Personally, I prefer Sam Gross' take on that: An Elephant is soft and mushy.

Thank you. I'll check it out and maybe buy it.

TFA is for subscribers only. Not much good, is it? And, by the way, First Post!

I did it the same way I'd do it on paper, with the first number on top.

No, it's not that those who don't pass will be stuck there, it's that they won't qualify for the elite Green Berets. And that's just being used to illustrate how some people just can't wrap their minds around math.

For example, if I asked you, "what is 98 + 87?" you would probably intuitively subtract 2 from 87 to get 85, then add 100 to get 185.

Now that's a weird, counterintuitive, roundabout trick if I ever saw one. When I saw that question, I simply added the two numbers together in my head and see no reason to do things the hard way as you expect.

Here's another real world example: most adults know that if 100 soldiers try out for the Green Berets, only three will pass, but if you ask them what percentage passes, they'll draw a blank.

No, they're just using alcohol to extract it, just as it gets extracted while wine or whiskey are being barrel aged.

What about the artificial vanilla flavor?

Chemically it's identical to what you get from vanilla beans, and it's not synthesized in a lab. The only differences are that it's extracted from wood, and the other chemicals that give natural vanilla its rich flavor aren't there.

The big problem here is people who've been carefully taught and never managed to overcome that part of their education.

Yes. I remember seeing a movie that took place in rural Arizona in the early '50s. Part of the plot had to do with moving a small herd of horses across country to a dirt road that was good enough that they could drive a truck up it and load the horses on it so they could take them to market and sell them. One evening they stopped at a ranch house that was still lit by kerosene lanterns because the team stringing electric cables wasn't due to get there for another six months.

There's a lovely collective facepalm right now as Virgin Gin isn't allowed to be called Gin anymore because the regulations governing alcohol say to be called Gin it has to have certain ingredients in it.

That might or might not be fucking stupid depending on what Virgin Gin is and what those required ingredients are. As an example, I'd think that most people would find it quite reasonable to require that anything called "gin" would have to have juniper berries as an ingredient.

Yes, that mean that nowadays, "advanced users" means "know how to read".

Alas, knowing how to read isn't enough now, if it ever was. All too many computer lusers (not misspelled) are aliterate and won't bother to read any warnings that accompany those links. To paraphrase an old saying, you can show a person all the warnings you want, but you can't make them read them.

And I don't want Google having complete control over search either. Which is why all my searching is done with non-Google search pages.

I agree with everything in your post except for that. My search engine is startpage.com, which acts as a proxy between me and Google so that it has no way of knowing who made which query.

Old school - a note under the door, at least when they make the bed and provide fresh towels.

Not everybody is going to notice a note slipped under the door or bother to look at it. Much better would be hanging the notes from the room's doorknob, similar to the Do Not Disturb signs. If you make them the right size, they cover up the place where you use your keycard to unlock the door so that you can't even get into your room without at least looking at the notice and there's no plausible way to claim that you thought it was spam.