Why freaked out? It is like watching a narrated movie. Sometimes, particularly at the beginning of a movie, the lead character will give some spoken exposition while the screen is showing what he/she sees looking out over the apocalyptic city, or whatever. It’s like that.

Yes. Although I can’t read and the conscious word stream is less well formed in dreams - for example, were I awake, I might think “I’d better not look in that closet”, but asleep the inner voice is often more like “I closet - no!” and I somehow know the complete sentence I meant to think, and it is fine.

Yes, I sometimes go “animal”. I exclusively think in words, except on rare occasion when hiking. Sometimes my brain flips into “animal” mode where there is no word stream in my head; rather I am aware of smells, sounds, wind and the environment much more than normal. It isn’t that those senses are superhuman, it is…

HARDEST of hard passes on women writing Superman.

You might be happy to know that this was just posted outside the offices for the Opportunity flight team.

Yes, 7 out of the 400 words I know. It is possible that the sample I had is skewed, though unlikely. It is also not terribly likely that I found one cognate example, and then started to pay attention to all the rest, thus biasing the sample. That is because I learned almost all the 400 words from a single…

7 out of 400 times?

I lived in Polynesia and spoke one of the languages. I then spent some time in Southern Belize in a Mayan village where Mopan was spoken - about 7000 speakers and a very old language. With my Mopan Mayan vocabulary of about 400 words, there were 7 that seemed to be Polynesian words because the sound and meaning were…

How bizarre, Vasili. Did someone say that you said those quotations? No.

Interesting. Perhaps I was wrong and you are a Russian troll. Your responses go from 4 pm to past 1 am. That seems like the Eastern hemisphere.

While I think you are too literate to be a troll, and I accept the basic argument that the election was not won or lost by Russian trolling, your argument is fairly easily dismissed.

Assault and Battery.

Is this a crime? I ask because I am trying to figure out how to report this to my state’s AG

Well, there I am pseudo-speaking against net neutrality. I am the only living person with my name in the US. And I’m doubly certain that I’m the only person with my name and at my former address. California resident here. Guess I’ll let the AG know. Thanks, Rhett.

The thesis of this article seems absurd - a major ecological niche left unfilled for ~ 20 million years? If nothing else, some mammalian herbivore or other animal not at the top of the food chain would have quickly found it very productive to eat during the day when all of its predators were asleep.

This is a wonderfully revealing comment in so many ways.

In order to open a factory in Shanghai, or China in general, you will have to give the plans for the factory design - all of them, in great detail - to get *local* building approval. You will need approval for the materials you are moving in and out, with a detailed accounting. There will be “safety inspections” by…

For those of you who think the crazy thing I said is crazy:

My guess: This Doppler-based technique of listening in on the diplomats. If the walls in the embassy are more or less transparent to these frequencies, then you can beam them in and hear the same tones echoed back outside the building from the stuff inside, like, say, a chair. Each of those tones will set objects in…

Don’t Makemake me come over there. (And yes, I know how it is pronounced)