Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Ah, Brain...My Old Arch-Nemesis

Healthbolt posts this "brain teaser":

Count every ‘F’ in the following text:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS…


Take a moment to review, if you like, before I give away the answer. I'm not sure if it has to be in all-caps for this to work, so I'll leave it that way, although it rather grates on the eyeballs.

Ahem. [Twiddling thumbs, humming to self.]

OK: it's six.

Apparently a lot of people count fewer, because they overlook the ones in the word 'of.' (I counted all six myself, but did have to make a point to be sure I wasn't missing any, so I could see myself skipping 'of' if I hadn't been paying attention).

Yet another instance of the brain leading us astray. I tell you, those things can't be trusted!

My other point here was that I read the explanation and immediately thought "well of course, 'of' is a stopword."

I do spend a fair amount of time with databases, yes.

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