Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from the Sunday farmers' market. And so she says, "let's get a loaf of bread, some flowers, and a flat of strawberries!" When we roll home with only bagels, I feel I've won.

No more. I've armed myself with the tools of illogic, thus guaranteeing I win every marital argument from this point forward. You can too.

Use the following brain-deflating fallacies to ensure dominance in debate club and/or with unsuspecting significant other.


• Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc: Because x follows y, y caused x—"See? Now you have an upset stomach! Thus, my dear wife, j'accuse!"

• Red Herring: An unrelated fact throws off the scent—"You will, of course, have noticed that even now every piece of pickled herring remains firmly jarred!"

• Slippery Slope: A supposed string of causes and effects, with a massively undesirable endpoint—"Honey, if you keep fixating on the fate of the jamocha almond fudge, you won't be able to sleep and you'll lie awake all night wondering if maybe you're the one who ate the ice cream, and then you'll start questioning reality in general, and before you know it, you'll be pulling your hair and muttering gibberish down by the waterfront."

• Straw Person: mischaracterizing an opinion to the point of parody—"So you're saying that I'm incapable of love and was likely the second shooter on the grassy knoll?"

• You Too: Distracting from fault by counterattack—"Yeah, but last week you drank the last Redhook Double Black Stout!* Seriously, have you no speck of human decency?"

* Cases of above beverage can be sent to this author care of Scientific Blogging. Wait, maybe that's not a good idea. If you want to send me cases of ber, email me and I'll give you a way to send 'em direct.

More importantly what kind of geek are you? If input="math geek", goto your nearest bookstore and purchase a copy of Geek Logik: 50 FoolproofEquations for Everyday Life. If you're a full featured, renaissance geek of all trades looking for a good time at others' expense, consider a copy of The Geeks' Guide to World Domination: Be Afraid Beautiful People.   And if you're a geek of the mind, consider preordering a copy of my new book, Brain Candy: Science,Paradoxes, Puzzles, Logic and Illogic to Nourish Your Neurons(shipping August 3rd).