Ha! Even though the whole thing is ridiculous (בֹרֵחַ מִלִּפְנֵי יְהוָה, etc), that’s just ....anyway, he ends up being vomited (disappointingly, ἐξέβαλεν rather than ?ἐξημεσεν) from the dag, so there would seem to be two transfers required.

I should leave town more often; apparently I earned a cape in my absence last week.

@Davïd One of the best perks of being a mod (on any SE site) is the ability to edit chat messages across the whole network.

@Caleb That’s really beautiful. You should update your picture.

@Caleb @Susan Wonderful! Would love to have a cape like that....

Does anybody know what they use the IDs that are tacked onto the end of the 'share' URLs for? They're tracking this?

@Susan The main thing being tracked there is the key by which I've shared the pic. It's in a private album but by generating a share key and making that URL I was able to post the link so that anybody can reach it, but I can also revoke the share so it's no longer accessible. I'm sure Google is tracking other things too, but that's what the ID is for. The main part of the URL is the resource locater, the second part is a unique share key.

I could generate another link that would be to the same resource but with a different share key, in which case I it could be revoked separately so some people I shared with would be blocked but not others depending on which link they had.

@Susan It's a pretty dragon but it doesn't lend itself to cropping to a small form factor quite as well as the last one I used.

@Caleb Thanks. I meant SE, but I guess it's the same basic idea. I have no doubt about Google being broadly interested in knowing everything possible about each of us, though. SE - I'm not quite sure why they care.

@Susan I don't think SE has anything on that URL. In fact a quick look at the inspector shows they don't even have an event handler enabled to catch analytics on outgoing links (which would be done without anything on the URL anyway).

@Caleb That kid (if that's who it was) has some talent. I couldn't draw an identifiable animal (or imaginary creature, or anything else) to save my life (really, like 3+ standard deviations below the mean - my 7 year-old niece does markedly better), and I'm always a little shocked to find out there are people walking around who can do things like that.

@Caleb No no, our share URLs. On SE sites. Generating a share link. It always as a userID.

@Susan Oh. That is to track your progress towards badges you can get for generating traffic.

You can remove it and the link will work fine, but people following the link won't count towards your badges.

@Caleb Oh, I didn't know there were such things. Presumably for outside traffic only?

@Susan Correct. Links on the same-site doesn't do anything for you last I checked, although I think other sites in the SE network might count.

The announcer, booster, and publicist badges all depend on the shared link being traceable to you being the one sharing it.

And it doesn't have to be your post to qualify, you can share a link to anything interesting and if your publicizing the link gets any traction...

@Caleb Interesting. Of course, people could just sign out and follow their own links, but maybe they have some fancy IP-tracking going on there.

@Susan Yes, visits have to be from unique IP's. Unless you run a bot-net it's kind of hard to get any significant number together. Even if you reset your modem once a day and hit it up from ever cell network zone and friends house and free wifi you can get on you aren't going to rack up anything significant.

And yes there are people that have used bot-nets or spam methods to get that badge, but for all the good it does them they should have spent their time better.

There are some folks that have the fanatic badge on nearly every site on the SE network too. 100+ gold badges and no rep—all it proves is they can run a script to access all the sites using their user cookie once a day.

And they can't get rid of them, so they carry around a visible mark of having obviously gamed the system for the lifetime of their SE account.

@Caleb That seems pretty dumb.

@Susan Yup. I may be behind in my pharmaceuticals, but last I checked there wasn't a prescription to fix stupid.

@Caleb @Susan (i.e., reasonably handy mods!) - Would we normally be content with three answers from the same user? The amount of (wasted) effort in them makes me sad.

@Davïd I'm slightly surprised the culprit was not my first guess. I was just reviewing a 2 answer situation earlier.

@Davïd But to answer your question, normally the answer would be no. And I'm not seeing any reason to consider this an abnormal case either.

@Caleb I haven't spent enough time checking to see how different they might be. They aren't identical, but obviously are developing a theme!

@Davïd I didn't study the content either, but I did a chop job on it anyway.

Post timestamps for the win.

@Caleb :) The same graphics certainly recur. If poster is keen, can edit the new material (if any) into the existing answer. Chop job ftw. ;)

@Davïd I was hoping the revision diff would be more helpful figuring out what the difference was between answers, but no such luck. It looks like each is a re-hash of related content not just an edit.

In any event I don't have time or expertise to do more than the chop job.

Anybody know any good articles about the concept of literacy and how the modern trend of directly equating proficiency with an orthographic system with general intelligence and level of education might not necessarily be a valid assumption to make historically? I'm looking for something that explains it well to modern people who may be proficient with their language's orthography but not necessarily very well educated themselves.

Just for the record and because I'm thinking of it, that chart is baloney^^^.