"Newsweak" Nostradamus
Check out the dueling headlines: "Gas Prices Predicted To Hit Five-Year Low in 2026" and "Gas Prices on Course To Beat 2022 Record: Which States Are Charging Most?"...
Fallacy Files
A weblog for the Fallacy Files website.
Latest posts
Crack the Binary Combination
In previous "Crack the Combination" puzzles, the combination has always been decimal, that is, the digits in the combination were the ten from 0 to 9. Now, the combination lock you need to open has a binary combination of five of the two binary digits--"bits"--0 and 1. The following are some incorrect combinations....
Notes and Quotes: Sylvia Plath, Vigilante, Caveat Lector and Post-Reality
Headline: "The latest historical fiction books take inspiration from Sylvia Plath, a New York vigilante and Shah of Iran"....
100% MORE!
I recently saw an advertisement for an expensive electric toothbrush that made me wonder whether I should purchase one. My current toothbrush has the advantage that it's cheap, but how good does it clean my teeth? Should I pay over ten times as much for a replacement?...
Sorry, "Wrong Number"!
"An individual study is a brick, and it only proves itself when incorporated into a useful structure. Bad bricks either get rejected as not fitting into the structure, or exposed when things built on them collapse. But the Wrong Numbers you'll find in this book do not try to fit into structures, they are used to throw through windows instead. They go direct to the public, claiming the authority of…
Sow and Sew
The words "so", "sew", and "sow", in descending order of familiarity, are homophones, that is, they are pronounced identically. "So" is a common and highly ambiguous word with too many meanings to list, but what is important for our purposes is that in most of those meanings it's an adverb, whereas both of the other homophones are verbs. So, it's more likely that the verbs will be confused with…
Independence Day at the Logicians' Club
Those fun-loving logicians of the Logicians' Club celebrate Independence Day each year with a patriotic puzzle party, and what a wild party it is! This year's party was even wilder than usual since it celebrated the 250th anniversary of American independence. Here's how it went....
How to Lie With Notes 8: The Logrolling Citation
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."...
Darkness at "High Noon", Political Prejudices and Death by Endnote
A Follow-Up: In a book about the making of the movie "High Noon" and a congressional committee investigating communist influence in Hollywood, we read: "The committee had acted with malice and flaunted the civil rights of witnesses...." Did they flaunt them or flout them?...
E. G. V. I. E.
The title of this entry means "e. g." versus "i. e.", that is, these two abbreviations pitted against each other. Both abbreviate Latin phrases: "i. e." abbreviates "id est", which translates into English as "that is", "that is to say", or "in other words", and it's properly used in any place where its English translations would make sense. "E. g." is short for "exempli gratia", which means "for…
The Long, Hot European Summer
Here are two headlines from about a year apart: "Heat claims more than 175,000 lives annually in Europe, latest data shows" & "Over 62,700 Deaths Associated with Record-breaking Heat During the Summer of 2024 in Europe"....
How to Solve Logic Puzzles with Euler Diagrams
In a couple of previous entries, I explained how to use Venn diagrams to solve certain types of logic puzzle. In this one, I'll show how you can do so with Euler diagrams instead. I've previously explained the difference between these two types of diagram, so I won't do so again. Let's begin with an easy example; try to solve the following puzzle with any method you please, or none at all. Here…
Another Puzzle in Woodpecker Woods
Woodpecker Woods (WW) is an ornithological nature preserve especially for woodpeckers. All but six of the woodpeckers in WW are Red-headed Woodpeckers. All but six of the woodpeckers in WW are Hairy Woodpeckers. All but six of the woodpeckers in WW are Red-bellied Woodpeckers. There are no other types of woodpecker in WW. How many woodpeckers are there in WW?...
How to Lie with Notes 7: The Zombie Citation
The previous entry in this series concerned the bizarre and troublesome spread of phantom references, that is, citations to works that do not actually exist. Zombie citations are different from phantom ones: the latter are citations to works that never were, whereas the former are references to works that once were, but are no more, that is, a zombie citation is to a scholarly work that has been…
The Not-So-Whole Truth
There are two types of lies: lies of commission and lies of omission. A lie of commission is what we usually think of when we think of a lie, namely, an intentional untruth. Such lies violate the requirement when testifying under oath of speaking "the truth...and only the truth". In contrast, a lie of omission is the failure to tell a truth when it is required, as in testimony, where it violates…
The Almost Right Word
Opening a book at random, I found the following sentence: "That summer, in the hot cities where poor families lived in cellars and drank infested water, the children became sick in large numbers."...