The Zhuangzi was originally compiled around 350-300 BCE, or the Warring States period, during which many classic Chinese philosophical works were written. Like the Dao De Jing and other canonical Daoist texts written around this time, the Zhuangzi has been used as a meditative guide and self-cultivation handbook for people looking to escape the social pressures of traditional Chinese culture. T...

Despite our recent commentary on the article by Resende and Weber, the authors still seem to believe that Sir Charles Bell (1774-1842) himself was affected by facial paralysis. They came to this erroneous conclusion from a paper by Jongkees and by “neurological examination of the photograph of Sir Charles Bell” (Fig 1). However, had they taken the effort to check Jongkees’ German translation wi...

The role of intuition in software development was discussed in a most original fashion by Peter Naur in 1984. Yet there has been little subsequent interest in elaborating on Naur’s ideas. In seeking to explain this neglect, we argue that the accepted views of software development, both within the formal and pragmatic traditions, are deeply influenced by a conceptual framework inherited from com...

We investigate a coin-weighing puzzle that appeared in the 1991 Moscow Math Olympiad. We generalize the puzzle by varying the number of participating coins, and deduce an upper bound on the number of weighings needed to solve the puzzle that is noticeably better than the trivial upper bound. In particular, we show that logarithmically-many weighings on a balance suffice.