Your Mathematics Puzzle Of The Day

Three trains are traveling on one north-south track. The first train is colored mustard yellow and beige and is slowly progressing northward at 30 mph, and though no one believes it has the fuel to sustain its momentum, it has not abated in its advancement. Train number two is colored a very ugly orange and black and is also slowly progressing northward, at a rate of 10 mph, despite being weighed down by a 300-lb panda among other dead weights.

Train number three is colored a beautiful blue shade, but is hurtling southward at a rate of 186,282 miles per second, billowing smoke from its locked windows and doors while its passengers scream bloody murder in their futile attempts to escape.

How long will it take before train number three explodes in an enormous ball of fire, taking out a rancorous divorcing couple in the engine room (which would be okay) as well as millions of the train's supporters (which would not be as cool)?

Please show all work; partial credit will be given.

Post-Game 102 Thread: Holy Shit, Batman

Argh! So here I am, trapped between a rock and a hard place in the ninth inning of a tie ballgame against the evil Fortunate Friar. He's getting away, roughly about six full steps ahead of me, with the possibility of it increasing to seven full steps. If I can only...reach...my utility belt...

There, I got it. So there are two weapons on my utility belt left unused, primed, and ready for action. One is a potent magnum which can be unreliable at times but still packs a powerful punch. The other is a toy capgun with no useful value whatsoever, an item which I had actually tried to take off my belt altogether, but somehow it has stuck around without rationale for the last four months, continuing to suck wind in a toxic, nuclear-implosion type of way. Which one should I use to try and catch my enemy, who is on the precipice of slipping out of my grasp once and for all?

...I guess I'll choose the unreliable capgun, and just hope for the best. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. ... ... Hmm...it seems that the Fortunate Friar is just...walking off?

PADRES 3, DODGERS 2

Requiem for a 1977 Ford Mustang

Looking for some car advice here from the SoSG readers.

Back in December of last year, I bought a 1977 Ford Mustang. I'd seen them quite regularly as I was out driving around, and they looked pretty good from afar. Engines that revved with a lot of power. Nimbleness in a turning radius that appeared to be able to cover a decent amount of ground. A front grill that looked almost as if it was smiling at you all the time. And it looked pretty good in a two-tone blue and red exterior, so I thought it would look great in an all-blue paint job.

So I went on craigslist and searched for one, and sure enough, a beautiful one that fit all of my needs appeared. The seller was in Atlanta, and though I had to pay a pretty hefty price, my needs were pretty urgent (my current car was having a lot of trouble getting traction over the last year, due to a number of reasons), so I figured it was worth the premium.

Now, I don't know much about older cars, but I figured that if it was born in 1977, it couldn't be in that bad shape, right? And the previous owner said he'd driven it with regularity, almost every day of every summer for the last 12 years, and it never let him down.

It showed up at my door, and I had a big party with the neighbors in which a lot of people came by and looked on with jealousy. It looked a little wider around the body than I had thought it was, but I was hopeful that once I got the new paint job on it, it would soon become the envy of the block.

Well, it isn't quite running as I'd expected. The engine seems to get caught in idle a lot. It doesn't maintain its balance going around turns. And it seems to have lost a little bit in the pickup speed; maybe this is to be expected of older-aged cars, I don't know. I tried to use the car for my daily commute every day of April, and despite multiple checkups and oil changes, it doesn't seem like it's getting any better. And my neighbors are starting to snicker, particularly once they see it sputtering back to my garage, sometimes rather quickly just after getting out of the driveway.

The curious thing is, I went to my mechanic, and he said the best thing to do was to continue to drive the car every day. There wasn't anything wrong, he said, fundamentally. I implored with him about the noticable lack of power, the sputtering out of the driveway only to return to the garage, the fact that the car drove a lot heavier than I had originally anticipated. However, my mechanic was firm in attesting that only driving it every day would get it back on track. In fact, he wouldn't even admit the Mustang into his shop, as he was resolute that I had to keep driving it until it started humming again.

I'm thinking of going back and using my older beater car (which I bought the prior year), despite the fact that it didn't get traction last year, it's a much smaller car, and has a much weaker engine. (Plus, the hood seems a little askew, but that's not a performance issue, though it bugs me.) Under the right circumstances, rare in occurrence and only for short periods of time, it can motor around the neighborhood once it gets going. It's not a good long-term solution, but I can't see the value in driving the 1977 Mustang without taking it into a shop somewhere and giving it a full inspection, or maybe even a break from me trying to ride it each day. Driving it into the ground doesn't seem to be helping. On the flip side, the mechanic is pretty well-regarded and I'd like to take his advice to heart.

What do you readers think?