Boy Or Girl Paradox
A two-child family has at least one boy. What is the probability that it has a girl?
| S - | Ep - | 1959// |
| High | - min | |
The Boy or Girl paradox surrounds a well-known set of questions in probability theory which are also known as The Two Child Problem,[1] Mr. Smith's Children[2] and the Mrs. Smith Problem. The initial formulation of the question dates back to at least 1959, when Martin Gardner published one of the earliest variants of the paradox in Scientific American. Titled The Two Children Problem, he phrased the paradox as follows: Mr. Jones has two children. The older child is a girl. What is the probability that both children are girls? Mr. Smith has two children. At least one of them is a boy. What is the probability that both children are boys? Gardner initially gave the answers 1/2 and 1/3, respectively; but later acknowledged that the second question was ambiguous.[1] Its answer could be 1/2, depending on how you found out that one child was a boy. The ambiguity, depending on the exact wording and possible assumptions, was confirmed by Bar-Hillel and Falk,[3] and Nickerson.[4] Other variants of this question, with varying degrees of ambiguity, have been recently popularized by Ask Marilyn in Parade Magazine,[5] John Tierney of The New York Times,[6] and Leonard Mlodinow in Drunkard's Walk.[7] One scientific study[2] showed that when identical information was conveyed, but with different partially ambiguous wordings that emphasized different points, that the percentage of MBA students who answered 1/2 changed from 85% to 39%. The paradox has frequently stimulated a great deal of controversy.[4] Many people argued strongly for both sides with a great deal of confidence, sometimes showing disdain for those who took the opposing view. The paradox stems from whether the problem setup is similar for the two questions.[2][7] The intuitive answer is 1/2.[2] This answer is intuitive if the question leads the reader to believe that there are two equally likely possibilities for the sex of the second child (i.e., boy and girl),[2][8] and that the probability of these outcomes is absolute, not conditional.[9]
Boys' Life: "The Day We Explored The Future"
| S - | Ep - | 1959/12/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
Bob Tucker (the narrator, a jock) and "Brains" Baines (a nerd) find the time machine in a rockslide near their Scout camp. They pull the lever and wind up in the far future, where it's still a Scout camp, but people have evolved to be frail creatures with bald heads and no teeth. A future Scout troop with anti-gravity belts uses stun-guns on them. They escape, and befriend one of the future Scouts, orphan Kai Beezy Tentroy (K-BZ-10 Troy), and then return to 1959.
Boys' Life: "The Dog From the Time Machine"
| S - | Ep - | 1968/12/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
Bob Tucker's parents start to think he's crazy because he seems to talk to his dog Wolf (Unknown to them, he really is talking to him with the ESP pills, plus, he got Wolf centuries past with the time machine). The boys consider keeping him in Kai's future, but Kai's people want to defang him! In the end, they lease him out to movies, because Wolf has become a fan of Lassie movies and decides he wants to do that. Dion does not appear in this story. I was trying to remember if I read this one as a kid. It seems kind of familiar, but maybe not.
Boys' Life: "How We Got The Mind-Reading Pills"
| S - | Ep - | 1960/06/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
Brains Baines figures out how to move the time machine in space as well as time, with a time-viewer screen and joystick. They go "a thousand years" into the future, back to Kai's time. They go to his city-building Troy. Leave with him, anti-gravity kits (apparently self-powered unlike the ones from the first story), stun-guns, and ESP pills (Lets you understand other languages). Kai comes to live with Tucker in 1960.
Boys' Life: "The King and the Time Machine"
| S - | Ep - | 1971/08/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
Visiting Kai almost 5000 years in the future, he mentions his ancestor is King Edward III wikipedia. So they visit him in 1327, when he's 15. Brains takes him to 1971 to teach him a lesson, and disaster and hilarity ensue. Rodney Carver and Dion don't appear in this story. Wolf the dog-wolf does, and it's mentioned he comes from "prehistoric" times. He seems to spend his time guarding the time machine, so his movie career may have ended. The illustrations for this story are quite different from the other time machine stories; really trippy. At one point, they worry about what will happen if they don't get the king back to 14th century England. This is really the first instance where changing history with the time machine, at least theoretically, is mentioned. This is the first story I definitely remember reading as a kid, although I later found the 1967 collection THE TIME MACHINE TO THE RESCUE at the library and so read some of the 1960s stories.
Boys' Life: "Marco Polo and Our Time Machine"
| S - | Ep - | 1961/10/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
Apparently there are unchronicled time machine trips; Bob Tucker references a time in Rome when they saw Marco Polo. Dion has stayed in their time period (he lives in the hills outside of town, apparently). Due to rashly telling a professor he knew Marco Polo brought a compass back from China, and challenged to prove it, they go to Peiping (Beijing), China in 1275 A.D. Meet Marco Polo (again), and Kubla Khan. But to the Chinese, the compass is unknown, so the 1961 Boy Scouts end up teaching the court wizard how to make a compass with lodestone and needle!
Boys' Life: "Mutiny in the Time Machine"
| S - | Ep - | 1962/12/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
(4-part serial) Dec 1962, They try to find how the time machine came to be in the rock slide in the first place. Trace to 450 years ago or so when two men are picking herbs and Indians start the landslide just as one is attacking the other. The survivor, Peters, aka "Widgett", says the time machine comes from 2035 A.D., invented by a Professor Zimmer, and Otto, the dead guy, was the pilot. Peters is a self-professed pirate, the time machine was built to get the valuable medicinal herb. Meanwhile, Zimmer is in 1889, with the medicine man who was last known to have the herb - in Johnstown right before the flood. Meanwhile, with the ESP pills, Tucker befriends a wolf-dog and brings him along in the time machine. Tucker doesn't trust Peters, Kai seems undecided, but Baines and Dion want to go - they mutiny, in effect. They head to 1889. Jan 1963 Peters, Baines, and Dion go to search for the Indian medicine man Red Scar, meanwhile Tucker learns to operate the time machine with Kai. Tucker moves the machine, trying to regain control. He has Wolf, and Kai. Peters injures Red Scar and finds Zimmer tied up. They return with Baines and Dion to find the time machine gone. Stalemate - Tucker can't leave them behind, but he won't tell them where he hid the time machine. Feb 1963 Peters throws Dion and Zimmer out in 1889 Johnstown, with the flood approaching. They go back to 2 years before the landslide (circa 1600 or s), and the Peters takes Baines hostage out of the machine. Tucker and Kai go back 24 hours and befriend the Indians. They go forward 24 hours and rescue Brains, get back in the time machine, head to 1889 Johnstown to rescue Dion, but Brains insists that Wolf is tied up. Then Peters emerges from the supply closet, taking command again. Mar 1963. The flood hits, and Bob, Dion, Kai, and Brains Baines struggle to stay alive. Peters and Zimmer are washed away. There's a note at the end that the book form of this story will be longer. I'm actually a little surprised that there was an origin story of the time machine; from the later stories I read as a kid, I just assumed it always remained a mystery.
Boys' Life: "Our Time Machine at the Jamboree"
| S - | Ep - | 1960/07/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
To get in shape, they get a personal trainer: Dion, a Spartan kid from 450 B.C.
Boys' Life: "A Pirate Took Our Time Machine"
| S - | Ep - | 1989/09/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
They go to 1731 to attempt to find buried pirate treasure to finance their island Scout camp. Instead, Tucker, Baines, Carver, Kai, and Dion are taken captive by pirates, one of whom climbs into the time machine and shifts it to neutral, vanishing. They finally get him back by putting a sign on the hilltop telling him to pull the lever, which he sees on the viewscreen. The time machine appears, he tumbles out, they get in. They go to 1733 and get the treasure!
Boys' Life: "Santa Claus and the Time Machine"
| S - | Ep - | 1973/12/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
They kidnap the historic inspiration for Santa Claus from Lapland long ago, bring him to Kai's future, and outfit a sleigh and reindeer with anti-gravity belts to show a bunch of future-kids a real Santa Claus. Rodney Carver and Dion do not appear in this story. One last story by "Donald Keith," the father-son team of Donald & Keith Monroe. Donald Monroe apparently died in 1972, so two of these stories were published posthumously.
Boys' Life: "Target Timbuktu"
| S - | Ep - | 1988/09/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
They go to Africa in 1310 A.D. to meet Rodney Carver's ancestor, Emperor Mansa Musa, and get some cloth to make a robe for a school project. Tucker, Baines, Dion, and Kai also go (In this story, Kai is described as "living with us now").
Boys' Life: "The Time Machine and the Generation Gap"
| S - | Ep - | 1970/09/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
Tucker, Baines, and Rod go 50 years into the future to 2020, to see if their Scout Troop, Watertown Troop 1, is still going. Apparently the town is near the ocean, and they find the troop is exploring a future fish-farm. Brains Baynes's grandson, Nick Baynes, has gotten the troop in trouble. Meanwhile, the Scoutmaster is Paul Freeman, their Senior Patrol Leader in 1970. And he's rather surprisingly unsurprised to see kids he knew from 50 years ago unaged, and their tale of having a time machine. Nick has some sort of mental disorder, so they go to 2045 and get him cured, then fix the problems he caused. Kai and Dion do not appear in this story. "Braines" Baine is 16 in this story. It's mentioned that the future Brains Baines is a professor at a university, and that his daughter is dead by the time grandson Nick Baines is a teenager, which would seem to be a pretty heavy weight to age into the future with, though Brains doesn't reference
Boys' Life: "The Time Machine Cleans Up"
| S - | Ep - | 1973/02/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
Rod, Brains, and Tucker use technology from Kai's time to clean up the river and town dump. Mr. Shephard is Scoutmaster. They drop Dion off in Sparta 450 BC, which is interesting, because previously he seemed to relocate permanently to their time period, living in the hills. In an earlier story it didn't seem like he had a home in Sparta anymore. Their town formerly called "Watertown" in 1970 if now called "Waterton" - it lost a w! It's mentioned that the water treatment process is put into use elsewhere, which may be the first real instance of paradox in these stories --- future technology changes the present, and by Kai's time, it's already known, so nobody really ever invented it.
Boys' Life: "The Time Machine Cracks a Safe"
| S - | Ep - | 1964/06/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
With the time-viewer they follow the events that got Kai's parents deported to a Jovian penal colony and then lost in space. They're archaeologists exploring what used to be Chicago, a Tabu Zone, now a plain of fused volcanic glass (Was Chicago nuked?). But an officer of the Air Patrol/Future cosmonaut finds them and deports them, ignoring the ancient safe they found. In trying to track down the safe, they end up with that Air Patrol officer in 1871 Chicago, and his fight with Dion starts the Great Chicago Fire, and he zooms off on anti-gravity belt, so they leave him behind with the Chicago fire raging. The evidence of the safe exonerates Kai's parents in absentia.
Boys' Life: "The Time Machine Fights Earthquakes"
| S - | Ep - | 1974/11/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
Kai's father in the future asks them to use the time machine for his earthquake research. So Bob Tucker, Brains Baynes, Rodney Carver, Dion, and Kai head back to 1400 BC Greece. They help Theseus get a sword from under a stone to prove his king-worthiness. Then Dion and Theseus get captured and taken to Crete by African mercenaries of King Minos. They get thrown in the minotaur maze, but their ESP pills help them befriend the bulls and their anti-gravity belts help them ride the bulls. Then they find the bulls can predict earthquakes. Theseus heads off, seemingly still wearing an anti-gravity belt. They impart the earthquake info to Kai's father 5000 years in their future All the stories from here on are solely by Keith Monroe. Seems like Kai's father could have just fed some ESP pills to bulls in his time period and learned the same thing, but, oh well!
Boys' Life: "The Time Machine Flies Backwards"
| S - | Ep - | 1960/02/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
To get old Scout uniforms for a Golden Jubilee camporee, Tucker and Baines go back to 1910 and "borrow" some uniforms. They unknowingly meet Teddy Roosevelt, and a kid, Jay Henney, sees the time machine so they bring him back to 1960. After the camporee, they take him and the uniforms back to 1910. He thinks it's all a dream, but back in 1960, they visit the adult Jay Henney's restaurant. Their town is Watertown.
Boys' Life: "The Time Machine Gets Stuck"
| S - | Ep - | 1965/02/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
(3-part serial) Feb 1965 New Tenderfoot Rodney Carver ("A Negro") joins the patrol. Tucker and Brains reluctantly tell him about the time machine. For a school contest he needs Emperor Maximilian's autograph, so they plan to go to Mexico City, 1866. But first they go to Mexico City, modern day, to get their friend Manuel they met last Easter to go back and translate for those who don't have the ESP pills (They're surprisingly quick to want to let Manuel in on the time machine secret). But, once they're in Mexico City 1965, a mysterious woman appears, they first mistake her for a ghost, but she seems to be from 1866. She already knows where the time machine is and has filled it with fireworks when they weren't looking. So they take her back to 1866 too. Rodney and Manuel are, understandably, excited about time travel. Rodney accidentally damages the machine. Brains gets out to talk to the Emperor. La Malinche, the mystery woman, gets in, angry that they're not in the time of Cortez. She pulls the lever and they wind up in 1847, in the midst of the "Spanish War", (The Mexican-American War, 1846-1848, wikipedia, with the time machine broken, and Brains Baines, the only one who can fix it, still in 1866! Mar 1965 In 1847, they think the time machine is broken so it can only go backwards. Bob Tucker and Rodney Carver go to the American forces to try to find some wire. Manuel is bewitched by La Malinche, and joins the Mexican forces during the Battle of Chapultepec. He's injured, and Bob and Rodney pull him back to the machine - where La Malinche knocks them out, taking command of the time machine! Apr 1965 La Malinche figures out how to get the time machine back to the time of Cortez, 1519. She delivers the fireworks to him. Tucker, Rod, and Manuel go back a week, and through the Viewer find Baines back in 1866, where he's whitewashed a message on the wall for them to fix the machine with silver wiring. They meet La Malinche before she ever met them the first time. She gets silver wire from Cortez, they fix the machine, and drop her off in 1866 the day before she first met them (so she'll get the fireworks and meet them the next day). They rescue Baine and head back to 1965 with the autographs! Dropping Manuel off on a park bench in Mexico City, and hoping he'll think it's all a dream. Rod Carver is ready for more time machine adventures! Dion and Kai don't appear in this story at all. There's a note at the end about the book MUTINY IN THE TIME MACHINE now being out. This may be the first time the Polaris Patrol is mentioned by name.
Boys' Life: "The Time Machine Hunts a Treasure"
| S - | Ep - | 1967/04/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
(3-part serial) Apr 1967 An unscrupulous antiquities dealer steals a family heirloom from Rod Carver's house, leading the boys on a treasure hunt, first to Massachusetts in 1900, where they learn a woman's family bible in 1863 Kansas has clue where the treasure is buried. They pop back in 1967, and the villain, Blount, finds them in the time machine! He ends up back with them in 1863 Kansas, in the middle of the Kansas-Missouri border war. May 1967 Blount takes Rodney Carver hostage, and Bob Tucker and Brains Baines go back to 1860 to intercept a Pony Express rider (A young Buffalo Bill Cody, as it turns out) because he's carrying a letter with a clue. Cody is attacked by Indians, they rescue him. Jun 1967 They find the clues in the letter, use the time-viewer in 1692 to see where the treasure is buried, go rescue Rod in Kansas 1863 (as it turns out, from Frank James and Cole Younger), go to 1900 and, via tape recording-ghost gambit, let Rodney's ancestor know where the treasure is. Then, they return to rescue Blount in 1863, who tries to doublecross them yet again, and they dump him in his front yard in 1967. It's unclear why he's not going to be an ongoing problem, now that he knows where they keep the time machine. Kai and Dion don't appear in this story
Boys' Life: "The Time Machine Kidnaps a Parade"
| S - | Ep - | 1976/07/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
"The Time Machine Kidnaps a Parade" July 1976. For America's Bicentennial, they discover their town Waterton's parade will be ruined because a busload of 1776 Continental soldier-reenactors have their bus stuck in the mud. So Tucker, Brains, Rodney Carver, Kai (part-time Patrol member from the future), and Dion from Ancient Sparta go kidnap some real American Revolution soldiers from 1776 to be in the parade, led by Lieutenant Colonel William Barton (wikipedia)
Boys' Life: "The Time Machine Saves a Patriot"
| S - | Ep - | 1975/11/ |
| Short Story | - min | |
They go to 1775 and meet Paul Revere. Bob Tucker, Braines Baines, and Kai help him evade the British with the help of some skunks. First of two Time Machine stories to tie-in with the approaching American Bicentennial. This was the first Time Machine story after BOYS' LIFE went to the smaller format in January 1975