Panera should go ahead and put prominent warning labels on it. Call it The lemonade so charged it killed [name of latest victim]. It might double sales of the product.

Two is the only even prime number, which makes it the oddest prime of them all.

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.

I support giving convicts with death sentences the right to choose the means (within reason). Nitrogen hypoxia is probably more humane than most of the methods we've tried, although I personally prefer bringing back the guillotine. If we're willing to kill a man for justice, we ought be willing to reject childish euphemisms (putting him to sleep) and make a bloody mess of it.

Are they keeping the loophole where you only have to discuss side effects if you also discuss the intended use?

I've seen an obnoxious trend in pharma ads where you get 25 seconds or so to guess what ailment the actors are concerned about from their demographics and general demeanor, followed by an instruction to "ask your physician if [brand name] is right for you too."

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Might work for MD size states, but most smaller even EV states would split their EVs evenly, even if the state voted 60/40 one way or the other -- while odd EV states would always cast a net vote for the winner.

For example, using the 2020 election numbers Trump would win if the election included only the following states:

• AK (R+10) Trump 2-1 Biden
• GA (D+0) Trump 8-8 Biden
• WI (D+1) Trump 5-5 Biden
• PA (D+1) Trump 10-10 Biden
• NV (D+2) Trump 3-3 Biden
• NH (D+7) Trump 2-2 Biden
• ME (D+9) Trump 2-2 Biden
• RI (D+20) Trump 2-2 Biden

I don't know that it's any nobler to for electoral influence to discriminate on the basis of even states and odd states than swing states vs safe states. Unless you're also one of the group wanting to expand the legislature until there are no 4 and 6 EV states ...

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

Metonym?

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

I've never shoveled coal.

Fish would eat you if they got the chance.

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.

Is Hiller Lake not pink anymore?

Seems simpler for the good people of Wisconsin to just vote on a new law that says whatever they think is proper. Obstetric science has advanced somewhat since the time when Ignaz Semmelweis first proposed doctors washing their hands before delivering babies (especially if they'd just come form the cadaver lab), so some of the reasoning behind the 1849 law might be out of date.

Unfortunately, that would require certain politicians to go on record about something that might be used against them if they later ran a national campaign, so better to let the court take the matter out of their hands and (mis-?)interpret an old law in a politically advantageous way.

One consequence of this, even though it only applies to the primary and even if it is reversed on appeal, is to effective kill any momentum the NPVIC might have had.

It really punctuated the fact that there is no such thing as a national vote when voters from different states aren't even presented with the same choices. With the electoral college in place, this mostly doesn't matter, but NPVIC would encourage the most partisan states to run up the score for their guy by any means possible.

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.

Unless Maine also repeals their use of instant runoff voting for the presidential election, their own votes won't count toward the national popular vote. The compact makes no provision for counting ranked ballots, and there isn't really any fair way to do so anyway.