Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Lectorog]

I am the beginning of eternity and the end of time.

Try that on for size.

The letter E

[Necro910]

This is the sphinx's riddle, you may have heard it before:

What animal has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?

It is man.

When a man is a baby/toddler [for some time], he walks on four legs. When he is a child/teenager/adult, he walks on his own two legs, without the aid of his arms. Finally, when he is an elder...Well, some use canes.

I got the Greek Myths book, so i know that riddle better then you.

Eeyup.

I knew someone knew the myth 

[Orangebottle]

I am the beginning of eternity and the end of time.

Try that on for size.

The letter E

booo, that's no fun.

[Leafsnail]

Your mirror image has the same up/down orientation as you, but an inverted left/right orientation.  How can a mirror tell the difference between up/down and left/right?

[Urist Imiknorris]

It doesn't.

[Il Palazzo]

It was a while ago, but the question has been asked already:

Well, I have one.

Why do mirrors reverse seem to reverse left and right, but not up and down?  It's... quite easy to see the answer, but quite hard to explain it coherently.

The answer is: because they do neither and we're a laterally symmetrical species.
What a mirror does, is preserve left/right and up/down, while reversing front/back. This is all it really "does". Now, if we ask our brains to take the resulting picture and rearrange it, by imagining that we stand facing in the same direction that the reflection does(restoring the front/back direction), we can do it either by turning our imaginary selves left-right, or up-down. We preffer left/right, because we're laterally symmetrical, so that the resulting rearranged image still makes sense to our brain - it still has one hand on each side, and still stands with it's feet on the ground etc.
If we were a race of sentient chinaware dishes, we would have no such prefference, as we would be both left/right and up/down symmetrical. Then we would be saying that a mirror can do either, but never both at once.

Mathematically speaking, the mirror changes the handedness(I just hope that I'm translating these terms properly) of the reflection's refference system, so e.g. the typical left-handed cartesian system becomes right-handed.
Other than that, it's all our brains' doing.

Spoiler: No explanation like a drawn explanation (click to show/hide)

[Leafsnail]

Damn my inability to remember 2 years back!

[Il Palazzo]

Search function is your friend.

[Leafsnail]

It's a lot less helpful than you'd think when it's something vague!

[Neonivek]

Fine here is a stupid one

When is a Square not a Rectangle?

[Pnx]

Fine here is a stupid one

When is a Square not a Rectangle?

When you're trying to bypass Apple's patent on the rectangular design of it's electronics.

[Neonivek]

Fine here is a stupid one

When is a Square not a Rectangle?

When you're trying to bypass Apple's patent on the rectangular design of it's electronics.

No, but oddly close to a similar riddle.

Delicious I have made the unanswerable riddle of all time!

[da_nang]

Fine here is a stupid one

When is a Square not a Rectangle?

When the Rectangle is not a degenerate rectangle.

This is the sphinx's riddle, you may have heard it before:

What animal has four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?

Human male. Crawls out of bed in the morning with a hangover, works on two legs in the afternoon and shows his "third leg" in the evening.

[Neonivek]

When the Rectangle is not a degenerate rectangle

Nope, guess again.

The perfect riddle shall never be answered!

[The Darkling Wolf]

Fine here is a stupid one

When is a Square not a Rectangle?

When it's a root.

Also PTW