We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars adding machines and other artifacts but nothing is proved by such attributions.
Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts.
What I learned is that in business you must make decisions based on facts not react with your heart.
My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
Definition of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths they become facts or at best part of the public character or at worst catchwords.
Facts which at first seem improbable will even on scant explanation drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.
Pessimism only describes an attitude and not facts and hence is entirely subjective.
Attitudes are more important than facts.
Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know or to admit the change and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
I was writing a scene where a guy was choking another guy to death. You can go online and type 'chokeholds' and watch scenes where martial artists choke each other out. You can hear what noises they make when they go unconscious see how their bodies flop and everything. YouTube is amazing for the more detailed stuff.