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Drop us a line! Head on over to The Rockwood Mailbag at any time to leave us a message! It's easy!

Consider it an experiment in web interactivity. Or, consider it a way to artificially inflate our hit count. Either way, just write in!

 
February 17, 2010,

A dump truck that can hold 250 m3 would not be highway legal in Canada or the US. Most semi dump trucks carry about 75 m3 (~2.5 m wide and high by ~12 meters long).

--N Kalanaga

Whoops! And thus are the hazards of creating story problems, N Kalanga! Although that problem can still be solved with the incorrect dump truck volume, you are correct in that 250 cubic meters waaaay too much volume for a dump truck.

So what happened? We originally started off using English units and feet. A dump truck with a 250 cubic foot payload bay is very realistic. But in the course of writing the rest of the problem we decided that everything should be metric since the problem was based in Canada. We just forgot to convert all of our units back to metric.

That's a bad mistake, but at least it was just for our simple story problem and not something like, say, a $125 million Mars orbiter. Check your units, kids!

 
February 18, 2010,

"How many ends will it take for every member of the team to reach a blood alcohol content of 0.1 and be legally drunk?"

It's a trick question. One of them is pregnant and therefor will not drink.

Alternately, Imhotep is invisible.

--Crabtree

Oooookay. We're not quite sure what this means, Crabtree. It might even be right. But the ALT tag on Wednesday's comic clearly stated "Don't forget to show your work" (hover your mouse over that strip if you don't know what we're talking about). Since you didn't, we can't give you credit. Sorry!