These are some pretty cool words. If you flip them upside down they still spell the same thing. They’re like vertical versions of a palindrome. I wrote a little python script and ran in on the standard linux dictionary file, and, to my knowledge, these are the only words in the English language that have this property. There were other words that spell different things when flipped upside down, like “owns” and “sumo”, but these three were the only ones that were the same. I didn’t count SOS as a word, but that’s pretty cool since it’s both a ‘vertical’ and a standard palindrome.

Here’s my python code for the first programming challenge on hackthissite.org. Basically I loaded both the scrambled words and the dictionary words into separate lists, checked for a one to one correspondence between the elements, and returned the corresponding dictionary term. She ain’t pretty, but she works!

As I walked I tried so hard to capture this moment, to solidify this feeling and place it on the mantle with all the other things that are precious in my soul. When I found that I couldn’t do this, I began to ask: why was it that I was ferreting about in my thoughts trying to catch moments of time, like meadows of fireflies, in test-tubes only for the sake of later being able to point at them with oily fingers — as if they wouldn’t die anyway! 

Did I even bother to ask time (the freest of free-spirits!) whether or not he wanted to be caught? How rude of me, I thought (is that why he eludes us at every corner?)! Perhaps instead of filling my mantle with jars of dead insects and rotting beauty, it might be more of a cosmic courtesy to simply APPRECIATE this moment, to value it for it’s freedom to yawn into the past, rather than snare it in selfish coffins — to let the moment not occupy a SPACE withIN me, but rather let it make an IMPRESSION ON me? Perhaps then this moment would become a PART of me, a part of who I am, and therefore be truly MINE – mine, yet without my possessing it? Aren’t these the things that are truly ours – the things we have even when we don’t possess them?