We have a winner, finally. 
When Randall’s table was published, the systematic name would have been relevant for then-new elements like Octium. Randall mentions that in the alt-text: “…temporarily named ‘pentium’ through ‘unnilium’.”
I see where you were going after the fact. It didn’t click right away what you meant by the back-formed systematic name, even though I knew about unnilquadium and the like. Once I got it, I was able to write a short Perl script to generate the answer .
Upon reflection, using back-formed systematic names is problematic. Is U Uranium or Hydrogen? B for Boron or Helium? P for Phosphorous or Boron, H for Hydrogen or Carbon, S for Sulfur or Nitrogen?
You out-nerded me, congrats. 
ETA:
Twice, even. Using the back-formed names isn’t ambiguous, but using the derived symbols would be, which is why they aren’t generally used.
The story is narrated by a ten-year-old boy living on Earth after it has become a rogue planet, having been torn away from the Sun by a passing “dark star”. The loss of solar heating has caused the Earth’s atmosphere to freeze into thick layers of “snow”. The boy’s father had worked with a group of other scientists to construct a large shelter, but the earthquakes accompanying the disaster had destroyed it and killed the others. He managed to construct a smaller, makeshift shelter called the “Nest” for his family, where they maintain a breathable atmosphere by periodically retrieving pails of frozen oxygen to thaw over a fire.
Another part of the absurdity is that he refers to the decade of darkness as “terrifying”, but of course, to someone raised in such a world, it would be no more terrifying than night or winter is in ours.
Come to think of it, living things in general would have evolved around that cycle. I can imagine most things going dormant for the dark time, and even those that have found ways to stay active through it (including, presumably, us, or whatever analogues we have in that would) would probably still have significant cycles corresponding to it. For instance, humans might well only mate at close to the age of 22 (or maybe 44), so that all children go through the same cycles growing up (whether that’d be dark childhood followed by a light prime of life, or the reverse, or somewhere in between, I’m not sure).
To save everyone some googling, IRB = Institutional Review Board
That’s an excellent one. It’s funny, but it’s highlighting just the kind of nonsense that you do see. Recalls this one, but more subtle.
I took this as making fun of plots with misleading axes and those insufficiently aware of such details. In this case, the lower limit of the vertical axis is only a little smaller than the upper limit. The plot thus overly dramatizes the variation. And the credulous writer then draws the amusingly wrong conclusions.
I don’t think that can be what he’s intending, because that vertical axis is not brightness at all. It’s number of sunspots. The brightest and dimmest suns both occur at low values.
I’m not sure what he’s going for at all with this one.
And in fact, that’s what plots like this, in the real world and produced by real solar physicists, usually show. See, for instance, this example from the European Space Agency:
The y axis goes from 0 to 300, where 0 means 0 sunspots, and 300 means 300 sunspots.
Thinking more about that Y axis–it shows a peak sunspot number when the Sun is roughly 50% covered. But that wouldn’t happen. Neighboring sunspots have already started to merge together, essentially because there are lots of ways for that to happen (if we imagine a 2D grid, each spot has 4 neighbors, and it only takes a single one to form a cluster).
Percolation theory has the answers here, though I don’t know nearly enough about it to come up with a quantitative answer.
I expect that the real curve would look not like a sine wave, but a sine wave taken to a high power, something like:
Everything from say 70-100% fill is just a single sunspot, or close to 1, because the anti-spots are disconnected.
Well people in general don’t think about opportunity costs (the time spent when that time might be spent doing something more enjoyable/profitable), but do think about the cost to go to a theater vice to watch TV at home.
I think the strip rings true even if you’re talking about streaming the movies at home.
I’m not sure there’s a suitable example of a series of 24 movies where the last 16 are really good, though (to compare with TV series that have 2 really good seasons out of 3).
James Bond for a young person who’s never seen any and can’t tolerate the pacing of older movies, maybe? Not a great example; they could just start with the Daniel Craig era and call it good.
I think part of it is that TV shows tend to be more character-driven. In a several-season-long show, there’s time to develop characters, and see how different characters play off against each other, and so on. Very few movie series go on long enough for that, and fewer yet that the creators knew in advance that they’d go on that long so they could start setting it up. And the few movie series that do go on that long still usually aren’t very character-driven: James Bond, for instance, only has one really consistent character, and even he’s changed actors a bunch of times.
I’ve been on highways like that. Not quite to the same level, but where I must have done a dozen lane changes just to stay in the same relative position. I wonder what the record is.