• A. O. Scott of The New York Times felt the film "has the grandeur and authority of the best long-form nonfiction. If it were a book, it could sit on the shelf alongside The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer and the great biographical works of Robert Caro. It's very much a film, though, a feat of tireless research, dogged interviewing and skillful editing." However, Scott felt a "significant blind spot" for the film was its "predominance of male voices among the interview subjects, and the narrowness of the film's discussion of domestic violence... [T]he film, which so persuasively treats law enforcement racism as a systemic problem, can't figure out how to treat violence against women with the same kind of rigor or nuance", adding that "O. J. Simpson is viewed as a symbol" while "Nicole Brown Simpson's fate, in contrast, is treated as an individual tragedy, and there seems to be no political vocabulary available to the filmmakers to understand what happened to her. The deep links between misogyny and American sports culture remain unexamined."^[18]

   
• A. O. Scott of The New York Times felt the film "has the grandeur and authority of the best long-form nonfiction. If it were a book, it could sit on the shelf alongside The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer and the great biographical works of Robert Caro. It's very much a film, though, a feat of tireless research, dogged interviewing and skillful editing." However, Scott felt a "significant blind spot" for the film was its "predominance of male voices among the interview subjects, and the narrowness of the film's discussion of domestic violence... [T]he film, which so persuasively treats law enforcement racism as a systemic problem, can't figure out how to treat violence against women with the same kind of rigor or nuance", adding that "O. J. Simpson is viewed as a symbol" while "Nicole Brown Simpson's fate, in contrast, is treated as an individual tragedy, and there seems to be no political vocabulary available to the filmmakers to understand what happened to her. The deep links between misogyny and American sports culture remain unexamined."^[25]

• Many variations in wording of the Linda problem were studied by Tversky and Kahneman.^[3] If the first option is changed to obey conversational relevance, i.e., "Linda is a bank teller whether or not she is active in the feminist movement" the effect is decreased, but the majority (57%) of the respondents still commit the conjunction error. If the probability is changed to frequency format (see debiasing section below) the effect is reduced or eliminated. However, studies exist in which indistinguishable conjunction fallacy rates have been observed with stimuli framed in terms of probabilities versus frequencies.^[9]

   
• If the first option is changed to obey conversational relevance, i.e., "Linda is a bank teller whether or not she is active in the feminist movement" the effect is decreased, but the majority (57%) of the respondents still commit the conjunction error.
• It has also been shown that the conjunction fallacy becomes less prevalent when subjects are allowed to consult with other subjects.^[15]

• In one experiment the question of the Linda problem was reformulated as follows: 

   

  There are 100 persons who fit the description above (that is, Linda's). How many of them are:

   

  • Bank tellers? __ of 100
   
  • Bank tellers and active in the feminist movement? __ of 100

   

  Whereas previously 85% of participants gave the wrong answer (bank teller and active in the feminist movement), in experiments done with this questioning none of the participants gave a wrong answer.^[18]

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• Using another metaphor, Weigel compares the experience to being cast in a bad piece of experimental theatre: “You and a partner showed up every night with different, conflicting scripts. You did your best.” This makes dating sound a lot like a recurring anxiety dream. You’d have to be a masochist not to try to wake yourself up.
• Compared with dating, calling sounds unbearably repressive. Weigel points out that it turned women, primly cloistered in their drawing rooms, into passive objects of male desire. (In “The Glass Menagerie,” Amanda Wingfield, with her fantasy of a “gentleman caller,” suggests the more destructive effects of this philosophy.)
• Another girl tells Sales that social media is “destroying our lives.” Sales asks why she doesn’t quit. “Because then we would have no life,” she is told.
• Traister got married when she was thirty-five, to a man who was a decade older. At that age, she writes, “one of us was not simply going to subsume the other.” In other words, they had selves, ones they wanted to keep and share. The best part of hitting the dating jackpot on the first go-round also sometimes turns out to be the worst: you might get just what you thought you wanted.

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• You made it very clear that you were interested before and she made it clear that she was not. If she has changed her mind, the onus is on her to make it just as clear. In all probability, she has not changed her mind. Do not waste another minute pursuing her.
• To be frank, it sounds to me like she is using her knowledge of your affection for her as a crutch while she deals with her break up. She knows that you adore her, and she can depend on you for positive reinforcement. I don't mean to imply that her behavior is malicious in any way, in fact, I doubt that she realizes that she's giving you signals at all.
• You made it very clear that you were interested before and she made it clear that she was not. If she has changed her mind, the onus is on her to make it just as clear. In all probability, she has not changed her mind. Do not waste another minute pursuing her.
  

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• Sex isn't that big a deal. It feels nice, and it's lots of fun. But, but, but, it's easy to get the idea from popular culture that it's this huge deal and that your life is significantly emptier if you haven't been initiated. Really, it's not that big a deal, so try not to worry.
   
   I say try not to worry because worry may translate to a lack of confidence, and a lack of confidence seems to be really unattractive to most people. More unattractive than a couple hundred extra pounds even.
   
   I wouldn't wait until you get closer to your ideal weight to start dating. Your weight in this circumstance is an excuse in this case. You need to recognize it and move past it.
   
   I don't think that I would mention being a virgin unless they ask (which they probably won't). It's a lie of omission, and you can maybe come clean about it later. I just think there's very little chance of that conversation not sounding desperate, and desperation is as unattractive as a lack of confidence.
   
   It sounds like you'd be happier if you went out on a few dates with somebody. Start taking steps to make that happen. Work on your self-confidence. That will probably be the biggest thing you need to change. Set some goals in that respect, and start achieving them. You already mention losing weight. Great. Keep up the diet, keep exercising. Go get yourself a nice new wardrobe. Make a conscious effort to start approaching people. If you're not comfortable with that, get on a few dating sites. For some people, it's a lot easier to do it that way. Map out the steps you're going to take to achieve your goals and then do it.
• Some people are excedingly jealous of past relationships, and you don't have any to trouble them. Some folks are walking around with herpes and other health scars from previous relationships, a drawback you're clear of. And some people might really be turned on or just charmed by the opportunity to be your first.
   
   Play in to what you have rather than thinking of yourself as way way behind the game. You'll catch up in no time.
• [I have no idea, statistics mean pretty much nothing to me and there are so many variables that statistics like that do NOT take into account or make transparent] but because it DOES NOT MATTER. I'm sure we could all find some kind of statistic to prove that we're in the minority of some generic standard. The point is that you want to change something, not that other people expect you to change.
• Kissing: Do not kiss so limply that you resemble a dead fish. You know when you shake someone's hand and it just sort of lays there? Don't do the kissing equivalent. Conversely, do not do the kissing equivalent of the guy who crushes your hand when you shake it, either!
• Dress neatly and with style, get a good haircut, pay attention to your skin and the way you smell -- these things are all more important than your weight. Women want to date confident, funny, generous, caring men. Lots of "pretty boys" aren't any of those things.
   
   Anastasiav has nailed it! Good men of MeFi, please take note of this. Write it on a slip of paper and put it in your wallet. Consider engraving it on a plaque and putting it on your wall.
• Geez, scody, it seems like it would be easier to hit the gym more often. Losing weight is a pretty simple process us men can understand (even if not all of us can follow through). Those other things are subjective and mystifying.
  
• I always ask the guy I'm dating what scent he is wearing, because he always smells so nice. The answer is always "laundry detergent".
  
• scody, you have to learn soomething about men here: we're just as insecure about our ability to be attractive as females are. For some guys this leads to excessive vanity and poodle-syndrome, for others (like myself) it leads to a weird sort of defensiveness: "you don't dig my 3-day unshowered self in my jeans and dirty t-shirt? Fuck you, snooty bitch."
   
   And some guys can actually do that and make it work, somehow. But breaking some poor slobs ball about it isn't gonna help. It's like teloling him, it's not your sloppiness, it's you, you just suck. Which is how a lot of men become bitter old bastards.

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• It was long thought that Earth's water did not originate from the planet's region of the protoplanetary disk. Instead, it was hypothesized water and other volatiles must have been delivered to Earth from the outer Solar System later in its history. Recent research, however, indicates that hydrogen inside the Earth played a role in the formation of the ocean.^[3] The two ideas are not mutually exclusive, as there is also evidence that water was delivered to Earth by impacts from icy planetesimals similar in composition to asteroids in the outer edges of the asteroid belt.^[4]

• An alternative argument is as follows. Credence can be viewed as the amount a rational risk-neutral bettor would wager if the payoff for being correct is 1 unit (the wager itself being lost either way). In the heads scenario, Sleeping Beauty would spend her wager amount one time, and receive 1 money for being correct. In the tails scenario, she would spend her wager amount twice, and receive nothing. Her expected value is therefore to gain 0.5 but also lose 1.5 times her wager, thus she should break even if her wager is 1/3.

• Nick Bostrom argues that Sleeping Beauty does have new evidence about her future from Sunday: "that she is now in it," but does not know whether it is Monday or Tuesday, so the halfer argument fails.^[4]

   
• Nick Bostrom argues that Sleeping Beauty does have new evidence about her future from Sunday: "that she is now in it," but does not know whether it is Monday or Tuesday, so the halfer argument fails.^[7] In particular, she gains the information that it is not both Tuesday and the case that Heads was flipped.
• Another way to see the two different questions is to simplify the Sleeping Beauty problem as follows.^[9] Imagine tossing a coin, if the coin comes up heads, a green ball is placed into a box, if, instead, the coin comes up tails, two red balls are placed into a box. We repeat this procedure a large number of times until the box is full of balls of both colours. Then, a single ball is then drawn from the box. In this setting, the question from the original problem resolves to one of two different questions: "what is the probability that a green ball was placed in the box" and "what is the probability a green ball was drawn from the box". These questions ask for the probability of two different events, and thus can have different answers, even though both events are causally dependent on the coin landing heads. (This fact is even more obvious when one considers the complementary questions: "what is the probability that two red balls were placed in the box" and "what is the probability that a red ball was drawn from the box".)

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• The film features shades of Interstellar, Contact and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but never feels derivative. Rather it’s smart, sophisticated sci-fi that that asks BIG questions, and does a pretty good job of answering them.
• Production designer Patrice Vermette discussed the film in a February 2017 interview with Popular Mechanics, stating that a big influence on the look of the film was the works of artist James Turrell, particularly the design of the meeting room aboard the alien craft. "I wanted the simplicity and the sensorial experience you feel in a room like that. That big screen was always there in the script, and I used it as an element to unite Louise's world. For me, that big screen is more than a screen—that room, which they called in the script 'the interview room,' is a classroom. That big white screen, [you see it] represented in Louise's house with the big window. You also see it in her school, in her classroom."^[29]
• The asteroid 15 Eunomia is the inspiration for the look of the heptapod ships.^[31]

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• • Maybe Indy's plan was to use the idol as leverage to convince the museum to mount a more thorough expedition. Without the idol, all they have is Indy's word that there's a huge hidden temple deep in the Peruvian jungle. Pretty easy for them to put the REJECTED stamp on Indy's funding proposal. But with the idol, they at least know something's there and they have reason to believe it's highly valuable. 
• Alternatively, Indy could have been acting like the trap was light-sensitive. In reality, he was stepping on a pressure-sensitive tile and moving his hand into the light at the same time to give the illusion the latter is what triggered the trap. As to why he did this, an explanation is that he did so just in case Satipo were to betray him later on, which he does, and the trick ultimately works.
• Why is the assumption always that the traps themselves are ancient? There are living people a short walk from the temple who revere the idol enough to worship whoever holds it. Doesn't it make more sense that the traps are of a modern vintage, being lovingly maintained and reset; while the idol itself is the only truly ancient thing in the temple?
• Using mummies as fuel is an apocryphal tale: a desiccated mummy wrapped in centuries-old linen would burn like gunpowder in a fire.
• If worth something, I thing one of the (crazy) Nazi theories is that modern Jews are descendants of converted Khazars and that the ancient Israelites were Aryans or something like that, therefore, an "Israelite Rite" wouldn't be entirely contradictory to Nazis, at least not for those that held that belief.
• • Just because they're hesitant to engage in open warfare doesn't mean they're at all averse to covert operations. The US was pretty hesitant to go to war with Soviet Russia too. Didn't stop us from spying on them and trying to muck up their operations whenever we could.
  • I always assumed it was because they expected a war sooner or later, and didn't want the Nazis to have such a powerful weapon at their disposal when it did. This is more of a justification in LC, when the war was a lot closer.

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• One possible explanation which has rather Unfortunate Implications: someone who mistakenly thinks they have to bow, as in a Muslim bowing towards Mecca, completely to the floor, is going to be weeded out as much as a nonbeliever. You have to kneel before God, not prostrate yourself. 
  • I find this explanation a small win for the hive mind in the war against Fridge Logic, since the grail is an extremely Christian artifact and Muslims would have been part of the Them that the crusaders Did Not Like. 
  • Except prostration is not an explicitly Muslim act. Plenty of Christians prostrated as an alternative to some other form of bowing or kneeling. 
  • But did the Crusaders who built the traps know that?
• • Loads of Nazi propaganda was used to brainwash generations of German boys into going out and getting themselves slaughtered in the name of the Fatherland. Being able to promise them instantaneous magical healing if they got wounded, even if they never actually used the Grail for anyone but themselves, could've been a morale-boosting coup for Hitler and his croneys. 
• Perhaps the second blade is because the penitent man should realize that the hallway of doom isn't really God and he shouldn't be bowing to it. He gets up after the first blade and is spared the second.
• One possible explanation which has rather bad implications: someone who mistakenly thinks they have to bow, as in a Muslim bowing towards Mecca, completely to the floor, is going to be weeded out as much as a nonbeliever. You have to kneel before God, not prostrate yourself.
  • I find this explanation a small win for the hive mind in the war against Fridge Logic, since the grail is an extremely Christian artifact and Muslims would have been part of the Them that the crusaders Did Not Like.
  • Except prostration is not an explicitly Muslim act. Plenty of Christians prostrated as an alternative to some other form of bowing or kneeling.
  • But did the Crusaders who built the traps know that?
  • In Crusader times, it was not uncommon for regard other Christians who had the wrong beliefs or rituals as heretics who were just as bad as outright infidels. I don't know of any specific schism on the issue of how to properly kneel before God, but the trap designer may have assumed that a proper Christian would do it in a specific right way.
• According to the Novelization, the Grail knight occasionally had impure thoughts. On those days he refused to drink from the Grail, and hence his age did advance. As for going crazy ... A Wizard Did It. Not to mention that he's an ascetic monk now who has absolute proof that God exists and that he's likely going to Heaven when God gets around to calling him there.
• Just because the Ark of the Covenant really existed and really contained the power of God doesn't mean the Holy Grail was real. After all, the legend of the Ark stems from the actual text of the Hebrew Bible, whereas the Holy Grail legend has no known Biblical basis, doesn't appear in writing until the 12th century (IIRC), and could very well have started as an old pagan legend that was adopted and Christianized by medieval Europeans, much like All Hallow's Eve. It could very well be that while the Ark of the Covenant was real, the legend of the Holy Grail was simply a bit of fantasy dreamed up by the overactive imagination of some medieval parish priest to inspire his flock. 
• Fridge Brilliance sets in when you realize that with the knight drinking from the Grail to remain alive all that time, it wouldn't have any dust on it while the other Grails, presumably remaining untouched, would be covered in dust. Yet when Indy gets in there, they're very clean. So he probably maintains the room, making sure that if anyone shows up they don't wind up with thirty or so obvious fake Grails and one non-dusty real one.
• Heck, the Church requires 3 miracles in the process of becoming a saint; clearly, even they realize that simply assuming something isn't exactly the smartest idea.
• Note also that when the Knight stumbles, Indy instinctively reaches out and grabs him in order to help him regain his balance. In doing so, in a way he technically 'overpowered' the Knight.
• Just how, exactly, is having a magical cup which heals wounds and grants immortality (without immunity to causes of death other than old age) going to win the war for Hitler? What, will they pass the Grail throughout the Wehrmacht and have everyone take a sip? I'm not sure having a soldier who will theoretically live forever is much use if you can still shoot and kill him. And if the cup is to be used for healing wounds, then I somehow doubt it's going to make much of an impact on a worldwide war featuring millions of combatants. I'm not seeing Henry Jones' 'Armies of Darkness marching all over the face of the Earth' in the event of the Nazis getting the grail.

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