Puzzler: MAGNIFYING GLASS MYSTERY - Bogus!

I disagree with the answer to this one. If you draw 2 lines on a paper, you didn’t draw an angle. The angle is essentially the space in between the lines you drew, not anything you drew yourself. It’s not like drawing a square or a circle, where you put the shape down on the paper. I would argue that you can’t actually draw an angle on paper at all. An angle is not a shape - it’s a measurement of the intersection of the two lines. Just like you can’t draw an inch, or a color (but you can draw a line that is one inch long or a line that is green), you can’t draw an angle, you can only draw lines that intersect at a specified angle.

^^^ So, you would not be able to complete this task: “Draw a 30 degree angle.”

;-]

I don’t know the original puzzler, but I think you are nit-picking. Nothing is ever exact. You can’t draw a straight line, or any line, because a line is an abstraction. As is a square or a circle or an angle.

I can draw myself a beer. And I don’t need no stinkin’ pencil to do it.

I checked my son’s Geometry book, and it never (that I could see - I didn’t check every single lesson) directed the student to draw an angle. It always said something like, “draw two lines that form a 30 degree angle.” But whatever. I wasn’t surprised by the answer, I was just a little disappointed. I thought the answer was going to be an “aha!” not a “seriously?”

And yes, of course I’m nit-picking! :slight_smile: Many of the puzzlers are very nit-picky already, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to be as well.

If you draw two lines that form a 90 30 degree angle, they’d look the same unmagnified as magnified wouldn’t they? I mean if you centered the image at the point where they crossed, and you couldn’t see the end of the lines, you couldn’t tell the difference by looking at the two images, right?

I wouldn’t say that claim was something to object to. The claim that “writing” includes drawing two crossing lines, well a person could say that was misleading. There’s merit to that complaint, but not to the sameness of the magnified vs unmagnified image of the two lines, as long as the image is centered at the point where they cross.

Edit: There’s a scientific field people study – or at least used to study, quite a popular thing to study in the 1990’s – called “fractals” where this kind of magnified/unmagnified image equality thing comes up. So the puzzler is actually quite interesting.

Another answer would be to make a punctuation mark, a period, which is a point (a dot). That would look the same magnified or unmagnified, if it was an ideal point dot.