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The Brainteaser Elon Musk Asks New SpaceX Engineers
Nerval's Lobster writes: The latest biography of Elon Musk, by technology journalist Ashlee Vance, provides an in-depth look into how the entrepreneur and tech titan built Tesla Motors and SpaceX from the ground up. For developers and engineers, getting a job at SpaceX is difficult, with a long interviewing/testing process... and for some candidates, there's a rather unique final step: an interview with Musk himself. During that interview, Musk reportedly likes to ask candidates a particular brainteaser: "You're standing on the surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?" If you can answer that riddle successfully, and pass all of SpaceX's other stringent tests, you may have a shot at launching rockets into orbit.
The harder brainteaser they SHOULD ask:
A large, cylindrical object is falling. You want it to land upright, with the correct end down. Which of these strategies do you choose:
a) Attach a parachute to the nose and let basic physics work.
b) Try to balance it atop rocket engines firing from the bottom.
or a treadmill, but you'd have to turn it 90 degrees clockwise twice.
Who ordered that?
The room or the bear?
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Answer: Butter the bottom
(alt: affix cat to superstructure)
crazy dynamite monkey
The Brainteaser Elon Musk Used To Ask New SpaceX Engineers, Because His Old Question Got Slashdotted.
Thanks jerks!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
The question doesn't say walking in a straight line, just walking west. A circle around the pole is the trajectory traveled when walking westward near either of the poles. The solution around the North Pole also requires walking a curved path. If you walk straight you either end up almost a mile away (if using Great Circles as your definition of "straight"), or exactly a mile away, hovering in the air (if using Euclidean "straight").
Funny thing, those hairs block infra-red pretty well too, as discovered by a guy that stood on a polar bear while wearing night vision goggles. Luckily he also discovered he could run quite a long distance while the bear was waking up and wondering who stood on it.
The north pole and a circle of lat 1 + 1 / (2 * PI) north of the south pole.
Actually the answer is the north pole and a circles of lat 1 + 1 / (2*pi*n) north of the south pole where n=1,2,3,4... etc. plus there is a slight correction because the surface of the earth is not entirely flat and so the circumference of a line of latitude is actually less than 2*pi*s where s is the arc length from the line to the south pole for the distances involved it would probably be negligible compared to surface defects.
See, if you gave the above answer, you would get a SpaceX job as an engineer due to the detailed, exact nature of your answer. Or maybe a job in their legal department.
If you just casually said "the North Pole," you would get a SpaceX job as a manager of engineers.
That only happens if you are walking at exactly eighty-eight miles per hour.