There are twenty-six coins lying on a table in a totally dark room. Ten are heads and sixteen are tails. In the dark you cannot feel or see if a coin is heads up or tails up but you may move them or turn any of them over. Separate the coins into two groups so that each group has the same number of coins heads up as the other group. (No tricks are involved.)

I know it’s an old (and good) puzzle because I had read it before, and for this reason, some inkling of the solution was lurking in the back of my brain somewhere. I remember it being relatively simple but elegant. (It seems like the solution to every logic puzzle and half of mathematical proofs are elegant, and that “simple” solutions and “elegant” solutions are heavily overlapping subsets. But on second thought, maybe this one is merely cool or neat.)

The solution
My mostly faded memory of that solution involved moving the coins into two piles and turning over all of one pile, or 10 of one (or both) piles, or 16 of one (or both) piles, or maybe half of the coins, so I tried a few strategies in my head until I came across the right one.

You can’t see the coins, but you can feel them and count them as you move them and flip them. Clearly, you need to separate them into two groups before flipping them, because if you try a strategy of flipping and then grouping them, you won’t be able to tell which ones you’re moving!

Separate the 26 coins into a left and a right group of 10 and 16, respectively. The left group has between 0 and 10 coins that are heads up, and the right group has 10 minus that number heads up. Assume the left group has nothing but 10 heads-up coins, meaning the right group has 0 heads-up coins. Flip over all 10 coins in the left group, resulting in 0 heads-up coins, the same as the right group.

Or assume the left group has 9 heads-up coins and 1 tails-up coin. Flip all 10 over, resulting in 1 heads-up coin, the same as the right group.

Or assume the left group has 8 heads-up coins and 2 tails-up coins. Flip all 10 over, resulting in 2 heads-up coins, the same as the right group.

You can verify that this pattern continues all the way down to 0 heads-up coins in the left group, which, when flipped over, become 10 heads-up coins, the same as the right group.

So no matter how many heads-up coins start in the left group of 10, after flipping them all over, this number becomes the same as the number of heads-up coins on the right side!

The math behind it
I did not arrive at that solution by deduction or the use of any math or equations. Rather, I arrived at it by drawing on my vague memory of reading the solution two or three years ago and by performing a lot of trial and error in my head. When I pose this logic puzzle to my children several years from now, I will tell them what I think is the best way to solve this puzzle: to try a bunch of things until you come up with the winning strategy and explain why it works afterwards, not to come up with a theory to explain what should work and then verify it with several iterations.

But there is, of course, algebra to explain why that solution works:

In the left group of 10 coins, there are n heads and 10–n tails. In the right group, there are 10–n heads and 16–(10–n)=6+n tails. Of those four quantities, it is easy to notice that two of them are represented by the same expression: there are 10–n tails in the left group and 10–n heads in the second group. (This happens because we have chosen the group sizes wisely.) To take advantage of this fact, we need to perform some action that makes the two 10–n expressions refer to two sets of heads instead of one set of heads and one set of tails. As we now know, we must flip over all 10 coins in the left group. This converts the n heads to n tails (not entirely relevant) and the 10–n tails to 10–n heads. Now there are 10–n heads in both groups!

The discussion thread that most recently reminded me of these facts was this one, which was about this column written by a mother who is concerned about the violent, debasing, disturbing porn video her 11-year-old son was shown by schoolmates. It is an interesting, well-written, sensible, level-headed column, so I’ll quote it at length:

Last week my son told me he had watched something horrible online. Something sexual where the young women involved seemed coerced into an act that was brutal and disgusting, not just to an uninitiated 11-year-old, prone to anxiety, but to anyone with a shred of humanity. …

He watched it because one of his new friends told him he should – because it was “funny”. …

He said he had been horrified watching a short video online but was unable to stop thinking about it. He told me he couldn’t “unsee” it, and how he felt his childhood was effectively over. He had not told me anything as he thought I’d be angry with him.

So I’m left cuddling my son, who is strung between childhood and adolescence. He tells me that everything is moving too fast. We talk about his observation that you can’t “unsee” stuff. We talk about how you can’t go backwards. And we talk about the importance of moving forward. I tell him how he needs to grow older so that the world can have a great man in their midst.

Then we talk about the porn industry and how often it portrays women as passive beings. We talk about how women in the video he saw are real people, forced into very unpleasant situations – perhaps mums and sisters, certainly daughters – and we talk about how very far from “funny” videos like these really are. We also talk about how sometimes women choose to go into the sex industry and that when the work is on their terms, that’s OK.

We talk about why people might access porn. That being curious is completely natural. We talk about the difference between what he watched that was brutal and violent and something that the majority of people might find titillating.

I am looking at this through the eyes of my 11-year-old. He can see that there are gradations of porn. Some of it, though an unrealistic view of sex between two consenting adults, is bearable and allows you to retain a basic positive belief in the world. But then there is the degrading, shockingly violent porn that showed him a dark underbelly of an online world that until that moment was largely populated by Minecraft and Harry Potter. Faced with this hideous new information, he simply doesn’t know where to file it.

After watching the video, he changed his settings on his phone to strict. He was the last in his year to get a phone. I held out giving him one, not due to fear of him having access to porn, but because I question why someone his age needs a phone.

A month ago, however, I caved in to his peer pressure. I want him, for his sake, to fit in where he can.
[...]
I use the internet all the time. I am very active on social media. I’ve seen porn – most of us have. But I recognise that this time the internet has crept up and slapped me right in the face.

This week, one of this country’s major teaching unions published research suggesting that 90 per cent of eight to 16-year-olds had at some stage accessed pornography on the internet – many without meaning to – and asked for training in how to deliver lessons warning of the dangers of pornography. This is not about censorship but education. It’s about having frank discussions about the content that our generation has created and giving it a context for the younger generations who are consuming and replicating it.

Children have always found ways to discover the world on their own and that’s essential and it’s important that adults don’t interfere with that discovery and self-education. But it’s our adult world that is increasingly seeping into their childhood, at the touch of a button. And when the mark of fitting in with your mates becomes watching a “funny” video, which is essentially violent porn that changes your world in an instant, then I think we, as a society, need to reassess things.

The Farkers reveal their ugly true colors by jumping all over the author for being a “bad parent” by failing to prepare her 11-year-old (!) for seeing violent, debasing, abusive, coerced pornography, and assuming that what he saw wasn’t so bad, and saying that all normal kids see that stuff sooner or later so 11 is just fine, and the child will never adjust to the real world with his parents sheltering him so much, and they’re obviously cheap, oppressive bastards for waiting all the way until age 11 to buy him a smart phone, and this mother clearly just wants to censor the internet. It is hard to imagine such a large proportion of an entire online community missing the point so badly and failing to address a single issue that the column was actually about. See for yourself:

Yes, oh great and knowledgeable parent person, shelter your son more. That way, he’ll be guaranteed to grow up to become a well-adjusted member of society. There will definitely not be any negative repercussions from trying to protect him from things which he does not understand, and there will be zero chance of your little snowflake having sex-related psychological issues in his adult relationships with women.

The mother was not trying to shelter her son or protect him from sexual content; she was trying to protect him from violent, disturbing, debasing pornography—that means rape! (Only one contributor to that discussion thread even mentions rape, so that says something about Farkers’ understanding of the column and the issue in question.) It is hard to imagine this ignoramus being more wrong about the mother’s point or about what types of experiences will poison the boy’s future adult relationships. The way children get screwed up psychologically and lose the ability to have happy, healthy sexual relationships is by seeing and experiencing the exact things this boy claims to have seen. The people who will have sex-related psychological issues are the ones who think debasing, dehumanizing pornography is “funny” or arousing in any way. Until they are probably in their mid- to late teens, children cannot cope with or understand certain sights and experiences, violent sexual assault among them. Many people who go into pornography, who suffer from dysfunctional intimate relationships, or who become sex offenders have a disturbed conception of sex, intimacy, violence, abuse, and interpersonal relationships, which often results from exposure to something sexual and/or violent at too young an age to process it and cope with it. True, most of these were probably victims of actual abuse and not of an unexpected porn video, but exposure to any sexual content at a very young age and exposure to this type of disturbing sexual abuse at a pre-teen age can very well cause long-term psychological harm. Much more than “sheltering” a boy from footage that, according to the mother, would disgust anyone with a shred of humanity. I trust her assessment of the video more than this basement-dwelling sociopath who probably is aroused by that type of thing.

wait, the mom in the article was rational while taking to her son. at least she was able to talk to him AFTER the FACT. (why she didnt talk to him BEFORE the FACT was actual the cause of the problem. talk to your kids. NOW! Whoops too late.)

“educating pupils to the dangers of viewing internet pornography ”
Yup, the author of the article agrees with the crazies. PORN KILLS!!!!
YES we should all be talking to kids about sex and porn. (teachers and parents, probably not farkers…)
YEs they are going to see it either way, no matter what you do. His not having a phone just meant that he would see it on his friends phone.

The sex talks that parents are supposed to have with their children do not involve describing the types of disgusting, dehumanizing pornography that sick fucks find stimulating or arousing. The author of the column seems to imply that she and her husband have talked to their son about sex to some degree, so they have a mature enough relationship to be able to talk about porn at this time. This doesn’t sound like the first sex-related talk the author has had with her son. (If parents haven’t even broached the topic of sex with their children, then I guarantee they can’t all of a sudden have a calm, rational, fruitful discussion about dehumanizing sexual abuse one night.)

So this Farker’s “point”, if you want to call it that, that the parents were negligent for not talking to their son about sex yet, is almost certainly nullified by the facts. If this Farker’s point was that the parents should have talked to their son about the violent, disturbing, dehumanizing rape-pornography that’s out there, and described it in detail, possibly by finding examples to play for him, so that he wouldn’t be shocked by it when he found it on his own, then this Farker’s disconnection with the real world and human decency is self-evident. If this Farker’s point is that the parents should have already talked to their son about the existence of violent, disgusting pornography but without going into any detail or description, then I don’t see how that would have helped anything in this case. If this Farker’s point is that parents should talk to their children about sex and include some information about the basics of pornography (its purpose, the fact that it’s acceptable and hurts no one as long as its consensual), but not mention violent, dehumanizing pornography, then that also wouldn’t help anything.

In summary, this Farker doesn’t have any discernible point except to lash out at a parent because it makes him feel good to get on his high horse about over-protective parents and the pussification of children, when neither of these factors is relevant.

Several other Farkers were guilty of the same basic kind of misunderstanding: thinking that the issue at hand is talking to children about sex (and even pornography) and that this mother’s failing was that she waited too long, until after her son had been horrified by an online video, to talk to him about sex. Here are the four other such comments I noticed:

1. If you can’t take five lousey minutes to talk to you kids about sex. . .

2. If only there were a way for parents to help their children understand such complex issues.

/then again ,I suppose I’m asking too much as their are innumerable adults walking around with childish notions about sex

3. The problem is shiatty parents. You need to teach your kids when it’s acceptable to view porn, drink, and curse.

4. People are naive to think that their “children” are not having or thinking about sex. Humans are naturally curious. Unless you use the fear of god to fark them up.

Let me make this clear: This column is not about sex or talking to children about sex. It is about an 11-year-old child, who is not even an adolescent and is three or four years away from even starting high school (or whatever they call it across the pond), who was disturbed, troubled, and disgusted by a violent, debasing, dehumanizing video of sexual abuse that he was tricked into watching by his peers, who called it “funny”. (Whether they called it such to trick him into thinking it was a comedic video or they actually found it funny, I don’t know. Probably the former.) No parents’ sex talk with their children should include this type of abusive, coercive rape-pornography, except to warn their children to stay away from it and to remind them that there are some very bad people in the world who don’t respect others and who need to hurt others to feel good about themselves. People should not be exposed to certain things at all in their early childhood years and should only be exposed to palatable, non-disturbing sex and violence as they grow into their pre-teen and teenage years. This mother is rightly concerned that her son and millions of other children could be and are being irrevocably damaged by violent, unsettling images of involuntary abuse and debasement. (Even if the video was fiction staged by voluntary actors, it clearly sounds like way too much for an 11-year-old to see. He didn’t think it was fiction; that’s enough. The author opines that no one with a shred of humanity should react with anything but repulsion to it, and I trust her opinion much more than maladjusted Farkers’.)

No human being should ever perform any violent or coercive act, especially a dehumanizing and abusive act like the one in question; they certainly shouldn’t film it; it shouldn’t exist as pornography, whether staged or real, because no one should be aroused or in any other way turned on by violence and abuse; and if you are aroused by rape and debasement, then you are a psychopath who is unfit for human society.

The purpose of pornography is to sexually arouse the viewers to enhance their sexual experience either alone or with their partner(s). If you are sexually aroused by brutality, coercion, and debasement, then you have a mental illness and need professional help, possibly institutionalization. You are the one who is maladjusted and dysfunctional. I am not talking about insistent or even forceful persuasion in which one person is reluctant but then gives in to carnal desire voluntarily. I am not talking about objectification, which is fundamentally different from dehumanization. I am not talking about the entertainment value of violence and bloodshed in video games, police dramas, and war movies. I am talking about rape, forceful and involuntary, whether it is all fiction or not. The human brain should not be wired to be sexually aroused by any type of violence or coercion, and if yours is, then it is abnormal, and not in the Albert Einstein/Leonardo da Vinci kind of way. The purpose of brutal, debasing rape-pornography is not to add a level of rawness or realism to a story about crime, or to comment on our violent society, or to depict how evil the rapist is for getting satisfaction out of that act, or to make us sympathize with the victim, or to provide an entertaining, bloody fight of good guys vs. bad guys; it is to arouse the viewer by showing brutal rape, as well as depicting the arousal and satisfaction of the rapist. Therefore, just as the occurrence of any violent act is disheartening to any decent human, there mere existence of brutal rape-pornography is something all decent humans should oppose and keep children from seeing, because we shouldn’t want any fellow human to be so disturbed as to be aroused by it. We should never want to see it—we should be disgusted and disappointed it even exists, for the reasons above—and we should be doubly opposed to our children seeing it.

That does not mean we should pretend it doesn’t exist. That does not mean we shouldn’t warn our children about miswired psychopaths who are sexually aroused by violence. That does not mean we shouldn’t teach our children about evil and violence. It simply means children who are barely out of elementary school and cannot possibly understand the complexities of intimacy, sex, and the psychological and physical abuse of rape should not be exposed to disturbing rape-pornography that is more likely to scar them than enlighten them. At least let them get into puberty before exposing them to such overwhelming stuff.

It is bad enough that brutal atrocities have been committed by murderers, rapists, generals, dictators, and other psychopaths throughout history; at least the genocides and wars and serial killings and individual acts of abuse, rape, and murder are universally seen as deplorable acts of violence. But what is even worse is when deplorable acts of violence, whether fictional or real, are depicted as serving the sexual pleasure of the abusers and are filmed for the sexual enjoyment of viewers. It is not healthy for anyone to be aroused by documentary footage or reenactments of wars, genocides, murders, or rapes, and it is equally unhealthy for anyone to be aroused by pornography that is brutal, coercive, and dehumanizing, whether fictional or real. That is why children should never see it and why adults probably shouldn’t, either.

“Too young to have a phone.”
HAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAH
For 8 billion years parents have been using this moronic chestnut to keep from having to spend money and to punish their children because when they were kids they had to walk up hill both ways in the snow.

But most 11-year-olds don’t need a cell phone. What do they need it for? They can’t drive yet. It is extremely unlikely that they will go anywhere or be in any situation that the parents don’t know about. Their parents or other parents chauffeur them almost everywhere they go. Most households with children have a land line that the children can use to talk to their friends. The one and only reason any child wants a cell phone is as a status symbol to compare with the other children’s. The only good reason to give a middle-schooler a cell phone is to use in emergencies where using a land line is impossible, which this Farker doesn’t bring up. He assumes parents deny their children cell phones and other gadgets to avoid spending any money above the bare necessities of life and to make their children suffer through all the parents had to suffer through at that age. Wrong and wrong.

Has any kid, ever, said they want to remain a child?

Um, yes, plenty. I have a feeling most children, at least most children who are relatively happy, healthy, well-adjusted children with comfortable, pleasant home lives have wanted to avoid growing up at some point in their adolescence. This feeling was echoed by three or four other Farkers who responded to that comment.

I blame the parent. The kid was smart enough, after viewing said pron, to change the settings on the phone to ‘strict’…the parent should of done that immediately prior to giving their kid the phone. The author’s stated how they saw pron all over the internet and still gave the phone to their kid with unlimited viewing ability.

Parental FAIL.

You don’t need to blame the parent, the child, or the internet that produced the pornography. If anyone, you should blame the child’s degenerate classmates for fooling him into viewing a video by describing it as “funny” and by finding it the slightest bit enjoyable or entertaining. Maybe the parent didn’t know the phone had a “strict” setting (I’m almost certain mine doesn’t), or maybe they didn’t want to shelter the child by being over-protective, which this Farker probably would have objected to if the parent had originally taken those precautions. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, though, so suffice it to say that there’s no need to blame the parent or child or the technology at all.

From the article: He told me he couldn’t “unsee” it, and how he felt his childhood was effectively over.

It’s pretty damn obvious that the author is putting words into her kid’s mouth here. I don’t doubt that he was shocked by seeing something extreme, but there’s no way in hell an 11 year old actually said that.

It’s pretty damn obvious that clueless Farkers will grab onto any person, situation, or story that doesn’t fit their myopic worldview and rail against it with whatever comes to mind, regardless of the validity of their argument.

This Farker seems skeptical that an 11-year-old child would use the word “unsee” or say he felt his childhood was effectively over. First, where have you encountered the word “unsee” in your travels? Mainly on the internet, of course! So this Farker is saying he finds it unlikely that a child of the internet age would use internet terminology in real life? And not only is that unlikely, but the person who put that word into the child’s mouth was the mother, who, while she describes herself as an active, frequent internet user, is not a child of the internet age, is probably in her late 30’s or early 40’s, and is therefore not in the demographic group of most frequent users of internet jargon. No, between the two of them, it is far more likely that the child is the one who used the word “unsee”, rendering yet another Farker’s “logic” completely invalid.

As for the unlikelihood that the child actually said he felt like his childhood was effectively over, that wasn’t quoted and so was obviously the mother’s words. She was paraphrasing the gist of his feelings in her own words. Any half-literate simpleton could deduce that from this thing we call punctuation.

Yet again, a Farker demonstrates his incapacity for a considered, sensible evaluation of the mother’s position, preferring instead to lash out at what he considers an easy target, only to fail to make a single valid point.

But, if there were an instructional on the best way for a mom to not give her son weird sexual hangups for life…this would be the opposite of it.

This mother (and, probably, the father or her partner) has talked to her son about sex and is capable of having a thoughtful, sensible, mature discussion with him about pornography and porno actors. This is exactly what the parents of an 11-year-old should be doing to raise a mature, composed, sexually healthy adult. In contrast, an example of something that would give a person “weird sexual hangups for life” would be seeing shocking, disgusting, dehumanizing, coercive sexual abuse as a pre-teen and being surrounded by peers who think it has any redeeming qualities. These are facts that are obvious to anyone who has actually been through all of childhood, grown up into an adult, had normal, healthy relationships, developed a sense of respect for women, learned that we should be outraged at any and all violence and abuse, and acquired something resembling a decent moral compass.

I am of the opinion that the incident she is describing… never actually happened. Makes for a convenient excuse for a porn-hating article.

The ethics of porn are complex. Some people think everything is simple. Therefore, they choose an opinion that lets them think a complex subject is not complex. This opinion is usually wrong.

This Farker completely ignores an important and long passage of the column. I’ll quote it again:

Then we talk about the porn industry and how often it portrays women as passive beings. We talk about how women in the video he saw are real people, forced into very unpleasant situations – perhaps mums and sisters, certainly daughters – and we talk about how very far from “funny” videos like these really are. We also talk about how sometimes women choose to go into the sex industry and that when the work is on their terms, that’s OK.

We talk about why people might access porn. That being curious is completely natural. We talk about the difference between what he watched that was brutal and violent and something that the majority of people might find titillating.

I am looking at this through the eyes of my 11-year-old. He can see that there are gradations of porn. Some of it, though an unrealistic view of sex between two consenting adults, is bearable and allows you to retain a basic positive belief in the world. But then there is the degrading, shockingly violent porn that showed him a dark underbelly of an online world that until that moment was largely populated by Minecraft and Harry Potter. Faced with this hideous new information, he simply doesn’t know where to file it.

That’s three paragraphs of the mother displaying an understanding that the entire issue of pornography is complex (especially as relates to children) and that it’s not possible to demonize all porn or shun it in a black-and-white manner. And she probably passed at least some of that mature understanding of this complex issue on to her child. She discussed it with him like a mature, responsible parent. This is the polar opposite of what this Farker and most others in this discussion thread have done. This Farker’s conclusion is: “Nope, she made it up. She just wants to demonize porn. Her thought processes and conclusions are wrong.” That is not complex or nuanced but rather jumps straight to conclusions that are not only unsupported by the column but are in fact directly and specifically contradicted by the column. So in fairness to this commenter, he probably didn’t even read the whole thing; that’s why his points are so stupid and vapid.

Yeah, for all we know it was just some video of a chick taking a jizzblast to the face. Hardly violent, but to Pruneface McUptight in the article it’s all ZOMG, VIOLENCE AGAINST WIMMINZ!!!!

Translation: “I didn’t read much of the mother’s column, so I’m just going to take the lazy approach of assuming what I want so that I can bash her as an uptight prude, because this fits more nicely into my myopic worldview, viz., that everyone in the history of the world who isn’t a Farker or other basement dweller who agrees with me most of the time is worthy of scorn and condescension.”

Jesus christ, the kid is 11 so
a) he should already be familiar with porn
b) should be infatuated with it-not scarred by it.
c) might have teh gheys
d) is a pussy

When I was 11 I was smoking unfiltered lucky strikes (quit @ 16), smoking pot (no comment), drinking (never stopped) and looking for a connection for acid & coke (came around a year or two later). Violent porn and Faces of death were old news.

Kids these days are never allowed to grow up or make mistakes, thats why they are all pussies.

Again, this is not about porn or sex, it is about disgusting violence and debasement. It is about the depiction of an immoral, inhuman, illegal violation as sexually enjoyable, filmed for sexual enjoyment. Kids who miss out on seeing violent, debasing rape-porn don’t grow up to be sissies who are scared of sex because of it. In contrast, kids who see violent rape-pornography might very well be more likely to grow up to be sexual abusers and rapists. I don’t have any data from longitudinal or retrospective studies to back that up, but my main evidence is that anyone who is aroused by that already has a disturbed psyche, and only someone with a disturbed psyche can become a sexual abuser.

*sigh* And the quest to censor the internet continues.

There is nothing explicit or implicit in the mother’s column about censoring the internet. Again, instead of addressing the issues the mother brings up—she doesn’t actually propose any concrete solutions to the problem of children viewing porn at ever-younger ages; that isn’t really the point of the column—this Farker just jumps on a simple issue (censorship) that he feels strongly about and that no sensible person could possibly oppose him on and bashes the author for her (imagined) wrongheadedness. Lazy and stupid—par for the course for Fark.com.

That was the most pretentious “think about the children” article I have ever read.

Poor kid.

It was the opposite of pretentious. It was sober and sensible. This Farker probably didn’t actually read the column. If he did, I feel sorry for him that that’s his best guess at the meaning of the column.

Finally, I should mention that eventually several Farkers did chime in with sensible viewpoints and facts that contradicted the sociopaths above, though none of them was very forceful or eloquent about it. That’s the way it goes with online communities like Fark.com: the hivemind is antisocial, ignorant, puerile, myopic, and fervently, crusadingly intolerant of differing opinions—precisely the reason I abandoned Fark and haven’t even logged in since about 2007—and the minority thinkers have to tread lightly to avoid offending too many sheep and starting flame wars all the time.

It wasn’t that they were being rude; in fact, her kids might not have been making any noise, though that seems doubtful, because they’re kids. What struck me was how little—none, it seemed—this woman cared about a good, interesting, well-told movie and what she had missed of it and how she could catch up with the plot after missing several minutes. Paying attention to and enjoying the movie just weren’t among her goals for this movie outing. Such concerns weren’t even on her radar. Her purpose in taking her kids to see Brave was to go to a public place for a relatively easy, sedentary activity, to avoid the summer heat, and to put her kids in front of some big, colorful, moving pictures for an hour and a half.

I made remarks along these lines, in much briefer terms, either during or after the movie to Kathy, and she agreed it was kind of funny or weird. Unrelatable, at least. We couldn’t relate to someone who would go to a movie, even if it’s a kids’ movie, and have no interest in following and enjoying the whole thing. Now, I fully expect to take our children to some movies or other events where my main goal is to entertain and distract them for a couple hours to ease the burden of caring for them once in a while, but I also expect to at least pay attention to the whole movie and care about following it all. And let’s not forget that kids’ movies these days are on average better than ever, with the possible exception of the wonderful early- to mid-1990’s Disney movies (Brave won the Oscar for best animated film). So anyone who was paying attention to Brave would have become interested and invested in the movie almost immediately. But once the duty of taking her charges to the bathroom or the concession stand arose, this mother’s interest in the movie apparently disappeared. I hope Kathy and I never get like that with our children in the theater. Or even at home when we’re actively watching a movie with our children.

His teeth felt strange in his head, tiny tombstones set in pink moist earth.
—Stephen King, The Gunslinger

Those gods might not punish at once, but sooner or later the penance would have to be paid…and the longer the wait, the greater the weight.
—Stephen King, The Waste Lands

It was only this clearing that had heard the full and painful measure of her grief; to the stream she had spoken it, and the stream had carried it away.
—Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

And beneath them as the night latened and the moon set, this borderland world turned like a dying clock.
—Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla

We spread the time as we can, but in the end the world takes it all back.
—Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla

A mist hung over the Devar-tet Whye like the river’s own spent breath.
—Stephen King, Song of Susannah

Outside, the wind gusted. The old horse whinnied as if in protest to the sound. Beyond the frost-rimmed window, the falling snow was beginning to twist and dance.
—Stephen King, The Dark Tower

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. … Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

On the northern faces and higher ground of the rolling hills in the valley divide, the wind combed billowing fields of gray standing hay with rhythmic strokes, while dark evergreen boughs of spruce and pine swayed and shivered in erratic gusts that found their way around to the protected south-facing sides.
—Jean M. Auel, The Plains of Passage

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.
—Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson’s was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

No vivacious Bacchanalian flame leaped out of the pressed grape of Monsieur Defarge; but, a smoldering fire that burnt in the dark, lay hidden in the dregs of it.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

…nobody wondered to see only Madame Defarge in her seat, presiding over the distribution of wine, with a bowl of battered small coins before her, as much defaced and beaten out of their original impress as the small coinage of humanity from whose ragged pockets they had come.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Troubled as the future was, it was the unknown future, and in its obscurity there was ignorant hope.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

When the dream of vengeance in which we joined begins to drown all innocence in the blood tide, we are forced to look at the mingling of innocence and violence in ourselves.
—Stephen Koch, Afterword to A Tale of Two Cities

Sixteenth Street traffic moves in frustrated inches and headlong stampedes.
—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.
—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

The cold sank its fangs into my exposed neck and frisked me for uninsulated patches.
—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

He chiseled open the fault lines in the others’ personalities.
—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

I lived with them on Montague Street in a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air.
—Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up In Blue”

There is no greener green than the green of a ball field in spring.
—Buster Olney

Tall green plants, possibly corn, grew in softly sighing ranks that stretched to the distant horizon where the last arc of a huge red sun was setting.
—Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

Well, to put it bluntly, they kind of jerked me around. The producers of the show approached me, asking me to do a new theme song for the show. I wrote the lyrics (which they approved) and then recorded the song (which they said they “loved”). And then they never used it. Go figure.

I’ve always liked that song since I first heard it on my cassette tape of his album Alapalooza (most famous for “Jurassic Park” and “Bedrock Anthem”) back in the mid-90’s. I thought it was kind of funny and/or curious that the “E!” audio logo appeared at the end of the song, which apparently is the same exact clip used by E! and not an imitation. I guess I assumed Weird Al put that there as more of a reference or homage to the TV show Talk Soup, which made fun of daytime talk shows like his song did (before his song did), or maybe something akin to Jim Morrison’s “Stronger Than Dirt” at the end of “Touch Me” (a reference to the Ajax household cleaner commercials of the time, which had a four-note melody similar to the last four notes of “Touch Me”). But it turns out the name of Weird Al’s song, its content, and the “E!” audio logo at the end were made for/came from the TV network itself. You learn something new every day…

Looking back, those little douchebags remind me of the boys in the South Park episode “Bebe’s Boobs Destroy Society”. In that episode, Bebe starts maturing a little early and shows signs of boobs in the 4th grade. This triggers a primal sexual-attraction instinct in the boys, and they devolve into cavemen fighting and grunting to compete for Bebe’s affections. Their vocabulary drops to one word, ata, which I guess they use to mean boob.

This is almost exactly what some 6th-grade boys in my class were like. Maybe every 6th-grade class (or 5th, or 7th) is like that to some extent. I think the fact that 6th grade was the beginning of middle school was key in the timing of this Neanderthalism. I didn’t even observe the boys trying overtly to impress girls, but rather I think it was just a male dominance/machismo thing. I’m sure it was all attributable to hormonal changes combined with some evolutionary desire to establish physical dominance in any group and/or new situation, and I don’t doubt several of them would cringe in embarrassment if they could peer back through time at themselves at that age. But a lot of us weren’t like that, and we continued to behave like civilized, intelligent human beings through the rest of adolescence.

Seventh grade was clearly the worst, a year when respect, civility, and decency reached a lifelong low. During 7th grade, I clearly remember thinking how awful many of my classmates were and how much I disdained them. I wasn’t an angstful, emo teenager at all, and I was never one of those depressed kids who felt like an outcast and hated the world. I was the opposite: I just wanted to get straight A’s and obey the rules and never get into trouble and generally conform as long as it didn’t take too much effort or social interaction. I was calm, quiet, and followed the rules, which is probably partly why I disdained all the disrespectful, misbehaving 7th-graders so much.

I think about the dehumanizing, decivilizing nature of our school systems often, especially how their coercive, authoritarian nature, which is actually quite disrespectful to the children from the beginning, engenders so much angst, rebellion, and misbehavior in them. My main long-term concern in life is how to raise my children to be as mature, responsible, and respectful as they can at every age, and to make sure that their educational experience, whether it’s at home or in schools, also encourages and allows them to maximize their self-respect, maturity, and independence at every age. Traditional, bureaucratized schooling, especially polluted with douchebags and Neanderthals as is so common, should be the main thing all parents strive to avoid.

It is amazing how hard it is to find any list, much less a comprehensive one, of scientific terms to add to spelling dictionaries, such as those of Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, etc. Well, I decided to remedy that by putting my lists online for all to download. I’ve accumulated thousands of terms in my Microsoft Word custom dictionary over my career as a scientific editor, and I added thousands more from such sites as Rawge’s Scientific Names Spell Checker Dictionary, which actually includes several lists of various types of animals; this list of European species names; and my editing company’s house list.

One note about UK/US spellings: the file “custom_scientific” below should be rid of all UK- and US-specific spellings, such as hem-/haem-, -iter/-itre, estr-/oestr-, -ize/-ise, etc. If you find any that don’t belong, or any other typos, please please please tell me in the comments.

I’ve included three files:
custom_scientific.txt (49,552 entries): the words from the above-mentioned sources, minus UK-/US-specific spellings.

custom_scientific+US.txt (58,775 entries): custom_scientific plus all of the entries in my Microsoft Word US English spell-check dictionary that I’ve accumulated over the years. (This includes many AmE-specific spellings but also several thousand terms that have only one spelling and which therefore would belong in custom_scientific above, but I haven’t gotten around to copying and pasting the latter subset there. It also includes several foreign names, geographic locations, and words related to research institutes and departments, such as Recherche and Tecnología, because I encounter them often enough that it was preferable to add them instead of clicking “Ignore all” every damn time and/or because they aren’t similar to any mistyped English word that would need flagging and correcting.)

custom_scientific+UK.txt (52,200 entries): same as previous paragraph but for BrE.

Finally, please download these, copy them, share them, spread them, host them, correct them, add to them, and use them! The more such lists exist on the internet (and, eventually, in software spell-checkers’ native files), the better off every scientific writer, editor, researcher, and student is.

At the very top of a Google search results page is a black bar with the alternate search options +You, Search, Images, Maps, Play, YouTube, News, Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and More. Below that is the search box with what I’ve just searched for, and below that is another line of alternate search services I could use to narrow (or widen) the results it gives me: Web, Images, Maps, Shopping, News, and another More. The first “More” dropdown menu includes Translate, Mobile, Books, Offers, Wallet, Shopping, Blagger, Reader, Finance, Photos, and Videos. The second one includes Videos, Books, Places, Blags, Flights, Discussions, Recipes, Applications, and Patents.

Both “More” dropdown menus, or at least the top one (I’m not sure how long there have been two), used to include Google Scholar. Why would they take it away? Why not just add it back? How hard could that be? What would possess them to believe that fucking Offers, Wallet, Flights, Recipes, or Patents are relevant or desired search filters more often than Google Scholar? Don’t they realize that pissing off a sizable portion of your customers for no good reason is generally considered a bad business practice? Sure, there are occasionally good reasons to piss off a lot of customers, such as tightening an over-exploited return policy, instituting tighter security measures, charging for something that used to be free but which is costing you more money than it’s making, etc. But there is not—cannot possibly be—any reason whatsoever for simply removing Google Scholar from the available sub-searches. It boggles the mind.

This inexplicable decision of Google’s reminded me of this recent Onion news video: Google shuts down Gmail for two hours to show its immense power

Gmail servers were down for nearly two hours today in what Google called “a show of their immense power”. In an online statement, the company said, “Tremble before Google! With the mere flip of a switch, we can bring you to your knees.”

Why can’t they just flip a switch and return Google Scholar to the alternative search results list? The inability to switch between full web search results and Google Scholar results is the greatest impediment to my productivity outside of internet distractions and other entertaining things. It would harm literally no one, and its absence is helping literally no one. It just makes no sense.

What? What’s that you say, Wikipedia? Sub rosa comes from the Latin, literally under the rose, from the ancient association of the rose with confidentiality, the origin of which traces to a famous story in which Cupid gave Harpocrates, the god of silence, a rose to bribe him not to disclose the indiscretions of Cupid’s mother Venus? Hence the ceilings of Roman banquet-rooms were decorated with roses to remind guests that what was spoken sub vino (under the influence of wine) was also sub rosa? Fascinating, Captain…

No, humans invented those. What purpose does it serve to thank God for inventing those? How is your point enhanced by saying God invented something instead of saying “That’s why man invented” or “That’s why they invented” or “That’s why people invented” or “That’s why someone invented”?