One of the most important jobs a parent has is to name their children's private parts.  This would be so much easier if I had a boy.  The truth is, I have no idea how to go about this. Knowing that this job is so important, and knowing tha...

Have you noticed that those sleigh bells ringing and jing ting tingling too sound suspiciously like a cash register? Is this some sort of Pavlovian conspiracy between Toys R Us and the Salvation Army? I hear that noise and I become a Romero zombie lurching into the aisles to spend…spend…spend. But ...

When I was a kid, I dressed up as a Star Wars character just about every year for Halloween. Even though my Chewbacca & Ben Kenobi costumes were pretty sweet, nothing beat the Stormtrooper getup that my parents made for me when I was 5 years old. Because it meant so ...

If you missed it, this week’s puzzle asked you to use basic physics formulas to transform: Of course, specific steps will vary, but here’s one way to do it: . Unfortunately, there were NO CORRECT ANSWERS to this week’s puzzle, likely because we all spent too much time on CS and not enough ...

In the movie Top Gun, Maverick is the Aristotelian ideal of cool — the non-thinking, seat-of-his-pants antithesis of everything geek. But did you know that all it takes is basic physics to transform one into the other? Use basic physics formulas to transform: Please show your steps, and don’t get your tighty-whiteys ...

When I was a kid, I dressed up as a Star Wars character just about every year for Halloween. Even though my Chewbacca & Ben Kenobi costumes were pretty sweet, nothing beat the Stormtrooper getup that my parents made for me when I was 5 years old. Because it meant ...

Oh, no! Corrosive Gecko is at the bottom of the fence where he can be munched by Chirp-Chirp the carnivorous robin! Your job is to guide Corrosive Gecko, shown below, from his current position to the top of the fence. Of course, there are some rules: 1. Each turn, Corrosive Gecko must ...

Carcharodon carcharias? Nope. The man-eating tigers of the Sundabarns? Nope. This is a picture of Pacha, the world’s most deadly efficient eating machine — our friends’ dog whom we sat this past weekend. Like an expert poker player looking for opponents’ most minute tells, Pacha watched my wife and I ...

The claim of an IQ score is that it’s unchanging through your life — an accurate measurement of your innate intelligence. The same can’t be said of your child’s estimation of your IQ, which ebbs and flows depending on factors like how much you’ve recently spent on toys and whether ...

I have to admit that it feels good to get back to my roots, yo — i.e. “foolproof” equations that supposedly solve things we’d like solved. With that in mind, here’s my take on parental IQ through the (not so) innocent eyes of a child. Because this is a puzzle ...