In this week’s episode of Dear Hank and John, John expressed his appreciation for receiving four hundred and seventy-eight Snickers bars at his office. Hank and John then expressed their desires for more things in groups of 478.
sms 1: just wondering what the plan is for lunch tomorrow?
sms 2: will b home c u tomorow
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One of these text messages is from my sister, who is in her mid-twenties, and the other is from my 88 year old grandfather. It probably won’t be surprising to many that sms1 is from my sister and sms2 from my grandfather, even though he used to spend hours trying to improve my spelling.
My grandfather did some basic signals work during WW2 and has an entertaining variety of abbreviations that require some cryptic-crossword type skills to decipher. My sister, like many of her generation prefers standardised spelling and punctuation unless deliberately being playful (which often involves inputting more effort than using abbreviated or normal forms).
I was thinking about the inter-generational differences while reading this majestic Tumblr thread - it’s basically everything I love about the the Tumblinguistics community.
When Kay Jewelers casts your @emmaapproved stars as themselves! It’s like real life Emma x Knightley! and how awesome and ridiculously adorable are Jo and Brent?!
kristengish asked: Hi Hank! So a lot of people are saying that because Hillary Clinton's campaign is partly funded by CNN, CNN claims she won the debate even though she didn't. Is there truth to this? It does seem the mainstream media is underestimating Bernie's popularity with millennials and the amount of support he gets on social media, but maybe millennial's are underestimating Hillary's popularity with baby boomers? I'm having trouble finding an unbiased opinion on this subject.
The idea that the end result of a discussion is a loser and a winner is the deepest problem with this conversation.
BUT
More traditional commentators (not just CNN) said that Hillary Clinton won the debate because she made good points, and was well-spoken, and appealed strongly to the majority of people watching.
The internet said that Bernie Sanders won the debate because he refused to participate in the B.S. and his messages resonated very strongly with young people.
But the idea that news networks pick debate winners based on donations is an excellent example of cognitive bias spinning out of control. When someone is so wrapped up in their own perspective that they cannot believe someone would ever have a different perspective they cast about for some way, no matter how outlandish, to explain what they perceive as outlandish unfairness.
In fact, the insanity that they are perceiving is manufactured by their own inability to consider that other people have legitimate perspectives.
Here’s how human athletes (our very BEST human athletes) measure up against a few other members of the animal kingdom. We don’t look too good.
BUT there is one physical activity where humans actually do pretty well. In fact, we might be better than every other species on planet earth. Watch Skunk Bear’s latest video to learn more:
