Is a guy sore if the Model T he got for twenty bucks don't run after he's run it five year? Forget it Johnny, profit and loss.

There are a number of potential candidates for most threatening X-risk. Personally I worry most about global pandemics, both because things like the Black Death and the Spanish flu have caused massive death before, and because globalization and the dawn of synthetic biology have made diseases both easier to spread and easier to tweak (intentionally or not) for maximum lethality. But I'm in the minority on that. The only X-risk basically anyone wanted to talk about at the conference was artificial intelligence.

The name of Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates, has become proverbial for a termagant.

An expert, given a certain query, will often come up with a crisp answer: “yes” or “no”.