A couple of funny five year-old Duncan stories: Ellyn was checking his math work a few days ago, and noticed that during complex addition or subtraction problems-- let's say, 384 minus 215, or 85 plus 123-- he was only sporadically notating his "carry" digits, or when he would, they would be wrong, despite his having formulated the correct final answer.

She lectured him about not erasing his work, whereupon he replied in a frustrated tone, "I'm not!" Not believing him, Ellyn decided to covertly watch the little rascal resume his math, and much to her amazement, she discovered that Duncan was doing the work in his head, only writing the "carry" notations after the fact just to placate his mother! Because he wasn't in fact using the notations during the work, he was merely tossing a few ones above the numbers, hoping she wouldn't confirm their accuracy.

A second incident involving Minecraft also happened yesterday: Duncan runs the Java version of the game, on GNU/Linux, using the "old" launcher. Every so often, the login token expires, and he doesn't know the password. I realized that he hadn't asked me for said password recently. And so, watching over his shoulder, I saw him somehow bypass the login form, launching the game anyway. "How did you do that??", I asked. He explained his discovery: the launcher displays the "run game" form for a fraction of a second before it verifies the login token-- so, if one positions the mouse cursor in just the right spot, and clicks at precisely the right moment, the launcher will run the game before it has a chance to swap forms!