[ExI] Riddle?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2025 at 7:45 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> It seems that the information was sufficient for some.
>

The missing information was that song.  I had never heard of it before, nor
was the riddle phrased in such a way as to suggest investigation of such a
possibility.  Be careful with cultural assumptions like that when judging
how easy or possible a riddle is.

For instance, if I were to go on about a girl who demonstrated her love by
learning as she once taught, I would not expect most members of this list
to guess that I mean...



(break inserted so you can try to guess)



...Pearl from the Splatoon franchise, who met a foreigner, taught said
foreigner the local language, fell in love with said foreigner, and
eventually learned her love interest's native tongue.

Perhaps a little easier to guess - Spike in particular might guess this one
- would be that I'll soon be facing some critics of my criticality...



(another break inserted, for the same reason)



...when, next week at NETS 2025 (this might be discovered with a Web
search, but the speaker lineup is probably too recent for most publicly
available AIs to be aware of), I present the results of a study I've been
leading on nuclear thermal propulsion, including specific details of the
engine - basically a flying nuclear reactor - "achieving criticality" in
nuclear engineering parlance ("turning on and warming up" is a not too
inaccurate translation), to an audience which I have good reason to believe
will include skeptics (for good reason: the application I'm investigating
hasn't been seriously attempted in a long while).

Quite a few in "my circle" would get both of those quickly.  There are
probably literally millions in the world who would get that first riddle,
and the second might be guessed by anyone going to that conference or
anyone who knows the basics of nuclear engineering and guesses (or reads
online) that I've been working on a project in that field.  The overlap is
not so large.
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