This week’s Micro Softy tests the way fast food motivated a chubby little boy to exercise.

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In order to beat the new early curfew, imposed by the new federal Food Czar on fast-food outlets, Tony bicycled to Burger Doodle at an average speed of 12 miles per hour to get there before closing. With his Doodle Cheeseburger and fries in a bag, Tony rode home at a slower speed of 6 miles per hour.

For the round trip, what was Tony’s average speed on his bicycle?

Hint: As revealed in Micro Softy 7 and the answer given in the Micro Softy  8 column, averaging averages can be tricky.

Now Here’s the solution to last week’s pill popping Micro Softy 44: Pete’s Pill Problem

As readers may recall, Pete was on a four-day vacation to a remote island with just enough medication for his stay: two Munchoril pills and one Progofrin pill each morning. On the first day, he accidentally spills all his identical-looking pills on the table, creating a dangerous situation. He could not tell one pill from another. His doctor warned that taking the wrong balance of medication would result in serious side effects.  So Pete uses his wits to correctly take his medication for all four days.

Here’s how.

Peter retrieved a hard fist-sized rock from outside his cabin and crushed all his pills into a fine powder on the hard wooden tabletop. He mixed the finely powdered pills well. Using the hard cover edition of the book Non-Computable You (2022) by Robert J, Marks as a straight edge, he divided the well-mixed powder into four equal piles.

Each of the four piles of powder contained the same medication content as two Munchoril pills and one Progofrin pill.

Disclaimer: The Micro Softies in this ongoing column have been gathered over many years, and I’ve since lost track of their initial origins. There is no claim of originality. Some general sources include oral anecdotes from students interviewed by Microsoft for coding jobs, the column “Mathematical Games” by the late Martin Gardner in Scientific American, the Puzzler section of Car Talk on PBS Radio, Marilyn vos Savant’s “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade magazine, and the book Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics . More recently I benefited from a copy of The Sherlock Holmes Puzzle Collection (2012) that contains fun puzzles, many of which I’ve seen other places.

The Micro Softy is a weekly feature of Mind Matters News. Links are provided to all the puzzles and answers to date.

The Monday Micro Softy is a weekly feature of Mind Matters News. Here are the links to all the puzzles and answers to date:

Monday Micro Softy 44: Pete’s pill problem. Pete, alone on a desert island, accidentally scattered the pills he must take in the correct order. He has only a few numbers to work with to reconstruct his instructions. For Micro Softy 43, the bookkeeper’s trick consists in applying the fact that when two adjacent digits are switched, the difference is always divisible by 9.

Monday Micro Softy 43: The bookkeeper’s trick How could division by 9 explain what happens when numbers in a sum are inadvertently transposed? Micro Softy 42 is easier to solve if we recall the rules for dividing by each of these numbers in turn.

Monday Micro Softy 42: Bacteria multiply by dividing. But our puzzlers must solve this math question without doing either. And no calculators allowed. A hint for solving Micro Softy 41: Dividing an unusually shaped piece of land among four sons rather than three is easier if you think in terms of fractals.

Monday Micro Softy 41: King David’s sons’ puzzling inheritance. Solomon must figure out how to divide an oddly shaped piece of land equally among his brothers and himself. In Micro Softy 40, the critical question is not whether the watchman’s prophecy comes true or not; it’s how he came to learn the information anyway.

Monday Micro Softy 40: The fate of a false prophet. He wasn’t actually fired for being a false prophet but for something that his prophecy unintentionally revealed. The solution to Micro Softy 39 lies in considering an alternative possible meaning of a word commonly used in sports. You will also find links to Micro Softies 30 through 39 and their answers here as well.

And here are links to all the earlier Micro Softies

Monday Micro Softy 29: A funeral lament in four lines. The funeral director was puzzled by Dan’s description of his relationship to the deceased but there was no question that his grief was sincere Here, you will also find links to Microsofties 22 through 29.

Monday Micro Softy 21: Finding More of the Deadly Fentanyl Pills. Here, you will also find links to Microsofties 11 through 20 as well.

Monday Micro Softy 11: What Happened to That Other Dollar? Here you will find links to the first ten Micro Softies. Have fun!