Mini Road Trip!

My Uncle Erick is throwing a party for his wife Ling this Saturday to commemorate her 5th anniversary of coming to the United States. Dan and I are driving up to San Jose on Thursday evening or Friday morning (depending on when he can get off work). Unfortunately, he wasn't able to swap shifts with someone for earlier in the day, so we'll either be getting in really late on Thursday or around noon on Friday. We're leaning toward super late on Thursday. If we leave around 7:30 pm, and it takes 5 to 6 1/2 hours to get there, we should get there between 12:30 and 2 am. Guuuuuh. Lame, but it will give me an extra day or so. Mom and Dad don't know (surprise!). I'm so excited to be going home. I haven't seen my family or any of my NorCal friends since Christmas, and I'm really missing them. I won't have that much time, but I'm hoping to at least see Spencer while I'm home. Maybe Geena will want to go to a pub with me or something. Bowling, anyone?

KELLY AND GEENA: I lost my keys months ago and haven't been able to find them. There's still a key outside, right?

Google is Random

Dan found a list of "140 Google Interview Questions" the other day. A bunch of them are fairly standard interview questions like, "Why do you want to work for Google?" or "How would boost the Gmail subscription base?" A significant portion of those questions has absolutely nothing to do with Google at all. They're completely random and designed to determine your intelligence and problem solving skills.

1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
2. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
3. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
4. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?
5. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
6. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
7. You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?
8. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
9. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?
10. In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
11. If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?
12. If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands?
    
13. Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it's only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?
14. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?
15. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
16. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
17. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)
18. You are given 2 eggs. You have access to a 100-story building. Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.
19. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.
20. If there is only one elevator in the building, how would you change the design? How about if there are only two elevators in the building?
21. How many vacuum’s are made per year in USA?
    
22. Why are manhole covers round?
23. A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?
24. You need to check that your friend, Bob, has your correct phone number, but you cannot ask him directly. You must write a the question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number?
25. What is the probability of breaking a stick into 3 pieces and forming a triangle?

How many can you answer?