USA, too—Spanish and French.

If we’d had a third language it probably would have been Chinese instead of German—the cultural influence of German was minimal in the part of California where I grew up.

Most art reflects on cultural and historical contexts that kids might not be aware of yet.
Most science museums are geared toward teaching scientific principles that kids are also less likely to be aware of.

So art museums depend on existing knowledge, while science museums supply knowledge to those who don’t yet have it.

As individuals, they can’t. But as a group making a decision through verbal discussion, they can exclude the information from the deliberative process. At least to their own satisfaction, they need to construct a justification for their verdict that doesn’t rely on the forbidden evidence.

Candide.

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 considered literally 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.

TASS is Russia’s state-owned news agency, so there’s no expectation of neutrality or journalistic best practices.

It can still be informative, as long as the stories are taken as the best plausible narrative they can construct to account for whatever it is that actually happened.

We should standardize on printing statistics like this in magenta superimposed on the population density printed in yellow—then per capita differences would show up as different hues (pinkish for high per-capita rates or orangish for low).

Where did you grow up?

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

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.

“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).

Confusion is a notification of prediction failure.

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.

RSS feeds seem like the obvious replacement—how is your vibe-coded solution better?

Your self is the private reservoir of knowledge and experience you draw on to interact with the world in a way that’s distinct from anyone else (and that couldn’t be predicted without access to that internal knowledge).