A mythology is a set of shared stories that define a culture—its values, its productive metaphors, its identity. They may or may not be believed in as actually true—even when they are, they’re generally understood to have occurred in a place and time distinct from the culture’s current reality.

But the point of a mythology is the relationship it establishes between community members, while the point of a religion is the relationship it purports to establish between its adherents and the divine.

Everyone immediately dismisses it as a promotional stunt for Crocs. The only ones who believe them are the Crocs company, who insist that the aliens either pay royalties or compensate them by appearing in advertisements.

The account starts reporting unexpected transactions.

Where did you grow up?

It was definitely illegal for teachers to assault students in California when I was a kid in the 80s.

as well as a Nobel laureate in economics

So a fake Nobel, then.

If one is opposed by 53% and the other is opposed by 71%, a title suggesting that either is “popular” is a bit misleading.

The Treaty of Sevres, which the Ottoman empire signed at the end of WWI, included an independent Kurdistan—but then Atatürk overthrew the Sultan and rejected the treaty.

Same with “I solved this with a calculator”.

niːʃ

Maybe drowning in a canal is to the UK what falling out a window is to Russia.

I think the group of people spending the majority of their lives communicating online would be the first to insist that people who spend their lives online shouldn’t be put in charge of anything in the real world.

“Perpetual motion” is a bit of a misnomer—it’s only a violation of the second law of thermodynamics if the system is losing energy to friction (or if you try to extract energy from it).

The killer feature is the lack of connection to Meta.

What if the risk of self-harm is a result of using ChatGPT?

Confusion is a notification of prediction failure.

Maybe they’re short on closet space.

Brain imaging studies show that in people with congenital cortical blindness, this area is often repurposed for tasks such as language, memory and reasoning. … Without visual input generating a constant stream of ambiguous or unpredictable signals, the brain may settle into more stable ways of interpreting the world, reducing the risk of the misfiring predictions that characterise schizophrenia.

If that’s true, do congenitally bind people show improvements in general prediction tasks? Could that be why there are so many legends about blind soothsayers?

Just looking at the words in your title, “country”, “random”, and “imagine” were all borrowed from Old French.

If it seems like multiple unrelated people are doing the same thing, it’s more likely an issue with your own perception or interpretation of them.

That was Jefferson—he wrote the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.