Was taught in UK schools in the 80s. The city was a grubby but sterile environment with the usual tropes of bloody sports and  I think high tech policing: then, through a big old fence was the country, very gentrified country piles, but the gent who takes our hero in has I think been lobotomised for being too passionate and thus we learn that aside from the wealth, amenities, health care, education, space and general comfort, the rich have it just as tough (!)
121864
I am trying to remember a book I read years ago probably in the early 2000's, but I don't know how old the book is. But I do remember the basic plot.  The world, or at least the country it is set in, is split in half. One half is a dystopian poorer world where crime rates are high and blood sports are the most popular form of entertainment. Libraries are all but abandoned. The protagonist lives in this half; he likes to read and longs to escape to the other half of the world/city.  The world is split by a giant wall which I believe he tunnels under to get to the better half of the world, which is more like the countryside, rather than the city he has come from. Everyone is well educated and seems perfect. The protagonist gets to live with a wealthy family; the father takes him under his wing and teaches him about how to make bonsai trees. From this he finds out this father figure was once a rebel trying to let city people into their half, but bad behavior results in a partial lobotomy to make them calm.   When the protagonist finds this out he tries to escape back to the city half of the world.  For the life of me I cannot remember the books name. I've tried a Google search and get results like Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I expect the book I'm looking for took influence from.
23861
If you look at       Or this Wikipedia page      Clearly  seems to be the statistic of choice when it comes to ages.  I am not able to explain to myself why  would be a worse statistic. Why is it so?  Originally posted  because I did not know this site existed.
58798
Is the wall a bad or a good place to be? Some people are sent there as punishment, others go because they want to (Jon Snow), others to get away from harm (Arya).  If I am not completely correct, it is because I have only started watching the series recently, and it is a bit confusing!  Please also correct me if I am wrong with any facts!
119449
I read a story in a sci-fi short story collection (about 35 years ago) in which the POV character is fleeing invading aliens with his child in his arms (I think the wife is dead).  He knows he's about to be caught and killed by these rapacious, violent aliens who just want to destroy. Finally, the alien emerges from the trees and the story describes how the hero looks - feline, with a tail.  The hero confronts the killer - man!  It was a cool story that blew my 8th grade mind.  BTW, its not Frenzy.
63648
As I remember a boy from another planet was dropped on earth. Gravity didn't affect him as much. He was being chased by something and leaped over a barbed wire fence "like a deer". Also the story started out with a young earth girl at "school", she sat in her bedroom and her books and teachers were on a screen ...cutting edge stuff for a 4th grader in 1974.
15799
Suppose that  (1990) is considered appalling, but you can't put your finger on exactly why, mainly because there are a plethora of reasons, most of which you lack the training/education/expertise to comment in-depth on (e.g. the writing, directing, editing etc.), so you use what you consider to be a disastrous moment/scene as an example, and think "this pretty much sums it up", for example , what would you call a scene like that? A single word or expression is satisfactory.  As an example:     "The Godfather 3 is so bad, for so many reasons, but here is a ______ that perfectly represents everything wrong with the movie."   An expression is also acceptable, and the example I gave is flexible (doesn't have to be structured as it is in the example).
54830
Especially while talking about FPS, the term "gib" is quite common. While I get it's related to a sudden and gruesome death, I'd like to know its actual meaning and where it comes from.
107450
Another dim memory from my sci-fi reading binges in the 1980s... this one almost definitely in one of the big hardback collections full of late Golden Age short stories.  The story is told from the perspective of a robot (maybe cyborg?) tank that has stopped responding to control signals and is aggressively "defending" some portion of the Moon, to which it was previously assigned. Maybe a war had ended, or maybe it became confused about an exercise that it thought was real?  There was a person trapped in a cave trying to communicate with the tank. The tank mostly ignores him, so the main purpose of what he says is exposition for the reader. I think this person was an expert on this type of robot/cyborg sent to "talk it down", but the tank had attacked, and this guy was the only survivor. The expert was badly wounded -- I think he mentions his suit had to amputate his leg to seal a hole -- or maybe flood it with water which would freeze to seal the hole but mean that his leg had to be amputated later. He keeps trying to convince the tank to stand down, at one point saying that he knew it "back when it was just a two-wheeler an autocyber in boot camp" or something along that line. (Edit: I must have been reading too fast and/or distracted back then, since per the quote below I seem to have misread "motorcycle" for "autocyber"!)  One detail of the attack stands out -- the tank was low on ammunition, I think, so it used a kind of bomb with an electric/magnetic "catapult" (aka "magnapult") to hit the expert's transport. The tank was proud of itself for figuring out a way to hit it far out of the normal range by 1) using its own top speed to add velocity to the projectile, and 2) building up the catapult's energy past its normal operating range, which caused it pain but made the bomb go much further. It catches the transport by surprise, since they thought they were safely out of range of the armaments it had left.  The premise sounds a lot like a Keith Laumer "Bolo" story, but I'm fairly sure that it's not actually one of them. It had a somewhat grimmer feel to it. I could be wrong, though, since it's been 30 years.
89918
Ok. So I read books as a kid, this may have been mid to late 1980s. Definitely before 1993. These details I remember, they might be from the same book or from several:   Slower than light space travel with severe time dilation. There were boardings of space ships, but the fighting odds could be very uneven because a foe could be from your future or your past, depending on when you started your space journey, because of relativistic time dilation. No faster than light travel, no time travel either. Just regular physics. To fight better in melee, soldiers would have (more or less willingly, I think they knew beforehand) false memories or notions implanted of the enemy as horrible human beings so soldiers could kill them more easily without remorse. Towards the end of the story, veterans of the war are described as not quite feeling at home after the war. One planet (home?) or country is described as inhabited entirely of clones, Adams and Eves, I think homosexual, or that sexuality could be switched deliberately. I think the veterans find at the end a refuge somewhere more like the home they are used to. The reason so much has changed is of course the time dilation. They spent maybe decades in the war, while on the planets centuries or millenia passed. I think one moral (there may be many more I missed as a child) of the story was the futility of war. If I recall correctly, the war was resolved in a way that made the efforts of the veterans seem for nothing.
106196
I read this book back in the late 80s/ early 90s.  I remember the title of the book as Mission.  It started with a man being admitted to a hospital in present-day NY at Easter, with all of the wounds that Jesus suffered.  He is brought back from death and ultimately recruits a sceptic who is persuaded to board an El Al flight to Israel.  A terrorist blows up the plane, but Jesus and this guy are transported back to Biblical times.  This goes to explain Jesus's disappearance from his grave over the Easter weekend.  Basically, this sceptic winds up writing the Dead Sea scrolls, but with the knowledge from his original time.  Another thread of the story has academics in the 50s (or so) going through the scrolls with mounting disbelief at the kind of stuff this guy is writing (particularly about sex/violence/regular life in NY in the 80s/90s).  They decide that it's too controversial and end up keeping the scrolls under wraps and this ends up being the reason that the scrolls have still not been released to the public at large.  Can anyone come up with the author / ISBN?  The trouble is that with vague terms like Mission, stigmata and Easter you wind up with thousands of results :)
70792
Take as an example the well-known . In the original paper, the regression model was used to model the amount people were willing to pay for improved air quality.  But the 'people' whose behaviour was being modelled was never specified. Presumably, it was not limited to 'residents of Greater Boston'. Only implausibly would it be 'humans anywhere on the planet'. Nor, 'all US residents'.   So what inference are we invited by the authors to draw about the scope they intend for their theory? Perhaps 'all residents of large US metro areas'. But - what about other First World metro areas? The first two sections of the Boston paper scrupulously avoid any reference which might suggest that they had a particular 'population' to which their 'sample' was to apply.  There is also the dimension of time - the data came from the 70s, whereas the theory is has no time limitations spelt out.  Plus - going back to first principles - how could the Boston data be treated as a sample of a population including, say, the Chicago metro area when no data from the Chicago area was considered?   Besides, lots of the covariates in the Boston regression weren't samples at all, but totals - so, for example, the proportion of blacks was supplied from census stats.  My question: how can we conceive the Boston data as supporting the geographically unlimited propositions in the paper? Is there a mathematical way of showing equivalence or approximation of the Boston data analysis to other cities? Or is it just assumed as a matter of common sense - such that the paper's authors would be amazed to think anyone could have any doubts on the matter?
121554
I was on the tube and overheard a dad questioning his kids about maths.  The children were probably about 11 or 12 years old.   After several more mundane questions he asked his daughter what $1/0$ evaluated to. She stated that it had no answer. He asked who told her that and she said her teacher. He then stated that her teacher had "taught it wrong" and it was actually $∞$.  I thought the Dad's statement was a little irresponsible.  Does that seem like reasonable attitude? I suppose this question is partly about morality.
48819
Donald Rumsfeldt had a way of speaking in public, where to make his point more forcibly he would pose questions and answer them. Has Saddam Hussain bombed his own people? Yes. Has he begun the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction? Yes Are we prepared to see him terrorise his neighbours? No (This is not necessarily an accurate quotation, but just an example of the sorts of things he said).  But what interests me is this form of rhetoric which involves posing loaded questions and providing answers that make your point. Another exponent of this was Josef Stalin. In his case it has been seen by some historians as a technique he learned during his childhood education in a religious seminary. It was a form of catechism.  So what is the rhetoric called? Is it catechismic?  The word does not exist (at least not in the OED) as an adjective.   Edit. I have briefly looked at .It is not entirely a parallel example - the OP complains that his wife does it in the course of everyday conversation. I am primarily interested in the development of an argument through this process. But the former question did bring out some interesting words - e.g. sermocinatio,- @Sven Yargs - which unfortunately does not have an OED entry. But I am also fascinated by the link to catechism, which I believe may be the provenance of this in some politicians. Someone has now come up with a suitable adjective - below.    Answer. I think the closest answer has been supplied by @Old English Lapdog. It seems to be the case that there are two distinct elements to this. One is that it follows the religious practice of teaching by question and supplied answer.  In that sense it relates to catechism. But in building an argument it is rhetorical. The word catechetical in its OED (sense 3) includes a reference to Socrates. 1711   J. Addison Spectator No. 239. ¶3   Socrates introduced a Catechetical Method of Arguing. He would ask his Adversary Question upon Question, till he had convinced him out of his own Mouth that his Opinions were wrong. So I am prepared to accept catechetical as the answer.
37460
,      &lt; 2% of people in the US have a #phd   Of those, 6.5% are Hispanic   By defending my PhD yesterday, I just became part of the 0.13% in the US that is #LatinoPhD   I find this statistic hard to believe, or if it is true maybe it is intentionally represented to look like a racial problem (although in my opinion Latino is not a race). Regarding my field, almost 40% of references are from Spanish surnames, 40% Chinese, and 20% European. Based on this analogy (maybe false) I think her statement is wrong. Is there any way or any source that can prove her claims?
73913
I read this somewhere in the 1990s, but it was probably older. I vaguely remember it as being two stories in sequence in an anthology. One was a story involving an Earth administrator comparing Earth curriculum to Mars curriculum and the second was just a class listing for Martian curriculum.  In the first story, what sticks out in my head was the Earth administrator proudly claiming some high value of WPM for reading for his students and the Martian admitting that their rate was lower, and then added a comment along the lines of that the Martian students, when reading at the rate attained at Earth, could not recall every word of the book and recite them back verbatim. In the curriculum listing, I remember that the physical education classes included Tightrope Walking and Advanced Tightrope Walking. In short, the implication was that Mars held its children, and therefore its citizens, to much higher standards, at the cost of sacrificing actual childhood. The children never played, just studied and drilled.  In retrospect, it might not have been Mars... I know one side was Earth and the other was a planet in the Solar System, and Mars sounds about right, but so does Venus. Either way, it was the casual arrogance of the extra-terrestrial society and the blustering attempts of the Earth administrator that stuck out for me.
60781
I'm trying to find a book I heard about once.  Little is known:    it was already in print in 1990's there were moving walkways (used for chasing in one scene) hero was predetermined to work as cleaner/sweeper, wanted to become an author of these tests ("books", "long books") that were used to determine profession,  and it was revealed that those who don't pass the test are actually rare genius.   It sounds much close to "Brave New World" or Gattaca's scenario, or Heinleins "Roads must roll", but is neither.    The most reason I'm interested in finding this book is, that Iar Elterrus's novels (these I'm currently worshipping) contains a ton of references to such plot, and I want to discourage myself knowing if the plot was actually "stolen" or not.  Also, references to such universes (psychological screening, massively genetic prenatal-tested society?) are welcome in comments even if they don't match the full request.
69022
Two years after his reported Reichenbach Fall demise, Sherlock, who has been cleared of all fraud charges against him, returns with Mycroft's help to a London under threat of terrorist attack.    I know, there are  (like The Hague), but I've never heard someone say a London till now.  Is a London under threat of terrorist attack used here as a description of some indefinite place in London?