How to survive if you're placed in a blender

The Wall Street Journal provided several answers to that dilemna in an article entitled "How to Ace a Google Interview."

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

These questions, posted by job candidates on Glassdoor.com, aren't from some wacky Silicon Valley start-up—they're asked of applicants at AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and Bank of America, respectively.

Goldman Sachs interviewers ask candidates the firm's stock price. Morgan Stanley asks interviewees to name a recent story they've read in the Financial Times—apparently, a lot can't. J.P. Morgan Chase asks the value of pi. (It's thought to be instructive to see how many digits the candidate can recite.)

Here are two additional, more standard math-type interview questions reportedly used at Google interviews -

3. Using only a four-minute hourglass and a seven-minute hourglass, measure exactly nine minutes—without the process taking longer than nine minutes.  
 
4. A book has N pages, numbered the usual way, from 1 to N. The total number of digits in the page numbers is 1,095. How many pages does the book have?

Answers to these and the blender question at the link.

Addendum: A hat tip to an anonymous reader who found an article written by someone with personal experience on a Google hiring committee.  The story that Google uses lateral thinking questions in their interview process is an urban legend (though other companies may do so).  Details at the link.