I have a bolo tie whose slide ornament is carved anthracite.

I’ve never shoveled coal.

Bob said he’s coming, but Janice said they can’t make it.

Fish would eat you if they got the chance.

Once, I made an account for something that let me write my own security question and answer. I thought that was much better than the usual options and wrote something that cryptically referenced a difficult problem I once worked on. The answer could possibly be found online, but only to someone who properly understood the question. Later, when I needed to authenticate myself again, I got my security question. The answer isn’t something you typically memorize, but I knew what the prompt meant and how to work it out so I did so.

But I was too slow. Apparently you had to answer within one minute. It took me about ten so it locked me out. Tech support helpfully reset my password after merely verifying my phone number and SSN which are probably known to thousands.

Can we just let gender-neutral toilets be the default so we can all stop worrying this? The fact that the stranger shitting next stall over may or may not have a penis is not a problem. Having to scrape turds off my shoe because someone followed this guy’s advise and shat on the sidewalk makes it my problem.

Not sure about MIchigan in particular, but other states have, in relatively recent history, given ballot access to presidential candidates who were unambiguously constitutionally ineligible for the office. It doesn’t make much sense to me either, but apparently neither the 14th amendment, nor any other federal law restricts who can run for president, merely who can hold the office if elected.

Metonym?

I see some correct solutions for the 50% case here already, so this reply is going for a perfect score within two tries.

There are 16 ways to answer the quiz, one of which is correct. Assuming you don’t repeat your previous answers, two attempts give you a 2/16 or 1/8 chance that one of them is perfect.

Now if you get feedback between your attempts, you should be able to do better. Let’s see by how much and break it into cases:

1. Your first guess is already perfect. This happens 1/16 of the time. No further guessing is needed.

2. Your first guess is 50% correct. This happens 3/8 of the time. Picking one of the unguessed answers improves your score to 100% 1/6 of the time.

3. Your first guess is completely wrong. This happens 9/16 of the time. Picking different answers for both questions wins 1/9 of the time.

So the overall chance of a perfect score is the weighted sum of these cases or 1/16 + (3/8 * 1/6) + (9/16 * 1/9) = 3/16.

I usually promote approval for its simplicity and intuitiveness. STAR also seems respectably decent, and a significant improvement over plurality and IRV.

I really wish IRV advocates would stop lying about things like:

since voters can feel free to support them without fear of inadvertently helping a candidate they definitely don’t want to win.

There is absolutely a spoiler effect in IRV, and it isn’t just theoretical – it happened in one of the elections the article praises as successful.

Any election system works well with only two choices. IRV improves very slightly on plurality and works well with many choices, provided only two of them matter. But as soon as you get three competitive candidates, exactly the thing many election reformers want to see, really counterintuitive things start to happen.

Verge’s editorial standards may discourage printing out the f-word in question, but following the links shows it to be the f-word for homosexual, not the f-word for copulation.

Corporate communications / public relations

They’ve largely subverted the occasionally useful profession of journalism. There’s a big difference between researching things your audience wants to know, and asking someone with a commercial agenda what they’d like to tell your audience.

Remember: invaluable is a synonym of priceless, but not of worthless.

I always interpreted Clarke’s Law as first fixing an observer.

Then there exist technologies that are sufficiently advanced that the observer can only understand as magic.

Obviously someone had to understand it to make it in the first place, but there are (or will be) even more advanced technologies that that someone couldn’t understand either.