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.

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.

Yup

So 2⁰=1.

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.

La Disparition by George Perec in French, translated to English as A Void. Neither version uses the letter ‘e’. I think the French original is better since the translator had to cheat a bit with the numbers (5 and 26 appear frequently for self-referential reasons, and when spelled in French don’t use e, but are translated as numerals.) but was still impressed. I read the side-by-side translated version, although I’m only marginally literate in French.

I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!

I wasn’t expecting a Mongolian answer to show up here, so this is great.

I think so. Some Scottish words are co-intelligible with English, but the song as a whole isn’t.

La Bamba and 99 Luftballons were on my list, others should have been.