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George Burns and Gracie Allen had an old bit about how she wanted to adopt a child from France, except that she’d have to take French lessons so she could understand the baby when it grew up.
It turns out she was more right than we suspected.
Update:
Poor Gracie. In a shocking turn of events it seems that the popular press has completely misrepresented the science. And the science wasn’t so hot to begin with.
This technique of cherry-picking atypical “typical” values for rhetorical effect is fairly common in scientific writing, but it should alert us to the fact that the authors are perhaps not trying quite as hard as they should to disprove their own hypothesis.
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