This 'Simple' Puzzle Stumped 96% of America's Top Math Students
Twenty years ago, this puzzle appeared on a test administered to top-tier math students from 16 countries around the world. Only 10% of test takers got it right. In the U.S., only 4% managed to provide a correct response. Can you find the “simple” solution that so many intelligent students missed?
Earlier this week, a logic puzzle went viral. The riddle, which you can read here, challenged problem-solvers to determine someone’s birthday, based on what seemed, at first glance, to be insufficient information. I opted not to feature the brain teaser on io9, because – potential spoiler alert – I thought it too similar to another puzzle I posted here a few months ago. So why do I mention it at all? Two reasons.
Reason number one: It turns out the birthday riddle recently appeared on “a math olympiad test” for number-savvy high schoolers in Singapore. When I learned of the problem’s origins, I was immediately reminded of another puzzle, which, twenty years ago, bedeviled many of the world’s sharpest high-school-aged math students.
The puzzle in question appears below, exactly as it did on a test administered in 1995 to students in their final year of secondary school in 16 countries around the world. The test was one of three developed by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) to assess math and science literacy around the globe. Unlike the other two tests in the series, this one was designed specifically for final-year students who had taken advanced mathematics courses. The IEA later reported that this question stumped more students than almost any other on the exam. “Students in all participating countries found this problem very difficult,” reads the IEA’s Third International Mathematics and Science Report. “Only 10%, on average, provided a fully correct response, with another 2%, on average, receiving partial credit.” Swedish students fared best, with 24% providing full, correct answers. In the United States, just 4% of students were able to provide a complete solution.
Reason number two: I hesitate to provide the second reason. I worry it would provide too big a hint. I allude to it pretty directly above, in the headline and lede, but if you want a more explicit explanation, click here.
Art by Tara Jacoby
Sunday Puzzle #28: String Around the Rod
We’ll be back next week with the solution – and a new puzzle! Got a great brainteaser, original or otherwise, that you’d like to see featured? E-mail me with your recommendations. (Be sure to include “Sunday Puzzle” in the subject line.)
The solution to this puzzle (or, at least, the solution I was looking for) is 1,023. The trick is to count not in base ten (which is how most of us learn to count on our fingers), but in base two. In this way, one can count as high as 31 using the digits on one hand, and as high as 1,023 using the digits on both hands. (Assuming they were nimble enough, you could use all your toes to count as high as 11111111111111111111 in binary, which translates to 1,048,575.)
Many of you arrived at the binary solution, above, but I was even more impressed with how many readers came up with ways to count even higher. Last week’s comments are full of solutions that involve using different hand positions to increase the maximum-countable-number multiple times over. Other commenters (who clearly possess more dexterity than I do), suggested using partial-finger (i.e. bent-finger) positioning to count in base three. Click here, then scroll down to the comments, to explore these alternate solutions.
Minds like Barbara Beskind's are America's most underused human resource.
She's a top-notch designer at an internationally known design firm in Silicon Valley. And she's 91.
She holds court every Thursday at IDEO, a design and innovation consulting firm in San Francisco, as an ad-hoc consultant.
There, she gloriously helps designers invent better, more functional products for the elderly. She meets with a team of designers, some five or six decades her junior!
IDEO sends out an email to let everyone know when Barbara is in the office. The designers she works with love her.
People like Barbara have seen the invention of nuclear power, the rise of the automobile, the death of the streetcar, the invention of TV!
Their experience is, as of now, untapped. Unhired. Un-asked-interesting-questions.
Their wisdom, their brains, and their spirit are one of our nation's greatest untapped resources.
"I've retired five times, but it's like a vaccination that doesn't take." — Barbara Beskin, my hero
How did she get there?
Barbara wanted to be an inventor and engineer her whole life. But when she asked her college counselor about pursuing it, she was told that it wasn't an option for her because engineering schools at the time didn't accept women. (!)
So she joined the Army, became an occupational therapist, wrote some books. ... Fast-forward to decades later, when she sent a nine-page letter to IDEO asking for a job. She got the job.
Here are some of the things she's already come up with:
#1. A unique brace that helps her BFF Hedy get up off the couch
Note to self: Become an inventor or befriend an inventor. They're so helpful!
#2. A magnifying glass for reading
She has macular degeneration. So she's just solving for it ... with inventions!
# 3. Modified walking poles
These are what I want for my grandma. She hates her walker; it makes her feel uncool. Already this little old lady inventor has changed the way I think about design.
#4. A revolutionary new walker
Much like her walking poles, Barbara is working on a walker that helps keep the person using it in a more vertical position.
#5. Prefab backyard living quarters for the elderly to live in an existing home with family
All those chill times you spent with grandma in your backyard? Well, Barbara's inventing new ways for grandma to live there! And ideas to make it better — like a chemical toilet and an electricity hookup that draws power from the main house. She gets it!
And that's just the beginning! She's 91 and she's JUST GETTING STARTED.
"You have to think outside of the box. You have to be more than yourself. The world is more important than you are." — Barbara Beskind, aka the coolest
Is it just me, or should more companies get out of their stereotypes and into some untapped wisdom?
IDEO is famous for being cutting-edge, but that doesn't mean they should be the only company that benefits from elderly people's DECADES of experience in the world.
The brains, the experience, and the sheer exciting fact that these folks are ALIVE ... that is our natural resource. We should respect it.
I'm gonna go call my grandma now! I need to tell her about some walking poles.
While I do that, listen to more of Barbara's story from "The Today Show":
Witness’s Live-Streaming App Is A Panic Button For The Smartphone Age
Posted 8 hours ago by Sarah Perez (@sarahintampa)
What if live streaming, like those streams that run today on apps like Periscope or Meerkat, could be used to save lives? That’s the premise behind an app called Witness, which made its debut today at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon.
Built over the course of the weekend, developer Marinos Bernitsas demoed an app that immediately begins recording live audio and video as soon as you tap the app’s icon, but doesn’t actually display the video stream being recorded on the smartphone’s screen.
Meanwhile, instead of having the stream sent out to the public via social networks like Twitter, only designated contacts you’ve previously configured in the app’s settings are alerted to the incident via phone calls and text messages.
“Whatever emergency I have, I pretty much always have my phone and my wallet with me,” Bernitsas explains. That’s why he says it made sense to take advantage of the smartphone’s camera, microphone and GPS to build an app that could help keep people safe.
Having previously worked in algorithmic trading in New York, Bernitsas quit his job a year ago in order to focus on his passion for building apps. One of these, an app called “Ask ne1,” is already live on iTunes, allowing users within a certain proximity to ask each other questions and chat.
Witness’s creator worked on his app independently over the course of the weekend at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, he says, only getting three hours of sleep in the process.
Bernitsas says he was originally inspired to take advantage of the smartphone’s camera and sensors for general personal safety purposes – like for those times when friends of his would walk home from his apartment late at night. But in more recent months, the idea seemed to resonate even further, as a number of incidents involving police brutality began to make national headlines.
In some of these cases, witnesses had recorded the arrests on their mobile devices which helped to build a case against the police officers in question.
However, having to rely on the chance that a nearby witness would record an incident isn’t really the best option. Plus, there are other times when you would want to record an emergency or otherwise threatening situation that don’t involve encounters with the law. In addition, the process of actually beginning to record a smartphone video makes it obvious to observers what you’re up to, and it takes several steps to even get started, much less later share the video with others.
The Witness app takes a different approach, operating sort of like a “panic button” for your phone. The app takes advantage of an open-source project called Kickflip, a library for live streaming for the iPhone, which Bernitsas modified to upload to his own server.
To use Witness, you first set up your emergency contacts by listing their name and phone number in the app. You can then start a live stream with a tap of the app’s icon. After doing so, your contacts receive a phone call with an automated recording that informs you that your friend has activated Witness and to “follow the link on your text message to track this incident in real-time.”
At the same time, your friends also receive a text with the link that takes to you the Witness website. On the website, which is mobile-optimized, recipients can watch and listen to the live video as it happens, view a map with the stream’s location (which is updated as the person moves), and view a full log file related to the incident.
On the Witness user’s phone, however, there’s only a red banner at the top above a black screen. That could make it a bit difficult to make sure you’re framing the right shot, but because the app is aimed at emergency use instead of social video, it’s less of a concern.
What’s also clever about the app is that even if the user loses their Internet connection, Witness will record video in 10-second chunks and store them locally on the end user’s iPhone. When their connection returns, that video is uploaded to the server.
Bernitsas says he may continue to develop Witness in the future, but needs to better research Apple’s policies on emergency apps to determine whether or not it would be allowed in the App Store.
Urban fiction, or street lit, has been snubbed by the publishing industry and scorned by black intellectuals. Yet these authors may just be the most successful literary couple in America.
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JaQuavis and Ashley Coleman, who fell in love as teenagers in Flint, Mich., and whose novels chronicle a hardscrabble world they know well.Credit Andreas Joseph
THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.
In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.
One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.
But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.
JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”
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Three of the nearly 50 works of urban fiction published by the Colemans over the last decade, often featuring drug deals, violence, sex and a brash kind of feminism.Credit Marko Metzinger
In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”
That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.
But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.
“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”
THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.
In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.
“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”
They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.
They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”
Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”
The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.
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The roots of street lit, found in the midcentury detective novels of Chester Himes and the ‘60s and ‘70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines.Credit Marko Metzinger
Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”
The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.
Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.
The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”
Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”
Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.
For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”
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The Colemans in their new four-bedroom house in the northern suburbs of Detroit.Credit Courtesy of Ashley and JaQuavis Coleman
Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.
The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.
But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:
WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW ABOUT USING A GUN: MURDER . . . 30 Years ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years ASSAULT . . . 15 Years RAPE . . . 20 Years POSSESSION . . . 5 Years JACKING . . . 20 YEARS
“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”
One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”
Every day brings new lessons, and at almost 59, I've learned a lot.
Mostly I've learned . . .
There is an incredible joy in giving, not expecting anything in return.
I've learned forgiveness is a choice, and one I'll forever be grateful I chose to embrace.
I've learned to expect the best - from myself and others.
I've learned that the decision to be happy is mine alone. I can choose to wake up thinking about all that is wrong in the world or in my life, or I can choose to focus on all the is right, and the possibilities of all of the goodness that lies ahead.
I've learned that there is no greater joy than being a parent. Nothing compares to seeing Ben and Frankie take their place in the world, and do those things that they alone are destined to do.
I've learned that all over the world, people are good, and kind and generous.
I've learned that in spite of our outward appearances and different cultures, people are much more alike than we are different.
I've learned that forgiveness unlocks the door to happiness and peace of mind.
I've learned that a smile disarms the most hardened among us.
I've learned, long ago from my dear Mom, that it's important to do your part when you meet someone - speak to those who may or may not respond. What they do with this greeting is their business, but you've done your part.
I've learned that sometimes people just need you to listen, to be.
I've learned that no matter what's happened, or who has wronged you, forgiveness is the key to get passed it.
I've learned, the hard way, that holding a grudge simply holds yourself in bondage. It's not about the other person, it's all about you.
I've learned that worrying is a waste of time. It accomplishes nothing but increasing your anxiety levels.
I've learned that believing in the wonders of God has little to do with organized religion.
I've learned to be grateful for my life - the ups and downs and everything in between.
I've learned to appreciate the lessons that life teaches us.
I've learned to live life and to enjoy every single day of it.
I've experience the pain of loosing a newborn child. I can't imagine the plethora of emotions of discovering a baby was stolen instead. On the one hand, these women must be eternally grateful that the children are alive, but on the other hand, they have to be incensed that someone would do this unthinkable thing - steal their babies.
~~~~~~~~~~
From The Huffington Post - Black Mothers Wonder If Their Lost Babies Are Still Alive
AP | ByJIM SALTER
Posted: 05/01/2015 3:24 pm EDT Updated: 05/01/2015 4:59 pm EDT
ZELLA JACKSON PRICE
ST. LOUIS (AP) — Eighteen black women who were told decades ago that their babies had died soon after birth at a St. Louis hospital now wonder if the infants were taken away by hospital officials to be raised by other families.
The suspicions arose from the story of Zella Jackson Price, who said she was 26 in 1965 when she gave birth at Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis. Hours later, she was told that her daughter had died, but she never saw a body or a death certificate.
No one is sure who was responsible, but Price's daughter ended up in foster care, only to resurface almost 50 years later. Melanie Gilmore, who now lives in Eugene, Oregon, has said that her foster parents always told her she was given up by her birth mother.
Price's attorney, Albert Watkins, is asking city and state officials to investigate. In a letter to Gov. Jay Nixon and St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, Watkins said he suspects the hospital coordinated a scheme "to steal newborns of color for marketing in private adoption transactions."
Gilmore's children tracked recently down her birth mother to mark their mother's 50th birthday. The search led them to the now 76-year-old Price, who lives in suburban St. Louis.
In March, an online video caused a sensation when it showed the moment that Gilmore, who is deaf, learned through lip reading and sign language that her birth mother had been found.
The two women reunited in April. DNA confirmed that they are mother and daughter.
"She looked like me," said Price, a gospel singer who has five other children. "She was so excited and full of joy. It was just beautiful. I'll never forget that," she said of the reunion.
After the reunion, Watkins started getting calls from other women who wondered if their babies, whom they were told had died, might have instead been taken from them.
Their stories, he said, are strikingly similar: Most of the births were in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s at Homer G. Phillips. All of the mothers were black and poor, mostly ages 15 to 20.
In each case, a nurse — not a doctor — told the mother that her child had died, a breach of normal protocol. No death certificates were issued, and none of the mothers were allowed to see their deceased infants, Watkins said.
"These are moms," he said. "They are mothers at the end of their lives seeking answers to a lifelong hole in their heart."
He plans to file a lawsuit seeking birth and death records. None of the women are seeking money, he said.
Watkins said he has no idea who, or how many people, may have been responsible if babies were taken. He believes the infants were stolen and put up for adoption in an era when there were few adoption agencies catering to black couples.
Homer G. Phillips Hospital opened in 1937 as a blacks-only hospital at a time when St. Louis was segregated. Even after desegregation in the mid-1950s, the hospital served predominantly African-American patients.
The hospital closed in 1979. Messages seeking comment from officials at the St. Louis Health Department were not returned.
Price said she gave birth to a baby girl born two months' premature on Nov. 25, 1965. The baby weighed just over 2 pounds but Price was able to hold the crying child after birth.
A nurse took the baby away and came back an hour later. The little girl was struggling to live, Price was told. She might not make it.
Shortly thereafter, the nurse came back. The baby, she said, was dead.
Price recovered in the hospital for two more days, in a ward surrounded by happy mothers.
"It was depressing to see when they rolled the babies in and they were taking them to their mothers, but I didn't have my baby," she recalled.
Gussie Parker, 82, of St. Louis, heard Price's story and was shocked by the similarities with her own life. Parker gave birth to a premature girl on Nov. 5, 1953.
Initially, she said, the child seemed fine. A short time later, a nurse told her that her daughter had died.
"I never did see the baby or get a death certificate," said Parker, who has another daughter, Diane, who works for The Associated Press in New York. "When you're young and someone comes and tells you that your baby's dead, in those days you accepted it."
Otha Mae Brand, 63, of St. Louis, said she was 15 when she gave birth to a girl in the spring of 1967. The child was two months' premature and was hospitalized for 10 days while Brand was sent home.
She got a call from a nurse who informed her of her daughter's death.
"I had no reason not to believe them," Brand said. "I got that phone call, and that was the last I heard."
Now, she wonders.
"I told my children, 'It's a possibility your sister may be living,'" she said.
Retired physician Mary Tillman was an intern and did a residency at Homer G. Phillips in the 1960s. Calls to her home on Friday rang unanswered, but she told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the hospital had protocols and record-keeping to track mothers and daughters. She never had any suspicions of wrongdoing, but said it should have been doctors, not nurses, who broke the news of death to mothers.
Price, who has five other children, said she's saddened by the lost years that she could have spent with her daughter.
"For me not to be able to love on this child like I did with the others, I'm going through a lot of emotions," Price said. "But I'm so blessed to know that she is alive."
In 1952, the owner of a chicken restaurant named Harlan Sanders began franchising out his brand to other restaurateurs throughout the country. Colonel Sanders’ chain, then known as Kentucky Fried Chicken (and now KFC), spread quickly, and Sanders became a very wealthy man. The key to his success: a secret recipe. In 1940, Sanders perfected his “original recipe” of “11 herbs and spices” — a mix which gave his chicken its distinctive, sought-after taste. Sanders used this recipe as a core part of the franchise agreement; according to Wikipedia, “independent restaurants would pay four (later five) cents on each chicken as a franchise fee, in exchange for Sanders’ ‘secret blend of herbs and spices’ and the right to feature his recipe on their menus and use his name and likeness for promotional purposes.”
It would have been easier to simply give the franchisees the herb and spice recipe mix and prohibit its unauthorized use via contracts and patents. But KFC decided not to, believing that the recipe was their biggest point of differentiation. And the recipe remains a secret even today — in no small part because the company wants to keep it that way.
The secret recipe is hand-written on a piece of paper by Colonel Sanders himself; there are no known copies, digital or otherwise. In 2001, the New York Times reported that the recipe “is locked in a company safe and treated as a closely guarded trade secret. The ingredients are said to be known only to a handful of employees who have signed confidentiality pledges.” And, according to a trade publication, ”the executives are prohibited from traveling together due to security reasons.” But most dramatically, even companies that make the spice mix for the chicken giant aren’t given the recipe. Instead, KFC gets the spice mix from two different companies, according to Wikipedia (citing this Times of London story, but the Times story is behind a paywall), with neither company having all the information: “half of it is produced by Griffith Laboratories before it is given to McCormick, who add the second half.” This makes it impossible for either to reproduce the entire mix of herbs and spices.
There’s reason for KFC to take this cloak-and-dagger approach to the recipe — had Sanders (or, later, the company) patented it, the recipe and process would have been published as part of the patent application. That patent would have eventually expired, allowing anyone to copy it verbatim. And even before the patent expired, the publicly-published description of the ingredients and process could be modified slightly to avoid liability. The only way to protect the recipe, therefore, was via obscurity — if no one ever knows it, no one can copy it.
It seems impossible to keep such a thing a secret for so long, making many skeptical about the above. There are many who believe that that the entire “secret recipe” protection process isn’t to protect the signature flavor of KFC, but to strengthen the brand’s marketing efforts. The legend of the recipe is always good for a PR bump, as even moving it around it newsworthy. For example, in 2008, according to CNBC, the company “temporarily relocat[ed]” the prized document in order to “revamp security around a yellowing sheet of paper that contains one of the country’s most famous corporate secrets.” And as many have pointed out, the “secret recipe” likely changed over the years to account for the mass production of fried chicken required for the company’s growth.
So take the secret with a grain of salt — and with some secret herbs and spices, too.
Bonus Fact: Colonel Sanders, as he got older, wasn’t a fan of KFC. According to the Consumerist, in the 1970s, Sanders commented publicly that KFC’s gravy reminded him of “sludge” and the mashed potatoes of “wallpaper paste.” KFC ended up suing its founder for libel — but lost. Why? In part, because, as the court found, “the assertion that the chicken served by Kentucky Fried Chicken Corp. was not prepared exactly according to Sanders’ original recipe was not defamatory. It is almost inevitable that at least slight deviations would occur. Indeed, prospective customers would expect that.”
Bonus Fact