I’ve never seen anything like this advisory:

URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA 413 PM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005

…EXTREMELY DANGEROUS HURRICANE KATRINA CONTINUES TO APPROACH THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA…

…DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED…

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER. AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE…INCLUDING SOME
WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY…A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD…AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING…BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE KILLED.

AN INLAND HURRICANE WIND WATCH IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS NEAR HURRICANE FORCE…OR FREQUENT GUSTS AT OR ABOVE HURRICANE FORCE…ARE POSSIBLE WITHIN THE NEXT 24 TO 36 HOURS.

Wikipedia’s Hurricane Katrina page is proving to be an exceptional resource for additional information.

(Via Jeff at Shape of Days)

Updated Feb 16, 2007, after a reddit link: Fixed formatting and pointed the first link to NOAA archive thanks to CB’s comment for the url, though a quick quick Google Search finds this text all over the place.

Yesterday I stumbled across this logic puzzle.

What always drives me crazy about stuff like this is that no one ever discusses the answer. I’ve never liked the implied wink wink smarty-pants attitude (see here). I want to know how someone arrives at the answer. What fascinates me is thinking, not trivia or secrets.

Here’s how I found the answer.

I don’t recall ever seeing this puzzle before and did not google it until I’d proven the results to myself. The puzzle is difficult, but I’ve posted answer at the end of the post, so you’ve been warned. The three little dots (∴) is the “therefore” symbol.

First I set up a 6×5 matrix of attributes then started highlighting and crossing out relevant details.

Then I got stuck.

Intuitively, I knew it all came down the Norwegian. This because we know he has only one neighbor. Everyone else can have one or two neighbors. Eventually, it came down to coffee (consumed and in clue 5).

The Puzzle:

There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.

Who owns the fish?

The 15 clues:

1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets and gets their products from http://petstop.com/ all the time.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green house owner drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.
8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.
9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Princes.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

The end of this puzzle will have five units, each with 6 attributes: {address, house color, nationality, drink, pet and smokes}

The data seems to break down into two types: Definitive data, that which defines an attribute directly within one unit. And relational data, which defines an attribute relative to another unit. Relational data often acts as a negating definition as well, showing what isn’t in a unit by describing what’s nearby.

Now stepping through the clues, definitive data related to nationality first:

1. The Brit lives in the red house.

Brit == red

2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.

Swede == dogs

3. The Dane drinks tea.

Dane == tea

10. The Norwegian lives in the first house.

Norwegian == 1st house

13. The German smokes Princes.

German == Princes

Next comes the secondary definitions. These can be used to reveal data which eliminates possible units based on what is already known:

5. The green house owner drinks coffee.

Coffee == Green ∴
Brit != coffee
Dane != Green

6. The person who smokes Pall Malls keeps birds.

Pall Malls == birds ∴
German != birds
Swede != Pall Malls

7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhills.

Yellow == Dunhills ∴
German != Yellow
Brit != dunhills

8. The man living in the house right in the center drinks milk.

Milk == 3rd House ∴
Norwegian != milk
Dane != 3rd House

12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.

Bluemasters = beer ∴
German != beer
Dane != Bluemasters

Many of the relational data clues reveal additional information about what a unit doesn’t have:

4. The green house is on the left of the white house.

Green = White’s address – 1

9. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.

Blends = Cat’s address ± 1 ∴
Blends != cats

11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the one who smokes Dunhills.

Horses = Dunhills’ address ± 1 ∴
Dunhills != horses
Horses != Yellow

14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

Blue = 2nd house ∴
Brit != 2nd house
Norwegian != Blue

15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Blends = Water’s address ± 1 ∴
Blends != water

The fourteenth clue is one of the most important. Since we know the Norwegian lives in the 1st house (clue 10), we know that the blue house is number 2. Number 4 is a tricky one, there is no reason to believe that the green house is the first house, all we know is that the white house is on it’s left. Also, clues 9 and 15 could be referring to one or two neighbors.

It’s interesting that the clues sort out into three quintuplets.

Here’s where it starts to get really hard. All that is known for certain is what was defined in questions 1-3, 10 and 13. There remain three or four unknowns for each unit. What I’m looking for is the first link in a causality chain. Of course it’s probably not so much a chain as a loop, so looking for an end is futile. How about an onramp?

After several minutes of staring, and re-reading the clues, I got the chills (really!)

WARNING: THE ANSWER IS REVEALED BELOW

The green house drinks coffee. The center house drinks milk. So the center house is not green. But the Green house is on the left of the white house. Since we know the second house is blue, we then know that the first house is not green either. So the only place the green house can be is fourth, making the 5th white. Now is the first yellow, or is the first red?

The elimination steps above provide the answer. We know the Norwegian is in the first house, and the Brit is in the Red house. That means the Brit is in the red house in the middle, drinking milk, and the Norwegian’s house is yellow and he smokes Dunhills.

Whoa, more chills.

At this point, the whole things starts to fall together.

Clue 11 puts horses in the blue house.
Clue 3 means the Dane is not in the green house
Clue 15 puts Blends in the second house, and, with clue 9, water and cats in the first house.
etc. etc.

The Answer

Here’s the final breakdown:

The German has the fish and drinks coffee in the green house, which is fourth on the block.

That was fun.

I hate puzzles.

Update: Here’s a programmatic solution to “Einstein’s Riddle” and another walkthrough by James Yates.

Tuesday afternoon, the south facing wall of the building at 13th St and First Avenue buckled. A phalanx of NYFD trucks were onscene through the evening making sure the building wouldn’t collapse. I didn’t find out what happened until late this evening on my way back from the ECFCPUG get together. A construction crew was scaffolding the building while one police car stood by.

This corner is home to Mee Noodle Shop & Grill, an East Village institution. There were two handwritten signs posted about them being closed, their awnings were in a heap near the construction.

I’m somewhat heartsick about this. I’ve been eating at and ordering from Mee since probably sometime around 1998 (shortly after Ginsburg died) when Dave insisted I experience Chinese take out which didn’t suck. I know the waiters and the delivery men; the cashiers and cooks are all familiar and have been there for years. Those people all work as hard as I’ve ever seen anyone work. I’m worried about them and hope they’re able to absorb what will hopefully be a very short loss of income.

Every year for the past decade I’ve felt that I managed to accomplish more than I did previously. Throughout most of those years I couldn’t see how I could possibly do more than I was doing. But every year I did more. Until now.

The Laffer Curve has been in the news recently after the recent surge in US tax revenues. The Laffer Curve is a simple economic theory which shows that government revenues decrease when taxes are too high or too low. It points to a sweet spot where revenue is maximized by a tax rate that isn’t too low or too high.

The Laffer Curve of my life looks something like this:

Currently I’m on the right side the hump and have Too Much Going On. Time’s not being wasted, but my productivity, as measured by accomplishments, has fallen off a cliff.

Getting back to the place of maximum accomplishment will take some time, because I’ve got a lot of stuff I want to finish. So, the slogging will continue for now.

As I type this, Noemi is sleeping on my chest. Michelle is back at work full time and for the summer I’m taking care of the girls. Noemi five days a week, Lila and Noemi three days a week. When Noemi’s a little bit older she’ll join Lila on babysitter days. So until school starts again I’m doing my best to cram working time in between full-time daddy duties.

FCP 5 broke my FXScript compiler and I haven’t had a chance to fix it yet. While fixing it, I’m also porting it to AppleScript Studio, since that satisfies a near term and long term goal simultaneously. Once that is functional, which should be soon depending on available time (of which writing this is taking away from) I’ll release an updated beta of Joe’s Filters which will remove watermarks for registered users.

There’s plenty of other stuff dragging on me as well which I don’t want to waste time enumerating. Identifying demands helps a lot, but it’s still frustrating how long it takes to get anything done and how tired I am at night.

NYC Creative Director leaves clients and staff in NYC, moves to Kabul to help establish the first communication agency in the country since before the Taliban. Is she a sadist, uniquely qualified for the task, or simply and blindly optimistic?

On June 21 at 7 pm in The One Club Gallery, Sharoz Makarechi of Think Tank 3, recently back from the trenches, will share advertising stories from war-torn Afghanistan and discuss the value of ideas, cross media thinking, and creative communication campaigns in a society struggling to recover from over 25 years of war.

That would be my friend Sharoz. It’s hard to put into words how much I respect and admire her courage. I feel lucky to know such an exceptional person.

Update: Kabob!

So the WWDC rumor mill just went into turbo-super-maximum overdrive.

CNET: Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips

Yeah, CNET is supposed to be pretty legit, as these things go. As would be expected, the MacRumors forums are abuzz, most interesting speculation is that Intel starts making a PPC-style CPU.

An ironic point, if true: Apple will be running on Intel. Microsoft will be running on IBM G5s. (OK, a sorta G5-ish tri-core CPU)

Not sure what to make of any of this. Mac-Intel rumors have been around forever. The technology isn’t really an issue, between OSX’s hardware abstraction and Apple’s excellent development tools, most apps should be able to migrate in a reasonable amount of time. The bigger problem is inventory and future sales. Who’s going to buy a dead-end computer? If everyone knows they’re switching chips (and if they do announce this, everyone will know), the hit on existing inventory and interim sales would be astronomical. If this is true, I hope they have a lot of cash in the bank.

How would the market react? Bump Apple up huge on the news until calmer heads point out the sales hit? Shares fall immediately based on the sales hit but recover to higher levels after a few months? Apple got hammered on Friday because of rumors of too much inventory, I really need to find a way to get quotes on my phone via SMS.
Whatever happens, I’m getting really psyched for the keynote.