Announcement from Car Talk Plaza

We're going back to the beginning of Car Talk—we hope you'll join us! Starting today, Car Talk will release two episodes a week. Double the laughs, double the lousy car advice, and double the puzzlers! Subscribe to our podcast and never miss an episode.

Counting Hairs

Let's say you have a town in which there are 200,000 people.

I want to know, what are the chances that two inhabitants of that town will have exactly the same number of hairs on their heads? Now, I will stipulate that no one in this town can have more than 100,000 hairs and nobody will have fewer than zero.

So you have a town of 200,000 people. And you have heads of hair that have between zero and 100,000 hairs. So I want to know what are the chances that there are two inhabitants of this town that have exactly the same number of hairs? Not necessarily in the same place. You could have like you want hairs on the front and somebody could have eight hairs on the back and that would be a match.

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

The Hungry Bookworm

My brother has written three books. The Collected Works of Thomas Q. Magliozzi, right. It's actually one book, which consists of three volumes while Volume One, Volume Two, and Volume Three.

They're on the shelf in order one, two, and three. Now a bookworm is going to eat its way from the first page of Volume One to the last page of Volume Three.

Now the pages of each of these volumes amount to three inches. So each volume has three inches of pages. And each cover is a quarter of an inch thick

He's gonna eat his wave from the first page of Volume One, the last page of Volume Three. And we want to know, the covers are a quarter of an inch thick. Each volume has three inches worth of pages. How many inches of material does this bookworm digest?

Now any fourth grader can figure this out. So if you have one, ask them!