Kabir Firaque

1 week ago | hindustantimes.com | Kabir Firaque

Exactly 20 episodes ago, readers solved a card puzzle that I had found, as I mentioned at the time, among the works of the English puzzler Henry Dudeney. I felt it necessary to mention that just in case this week’s card puzzle sounds familiar. Indeed, there are similarities. In this puzzle, as in the last one, you are asked to count to 10 while you place a series of new cards on an exposed card. On both occasions, you count the court cards as 10.

2 weeks ago | hindustantimes.com | Kabir Firaque

In an age when social media influencers are seemingly earning loads of money, you will occasionally come across individuals who invested in education and are now wondering if they made the right choice. If that startled you, let me assure readers: Problematics is not venturing into career advice or any scholarly comparison between the relative merits of studying and influencing. The only reason for bringing this up is that such misgivings have a context in this week’s puzzle.

3 weeks ago | hindustantimes.com | Kabir Firaque

Suppose you walk up a escalator that is itself moving up. Do you count more steps or fewer compared to moving up a stationary staircase of the same length? What happens if you walk down while the escalator moves up, or vice versa? How does the number of steps you walk change as you vary your walking speed, or the number of steps you cover with each stride? Puzzles with escalator steps offer a number of variations.

3 weeks ago | htsyndication.com | Kabir Firaque

Posted On: 2025-04-18 Posted By: Kabir Firaque, NEW DELHI Health & Lifestyle Education Technology International Hindustan Times NEW DELHI, April 18 -- Public perceptions of alien life, shaped largely by science fiction, often revolve around images of humanoid beings or caricatures of animals roaming a planet similar to our own.

3 weeks ago | hindustantimes.com | Kabir Firaque

Not anymore. Without ruling out the possibility that a rocky planet somewhere out there could be home to some form of life, a new school of scientific thought has been exploring another kind of world that could be potentially inhabitable — or even inhabited. Such as K2-18b, the subject of a promising new study published in The Astrophysics Journal Letters.