Charming Balloon

Now it's time for our charming new puzzler. For lack of a better word, I guess I can call it charming, but you all be the judge.

Here it is.

You have a balloon that is filled with air. Like a balloon, you'd get at the circus. You tie the knot with a string at the end, and you also tie a weight to the string. The purpose of the weight is because you're going to place the balloon in water, like a swimming pool, such that the weight will keep the balloon's top just even with the top of the water as we describe in geometry, tangential to the surface.

The entire balloon is submerged in the water, except for the very top. All right, and the weight is keeping the balloon from rising beyond the surface of the water. We can all imagine this would work right? Balloons want to float. If the weight were not there, or if you came by with your scissors and snipped the string, it would pop right up.

For the sake of this puzzler, you don't have to know what the amount of the weight is. The weight of weight could be anything. It doesn't matter, for the sake of this puzzler.

Okay now, you take your hand and push down on the balloon. You push it down all the way into the water, one foot down. So, when you push the balloon down one foot and of course, it will go down nice and smoothly as you push it down.

And then, when you take your hand away, what happens?

What happens and why?

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

The Two Strokes

It is that time again everyone. Time for the new puzzler.

Do you remember back in the old days the old Saab 95 or whatever it was. That thing had a three cylinder engine. It was a two stroke engine. Now some of you might not know this, but back then, at this time, the two stroke kind of fell out of favor for a lot of reasons. First of all, they were a little underpowered. Four stroke engines have valves and there are four strokes of the cycle which is required to complete revolutions of the crankshaft, and you only get one power stroke out of the four, the two stroke gets you power out of every two strokes, so the thoery is you have twice as much power. It doesn't really happen that way, but that is the theory.

Anyway, two stroke engines, they're inefficient, they're smoky, noisy and they're not environmentally friendly. Because they have to mix the gasoline and the oil and it's a pain in the neck. And in many cases, engines that had been two stroke engines eventually got replaced by the cleaner burning three stroke or four stroke engines.

So in the past, Saabs, lawn mowers and mopeds were two stroke engines and they switched them to four stroke for all the reasons above.

So here is the question. I have a chainsaw that is a two stroke chainsaw. You have to mix the gas and the oil and it's no fun. And the question is, why doesn't anyone make a four stroke chainsaw that uses gasoline? Lawn mowers have all been converted to four stroke engines, so why not the chainsaws?