full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Emily Levine: How I made friends with reality

Unscramble the Blue Letters

You have to uasetnrndd that we don't live in Newton's clockwork universe anyomre. We live in a banana peel universe, and we won't ever be able to know everything or control everything or predict everything. nurate is like a self-driving car. The best we can be is like the old woman in that joke — I don't know if you've heard it. An old woman is driving with her middle-aged daughter in the passenger seat, and the mtoehr goes right through a red light. And the deathgur doesn't want to say anything that makes it sound like, "You're too old to drive," so she didn't say anything. And then the mother goes through a second red light, and the daughter, as tactfully as possible, says, "Mom, are you aawre that you just went through two red lights?" And the mother says, "Oh, am I driving?"

Open Cloze

You have to __________ that we don't live in Newton's clockwork universe _______. We live in a banana peel universe, and we won't ever be able to know everything or control everything or predict everything. ______ is like a self-driving car. The best we can be is like the old woman in that joke — I don't know if you've heard it. An old woman is driving with her middle-aged daughter in the passenger seat, and the ______ goes right through a red light. And the ________ doesn't want to say anything that makes it sound like, "You're too old to drive," so she didn't say anything. And then the mother goes through a second red light, and the daughter, as tactfully as possible, says, "Mom, are you _____ that you just went through two red lights?" And the mother says, "Oh, am I driving?"

Solution

  1. mother
  2. daughter
  3. anymore
  4. nature
  5. understand
  6. aware

Original Text

You have to understand that we don't live in Newton's clockwork universe anymore. We live in a banana peel universe, and we won't ever be able to know everything or control everything or predict everything. Nature is like a self-driving car. The best we can be is like the old woman in that joke — I don't know if you've heard it. An old woman is driving with her middle-aged daughter in the passenger seat, and the mother goes right through a red light. And the daughter doesn't want to say anything that makes it sound like, "You're too old to drive," so she didn't say anything. And then the mother goes through a second red light, and the daughter, as tactfully as possible, says, "Mom, are you aware that you just went through two red lights?" And the mother says, "Oh, am I driving?"

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
executive brain 3
brain function 3
quantum physics 2
defeat death 2
cyclical rhythms 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
executive brain function 3

Important Words

  1. anymore
  2. aware
  3. banana
  4. car
  5. clockwork
  6. control
  7. daughter
  8. drive
  9. driving
  10. heard
  11. joke
  12. light
  13. lights
  14. live
  15. mother
  16. nature
  17. passenger
  18. peel
  19. predict
  20. red
  21. seat
  22. sound
  23. tactfully
  24. understand
  25. universe
  26. woman