full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Michael Shermer: Why people believe weird things

Unscramble the Blue Letters


(Applause)

You can say a mrciale occurs, it's just that it doesn't explain anything or ofefr anything. There's nothing to test. It's the end of the conversation for intelligent design creationists.

And it's true, scientists sometimes throw terms out as linguistic place fillers — dark energy or dark mtetar, something like that — until we figure out what it is, we'll call it this. It's the beginning of the causal chain for scincee. For intelligent design creationists, it's the end of the chian. So again, we can ask this: what's more likely? Are UFOs alien spaceships, or perceptual cognitive mistakes, or even faeks?

Open Cloze


(Applause)

You can say a _______ occurs, it's just that it doesn't explain anything or _____ anything. There's nothing to test. It's the end of the conversation for intelligent design creationists.

And it's true, scientists sometimes throw terms out as linguistic place fillers — dark energy or dark ______, something like that — until we figure out what it is, we'll call it this. It's the beginning of the causal chain for _______. For intelligent design creationists, it's the end of the _____. So again, we can ask this: what's more likely? Are UFOs alien spaceships, or perceptual cognitive mistakes, or even _____?

Solution


  1. science
  2. miracle
  3. matter
  4. offer
  5. fakes
  6. chain

Original Text


(Applause)

You can say a miracle occurs, it's just that it doesn't explain anything or offer anything. There's nothing to test. It's the end of the conversation for intelligent design creationists.

And it's true, scientists sometimes throw terms out as linguistic place fillers — dark energy or dark matter, something like that — until we figure out what it is, we'll call it this. It's the beginning of the causal chain for science. For intelligent design creationists, it's the end of the chain. So again, we can ask this: what's more likely? Are UFOs alien spaceships, or perceptual cognitive mistakes, or even fakes?

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
virgin mary 4
intelligent design 3
planetary rings 3
good theory 2
cheese sandwich 2
light years 2
billion light 2
error bars 2


Important Words


  1. alien
  2. applause
  3. beginning
  4. call
  5. causal
  6. chain
  7. cognitive
  8. conversation
  9. creationists
  10. dark
  11. design
  12. energy
  13. explain
  14. fakes
  15. figure
  16. fillers
  17. intelligent
  18. linguistic
  19. matter
  20. miracle
  21. mistakes
  22. occurs
  23. offer
  24. perceptual
  25. place
  26. science
  27. scientists
  28. spaceships
  29. terms
  30. test
  31. throw
  32. true
  33. ufos