Penelope rhymes with envelope, but I can’t decide if it’s the noun or the verb.
Reminds me of the widely circulated lore that cyanide gas smells like bitter almonds.
OK: what’s a bitter almond? When in my life would I have ever encountered that nut. When would I have smelled one? Shelled, or unshelled? Or do they mean cyanide gas smell like the tree or the flowers of the tree? Was bitter almond smell, like a butter churn, something everybody in 1910 would instantly recognize that’s slowly faded from our collective experience and therefore collective memory? Hellifino.
Since encountering cyanide gas is a life-or-death event, you’d think they’d be a little more precise and detailed about all this. But noooo.
At least it appears the CDC is beginning to de-emphasize this silly lore. Last I knew it was one of the Sacred Facts of DoD chem warfare training that they burned into the memory banks of every newbie. To zero practical effect even in an HC encounter.
We had a tank disabled by an arrow at an army base here. Crossbow arrow of unknown origin went between the turret and the body, and it jammed.
Cite.
Having smelled cyanide (I have made kill jars for entomology uses), it smells like…bitter almonds. Which is a smell I know because I was in the habit of prying open peach pits and the like as a kid (don’t ask me why, I dunno - I just did). But beyond that it smells enough like almonds to just say almonds. With a bitter quality to them 
.
It’s really a pretty spot-on description.
I loved that one.
Honestly, having never smelled anything called bitter almond, I believe I would recognize cyanide from that description. Especially since it’s really the same thing – fruit pits contain small amounts of cyanide.
And the reason people can recognize the smell of rotten eggs is that sulfides are one component of the flavor of even fresh eggs. In very, very trace quantities, but we’re really, really sensitive to sulfide scent.
Okay, I just got 15 min of entertainment from googling ‘worst ladder’. 
If I ever made a pocket thingy with a powerful laser, the laser would be the first thing I tested. And the ad copy about the thingy would mostly be exclamations of how wickedly cool that laser was!
Why do we even call them smartphones? They should just be called “Allthings”.
Way too many people can identify with this one.
11% seems very low to sweep two games of rps.
Why? Assuming both players choose at random, with no attempt to use psychology to beat their opponent, the odds are equal 1 in three chance that you will win, lose or draw. Winning twice in a row is 1 in 9, or 11.11 recurring percent.
Oh, I know the maths works out, it just doesn’t seem right to me - another example of people being bad at judging possibility.
Interesting aspect of the birthdate probabilities I had never thought of before. If you’re checking a group of people of size x (where x is less than 365) to find out if your birthdate 1) matches the birthdate of a member of the group or 2) matches the birthdates of two members of the group, then the two probabilities are in an inverse relationship.
Using the Senate example, which gives you a hundred people in x, if you’re looking to match your birthdate with one person, the ideal situation would be for each person in the group to have a unique birthdate. That would give you a pool of a hundred possibilities to match your birthdate.
But it would reduce your probability of matching two people to zero. To have the highest probability of your birthdate matching two people in the group, the ideal would be for the group to have fifty pairs of matching birthdates. But that would reduce your chances of matching any date by fifty percent.