. Cleek | Image Toolkits | Thumbnail maker

Raj Lal

You got it right. Here is your prize Up [^] --- My Unedited article^

Wjousts

Funny, 'cos I'm up to 34000000000 or so and I've got a total of nearly 24 which is clearly more than 1. Look at the sequence more carefully. It's not 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 +....

Nish Nishant

Troposphere wrote:

The sum will never even reach the number 1, much less exceed 100.

You are kidding, right? :omg: It crosses 1 after the 3rd fraction in the series. 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 = 1.08333 Regards, Nish

Nish’s thoughts on MFC, C++/CLI and .NET (my blog)
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Wjousts

Woohoo! Now that's a big candle. Need a lot of puff to blow that one out. That's what she said ;)

Raj Lal

Troposphere wrote:

And the candle gets extinguished from the carbon dioxide in our breath.

And if you blow air by some other method it won't ? --- My Unedited article^

Dan Neely

I want to say this is a nonconverging series, but it's been a long time since I did those in math, and google ignores /'s even when they're inside of quotes.

Raj Lal

OK lets divide it in two parts Question 1

Quartz... wrote:

When will the sum of this series exceed 100 ?

Question 2

Quartz... wrote:

Will it EVER ?

simple looking problems, are sometimes the most challenging ones. --- My Unedited article^

Jerry Hammond

I usually clean the wax out of my ears for that effect... Asking someone to define CP is like asking someone to define art. It is a known, a tangable thing, a state of being. To define it is to limit and miss its true nature.

Chris Losinger

it's very close to the Harmonic Series[^], it just starts with i=2, instead of i=1. Cleek | Image Toolkits | Thumbnail maker