Plurp: Suckin' on crickets

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2002.04.07 : 2002.04.13

Saturday, April 13, 2002
Blab. Just before being taken over, a reader writes:
Wonderful soup, so fresh and green!
Hard to believe, sprouts could be mean.

Blab. On the topic of various creatures that might or might not be waiting for Steve to come home, a reader writes:
Helen will wait until the end of time. He just better get home soon!
There are few things - and we mean vanishingly few things - that are worth getting up at 5 AM. Coming home to Helen is one of them.

Blab. That reader who wishes to challenge our latest Helenism is back with an attempt to bolster its shaky challenge.
who eats dog food?
Ah. We suspect a cultural gap. The reader may not be well schooled in the subtle linguistic stylings practiced by the modern technocratic elite.
Or maybe it has never heard of Google.

Yow. There's something really wonderful about working in a great piece of architecture. Sadly, we have little opportunity to do so, as we work in a dreary industrial building so devoid of style as to be completely interchangeable with the dozen other industrial buildings in the nondescript industrial park in which it is wedged. Its cramped interior spaces are almost completely cut off from the outside world, its decor is uninspired and ill-matched, and its furnishings seem to have been acquired from the dumpsters in back of Ikea.
IBM has been, more in the past than now, a great patron of architecture. Its original research lab in Yorktown Height, designed by Eero Saarinen, is quite a marvel - one, long, graceful arc on a well groomed grassy hill. Its current corporate headquarters in Armonk, designed by Kohn Pederson Fox, has long linear spaces and surprising angles.
So this past week, at our conference in a Faraway Place, it was a delight to roam the halls of the IBM Almaden research facility in south San Jose. Situated so far in the hills that the only neighbors are birds and some cows, the views are gorgeous, the wide stone floors and wood-paneled walls are soothing, and every corridor seems to continue outdoors into a sculpture or a spectacular row of trees. The offices, while small, are similarly well appointed, and the furniture actually compliments the decor.
We found ourselves admiring the place as much as the ideas.

Yow. Dinner last night with a couple of friends was at an anonymous sushi joint in a cookie-cutter shopping center near the lab, the decor and general clientele of which could only be described as ill thought out.
Nevertheless, the sushi was really good (we ordered more), and our share (with tip) was a mere $20. This is a far cry from Manhattan, where (admittedly better) sushi for one comes to $70. Or more.
We regard sushi as the world's most perfect food - a surprisingly simple combination of unlikely ingredients that tastes amazingly better than everything else in the world, and of which we never, ever tire. (We just might be capable of tiring of sushi, after sufficient exposure. We would like the opportunity to find out.)

Plop. Airline travel is god's way of punishing us for not yet having developed teleportation.

Yow. Today's Silly Online Personality Test O' The Day asks the cosmic question, Do you post too many quizzes in your journal?, which we like because of the self-absorbed meta-bloggish nature of it all.
And the answer is ...

So there you go.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was amazingly
annoying

Friday, April 12, 2002
Blab. A reader once again sends us a link to ...
The Handwritten Clock
Yes, we've featured it before. But it's such a good frob that we just had to feature it again.

Blab. Realizing, at long last, that we are actually a James Bond Villain Online Personality Test, a reader wants to know this.
who is the blond woman in your life?
That would be Mia.

Blab. A reader disputes our latest Helenism.
You may have documented the Helenism but you're full of sh-t. Yeah, shot. That's the word....
OK, reader. Let's duke it out right here in public. A speaker at our conference in a Faraway Place uttered the following Helenism.
We're committed to exploiting our own dog food.

We're committed to exploiting our own technology.

We're committed to eating our own dog food.

This seems quite reasonable to us. Which part do you dispute, dear reader? Hmmm?

Blab. A reader bemoans the fact that the free section of the Consumer Reports Web site contains:
No Miata?
True. Were we not such a confirmed cheapskate (where does that word come from?), we would pay real dollars to read the uninformed capsule summary of Miatas from the subscription side of the Consumer Reports Web site.
Instead, we think we'll take the experiential approach.

Blab. A reader inspired by Albert's dancing around writes:
I was looking for a song that I'd heard on Prairie Home Companion years ago. It turns out you were looking for it as well, in October.
It is available on the Web now. There's a site called The Astronomer's songbook.
Einstein the Genius in on page 58.
"I had a frame of reference, I left it on the fence
Along came relativity, ain't seen the darn thing since,
Ain't seen the darn thing since!"
Take care,
-Parrish
Yes indeedy! The Astronomer's Songbook is a jewel all by itself.
Now the question is: Can any of our clever readers (or even the dumb ones) find a recording of Einstein the Genius on the Web? Yes? Then send us the link!

Blab. A reader doesn't much care about the behavior of Him Who Waits.

Okay, so it seems that your daft cat sits, staring wistfully at the door, longing for your return home. Very nice. But does _Helen_? Inquiring minds need to know!
We asked Helen to ask the cat to take a picture of Helen. We are given to understand that the cat simply ignored her.
So we don't know.

Yak. From a conference call, only one of whose participants was a woman.
Woman: I guess it's pretty easy to tell that it's me talking.
Man: I often confuse you with John Wayne, but then I remember that he's dead and I figure it must be you after all.

Yo. Silly Online Personality Test O' The Day: What completely random person or thing are we? (We must admit we like the generic nature of this.) You, as we, are surely relieved to hear the following.

Ham bone soup, anyone?

Yow. Today's Wacky Conspiracy Theory about the U.S. government is brought to you by ... the U.S. government!
Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) is calling for an investigation into whether President Bush and other government officials had advance notice of terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 but did nothing to prevent them. She added that "persons close to this administration are poised to make huge profits off America's new war."
Yeah - that makes sense.

Plurp.
The blue dog
didn't much care about
the behavior of
the soup tureen

Thursday, April 11, 2002
Blab. A reader orders us to do work that we've already done.
Explain the dog food Helenism. I don't think it works and I should know!
Yes, you should. We documented it yesterday.

Blab. A reader assures us that ...
Ketchup is indeed a thixotropic liquid.
Wow! What a nice, simple experiment you can do at home, showing that ketchup behaves much differently at rest than after stirred.
But we're still not sure that's the whole story. Is it really true that you can shake a ketchup bottle, open it up quickly, and have the ketchup flow easily out of the bottle?

Rant. May we offer a few humble observations for those of you who give presentations with PowerPoint and similar technology?

For humans, colors actually matter. Light yellow lettering on a white background is impossible to read. Similarly, black lettering on a purple background is unreadable. If you don't want us to read your slides, please don't display them.

Using a font that is rendered as 2x2 pixels similarly creates reading challenges. This can be a good joke, but is not actually effective at conveying information. If you think you need to cram that much information on a slide, try writing a paper rather than giving a presentation. In fact, please never give presentations again. Ever.

Showing slide after slide of bulleted text is an excellent way to guarantee a dull presentation. So is reading your slides aloud. At least, to those of us victims in your audience who can read.

Saying, I don't intend for you to read this slide is a lot like saying, I don't intend for you to actually pay attention to me. It also pretty much says, I have too little regard for you to actually have modified my talk for this audience. If you don't want us to pay attention to your presentation, sit down.

Curiously enough, English turns out to be a pretty good way to communicate. If one of your slides says, DEN-ng policy-based extended NGOSS contracts, please be aware that no one has any idea what that means, and that you might just as well have written it in Chinese. In fact, writing it in Chinese would at least give a fraction of the audience a chance of understanding it.

Wonky screen resolutions that only work on your own, personal projector, often seem like a great idea. But are you aware that they only result in us mocking you as you spend the first ten minutes of your talk fiddling with equipment instead of talking?

It's really not that hard to plug your PC into the power outlet before you start talking. You may not be aware of it, but your PC is likely to shut its screen down just as you make your most fascinating (and long winded) rhetorical point. This always causes you to panic, fiddle with your PC, and forget what you were saying. But maybe you think that's a good thing.

If you don't plan your talk, you are likely to talk for too long. When the moderator signals to you that you only have two minutes left, talking much faster to get through your last 18 slides does not lead to comprehension on the part of your audience. We do think it's funny, though!

If you are giving a 30 minutes talk, talking for 40 minutes does not leave time for questions, no matter how important you think you are.

Yow. Science may finally enable us to achieve our desire to adopt sloth as a way of life.
[I]t now may be possible to develop a pill that pumps up muscle cells without all that exercise, said Dr. R. Sanders Williams, dean of the Duke University of School of Medicine and senior author of a study appearing Friday in the journal Science.
Cool! We'll begin practicing right away.

Yow. A kind correspondent sends us a Barrel Full O' Silly Personality Tests.
Wondering about our next life as a pre-1985 videogame, we discover the following.

I am a Breakout Bat.
I am an abstract sort of creature, who dislikes any sort of restraint. If you try to pigeonhole me, I'll break the box, and come back for more. I don't have any particular ambitions, I just drift, but I am adept at keeping life going along.
Uh, yeah, maybe. But the postscript suggests a more promising alternative.
(If you were not a Breakout Bat you would be a Scorched Earth Tank.)
I am a Scorched Earth Tank.
When I have a mission, it consumes me; I will not be satisfied until the job is done. I have a strong sense of duty, and a strong sense of direction. Changes in the tide don't phase me - I always know which way the wind blows, and I know how to compensate for it. I get on poorly with people like myself.
Much better!
Dropping off into Metaland, we are compelled to wonder what kind of online personality test we might be. Not surprisingly, it turns out that we are ...
The James Bond Villain Personality Test!
You live in a fictional world of spies and blonde women with ridiculous names, and you like to give people plenty of options. Although whether they're villainous is not optional.
All righty then.
Finally, what is surely the world longest list of silly personality tests can be found in the right-hand column of Blogatelle. (Scroll down a bit.)

Yo. Once again, for something like the third time in as many weeks, and for reasons that are absolutely inexplicable, "helen naked pitures" is once again the most popular search string in our foolish site's own little search engine. In fact, it outstrips the next most popular search string by more than a factor of 3.
It's an ongoing mystery.

Plurp. As we're off at a conference in a Faraway Place, and Helen is Home Alone, Helen has the rare opportunity to observe the behavior of Him Who Sheds at our regular coming-home time if we don't come home.
And the answer is: He sits there, facing the door, and waits. Just waits. He doesn't want to be petted. He doesn't want someone to play with. He seems content (or perhaps compelled) to wait for our impending (non)arrival.

Perhaps he is undergoing withdrawal from his afternoon Steve's-sweat fix. We don't dare ask.

Plurp.
If the blue dog
were an online
cartoon icon ...

Wednesday, April 10, 2002
Blab. A reader tells us what was entirely obvious to everyone except that lawyer yesterday,
The rules of the Saltine Challenge, although not explicitly defined on the website, state that there may be no drinking or liquids involved. Crackers... That's it. So there can be no "saltine cracker shakes" as one of your readers suggested.
So there you are. Get your saltines out. Ready ... go!

Blab. A reader more knowledgeable than we are (and that could be any of you, of course), composes the following essay on Cyc going open source.
Well, CYC is KINDA opening stuff up; they're not giving away the store and I think what they're really doing is giving away enough to get a firm toehold in the "Semantic Web" space - which is the new W3C boondoggle and All About Ontologies.
CYC is clearly trying to make sure that, if ontology-based Web classification schemas come into being, based around RDF, etc, it's CYC who's seen as the big Cheese. Cheese is made from milk. Milk comes from cows. Cows are mammals. Cows have hooves. The devil has hooves. Therefore, my FOPL-based reasoning system informs me, Doug Lenat is the devil.
Anywhere, they're only giving away the upper ontology - 6,000 concepts, 60,000 assertions, and compiled - not source - versions of their ontology browser. Not that exciting, given that they've got like a million assertions or more, if I remember, floating around at their scary labs in Texas or wherever.
Anyway, for cool on-the-spot hands on Ontology fun, go Wordnet! The first ontology-based product that I use every EVERY day, and useful in a huge variety of ways, free for the download, and with something like 70,000 words organized by semantic relationships, it'll tell you that dogs have paws and that a hogchoker is a kind of fish, but not good to eat. Not as richly linked as CYC, but did I mention free?
That's all!
pef
Ah. That both makes more sense and is much less interesting than the idea that the whole Cyc ontology was going open source.
As for the Semantic Web, we are in an advanced state of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, it seems Really Grandiose and Really Hard and Really Far Off. On the other hand, lots of smart people are all slathered up about it. So maybe we're just stupid. But, at the moment, we're not holding our breath while it happens.

Blab. A reader stumbles over a piece of the puzzle in a fallow field.
It is unfortunate that the potato count ended on four since this isn't prime. We can conclude that the potato group has multiple zero divisors leading us to further conclude that potatos have many roots and do not form a field, irish farmers not withstanding. --the irish cajun.
We will let the potato group speak for itself on this matter. As to the puzzle, we invite further explanation.

Blab. A reader sends us a ...
[link]
Uniquely, this one's pretty freakin' funny! Out of work loser + plenty of free time + Flash = Pretty Freakin' Funny. In our humble opinion, anyhow.
So go click on it, watch the thingie, and don't laugh. Don't even giggle. Say to whomever will listen to you (you know, one of that dwindling number of people who doesn't lock themselves in their office when you start muttering lately), This isn't even marginally funny!
That'll show us.

Blab. A reader tells us more than we really wanted to know.
You know, the first time I read this week's title, I thought it said "Suckin' on critics" - Oh the disappointment.
-AJL
Thank you for sharing.

Blab.A reader wants us to observe what happens ...
When Office Supplies Attack!
But, for some reason, we forgot to do so. Instead, we thought about how important it was to go out and buy office supplies, and we now have many happy staplers and desk lamps on order. Happy, happy.

Blab. From a moment of shame here on Plurp some arbitrarily large amount of time ago (in some units) comes this.
Finally able to rise from my bed of despondency after having put words out of synch in the blue dig's mouth, I wrote:
HE CAME SKULKING BACK
ASHAMED THAT HE HAD HAIKUED
FIVE FIVE SEVEN ONCE
That's really quite nice.
Now you can be forgiven
By all of Plurpdom.

Blab. A reader references the ketchup bottle.
With reference to the ketchup bottle thats because that range of compounds (Ketchup ) is thixotropic. That is it has weak chemical bonds that hold it together in a lump of slump until enough energy is fed to it and they suddenly break. Like lots of things that people do really . Maybe peoples brains are thixotropic too Or maybe its an effect of the mind control lasers?
There we go learning new words again. We hate that.
But is ketchup really thixotropic? We're not sure. It always seemed to us that the difficulty was in the narrow necks of conventional ketchup bottles, which seal up with ketchup, won't admit compensating air, and stay plugged up until a catastrophic failure of the seal results in ketchup on your brand new gingham pants. Hence the recent (and we must say brilliant) invention of Wide Mouth Ketchup Bottles, from which we drink daily.
Or maybe not. We do like lump of slump, though, and intend to use it in conversation tomorrow at our conference.

Yak. From our conference in a Faraway Place.
He's a jock of all trades.

Plop. Marketing slogan writers on very bad drugs.
End to end is nothing.
END 2 ANYWHERE is everything^TM
© IONA Technologies

Yak. From that same conference. In fact, from that IONA guy.
I don't really know what an XML artifact is. Maybe it's something that comes out of an archaeological dig in some future, digital version of Planet of the Apes.

Yak. And another. This time, it's a Helenism!
We're committed to exploiting our own dog food.
That poor, unfortunate dog food.

Yak. The distinguished dinner speaker.
Masking system complexity behind socially agreed-upon standard interfaces has been the way civilization has advanced since its inception. Let's assume, for instance, that you like pizza ...
Yes, they did serve wine with dinner.

Yow. Stars made entirely of free quarks? (Quarks are elusive subatomic particles that have never been seen outside of the larger particles - such as protons and neutrons - that they make up.)
Could be. Too early to say, really. But intriguing!

Plop. Or, more properly, lolliplop.
The U.S. government is Officially Frowning on nicotine laden lollipops and lip balm. Gosh. We wonder why.
What's next? Nicotine laden pacifiers?

Plurp.
The blue dog
denied that the
mind control lasers
were blue

Tuesday, April 9, 2002
Blab. A reader present an hypothesis that might explain our alleged observation that Playboy Playmates are dumber than average.
I wonder if it might be that the amount of makeup - foundation, toner, color etc - that the average playmate has to wear is simply blocking the educational mind control lasers?
-AJL
This actually suggests a fascinating new use of the mind control lasers, which propriety forbids us to detail here.

Blab. A reader comes up with a very clever explanation of the effect, which probably generalizes equally well to a number of other carnally related professions.
Playboy specifically selects for stupid women.
Women who have beauty *and* brains know that they can get further in the world by *not* posing nude for Playboy. Such a woman knows that her credibility in her chosen field would be hurt by such an appearance, and that she might suffer harassment from male co-workers as well (or just be unnerved by the idea that her male cohorts spend time masturbating to her nekkid image).
Women who have nothing but good looks have to bet everything on that horse, as it were - exploit it to its full advantage, because it's all they've got.
Rather pitiful, actually. As they age, their worth goes down the toilet (even as it is staved off as much as possible through surgery and chemical peels and botox injections).
Uh, what? Sorry. We were still thinking of that mind control laser thing.

Blab. A compulsive cheater writes:
The Saltine Challenge is poorly defined. One feels compelled to cheat.
For example, one could make a saltine shake (instant cocoa, milk, reduced salt saltines, a little nutmeg?) in a blender, and chug dozens of saltines in a minute. Easily.
If that's cheating too much, then there are drugs that increase salivation rate. (e.g. "muscarinic receptor agonists")
If that's cheating too much, one can (well, dogs can) be trained to increase salivation rate on demand.
The reader is clearly an aspiring lawyer, and hence undeserving of our continued attention.

Blab. Always pondering the Big Questions, a reader writes:
how do you know when you run out of invisible tape?
The same way you know when you run out of vanishing cream. Or disappearing ink.

Blab. A reader with high expectations writes:
Where is plurp? It's midnight and you aren't up!
It's pretty much always midnight somewhere. But not here. Not yet, anyway.
In that same vein, a reader staying up late at night in its local habitat writes:
Only eight minutes left in Double Jeopardy!
We'll take what's behind Door Number Two, Monty.

Plop. We are off to a conference in a Faraway Place, traveling without Helen for the first time (we seem to think) in a very, very long time. We find that we do not like it.

Yak. Words of wisdom from a movie on the plane.
Shake and shake the ketchup bottle;
None'll come and then a lot'll.

Plurp.
The blue dog
turned out to be made
entirely of
invisible tape

Monday, April 8, 2002
Blab. Focusing its mental energies on our brain teaser about why Playboy Playmates seem to be unnaturally stupid, a reader advances this theory.
You've hit on it with the cosmetics: the effort involved in maintaining the unnatural state that is Playboy Bunnyhood takes so much time and attention that they don't have time to be well-informed about anything else. Sort of like computer science, heh heh, heh heh.
Hmm! It would be interesting to see a head-to-head (and we really did not intend a pun here) competition on Weakest Link between Playboy Playmates and Ph.D.s in computer science.
Do we get to write the questions? (We have the distinction of being literate, after all.)

Blab. A life insurance spammist writes:
It's impossible to put a price tag on peace of mind, however a few moments of your time could be worth more then you (or your family) could ever imagine.
Seems to us they need to make up their minds.

Blab. A reader lays down the gauntlet. (What does that mean?)
The Saltine Challenge
Ah, the classic challenge: Six Saltines in Sixty Seconds!
Someday, O Crackers of Evil, we shall conquer you. But not today... not today.
Readers are invited to Try This At Home and (of course) report your results.

Blab. Presaging today's entry on recent disturbing events (about which more later), a reader with a time machine writes:
One potato, two potato, three potato, four.......
We add this to our growing list of disturbing events.

Blab. In light of the horrifying story we told yesterday about nuclear weapons and our childhood, what this reader took away was:
You were a _sprout_?! EEEEEeeek!
Only in the metaphorical sense, dear reader. It's a line we borrowed from an old Firesign Theater album.

Plop. Speaking of Enewetak, that South Pacific island where our father spent considerable time in his job through most of our childhood, here's a lovely shot of the radiological cleanup containment structure at Enewetak Atoll.
Extensive and compelling evidence was presented regarding the hardships suffered by the people of Enewetak during their relocation to Ujelang. Conditions there were characterized by famine, near starvation, and death from illness due to the severe limitations of the environment and resources on Ujelang. There were also polio and measles epidemics, an uncontrollable infestation of rats, and infrequent and irregular field trip ship service.
Isn't that nice?

Yak.
Wow. This sushi is really expensive!
Yeah, but what's money for if you can't spend it?
We could do a lot of other things with this money.
Oh, right. We could, for instance, eat it.
That would be a lot less expensive. We couldn't eat as much.

Yo. Who says the Web hasn't affected society?
Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse, fought for decades to introduce pornography to mainstream audiences. In succeeding, he may have built a gallows for his once hugely successful magazine. Pornographic images of every bent are now just a click away on the Web, often at no charge, and Penthouse, which once sold almost five million copies a month, now has a circulation of 650,000.
The auditors of Mr. Guccione's debt-ridden company, General Media, the parent of Penthouse and affiliated enterprises, stated in its annual report that the company would not be able to meet interest and amortization payments of almost $13 million this year on loans that carry a punishing 15 percent interest charge.
Maybe Bob shouldn't have put his corporate debt on his Master Card, hmmm?

Plurp. Recent disturbing events have been the subject of certain nightmares about which we may not speak. But readers are kindly requested to explain to us what in the bleeding heck is going on here!

Plurp.
Who says
the blue dog hasn't
affected society?

Sunday, April 7, 2002
Yow. Here's a surprise. Doug Lenat seems to be tossing his Cyc database into the open source room down at the bottom of the basement stairs.
Cyc is a bunch of "common sense" facts (e.g. Doug Lenat is a human; All humans are mammals) and an engine that uses second-order logic to conclude utterly surprising things (e.g. Doug Lenat is a mammal). Doug's hope, lo these past 18 years, is that he could accumulate "enough" facts to make the thing able to reason about the real world like humans do.
Now, having spent $12M of other people's money on it, and having announced it with a certain hoopla just the other month, he's now making it open source.
We're not clear on the business model, but it's an interesting development. We think large databases of common sense facts will enable us to create interesting reasoning systems in the moderately near future, though nothing close to human ability and nothing able to live up to the Cyc hype. Still, it will be interesting.

Plurp. Ian reminds us that we have a minor obsession about Cyc. Big surprise. We obsess about lots of stuff.

Plop. When we were but a sprout, our father use to fly off to an island in the South Seas called Enewetak for work stuff. He'd come back all tanned, and sometimes with the big, hand made glass balls that the local fishermen used to float their nets. It was all very romantic.
Our father was a civilian contractor for a local Air Force base in California. The schoolkids in the nearby town in which we lived would rush out onto the playground whenever we heard a rumble. Missile! some kid would yell, and we'd all pile out to watch the white trail of the missile rise, arcing out west towards the ocean. It was all very cool.
It was only years later that we understood it all. You see, the missiles were being tested. They were headed "down range", which was typically Enewetak, or so we were told. Our father did something-or-other having to do with monitoring the contracts for these things.
These things. These things were Minuteman missiles (and others) that would, one hypothetical unlucky day, carry nuclear warheads to the far-off Soviet Union, frying millions of people in a war that most would never know was coming.
Go see pictures of awful things. (leuschke)

Yo. Wanna play god? Well, yes, you could build nuclear weapons. But a cheaper, and more socially acceptable, alternative is Personal Smitings. It gets boring after a bit, and maybe that explains why god doesn't do it all the time. (leuschke)
Another fun idea (for us, anyhow) is to play an evil microbe, trying to evade the goodly defenses of the body's immune system. Yeah, it bears more resemblance to Space Wars than it does the immune system, but it's moderately fun for a while.

Yow. Really interesting article on simulations of various social phenomena, showing how complex things like segregation can result from really simple and really small effects, and in particular can arise without any massive, society-wide conspiracy. (leuschke)

Yo. Tonight we watched, with a certain feeling of horrific fascination, Weakest Link, Playboy Playmate Edition. Unsurprisingly, the women were generally quite pretty, at least by contemporary U.S. male standards. Whether or not surprisingly, they were, on the whole, astonishingly stupid, or at least astonishingly ill-informed (except on cosmetics questions, on which they did quite well). And much more so, it seemed to us, than randomly-selected elements of the U.S. population.
Why is that? Are women who choose to follow the path of sexual wiles and feminine beauty discouraged from learning the simple facts that the rest of us know, by bandwidth or societal pressures? Is there some kind of mysterious genetic anticorrelation between physical beauty and intelligence? (That seems pretty unlikely!) Does Playboy specifically select for stupid women?
Or is the U.S. population just much, much stupider on average than our intuition would claim? We do have the disadvantage of hanging around really, really bright people almost all the time, so what do we know?
(Curiously, one of them was suing a former spouse for $62.5M, so maybe they are better adapted in their social niche than we are in ours.)
Our learned readers are encouraged to speculate rabidly.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was the
weakest link

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