That's very thoughtful. I'm sure Iorek Byrnison will be grateful that you've taken such pains to make your car resemble his natural habitat.

And true scholars would have been well versed in Latin orthography.

Something not entirely unlike this was done a few years ago, but without the actually-launching-them-into-space part.

So then you had twice as many cornflakes, yes? Sounds like a good thing.

I have never created a web account, you insensitive clod.

Where does one list end and the other begin? In my country, we have punctuation for this sort of thing.

But what if you happen to want mock news on April 1? Then Slashdot and other "real-news" sites are your only hope, seeing as how The Onion prints only real news for April Fools' Day.

As long as we're correcting one another, please note that your link correctly redirects to Lake Wobegon.

Ah, fair enough. I should be more circumspect when making sweeping exclusions of usage. This means, of course, that one can throw a javelin wide, and GGGP's claim is still wrong, and so is mine.

Hmmm... if we're allowed to set porkchop = 7, then we can (sort of) answer both questions. But we still won't know what the answers mean.

That's certainly true. In fact the fraction is zero, since only a finite number of sentences have been uttered by humans, while infinitely many grammatically correct sentences can be constructed using only the word "buffalo".

I hope you warned him not to travel to Australia.

Agreed (although there are multiple notions of dimensionality at play here). The trajectory of a thrown javelin can be regarded as one-dimensional for many purposes, but if we look closely enough we find that the javelin itself has width. Even if we neglect its width, it has length; and as its velocity is generally not exactly parallel to its axis, it will sweep out a two-dimensional surface as it flies.

To say, as GP does, that the trajectory of a thrown javelin is "inherently ... one-dimensional" is to regard the simplest approximation as more fundamental than the physical reality -- i.e. confusing the map for the territory.

In my book, the reason why one cannot throw a javelin wide is much simpler: "wide" is not an adverb that can meaningfully modify the verb "throw".

Assuming you mean "above the 98th percentile", the required storage would be reduced by a factor of 50, of course. Huge / 50 = still huge.

Forget percentiles; maybe we can just store responses for the N most common sentences, where N is a million or a billion or something. Depending on who administers the Turing test, the philosopher may have been right.

Your post is substantially correct, but you shouldn't say 99% when you don't mean 99%. There are plenty of words with "-tious", "-tiate", etc.

Also, whoosh.

Certainly. In English we use nouns as adjectives all the time, and I'm trying to decide whether one of these "is" a noun or an adjective. Perhaps it depends on what the meaning of "is" is.

Maybe we can agree on noun present-participle noun-adjunct noun past-participle noun?

Still, in a discussion of grammatically ambiguous headlines, it may in fact be more relevant that the basic nature of the word "security" is nounish. One has to parse at least part of the headline in order to determine that it's being used adjectivally. In this particular case that's not the difficult part of the headline, but in another case, such as the good example that I'm too lazy to construct right now, it might be.