I have no math anxiety at all. I am just incredibly bad at math. Watch me attempt to add numbers for some real hilarity.

Researchers are creepily close to predicting when you’re going to die. The test was ~83% accurate in an analysis involving data on 7,600 people.

Wait, how can a test like that determine that I am going to die while leaping from the ISS and firing a nuclear-tipped missile back at it in a last-ditch effort to destroy the alien invaders that are attempting to colonize our planet?

Seems unlikely to me.

I eat way more food than I did a year ago and am still not gaining weight effectively while lifting. I don’t think I can eat much more as I am just not hungry enough and overeating is just unpleasant (unless you’re a Fat Acceptance type, I guess).

Ah well, still gaining muscle, just more slowly than I could be.

Gaius Appuleius Diocles Is The Highest Paid Athlete Of All Time Earning More Than $15B.

No. You can’t compare inflation this way. It’s unsound for a variety of reasons. A better way to do it is to look at purchasing power parity vs. today with goods that existed then and that exist now. Even that is by no means perfect, but it’s better than the garbage numbers from the article.

Diocles was indeed very wealthy, but at most (depending on how you do the calculations above), he won no more than $200 million or so in today’s money. He wasn’t even as rich as Michael Jordan or other top-earning athletes.

Whether I use the Oxford comma or not depends on how the sentence's rhythm is affected by it. It's a question of sound and voice in context, not formal consistency. Drives my proofreaders mad.

— Karl Schroeder (@KarlSchroeder) August 20, 2019

Exactly. There are few truly perpetually fixed rules in language and usage, but a lot of people require these because they have no feel for the flow. If you can flow, there’s no linguistic place you can’t go, you know?