It was a great week, during which I worked with two different groups of inquisitive mature students, caught up with lovely old schoolmates at a birthday party and separately managed to reconnect with a treasured long-lost friend!
In a reflective mood on Saturday I had picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers to reread and by Sunday morning I found myself looking at a page with the following puzzle to solve:
It’s a sample question from Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which apparently gives a measure of abstract reasoning skills.
Let me pose you a different question:
Guessing that it was a near-impossible problem, did I:
1. Solve it easily and prove that my intellect is in the top 0.1% of humanity?
2. Read on to the answer (which was in the sentence which followed) straight away, to maximise my (still-winter) Sunday reading time?
3. Challenge myself to solve it and still be trying to figure out the answer four-hours later?
Thank you to anyone who instantly knew the answer was No. 1… I truly value your (clearly misguided) views of me!
No. 2. would have been the most efficient answer but the answer was actually closest to No. 3, although four hours is a little out… fully eight hours elapsed before I gave in, although I did pause to run, eat lunch and cook dinner in between.
I will keep the answer to myself in case anyone else wants to have a go at it, but be warned that even when I knew what the answer was, I still couldn’t understand why!
Nor could Malcolm Gladwell, to be fair.
It being cold and miserable outside and with my mind trying to bend itself around an insurmountable challenge, I took to the running machine and stared at the wall for an hour.
Not much to report there then, other than to say that I ramped up the speed by 0.1 mph every mile and increased it more sharply in the last five minutes to complete 7.34 miles.
With chances of heavy snow in the South towards the back end of this week and with the winter weather set to stay with us probably into the middle of April, according to the BBC, expecting Spring to arrive anytime soon really is a lesson in futility.
Stay warm and upbeat peops!