Thank you for this great article. I appreciate the efforts made by people to look past themselves and the "obvious" reasons for things. Isn't that what makes good engineers good?
I appreciated how easy it was to read, at least until it got to the formal proof. This might be a good interview question to pose - to ask the interviewee to come up with the trivial lower and upper bounds of "pancake flips".
Google still seems to love their whiteboard interviews, to the point where you have to write syntactically correct Java, under pressure, for a rather difficult problem in only 45 minutes. It's stressful as hell, and has almost certainly driven off lots of good programmers. My company does sit-down interviews with a computer (usually a Mac) and the interviewer's choice of IDE. We get much better results that way - coding under pressure is still hard, but at least the IDE can save you from making easy mistakes under pressure, and you get immediate feedback about how you're doing, rather than just going on the ambivalent nodding of an interviewer.
Having gone to a Lutheran school (St. Olaf - Um Ya Ya!), I can tell you Lutheran theology nerds can hold their nerdy own against any programmer for sheer monomania. As you might guess, I'm a little bit of one myself. :)