stupid riddles

Originally posted by crazyblue
there you have a puzzle (an old one though):

an old man dies and his possessions (17 camels) are given to his 3 sons. the old man wanted his oldest sun to get 1/2 of the camels, the middle one 1/3 of the camels and the youngest 1/9 of the camels.
now they have no clue how to solve this, as they dont want to cut the camels into pieces.

so they go see ...[text shortened]... hat leaves them with 1 camel left over, which they give back to the wise man. how did that work?

The children get a higher percent of the father's camels than they are supposed to. This is ok though because the father had planned to have 1/18 of a camel left over after his kids got their camels. Because of the "wise man" there are no leftover camels. I hope the father didn't intend to do anything with the extra 1/18 of a camel he was supposed to have left over!