You are the ruler of an empire and you are about to have a celebration tomorrow. The celebration is the most important party you have ever hosted. You’ve got 1000 bottles of wine you were planning to open for the celebration, but you find out that one of them has been poisoned by your enemy. The poison exhibits no symptoms until death and the death occurs within fifteen hours of consuming even a diluted sample. You have over a thousand slaves at your disposal and just under 24 hours to determine which single bottle is poisoned. You also have 30 prisoners about to be executed, and it would mar your celebration to have anyone else killed. What is the minimum number of prisoners, you must have to drink from the bottles to be absolutely sure to find the poisoned bottle within 24 hours?

In this report we aim to identify which type of severe weather events have been historically most harmful with respect to population health and economic consequences. To investigate those events, we have obtained historical data (1950-Nov 2011) from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) storm database, although due to data recording methodology only data from 1996 is used in our analysis. Our results show that flood has had the highest impact in terms of economic loss in the US since 1996, while tornados have incurred the highest rate of both injuries and fatalties. Other high-impact events are both water-related (flood and flash flood) as well as wind-related (thunderstorm, hurricane/typhoon).