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Dr. Shapiro's Puzzle of the Day

Today's Puzzle

Tuesday, September 29

Taxonomy is the grouping of species according to shared traits. For example, mammals are generally warm-blooded, nurse their young, and have hair. Some taxonomic rules have exceptions; if you think mammals don't lay eggs, the platypus would like to have a word with you.

A junior taxonomist, with knowledge of animals confined to what she can glean from her favorite poster (see above), might infer that mammals can mostly be distinguished from non-mammals according to what rule? This rule has no basis in biology, but it correctly classifies 22 of the 26 animals as drawn by the artist.

Hint #1: The animals the rule gets wrong are... ... the alligator, fox, monkey, and whale.

Hint #2: For those who still can't see... Stop being such a mammal!

   


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Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution

Yesterday's puzzle seems to have had a lot of people stumped! If you want to give it another try before looking at the solution, here's a hint:
Hint All the answers are common two-word phrases whose first word is "baby".

When I was nine, I loved this joke: "If vegetable oil comes from vegetables, where does baby oil come from?"
Now I'm thirty-seven and sad at the thought of someone squeezing my baby for her precious oil. 😥 But I still love some good old lexical ambiguity!

  1. 👶 What do you call it when you erase all the data on your baby?
  2. 👶 What do you call equations that plot a baby? (Hmm, neither this nor this is quite right...)
  3. 👶 What's another name for a high chair?
  4. 👶 What did the caveman say when he discovered his baby was infested?
  5. 👶 And what did the caveman say when his baby was all better? (Other cavemen were confused about why he would seemingly reference a musical instrument.)
Solution
  1. 👶 Baby wipe
  2. 👶 Baby formula (Leo adds, "I need to see a baby proof")
  3. 👶 Baby sitter
  4. 👶 Baby buggy
  5. 👶 Baby grand

Congratulations to yesterday's full and partial solvers Yana, Nico, Leo S., and Mr. Gregg. Thanks to everybody who made a guess!

About This Site

Though he now teaches mathematics, Dr. (né Mr.) Shapiro's first job in a K–12 school was as a lunch monitor in Davis, CA. It was there that he originated the Puzzle of the Day, even rewarding correct answers with tickets in denominations like "15 points" (though without a clear idea of how he'd ultimately redeem these). Dr. Shapiro's favorite puzzle from this pre-professional era was "Tell me the location of the beehive on this campus."

Ten years later, Dr. Shapiro revived Puzzle of the Day at Proof School, writing each day's puzzle on a name tag. After 600 puzzles or so, he was just starting to feel normal about students reading his chest all the time when campus closed and the puzzle, like the rest of our lives, moved online. New puzzles are posted daily on school days.

Want to catch up on old PotDs? There's an archive currently containing puzzles from March to June 2020.