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Ambiguous "true-false" answer

Mark Frauenfelder at 2:57 pm Thu, May 24, 2012

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Screen Shot 2012 05 24 at 10 54 16 AMI hope this was a clever student's attempt to answer a question that he or she didn't know the answer to. (Via Bit & Pieces)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

  • Pedantic Douchebag

    I see a bright future in politics for this person.

  • That_Anonymous_Coward

    He has a bright future running the lab for “Little Bit Pregnant Testing”.

  • Antinous / Moderator

    Isn’t Frlse the Norse God of Ambiguity?

    • Just_Ok

      might be

    • flickerKuu

       Yes- and no…

    • Ambiguity

       Watch it, buddy!

  • jimh

    See, this is more of a gray area…

    • Finnagain

       Yeah, the grey scale really makes the piece.

  • http://twitter.com/digitalArtform Joseph Francis

    I love it. Reminds me a little of the main titles I designed to the movie ‘True Lies’

  • relawson

    What ever happened to “tralse”? Or “frue”?

  • phlavor

    I was in an Advanced Civics class in Jr. High and we were assigned a project to do two page bios for every president to date. 80 page assignments are daunting for a 13 year old.  Everyone swapped work and as a result the entire class was busted for plagiarism. The interesting thing that happened with this was that the brightest kids in the school started questioning the traditional educational process and advocating group work in papers and science projects. As I rose through High School with these individuals it became a more apparent catalyst for getting these bright kids thinking outside the scan tron form of education. I would give little ms. or mr. true/false a gold star.

    • awjt

      In high school we all had a similar stupidly huge assignment in American History.  I embedded in my first draft a non sequitur phrase: “If you read this, Mr. xxxxx, and point it out to me, I will give you ten bucks.”  I received a 100 on that assignment in red on the front when he handed it back.  He never told me he’d read it, so therefore I knew he hadn’t read *any* of it and I could bullshit the remaining ones, save the first page or so.  I showed it to my friends and we had a good laugh and got a lot more rest and free time after that.

      (Acts of Congress are written in much the same way, to this day)

      • GTMoogle

        I had to write  several 20 page papers for geography in high school, and combine them into one long paper at the end of the year.  Around the time of one of the turn ins, his wife’s cancer took a turn for the worse, and that paper ended up being graded entirely based on how accurate the margins on the first page were.  I… I can’t really fault him for that.  He was a great guy.  :(

        • Antinous / Moderator

          I had a high school history teacher who gave the final exam on the first and last day of class. The whole class did worse after the semester. Yeah, he was going through a bitter divorce that year.

      • http://vincenzoravina.tumblr.com/ Vincenzo Ravina

         I had a not particularly smart teacher in high school and so on a test, when I didn’t know the answer to a question, I wrote nonsensical sentences made up of words I figured she wouldn’t know the meanings of. And it paid off. I got a check mark next to them.

  • /dev

    Obviously Schrödinger’s answer.

  • http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

     The favorite response of a true Fortean is “all of the above” ;)

  • Brood-X

    This is a valid state for a quantum computer qubit.

  • http://2012diaries.blogspot.com/ tristan eldritch

    A young Robert Anton Wilson?

    • Sparg

       Was just thinking of “sombunall”.

  • Mark Dow

    Half credit.

  • corydodt

    The “r” is the problem. it doesn’t look anything like an “a”.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=20904881 Tom Buckholz

       yes, which could be fixed with a capital R A combo

  • http://twitter.com/BongBong BongBong

    That story made me hapgry.

    • BombBlastLightingWaltz

      works on so many levels… thank you

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=41203083 Joe Alfano

    It’s a lovely example of a “perceptual shift ambigram”.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram

  • liquidstar

    They get a checkmark with a backslash through it :)

    • jeligula

       The presence of something this awesome precludes outcome based education.

      • liquidstar

         I thought that’s what I said?

  • flickerKuu

    Hey its captcha. If you don’t know what the answer is, your’e  in-human(e?).

  • MythicalMe

    Honestly, “indeterminate” is a valid answer for true/false questions. No fudging necessary.

  • http://redesigned.com redesigned

    That paper would be easy to grade. :-)

  • AlexG55

    Reminds me of the “accent horizontale” that people would write in French class when they couldn’t remember if the accent on a letter was acute or grave…

  • bryan rasmussen

    ok well, obviously that answer is 70% true, 30% false, due to the fact that there is insufficient ambiguity about the second character. 

  • bryan rasmussen

    By the way Frue in Danish is an old lady, often when discussing if something technical will be acceptable to the general public or bits of policy someone will always refer to what Frue Hansen will think of the matter. 

  • marukosu

    As a teacher, when you’re running through the answers to dozens of tests quickly, and chanting an answer key in your head like “A-C-D-A-False-False-True; A-C-D-A-False-False-True…”, there’s only a split second for your brain to register the mark. Personally, I’m not sure I’d catch this one.

  • mistersquid

    That answer is rong, I mean, wright.

  • Ambiguity

    If you all like this kind of thing, check out Scott Kim’s lettering work. His ambiagrams should appeal.

    • Felton / Moderator

      Also…

      • Ambiguity

         Very well done!

        That movie is my wife’s favorite. Now I can see why :)

  • snagglepuss

    And thus we see how a young George Walker Bush got through the “business ethics” classes at Harvard Business School.

  • Lurking_Grue

    I did pass a test once by using creative bad handwriting. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/alkwerte Alkwerte Alk

    Frue that 

  • rogerdebris

    Damn the comments are more creative than the original post!