Art is built on metaphor, which is an underlying connection between multiple meanings.

In semantic space, meanings are points while metaphors are vectors.

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).

These days elders are printing screenshots of emails (and wondering why they’re cut off).

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!”

How much of their profits do the Waltons put back into the Bentonville economy?

What percentage of the money you spend in that Walmart will stay in Bentonville, versus money you spend in alternative local shops?

Or The Game?

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.

They’d have to prove they created the god in question first, which would undermine every other claim they made for it.

Words aren’t isomorphic to their dictionary definitions—words had commonly-accepted meanings long before the existence of dictionaries. Dictionary definitions are just an attempt to come up with a heuristic for identifying things as instances of the term in question, but they’re never perfect—and the real-world usage is ontologically prior.

If the dictionary definition of sandwich fails to distinguish cakes from sandwiches, it’s just an imperfect definition (like all definitions are)—and we can leave it at that.

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

Sure… but everything that’s been trending steadily upward over the last 50 years correlates with everything else that’s been doing the same.

To suggest causation, we’d need to find differences in rates of sunscreen use between locations, and see if that correlates with local differences in depression rates (after controlling for other confounding factors, etc).

1 877 Kars 4 Kids

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

Some (probably bacteria-like) form of life appeared almost as soon as conditions made it possible, so it’s conceivable that it arose multiple times in earth’s history. But eucaryotes (animals, plants, and fungi) took almost half the lifetime of the earth to appear, and have a lot of contingent features, so it’s overwhelmingly likely that all eucaryotes have a common ancestor.

I wonder which of that ancestor’s descendants would be its favorite child.

If it helps to conceptualize, you can always replace subtraction and division with these equivalents without affecting the order:

a - b
= a + -b
= a + (-1*b)

and

a / b
= a * b^-1
= a * (1/b)