(Taken From A Text In Spyloctogy)
Instructions: Read the passage, and answer the questions that follow .
In this chapter, we will be concerned with a study of the Pexlomb. A pexlomb is defined as any Zox with pictanamerals which flotate the Zox into five berta Zubs where each Zub is supramatilate to the Roserey of the Ord. For example, consider the Zox defined by 3 berta Ooz. It is obvious that any pictanameral which is Blat must necessarily be Cort to the Ord. This follows from our knowledge of the relationship of a dentrex to its voom. However, if the Ord is partivasimous then the Zox must be Zubious. Thus, if we Kizate the dox pictanameral, our Zox will be flotated into 5 berta zubs. But remember, each zub must be supramatilated to the Roserey of the Ord. If any one of the zubs is not supramatilated, we then have a pixilated Pexlomb which requires a completely different procedure.
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What is a Pexlomb?
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If the Zub is not supramatilated, what do we have?
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If we have a partivasimous Ord, what has happened?
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If the dox has been Kizated pictanameral, what has happened to the Zox?
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What must the zub be supramatilated to?
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What is a pixilated Pexlomb?
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Something is obvious due to our knowledge of the relationship of a dentrex to its voom. What is it?
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In your own words, summarize what you have learned from reading the passage about Martian math and answering the questions. Use the back of this paper if necessary.
What?
This addendum was written on September 14, 2025.
This is a faithful transcription of an in-class activity that we received on October 18, 2018, in my high school Chemistry Honors class with Dr. Heather Mellows. She gave out puzzles like this one in the weeks leading up to our major semester assignment, Olam, to train our pattern-finding skills. In Olam, we were given elements and their properties of a distant planet and had to organize them into a periodic table.
I remember trying to find the source of this passage to see if there was really a longer version of A Text in Spyloctogy from which this passage was taken, but beyond a mention on one or two websites,[^1] I didn’t find anything useful.
[^1] The Math Projects Journal’s Ultimate Math Lessons has the same passage with the first seven follow-up questions as above, but it didn’t cite the original source of the passage beyond another high school teacher.
Looking it up now, Google found a 1975 journal article by Bernice Bragstad. They say the passage is part of an exercise in Learning to Learn (1961) by Donald E. P. Smith, and they allegedly read it aloud; they refer to “spyloctogy” as the Martian equivalent of geometry. The article has the original passage word-for-word, but rather than the questions above, it was followed by symbols that make me doubt the passage was really read aloud.
We can represent the necessary conditions by the following:
- Q??----¢ (note: Q is nubbed according to the principle of Plasimony)
- By Axdrellation we arrive at: XQ/??---!!-* Thus it is evidence that the solution must be:
- M---/?? (Really quite simple if you remember to obscone in step 4 of the Axdrellation process.)
ChatGPT didn’t have the passage in its training data, but with a web search, it instead found the passage in Secondary Reading - ERIC (1978), which has a truncated reproduction of the passage and cites page 81 from Learning to Learn. I found a full scan of Learning to Learn, which had the same passage with the same three symbolic expressions as in the 1975 article above.
Unsurprisingly, the passage was written purely for pedagogical purposes, but I think it would be pretty interesting to spin it off into a full-blown fictitious universe of spyloctogy.