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

I’ve never shoveled coal.

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

Fish would eat you if they got the chance.

Metonym?

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.

Yup

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.

It’s generally fine with me if some of our posters are able to sell elsewhere what they share here for free. What I’d ask is that content be presented non-commercially, as if trying to appeal primarily to viewers who aren’t potential customers.

I vote for strict enforcement against advertising in titles, post texts, and unsolicited comments. Allowable in user profile.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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