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branches and shavings

Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2014 10:47 am
by clayton
This just occurred to me, and I want to see if this makes logical sense to everyone else as it does to me.

When you carve a small branch, you get three bark shavings. When you carve a medium branch, you get four bark shavings. When you carve a large branch, you get five bark shavings.
Now, if you chop a medium branch in half, resulting in two small branches, you still get three bark shavings per small branch. The medium branch should therefore yield six bark shavings, not four. When you chop a large branch in half, you get two medium branches right? Why then, do you get four bark shavings per medium branch, yet the total bark shavings from the large branch is five.

Logically, one has to conclude that the medium branches should yield six bark shavings, and the large branches should yield eight bark shavings, but the resulting shavings from the smaller branches to make sense.

It would not make sense, to say, well, since the large branch yields five shavings, a medium branch, and even a split medium branch, should result in 2 and a half bark shavings. If that happened, you'd have to divide that in half for the two smaller branches, or the two smaller split branches, to result in one and a quarter shavings. How can you have a quarter of a shaving.
I wonder if anyone else has pondered this since the shavings started to appear from the carving of branches.

Hughe