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stepping out of Jones’s path, but even that wouldn’t necessarily prove he was guilty.
    Overall, the chances are that Smith would get away with it. All that would prevent him being a happy man is the terrible burden of guilt that eventually becomes so unbearable that Smith takes his own life by following Jones over the same cliff …

How would you measure the weight of your own head?
    (Medicine, Cambridge)
    Not an easy one, since cutting off your head and placing it on the scales would render you incapable of reading the measurements. Keeping your head on your shoulders and resting your head on the scales might not be quite so fatal, but it’s unlikely to provide much of a measurement either, since your neck muscles would invariably offer enough support to invalidate the reading. Even an estimate from measuring a similar-sized melon is likely to be more accurate than this!
    So the best approach is to try a couple of methods that would give a rough measure and then take an average between them. First you can establish the volume of your entire body by filling a bath enough to entirely immerse yourself. Mark the water level (level 1) and then get in, allowing the water to completely settle down before gently and briefly submerging altogether. Get a friend to mark the water level (level 2), or do it yourself if you can. Get out of the bath and refill it to level 1 to allow for the water you’ve spilled and dripped out on your body. Now add measured amounts of water until it reaches level 2. The volume of water you added should give you a measure of the volume of your body. It’s only a rough measure, so repeat the exercise several times and take the average to reduce the error. (If you have a person-sized drum, this would make a more accurate measure than a bath, since the water level would rise further in the confined space as you got in.)
    Now you can measure the volume of your head the same way, immersing your head only up to a certain point – in a bucket rather than a bath to increase the water level movement. A friend would help ensure that this is to the right point. You could actually measure the volume of your body without your head instead, by getting into the bath to measure your body volume, but leaving your head above water.
    Finally, weigh your entire body on accurate scales. Now using the ratio of your body volume to your head volume,you can work out the weight of your head from the weight of your whole body.
    If you repeated this method several times, you would probably get a reasonable measure of the weight of your head, despite the inaccuracies of your measurements and errors introduced by the air spaces in your head.
    A quicker but less accurate method would be to measure the volume of water displaced by your head in a bucket, then convert this figure to a weight of water and add 5 per cent (to allow for the slightly higher specific gravity of your head).
    Finally, if you have access to a CT scan, you can get someone to measure both the density and volume of your head and then calculate its weight from that.

What is fate?
    (Classics and English, Oxford)
    Fate is the idea that events inevitably turned out as they did because they conformed to a plan set up by some outside, supernatural force.
    The idea that the course of one’s life is somehow predetermined is an old one, and crops up in many cultures, as the Arabic
kismet
, for instance, and the Ancient Greek Fates, the trio of goddesses – Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos – who spin webs to control the path of human lives.
    Fate is often linked in the imagination with tragedy rather than comedy. We talk about someone’s tragic fate, but rarely their comic fate. Fate tends to be presented as crueland mocking, often playing mischievous games with people’s lives as they vainly try to escape their predetermined course – but end up unwittingly pursuing the precise path that leads them to their unhappy end. Thus in the Greek play
Oedipus Rex
, the