Dont say Prometheus

Ok… it was Προμηθεύς.

The brain generates a characteristic signal (from a sub-region of Broca’s area) when it detects grammatical errors—but it generates an identical signal when you’re listening to a grammatical sentence and need to re-parse it partway through. I think this latter case is actually the real purpose of the signal: every time it triggers, your brain is warning you that you need to stop and check the sentence again even if the meaning seems unambiguous. So the “pretending they can’t understand you” reaction could just be a reflexive response to that signal (i.e., the brain is telling them it’s confused even if there’s no logical reason it should be).

My kingdom for the lord of all horses!

Since 1995, I’ve always associated Ian McKellan with his iconic portrayal of Richard III.

Which colored my impression of Lord of the Rings a bit.

“Happy birthday to the ground!”

Or The Game?

If you think they’d be open to it, try Bayes’ theorem. Ask them to give percent likelihoods for the following:

A. The odds that the government (or whoever) is trying to kill everyone, before taking the evidence of excess deaths into account
B. The odds of seeing excess deaths for any possible reason, not just their conspiracy hypothesis
C. The odds of seeing excess deaths if the conspiracy hypothesis were true.

Then logically, the odds of the conspiracy being real given the excess deaths should be A*C/B. If you disagree with them on the outcome, you must disagree on one or more of the assumptions (probably A—if it’s B, you can find the objective odds by checking historical data).

If you still disagree on the prior assumption (A), you can set aside the excess deaths argument and ask what other evidence led them to form that prior assumption. Then you can repeat the process until you either reach agreement or they’re left with an assumption they have no evidence for.

My Dinner With André

I think it’s because music enhances the ability to remember accompanying songs, which helped human groups preserve fitness-enhancing oral information.

Retailers order more plastic bags when their inventories fall below a certain level. If you reuse a bag, their inventories will last longer and they will order bags less frequently; and manufacturers will reduce production due to the decreased demand.

In the limit, all data is either destroyed or made public—privacy is always temporary.

If life is an experiment, and there is a measuring tool

So that’s what keeps causing our wave function to collapse!

They’ve got to do something with the cows once they’re too old to milk.

1 877 Kars 4 Kids

I think it’s more likely that you need to be able to empathize with someone in order to recognize when they’re being empathetic, and you empathize most with the middle class.

Why are you assuming that the fundamental goal is a stable society, rather than (say) a society that promotes the welfare of its members?

I grew up in California near the bay area calling them weed whackers.

Same.

It was the standard English printed style in the US and UK from the 1860s until the early 20th century, gradually phasing out by the 1950s.

For printers with variable spaces, it was typical to use a hair space before the punctuation and an em space after.

For more details, see this article on the history of sentence spacing.

Even if you don’t believe them, they obviously won’t be able to enjoy the vacation unless you avoid the circumstances they’re afraid of—so you might as well humor them.

A Timex-Sinclair 1000 in ’82.