Tim Bray, on an oversimplified analysis of differences between men and women:
Statistics are useful; essential, even, to understanding. But everybody is an exception, in at least one statistical minority, and the human mind is so prone to overaggressive pattern-matching.
I know I’ll use the phrase “prone to overaggressive pattern-matching” sometime, so I want to quote Tim here now, so I’ll be able to find the source anon.
In the age of the proto-semantic Web, here’s a question for mark-up mavens: If somebody writes such-and-such a thing on their web page, and I quote them on mine — am I obligated to replicate their mark-up as well as the visual appearance of their prose? Tim used 〈em〉 tags on his “useful” (no surprise that he’s conscientious about mark-up), but a casual reader might quote him with just 〈i〉 tags. Or a casual blogger might set a title in italics through a blogging engine that defaults to 〈em〉 tags; should I follow their imprecision for the sake of precise quotation? Do we need a 〈sic〉 tag?