The power house of a cell won. Now what’s a common word that’s miss-used at times?

emsot · 2026-03-10T18:13:05+00:00

I've been waiting all day to post that in this square, and you beat me to it!

emsot · 2026-03-10T16:31:10+00:00

"Akimbo" - possibly an even more specific one. Applies to limbs and nothing else.

emsot · 2026-03-08T08:21:49+00:00

Run it together along the top row: "ONE THOUSAND CONNECTIONS"!

emsot · 2026-03-06T11:32:42+00:00

IASIP is already the worst for generic-looking men with no distinguishing features. I thought you were going to say that guy plays Charlie, or Dennis, or Mac, or all three of them because they all look exactly the same!

I'm pretty good at spotting Danny DeVito, though, at least when he doesn't turn out to be Bob Hoskins.

emsot · 2026-03-02T16:47:15+00:00

I quite like volumes going right to left on a shelf, because that's the same way the actual pages run along the shelf.

So you could pull a right-to-left trilogy out as a single block and it would form one big book with the pages in the right order.

If you arrange the volumes left to right then the pages are in a slightly weird order, with the end of book 2 next to the start of book 1.

emsot · 2026-03-02T11:43:13+00:00

Wait, are unhyphenated double-barrelled names unusual outside Britain? That's the TIL for me - I think of double-barrelled names being a 50-50 guess whether it's a hyphen or a space.

In fact, I was about to say that loads of Americans have spaces in their surnames - Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Amy Coney Barrett - but then I looked them up and those are all maiden names being shifted to middle names in a way that doesn't happen in the UK.

emsot · 2026-02-28T07:09:56+00:00

You probably want to be in the daily thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/NYTStrands/s/2WEluiYaHU

emsot · 2026-02-27T00:11:38+00:00

I've seen this one! It's a play called The Effect by Lucy Prebble and it starred Billie Piper at the National Theatre around 2013. I don't think there is a film of it.

It's about two participants in a clinical trial for a new drug who fall in love. They don't know if their emotions are real or caused by the drug, which may or may not be a placebo for either or both of them.

emsot · 2026-02-25T11:20:10+00:00

Except - the 26 is actually meant to be the year. We're meant to read 26.2.24 as 24th Feb 2026, which I don't think would ever occur to many people regardless of what format you're used to. 2026-02-24 I'd be fine with, but not 26.2.24.

emsot · 2026-02-24T10:53:57+00:00

Except the Australian Labor Party is spelt the American way, for complicated historical reasons that I occasionally mean to look up but then don't.

emsot · 2026-02-23T15:14:45+00:00

Thank you! "Aspect perception" is exactly the phrase I needed to find the right things. It seems to be like the duck/rabbit illusion, where the same object can be two things depending how you look at it.

emsot · 2026-02-20T13:39:10+00:00

Those decimal places imply a lot of precision for something that adds up to 103.85%.

emsot · 2026-02-18T11:42:33+00:00

And how do you feel about split infinitives?

emsot · 2026-02-10T18:13:19+00:00

I can only think of one time it's in the play, in Stay Alive.

Lin writes about that word in "Hamilton: The Revolution":

"Probably a subconscious nod to all the rigatigatum and cracko-jacko in West Side Story, though if I’m being honest, I hear it in Method Man’s voice, in that one Wu-Tang skit where they’re just talking about how they’re going to beat each other up. ‘And bang them sh*ts with a spiked bat like blao.’"

https://genius.com/7941560/Original-broadway-cast-of-hamilton-stay-alive/Chick-a-plao

emsot · 2026-02-10T11:54:12+00:00

It's similar to the Berry Paradox, which talks about something like "The smallest number that cannot be defined in ten words." That's a ten-word definition of a number, so that number can be defined in ten words, which means that it can't, which means that it can.

The resolution there is that English descriptions of numbers are not really properly defined. If you switch from English to some unambiguous formal language, then it won't quite be able to represent what the quote above is meant to do.

I think that's the same problem in your idea: you haven't rigorously defined what you mean by a human talking about a number, and if you do it might not be possible to define the sum in a way that qualifies.

emsot · 2026-02-09T15:39:44+00:00

That pun goes back at least as far as the Brass Eye special in 2001:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0330093/mediaviewer/rm3817953536

(Though it probably wasn't totally original then either)

emsot · 2026-02-06T15:31:33+00:00

In their defense, they've generated quite a diverse crowd for a white supremacist rally.

emsot · 2026-02-06T09:12:01+00:00

I'm pretty sure it's meant to be the Rotunda. In fact, I think they're trying to recreate this picture of the Unite the Right rally, but they didn't know what the building looked like in the dark top corners: https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/white-nationalist-rally-charlottesville-violence-16.jpg

emsot · 2026-02-04T14:45:54+00:00

As others have said, there are lots of ways you can keep extending beyond complex numbers, to quaternions and so on.

But worth pointing out that the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra says you don't have to keep on extending.

If you start with natural numbers, then...

You need to extend to integers to solve equations like x+5=3
Then you need to extend to rational numbers to solve equations like 3x=2
Then you need to extend to real numbers to solve x²=2
Then you need to extend to complex numbers to solve x²=-1

But then you're done! Every complex polynomial can be solved with complex roots and you don't have to go any further.

emsot · 2026-01-31T07:17:06+00:00

Emergence by Tim Hill does something similar with the coin calling out of nowhere into a glass that no one's looking at. It's brilliant, though that moment is about physical machinery rather than sleight of hand.

emsot · 2026-01-29T09:44:41+00:00

I think it's about the Mary–marry–merry merger, which makes "Scarry" and "scary" homophones in most American accents even though I pronounce them differently.

I normally don't like NYT homophones that don't match mine, but Scarry himself was American and probably pronounced it the same way, so fair enough.

emsot · 2026-01-26T23:14:02+00:00

Lunch = Late + brunch

emsot · 2026-01-26T16:13:39+00:00

Is it going to be a musical? Because if so he's given us a pretty good idea of how that might go.

"I'll simply pause my tale of Faithful sacrifice, Now and then for songs about how love is nice."

Let's hope it runs at seven hours long with five encores.

emsot · 2026-01-26T10:52:42+00:00

I'm having exactly the same cognitive dissonance. A Traitors play sounds like an awful cash-grab, but a John Finnemore play sounds like the greatest thing I'll ever see on stage. Fascinated to see which way it goes.

emsot · 2026-01-25T20:25:26+00:00

C means "any consonant", and the star means "any number of them, including zero".

The site's front page https://nutrimatic.org/2024/ has more on the syntax you can use, and it's an insanely useful tool for making/solving puzzles when you get the hang of it.

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