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Here’s a fun and surprisingly accurate (a la Cosmo Quiz) test of your personality and morality. Read the following story and then rank Robin, Maid Marion, the Sheriff of Nottingham and Little John from most to least moral. Then check the interpretation below to discover your innermost personality secrets.

The sheriff of Nottingham has finally caught Robin Hood and Little John! Instead of killing them immediately, he makes the mistake of all storybook villains in simply stashing them in the dungeon. Despite their track record of heroics, there the two benevolent outlaws rot–until Maid Marion shows up pleading her love for Robin and begging for his release. Sure, says the Sheriff, if Marion will sleep with him.

She does. Robin and Little John are released. But when Maid Marion tells Robin the truth of how she earned their freedom, Robin dumps her faster than a leprous leech. Little John defends her behavior and offers his lifelong devotion if she will ride away from Sherwood with him forever.

She does. The end.

What do you think? Who’s most right and who’s most wrong? Don’t forget to rank the characters before checking the interpretation below.

• RH, LJ, MM, SN: A moralist with conventional ideas. Old fashioned. 5% total.
• RH, LJ, SN, MM: Massively puritanical. Women conspire against men. 2% total.
• RH, MM, LJ, SN: Your philosophy is a confused mix of romanticism and moralism. 4% total.
• RH, MM, SN, LJ: You have high standards and are not predisposed to trust others. 2% total.
• RH, SN, MM, LJ: Ruthless authoritarian with weak personal morals. 2% total.
• RH, SN, LJ, MM: You see women as the possessions of men and have a weak self-image .3% total.
• LJ, RH, MM, SN: Cautious and insecure-you distrust the opposite sex. 6% total.
• LJ, RH, SN, MM: Inferiority complex. Women: you bend in the slightest breeze. Men: you fear women. 2% total.
• LJ, MM, RH, SN: You’re a romantic, idealizing women or expecting too much of men. 15% total.
• LJ, MM, SN, RH: Slightly romantic realist. Broadminded, flexible and likely happy. 10% total.
• LJ, SN, MM, RH: You believe in common sense and relative morality. You’re uncertain. 3% total.
• LJ, SN, RH, MM: Misogynist! You’re a prude with an old-school opinion of women. 1% total.
• MM, LJ, RH, SN: Happy and well balanced. Some chivalry and/or high standards. 13% total.
• MM, LJ, SN, RH: Contended and maybe a little superior. Morality fits the occasion. 10% total.
• MM, RH, LJ, SN: You’re guilty, lack confidence, and are overly concerned about others’ opinions. 4% total.
• MM, RH, SN, LJ: Live a little! You’re too stubborn. 1% total.
• MM, SN, RH, LJ: Women: you like your men strong and your women stronger. Men: wannabe lover. 2% total.
• MM, SN, LJ, RH: You’re strong to the point of ruthlessness. Truth rules all. 3% total.
• SN, LJ, MM, RH: Sulky, confused and immature. 2% total.
• SN, LJ, RH, MM: Men: you see women as fickle and inferior. Women: get a backbone. 1% total.
• SN, MM, LJ, RH: You claim to be a realist, but you’re actually a romantic. 3% total.
• SN, MM, RH, LJ: A rebel with a trace of spoilt child. You value truth above morality. 2% total.
• SN, RH, MM, LJ: You prefer fantasy sex to real life. 3% total.
• SN, RH, LJ, MM: Men: You’re afraid of women. Women: you like bad boys. 2% total.

I posted this puzzle at Wired Mag’s Geek Dad blog. These kids have been photographed just as they started to pronounce the first letters of their names. The names are OOM, ALDEN, EASTMAN, ALFRED, ARTHUR, LUKE, FLETCHER, MATTHEW, THEODORE, RICHARD, SHERMER, and HISSWALD. Can you match the kids to their names?

SPOILER ALERT: Answer is posted below.

I would gladly have Sam Loyd's love child

Cover your eyes! Hide your head under the pillow! Don’t under any circumstances continue reading! (Unless you want the answer…). Here it is—in lower case so it’s not quite so immediate: Matthew, Alfred, Eastman, Richard, Theodore, Luke, Oom, Hisswald, Shirmer, Fletcher, Arthur, Alden. Shhhh! Don’t tell anybody.

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As promised to Peter Anthony Holder on his very cool podcast The Stuph File. Click the link for audio of me and Peter exploring the weird, wild folds of our gray matter.

What to do when an apology’s required but you feel less than apologetic? Or have been caught in the wrong and would rather bounce the blame than own it? Try the non-apology apology! The following strategies deflect the rays of wrongdoing like the S on Superman’s chest. How many have you heard on CNN in the last week?
•  Remove the specific act and yourself from it: “I think everyone knows that the misuse of taxpayer money is wrong. Anyone who does something like that is out of line.”
•  Question the harm done: “If my actions harmed anyone, I apologize.”
•  Truthfully confess to an unrelated charge: “I can honestly say that at no time during the unfortunate events with taxpayer money did I ever intend to use the money for my girlfriend’s cosmetic procedures.”
•  Bury in technical jargon: “I regret my failure to conform to the specifications of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act. There were instances in which I overlooked the sub-clauses governing the fair use of campaign contributions. I regret my lack of attention to the MFCFA and assure voters that I will make every attempt to conform to the regulations in the future.”
•  Passive voice makes the culprit disappear: “Unfortunately, it has been found that campaign contributions and taxpayer money were used in improper ways.”
•   Compare to a much worse possible outcome: “The thorough investigation found that, regardless of what you might have heard, no campaign contributors or taxpayers suffered any physical injury  whatsoever.”
•  Oops, I made a mistake: “In hindsight, I realize that I made mistakes in the handling of campaign contributions. All of us make missteps and I want you to know how sorry I am for this lapse in judgment.”
•  Bonzai! Sometimes the best defense is a good offense: “Let me describe to you the recent, vicious attacks on me, my family, and on our great country, these United States of America, all by a sensationalist and biased media.”

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• WISHING LIMBAUGH DEAD? A non-apology apology. “I think she shouldn’t have bothered. She apologizes… (pajamasmedia.com)

High res train track plan images, as promised in the Wired Geek Dad blog entry of same name. Check the link for the Six Demandments of building with track. Really, you shouldn’t build without them.

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You know the feeling: you step off the airport walkway and your body seems to be falling forward over your toes. Or you get off the treadmill and the drinking fountain seems to rush toward you. Or the classic visual illusion: after looking at a waterfall for 30 seconds a stationary boulder seems to drift skywards. Why?

It turns out a very basic mechanism of your brain is to blame: “normal” is what your brain says it is. Here’s a deeper look:

When you first look at or experience a stimulus, the neurons that recognize it get excited. They spring into action, processing the new information and forcing it into your consciousness: wow, look at all that falling water! Then the neurons get bored. The stimulus gets blasé and drifts into the background.

And your neurons adjust their expected baseline—falling water starts to look stationary—and you start to interpret things in relation to this baseline. And if falling is stationary, then stationary is up! So when you look from a waterfall to a rock, your baseline is off and the rock appears to levitate until your neurons readjust.
Okay, great. But here’s what’s really cool: the trick crosses senses. Looking at something moving (a waterfall) can make you feel like you’re moving (the walkway).  Maybe you’ve had the jolting sensation of MOVING backwards after SEEING a large truck slowly pass your car on the freeway.

Researchers demonstrated this phenomenon by showing participants images of black and white bars moving up or down through a computer screen, and then touching participants’ fingertips with a small electric device. After SEEING a waterfall-like pattern, participants felt the device MOVING even if it wasn’t.

But what’s really, really cool is this: the effect crossed the other way, too. A MOVING touch made participants FEEL as if a screen of black and white bars was moving, even if it wasn’t.

The responsibility of Twitter updates got you down? D’you think about tweeting but never actually get around to it? Never fear, Adam Wilson is here. The University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering grad student removes the clunky and outdated interface of keyboard and lets his brain tweet for him.

That’s right, he straps an electrode-coated swim cap to his head and watches as letters scroll across his computer screen. When his brain recognizes the letter he wants, the swim cap knows and uploads it directly to Twitter.

What’s the meaning of that F to which you’re inexplicably drawn? Why does your attention keep traveling toward the S? Now, thanks to Adam Wilson, you can become conscious of your unconscious, and make sure everyone else in the Tweetosphere is conscious of it, too. In addition to the way this technology promises to change human existence through hands-free Tweeting, secondary uses may include communication for people whose brains work, but whose bodies don’t, namely those with ALS or high spinal cord injury.

Vinay Deolalikar from HP Labs claims proof of Millenium Prize problem P=NP, and (potential) $1M prize (pending peer review)! This deceptively simple little bugger (think e=mc^2) has, until now, stumped all suitors—basically it asks whether problems that have verifiable solutions should always be solveable front-to-back, as well as verifiable back-to-front. (Okay, that’s massively simplistic, but going any deeper requires some serious CS.)

Deolalikar’s solution is a 100-page paper of dense to super-dense CS, which, with the $1M Clay Institute prize at stake, will certainly draw much attention from those with big brains and the time born of tenure to go sifting around in said 100-page paper looking for flaws. If you are one of said big-brained people with time and computing power on your hands, you can find the paper here. The proof is in the pudding, apparently.

Ah, how the mighty are falling! Girgori Perelman proved the Poincare Conjecture in 2002. And now (potentially) P=NP. Remaining Clay Institute prizes include the Hodge Conjecture, the Reimann Hypothesis, Yang-Mills Existence and Mass Gap, Navier-Stokes Existence and Smoothness, and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.

Best of Luck.

When you woke up this morning were you an expert water measurer? No? Well, you will be after reading this article. But that might not be a good thing: experts are sometimes worse off than regular Janes and Joes. To see why, first we need to wire your brain for expertise–read on.

Imagine you have three jars. One holds 4 units of water. Another holds 12 units. And the last holds 3. How can you measure exactly 2 units? (Hint: there’s gotta be some subtraction here.)

Now check this out: Jar A holds 8 units, jar B holds 24 units, and jar C holds 6 units. How can you measure 4 units?

And finally: Jar A holds 12 units, jar B holds 36 units, and jar C holds 9 units. How can you measure exactly 6 units?

Congratulations! You’re an expert!

Now the test: Jar A holds 6 units, jar B holds 78 units, and jar C holds 22 units. How can you measure 28 units?

Did you start with 78, subtract two-times-22, and then subtract another six (B-2C-A)? If so, congratulations again! You used the technique you learned to solve the tricky problem!

But check this out—there’s another solution: just add 22 and 6 (A+C). Wow, that would’ve been easier, huh?

Don’t feel bad. This water jar experiment by Abraham Luchins (1942) is a classic demonstration of the Einstellung effect: your previous experience makes the new problem more difficult.

And the Einstellung effect isn’t confined to water jars. It leaps the laboratory, showing up in situations like chess. We apply the solutions that worked in the past even when better solutions are available.

Or, certain people do.

To have previous solutions to fall back on requires some expertise. And so experts fall into the Einstellung trap: they use familiar, non-optimal solutions (while average Janes and Joes have to develop a fresh solution and are more likely to find the simplest way).

But something interesting happens when chess players reach a certain level of expertise: they stop getting sucked into the Einstellung trap. At the stage of Zen chess enlightenment, the mind again becomes flexible as the uncarved block, and masters look past familiarity and into optimal solutions, be they in or out of the box.

Einstellung (baby!) is only a trap for people who THINK they’re experts.

Did you wake up this morning with a tingling in your frontal lobes? Neuroscientists refer to this feeling as your “Spidey Sense” and it’s tingling for a very specific reason: Brain Candy is on shelves today! And your gray matter wants it. Don’t neglect your gray matter. Love it. Stroke it. And nourish it…with CANDY!

If you pick up a copy, please let me know what you think! (After reading, no matter what you think, it’ll be just a little bit faster.)

In a classic experiment known as the Ultimatum Game, person A is given 10 coins to split between himself and person B. If person B accepts the distribution, they both keep the coins; if not, no one gets paid.

According to Game Theory, the optimal solution is for person A to give himself nine coins and person B one coin——both will end the game richer than when they started. However, played in the wild, the most common distribution is 6-to-4, a ratio seen as fair by both parties.

But why? What’s the origin of the human idea of fairness?

To answer that, let’s take a look at a spin on the Ultimatum Game called the Dictator Game. In Dictator, player A decides how to split the 10 coins and they’re split accordingly. Just like that. Player B has no say. In this game, person A is much more likely to split the coins 9-to-1.

The difference between Ultimatum and Dictator is, of course, person B’s ability to punish person A. Let’s take a closer look:

In Ultimatum, person B scoffs at a one-coin offer, sacrificing personal gain in order to punish person A’s greed. Game theorists call this move an altruistic punishment. While person B loses a coin in this maneuver, he can expect his corrective behavior to result in more coins for him and all the other B’s of the world down the line.

Over time, player A has come to expect punishment for unfair behavior and has learned to limit his greed. So to some extent, humans have become social maximizers instead of personal maximizers.

Unfortunately for the mass singing of kumbaya and the potential dawning of a modern Aquarian age, this implies that human fairness is borne of player A’s fear of reprisal and player B’s angling for future payoff, and not of any innate higher moral order.