Bologna. Either it’s a trick, or it comes down to the impossibility of stopping the division of infinite decimals/fractions between minutes.
This is not an interesting problem. It is an age old paradox that baffled philosophers who had nothing better to do than be baffled.
James and/or Phoneutria. I demand that you solve the problem and answer the question immediately to prevent Arminius from pwning me.
That is irrelevant (see below). The said text with the task clearly says which angles are meant. Additionally I gave you this:
Mathematically it is absolutely irrelevant what Phoneutria said, namely that there is also a line to 6. You just need the information that the angles have the same degree in order to solve the problem mathematically. But which line you prefer is absolutely irrelvant for the mathematical solution.
Why are you not capable of solving the problem? You have not understood it.
[tab]H = Hours. M = Minutes.
H/12 x 360 + M/60 x 360/12 = 30 H + 0.5 M.
Position of the big hand: M/60 x 360 = 6 M.
Position of the little hand: H/12 x 360 + M/60 x 360/12 = 30 H + 0.5 M.
The sum of both angles is 360°.
So: 30 H + 0.5 M + 6 M = 360.
For H = 10:
300 + 6.5 M = 360 => M = 60/6.5 = 9.231 minutes.
Thus: 9 minutes, 13.8 seconds.
Time on watch: 9 minutes and 13.8 seconds past 10.[/tab]
Zoot Allures, what is “pwning”?
I can answer but I am not going to bother with calculating it because solving problems is fun, doing math isn’t. I’ll just hint at how to start solving it, as usual.
[tab]This is more akin to the hare and the turtle paradox, zoot, because both arms are constantly moving. By the time you reach 10 minutes, the hour clock has moved forward whatever much an hour arm moves in 10 minutes, making that not an exact angle, so one would have to calculate how many degrees of an angle per minute each of the arms move, (the hour arm moves 360 degrees in 12 hours and the minutes arm moves 360 in 1 hour), or something… I’d do the rest later. I’m tired.[/tab]
Yes, arminius, after you put your imaginary like there, your premise was complete. Also very cute with my lil spider there.
You do not have to do anything of that, because the solution and the solution process are already given.
[tab]H = Hours. M = Minutes.
H/12 x 360 + M/60 x 360/12 = 30 H + 0.5 M.
Position of the big hand: M/60 x 360 = 6 M.
Position of the little hand: H/12 x 360 + M/60 x 360/12 = 30 H + 0.5 M.
The sum of both angles is 360°.
So: 30 H + 0.5 M + 6 M = 360.
For H = 10:
300 + 6.5 M = 360 => M = 60/6.5 = 9.231 minutes.
Thus: 9 minutes, 13.8 seconds.
Time on watch: 9 minutes and 13.8 seconds past 10.[/tab]
Thanks guys. I understand now. But I’m still stuck on the infinite divisibility of the units of time thing. Also, what if the watch, which isn’t digital, stopped before the gear system which turns the hands stopped before the gear teeth were completely seated? You know each each ‘tick-tock’ is the turn of the gear wheel… so what if the tension created by the winding, which powers the gears, was at zero percent before the watch completed its final tick?
What time would it then be? You see the infinite divisibility of time units I’m talking about now in a different way. The watch’s gear teeth need to be seated in order for a unit of its time to be recognized. It could have stopped somewhere between 10:10 and 10:10.1 for all we know. We have Zeno’s wrist watch.
They used spiral gears - smooth, no slack.
And even if you wanted to quantize the whole thing, you would still solve it in the same way but then truncate the answer to the nearest quantum step.
Not a solution, but: EDIT: oops, missed a page of discussion on this one 
Anyway, this is my untainted first stab.
[tab]I’m assuming the equal angle is between the hands of the clock and the vertical. I’m also assuming that the hands are meant to be moving fluidly, such that at exactly 10 O’clock, the hour hand points straight at 10 and the minute hand points straight at 12. At 10:15, the minute hand points straight at three, and the hour hand points at the spot 1/4 of the way between 10 and 11.
So, we can narrow the answer down to between 10 and 10:15.
To find the answer, we need to convert time to radians, take the speed of each hand in radians/second, such that the speed of the minute hand 12x faster than the speed of the hour hand, and then find where the values cross (using the absolute value and counting up to pi and back down).
Does that at least get the question right?[/tab]
James, I hope to have time to give you an updated syllogism later today.
If the said watch was digital, then there would be no geometrical aspect in the said task. It would become senseless, because there would be no geometrical circle but merely numbers. The task is about realising the facts given in the text, the recognition of the geometric facts, and the finding of the algebraic solution.
I have already given the solution process.
[tab]H = Hours. M = Minutes.
H/12 x 360 + M/60 x 360/12 = 30 H + 0.5 M.
Position of the big hand: M/60 x 360 = 6 M.
Position of the little hand: H/12 x 360 + M/60 x 360/12 = 30 H + 0.5 M.
The sum of both angles is 360°.
So: 30 H + 0.5 M + 6 M = 360.
For H = 10:
300 + 6.5 M = 360 => M = 60/6.5 = 9.231 minutes.
Thus: 9 minutes, 13.8 seconds.
Time on watch: 9 minutes and 13.8 seconds past 10.[/tab]
So you put solutions in tabs, but you don’t know why?
He means this fact
I said this:
Mathematically it is absolutely irrelevant what Phoneutria said, namely that there is also a line to 6. You just need the information that the angles have the same degree in order to solve the problem mathematically. But which line you prefer is absolutely irrelvant for the mathematical solution.
No. You have not understood it.
To find out that the 12 is the line is already part of the task, namely the part that refers to the common sense. Everything you say about the time on the watch refers to 12, e.g.: “… o’clock”, “10 past …”, “20 past …”, “10 to …”, … and so on, thus it depends on the position of the big hand (minute hand).
Mathematically it is absolutely irrelevant what Phoneutria said, namely that there is also a line to 6. You just need the information that the angles have the same degree in order to solve the problem mathematically. But which line you prefer is absolutely irrelvant for the mathematical solution.
Again:
Duh!
Yes. But the line is irrelevant when it comes to find the mathematical solution!
That was meant ironically, Phoneutria. I had just given him the solution process. 
…
That is not necessary (see above). 
Should tabs - in this thread (!) - not be used because of discretion?
Ah, ok. You’re just really bad at irony 
Tabs are used so when you give the solution, you don’t spoil it for people who want to try to solve by themselves. Carleas knows that he can click the tabs and see the answer, but he wants to try to solve it on his own. Threads like this aren’t really about being the first to solve (since anyone can probably just google for the answers).
Very bad!
And you are just really bad at mathematics.
I called it “descretion”.
Ah, I see.
Carleas! Good luck!
Yes, I know.
In this case, I actually mistakenly thought I was offering the first attempt at a solution. I had the ILP tab open for too long, so I didn’t see the page and a half of responses. And I think Arminius’ solution is much better than mine anyway. Radians?
Probably only for James; tabbed because I don’t think anyone else would care (which is not to assume that James still cares):
[tab]
As with the Pythagorean Theorem, it will be sufficient to show that a solution follows deductively from the premises.
Here is a new, much simpler syllogism for proving the SR portion of the problem.
To preempt a possible objection, the second given may be contentious. However, I think it’s true, particularly if you consider the distinction between deductive reasoning and educated guessing. Your examples, such as the color wheel and pattern examples, involve at best educated guessing or scientific induction (as opposed to mathematical induction, which is a deductive method). More generally, colors, even ordered colors, do not bear logical relation to one another. One would not look at circle of people with headbands colored green, red, yellow, green, red, yellow, green, blue, and say that is logically inconsistent for them to be sitting that way. This is true even if the floor were giant color wheel or otherwise implied a pattern with the headbands.
All the work here is done by 2 and 6. I think this is basically the ‘certainty’ argument that Phoneutria offered earlier, but jazzed up with sets and provability statements. It comes down to that you can’t derive a member of a set only given the other members, so you can’t deduce any additional correct answer not already known to be a correct answer for at least one logician.
Tangential: this blog post about common knowledge, including the Blue Eyes problem (cast as the Muddy Children problem) and other considerations.[/tab]
