Lateral thinking puzzle for you

[Bundu]

Hi everyone!

It's not a math puzzle, but it's a thinker (hopefully)

A man (or woman, as you prefer) wakes up in the middle of the night because he hears a loud noise. He runs down the stairs and looks outside the front door. What he sees causes him great distress. He runs back up the stairs to a different room and kills himself....

Why?

Have fun, I'll post the answer (IF no-one gets it) in a day or two...

Cheers, Mark

[Orgasmic Troll]

I never really understood the appeal of these as just a static question-on-a-page puzzle .. they really only work for me as a back and forth with the question poser answering yes, no or irrelevant, otherwise, there's a million different answers that could fit ..

[Fusion_power]

Kind of agree with TravisT re too many possible answers, but since you ask, I'll guess that the loud noise was a nuclear explosion and he doesn't want to live on a radioactive earth.

Fusion

[Orgasmic Troll]

Originally Posted by Bundu

Hi everyone!

It's not a math puzzle, but it's a thinker (hopefully)

A man (or woman, as you prefer) wakes up in the middle of the night because he hears a loud noise. He runs down the stairs and looks outside the front door. What he sees causes him great distress. He runs back up the stairs to a different room and kills himself....

Why?

Have fun, I'll post the answer (IF no-one gets it) in a day or two...

Cheers, Mark

I'll throw an idea out there ..

He goes home drunk, and goes into the wrong house and falls asleep (a la Robert Downey Jr.) however, his wife has diabetes and he was bringing home her insulin. She ended up dying and their toddler son wandered outside and got run over by a car (the loud noise) he runs out, sees his son dead and runs into his house to get his wife and realizes she's dead, so he kills himself

[RazorWolf]

good idea... so what is the answer now?

[ahmerali]

I've heard this one before so I'll disqualify myself from answering...I don't know if the OP would mind if I posted a [not so easy] hint.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by TravisT

He goes home drunk, and goes into the wrong house and falls asleep (a la Robert Downey Jr.) however, his wife has diabetes and he was bringing home her insulin. She ended up dying and their toddler son wandered outside and got run over by a car (the loud noise) he runs out, sees his son dead and runs into his house

But the wording "... runs back up the stairs ..." in the initial posting implies that he ran up the same stairs that he had gone down previously, doesn't it? So after ascent he's in the same house as the one in which he woke (unless one stairway serves two houses).

[mfgoode]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

Kind of agree with TravisT re too many possible answers, but since you ask, I'll guess that the loud noise was a nuclear explosion and he doesn't want to live on a radioactive earth.

Fusion

Try this one for size. It has only two possible answers!
A landscape gardner is given instructions to plant 4 special trees so that each one is exactly the same distance from each other.
How would you arrange the trees?
Ref. 'Lateral Thinking' by Edward de Bono.
Mally

[xilman]

Originally Posted by mfgoode

Try this one for size. It has only two possible answers!
A landscape gardner is given instructions to plant 4 special trees so that each one is exactly the same distance from each other.
How would you arrange the trees?
Ref. 'Lateral Thinking' by Edward de Bono.
Mally

In pots, themselves supported at the vertices of a regularly tetrahedral framework

If the framework is an earth-covered regular tetrahedron, you can dispense with the pots.

Note that the framework could be the earth as a whole, so the trees could be planted at any four points on the earth's surface which form a regular tetrahedron. Most such will have at least one location on a water surface, so you still need the pots, but there may well be places where all four could be planted directly in the ground

Paul

[mfgoode]

Your are right Paul and have the general idea.
We are not interested in what medium the trees are planted but only in the spacing of the trees so in a way you have gone off key. Please bear in mind that the man is a landscape gardener and hence is limited to landscapes.
This piece of information has not been used and in a way is vital for the answer. There are two logical answers to this puzzle. To reduce the scale they could also be plants .
Mally

[jeff8765]

Highlight to read
One of the plants will be on top of a hill with the other three around the bottom so that they four plants form the points of a tetrahedron.