What are the dreams of the blind like?

If all Chinese jumped at once, would cataclysm result?

Which will keep you drier, running through the rain or walking?

The Straight Dope: home of Cecil Adams’ weekly question and answer column “fighting ignorance since 1973 (It’s taking longer than we thought)”.

What’s Cecil really like?

“Only his editors really know.
When you ask them, their eyes glaze, their bodies become rigid, and they start to spit.
They are struggling to express their joy, we figure. More than that we cannot say.”.

“A Tron clone in 3D.
This has been the tagline of Armagetron, since, well, a very long time, and is probably the shortest and most accurate description possible.”.

“Tron was an arcade game based on the movie of the same name, released by Disney in 1982.
The player uses a left/right joystick to control a Light Cycle which leaves a wall behind it wherever the cycle it goes, turning only at 90 degree angles.
The player must then get the AI to crash into their wall while avoiding hitting the AI’s own wall themselves.”.

Idioms by Kids “has over 1000 pictures of idioms.”.

“Sometimes the children knew what the idioms meant and drew pictures of the actual real meaning but most of the time the students drew the literal meaning and the results are often funny.”.

Above: Read Between the Lines.

The Movie Cliches List: “a list of the most annoying and common logic flaws and stereotypes found in movies.”. A sample:

War

“You’re very likely to survive any battle in any war, unless you show someone a picture of your sweetheart back home.”

Weapons

“Shots fired at the rear of a vehicle will cause the gas tank to explode.”.

Helicopters

“In movieland, there’s an abundance of corrupt helicopter pilots. Villains have no problem renting a helicopter complete with pilot who doesn’t mind shooting total strangers, or being shot at.”.

“Can you read people’s thoughts just by looking at them?”.

“Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?”.

“When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions.
Well, Blink is a book about those two seconds.”.
(Malcom Gladwell)

Gladwell dot com: “Malcolm Gladwell, blink, tipping point and New Yorker articles.”.

“Whenever the treasure-hunter girl is in trouble, someone comes to help her.”. Hoy te amo. Music: Tus Ojos by Belanova. From Vinnie Veritas by Alejandro Cordova.

Right: Papalote, Flash animation, frame detail. (Alejandro Cordova)

Requires Flash Player, plays better with broadband.

The Internet Movie Cars Database “can be used to find in which movie a particular car is visible, or to have more info about some cars visible in a particular movie.
You will also find lots of pictures of these cars, taken directly from the movies.”.

“A showcase of different Japanese consumer products from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, mostly, including everything from phones, radios, TV sets, audio sets, cameras to vehicles.”. From Tuk Tuk, by Akira Ota.

Right: Mazda AZ-1 (1992).

The Psych 153 slides (Jonathan Baron, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychology).

It’s a Google’s result for the query “Neglect of Probability” that is, from Wikipedia:
“…the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.”.

A sample:

“There is a distinction between an individual life and a statistical life.

Let a 6-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her.

But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths – not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.”.

“Getting free of the system is more complex than we’ve been led to believe.
In my case, as I understood what I had to go through to make money, I stopped spending it.”.

“This is the low-budget universe: I ride around the city on an old cheap road bike, in street clothes, often hauling food I’ve just pulled out of a dumpster.”.

“We are descended from risk-takers and adventurers, we fantasize about people in heroic life and death struggles, and here we are, cringing through a life of meaningless toil and the best justification we can come up with is that if we quit our jobs we won’t have health insurance!”.

Ran Prieur, How to Drop Out. Read also: Criticism and response.

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