Snoqualmie

I break (4) math.

On Friday, in a strange and reckless mood only heightened by the absence of anyone in my office to pay attention to me, I spent my afternoon break attempting to logically estimate the total weight of the Empire State Building. I used a piece of notebook paper, a pen, and a series of wildly inaccurate assumptions, and I eventually came up with a figure which was almost exactly 1% of the correct number. So said my post-project internet research, anyway. I invite you to, without looking up any dimensions or statistics, post any guesses, calculations, or wild hypotheses that you may have.

Beware, though; math may not be functioning to normal standards at the moment. Consider:

• The infuriating pattern-matching game Set contains a deck of precisely 81 cards.
  
• 81 is a number divisible by 3. This is a well-known feature of the number 81.
  
• This divisibility by 3 is what makes gameplay -- consisting of picking up sets of exactly 3 cards -- possible.
  
• Last night, when Katie and I played the game, we ended up with 9 cards that could not be made into sets. This is not a problem.
  
• When we checked through our sets, however, Katie had one set of 4. That IS a problem.
  
• With one set of four, we could not possibly have had a divisible-by-3 number of cards remaining.
  
• Every other set was a set of 3. There were no sets of two, no sets of five, and no other sets of four.
  
• Three, three, three, three, three, three, three, four, nine.
  
• No number of threes will make that sum to 81.
  
• When we shuffled and counted the cards there were precisely 81.
  
• Three, three, three, three, three, three, three, four, nine. Eighty-one. It's mathematically impossible.

All we could really do was give each other frightened looks, agree that we had somehow broken basic arithmetic, and go quickly to bed to try to forget about it.