I vaguely remember this from Sunday school. It seems like it’s been what everyone knows for a long time. A good subject for a historical-linguistic inquiry.
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That makes no sense.
That means it’s depending on a culturally specific understanding of the question, which is a stupid way to do an assessment that’s supposed to be valid across multiple cultures.
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By this do you mean “say the first thing that comes into your mind” sort of thing?
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The instructions page doesn’t mention the word “culture” – I just double-checked. Which is just as well, because they seem pretty culturally specific to me.
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“It’s a test, designed to provoke an emotional response. – Shall we continue? Describe in single words, only the good things that come in to your mind about… your mother.”
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I’m not trying to convince you to like something you don’t like, so I apologize if that’s how my posts in this thread have come across. It’s just an internet quiz (albeit one likely a bit less silly than the majority them) that I found kind of interesting.
I don’t see where they (i.e. 538) ever claimed that the quiz was universally applicable, but I agree that there are likely culturally specific biases and shared assumptions in the sorts of tests that rely on a “gut reaction” sort of answer. That’s a totally fair point.
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That’s exactly what I mean. Just answer the question and don’t second-guess yourself.
And again, to be be clear, that’s how it’s been explained to me when I’ve taken these sorts of tests in the past. I’m not an academic or any other sort of expert. And I’m a bit of a skeptic in other arenas. Yet I nonetheless find these things kind of interesting, not so much for any specific claims of truth or predictability, but for the common elements of any sort of sufficiently vague and predictive systems of thought (e.g. horoscopes).
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I feel like this is actually the most trenchant criticism of anything I’ve written in this thread, so far. It really is some kind of Freudian bullshit, isn’t it? Well played! 
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As someone who actually works with DNA sequence analysis, this makes me batty. I love the convenience of hand-held sequencers; I hate how cheap they make abuse. And five bucks says one way they bring the cost of analysis down is by making the DNA sequenced using it proprietary (i.e., free data for their inevitable pharma arm).
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It’s a quote from Blade Runner.
The first scene is a job applicant taking a personality test.
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say goodbye to planet 9!
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Please explain! 
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What’s there to explain? It’s all there in black and white.
(The paper posits that the same gravitation interactions that lead scientists to infer the existence of Planet Nine could be explained by “A relatively massive and moderately eccentric disk of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs)”.
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A: 42
I guess what I mean is this like a bunch of asteroids or comets all orbiting each other? About the size of a planet or a lot bigger? And are they in the plane of the ecliptic, or perpendicular or what? I was trying to visualize it and not having much luck.
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I’m visualizing it as a much larger, much more massive asteroid belt.
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Seems to me that wouldn’t have the condensed gravitational attraction of a single planet - it would be spread out around the ring. But if it were eccentric, perhaps that would do it.
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Can a ring be eccentric? Would gravitational forces tend to pull different objects in the same ring or belt into similar orbits, with the same aphelion, or would it tend to push them into different orbits?
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The linked paper says that they should be relatively easy to form, and their gravity would resist scattering by procession, with Uranus’s ε ring as an example. That much is a new idea to me. There definitely are eccentric rings around stars, like the lovely one 25 light years away around Fomalhaut:
But as it says, that seems to be unusual, and generally supposed to be maintained by a planet. Even Uranus’s rings have shepherd moons, Cordelia and Ophelia for the ε ring. So not that I am an astrophysicist, but it seems to me finding an eccentric ring existing on its own is at least not the expected case.
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Weather turns out to be as predictable as climate.
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Wish he could have given a bit of the details of why they’ve gotten so accurate.
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