English Language Learners

5:43 AM

Questions about "naturalness" are tricky ones.

I wind up walking around and saying things to try and listen to myself, because I don't necessarily say things the way I think I say them.

The "gonna" is one. I never write "gonna" down. But I don't really enunciate "going to" either.

It's more like GOYNE TAH

Anonymous

Most contractions aren't written.

Anonymous

A few are conventionalized and are typically written where they'd be pronounced

Anonymous

Others, like gonna, are occasionally written where they'd be pronounced

Anonymous

And many are hardly ever written in any form

Anonymous

@StoneyB I did not yet―I'm a bit behind on Linguistics.SE!

Anonymous

5:49 AM

@HostileFork I agree.

Anonymous

Not least because native speakers can disagree about what sounds most natural

Anonymous

Fortunately, we can agree more easily on things that don't sound natural :-)

Anonymous

Certain things are just clearly off.

Anonymous

But if you want to express yourself in the most natural manner, you need to have some sort of context

Anonymous

And our questions on ELL usually leave that off when asking about naturalness.

Anonymous

5:50 AM

Really, I think they just want to hear if anything sounds obviously off

HostileFork

I wish these sites and things like them existed back when I was trying to learn Russian and Japanese.

Which is about 20 years ago. I guess that's why I'm in support of this, because wow, how much faster can you learn with a distributed network of people answering? Which is... er... a distributed network of about 10 people in practicality. But it's about the concept.

Anonymous

I feel very distributed!

Anonymous

Lang-8 is another site people use. There, people post stuff, and native speakers proofread it and post corrections and comments.

Anonymous

That's another model.

HostileFork

How's the snail?

Anonymous

5:55 AM

My snails are well. They are both snailing about at the moment :-)

HostileFork

How long does a snail live?

Anonymous

This species of snail doesn't live especially long. Some species can live a long time--more than a decade

Anonymous

Pet snails are popular in the UK and a couple other places. But they have giant snails there

Anonymous

Here, giant snails are illegal! Invasive species, donchaknow.

HostileFork

When I was a kid in school we made a terrarium, and put a bunch of stuff in it at the beginning of the year to see how it fared by the end of the year. You were supposed to kind of balance it.

I think that's all the snail-handling I've done in my semi-adult life, that wasn't in a French restaurant. :-)

Not that I advocate snail eating. It's just something people do. In France, apparently.

4

Q: semicolon vs conjunction "and"?

Does using a semicolon to join two clauses form a coordinate construction with two clauses coordinated and is it the same as with "and" and are such sentences interchangeable ? And can we omit words(ellipsis/gapping) as we did with coordinate structure ? In 2000 there were seven cases; in 19...

Something about the "and" version doesn't sound right (or read right).

Damkerng T.

6:15 AM

@HostileFork Maybe because another comma is missing?

scrolling back...

Anonymous

People tend to leave out the comma when the coordinates are very short

Anonymous

My personal punctuation style tends toward inserting lots of optional commas

Damkerng T.

That's true, but I think leaving out one before and while having one before five looks weird.

Anonymous

An optional comma can be inserted to mark the location of the gap

Anonymous

You can find sentences like that in print if you look

Damkerng T.

6:18 AM

nods

Anonymous

Of course, there's nothing wrong with you having that opinion

Damkerng T.

Anyway, I like semicolon more in this case. :)

Anonymous

There are people out there who get away with never using semicolons :-)

Anonymous

books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=a+similar+idea/…

Anonymous

A similar idea beats the similar idea by a 30:1 ratio

Anonymous

6:23 AM

Not surprising :-)

Anonymous

We just started a discussion of that in comments on a recent question

Anonymous

I didn't link to the X / Y graph in my comment, though, because it always confuses people when I do

Damkerng T.

I think the similar idea sounds weird.

Anonymous

It does, but it's grammatical and appropriate in unusual contexts

Damkerng T.

Maybe because I don't have a right context for it.

HostileFork

6:24 AM

I use semicolons; all the time.

Anonymous

What it is, then, is difficult to contextualize, I think

Anonymous

@HostileFork Thanks, Lonely Island :-)

HostileFork

My computer-languages-of-choice use semicolons for comment-to-end-of-line

Damkerng T.

I can't decipher one word (so far) in Ghost Ship.

HostileFork

code code code ; comment

Damkerng T.

6:25 AM

> All right, you know the drill. We do a complete recon [souptenus]. Make sure we got no more problems before we get to work.

What should be that word, the one that sounds pretty much like [souptenus]?

Anonymous

I use semicolons a lot in code. I also use ; instead of : in vim to avoid pressing shift all the time

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. That's, um, er . . . さあ :-)

HostileFork

@snailboat If you're a fan of computer language and linguistics, do you know of Rebol/Red?

Anonymous

A complete recon sweep tennis?

Anonymous

@HostileFork I do not

HostileFork

6:27 AM

Do you know Lisp?

Anonymous

Yes

HostileFork

Not the same thing, but also homoiconic.

It has some interesting decisions. Strings, for instance, can be "enclosed in quotes" or {enclosed in {curly braces} such that nested brace pairs are allowed}

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. This quiz is killing my brain. How long before my brain dies and gives up, d'ya s'pose? :-)

HostileFork

Lots of little details like that which turn out to have large impact, but the evaluation engine is extremely flexible.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat Should I upload a short clip?

Anonymous

6:29 AM

@DamkerngT. Sure!

Anonymous

That way I can use a part of my brain I've heavily optimized :-)

Damkerng T.

A moment. :)

HostileFork

So if you write (for instance) code: [x: 10 print x] then you've assigned a series of 4 items to code. The first item in that series is a "SET-WORD!" symbolic element. Unevaluated you may do what you like with it, but if you hand it over the evaluator will crunch through it--for instance, giving it the value of the integer 10 if you were to do code

Unevaluated code can use the many tinkertoys as you wish. For instance, there is a special "flavor" of string for patterns like foo://blahblah - anything looking like that is a URL. It behaves just like a string but it's a subclass. Similarly for <tags> - they also are strings behaviorally, but a routine can be polymorphic.

Damkerng T.

dropbox.com/s/lzokoc17p89wkq6/souptenus.wav

HostileFork

So for instance, read http://hostilefork.com gets a string passed in to it, but read can look and know "oh, that's a URL flavor string" and can have special behavior based on that.

Anonymous

6:33 AM

Soup to nuts

Damkerng T.

What does that mean!? I mean, in this context!

Oh, down to the most details, probably?

HostileFork

@snailboat It's also really optimized, 1/2 meg with quite a number of amazing built-ins. rebolsource.net

I drew the logo. :-)

Anonymous

Soup to nuts

"Soup to nuts" is an American English idiom conveying the meaning of "from beginning to end". It is derived from the description of a full course dinner, in which courses progress from soup to a dessert of nuts. It is comparable to expressions in other languages, such as the Latin phrase ab ovo usque ad mala ("from the egg to the apples"), describing the typical Roman meal. == See also == Soup to nuts may also refer to: From Soup to Nuts, a 1928 short comedy film starring Laurel and Hardy as butlers hired for a high society dinner party Soup to Nuts, a 1930 feature film starring the trio who later...

Damkerng T.

I see. Many thanks!

HostileFork

Red is the compiled variant, more attention on it these days

85

A: Open Source Advertising - Sidebar - 1H 2014

I also drew the logo for that. :-)

But both are in a way, very much language and dialect-based projects.

Damkerng T.

6:37 AM

@HostileFork Looks really great!

HostileFork

@DamkerngT. I won't lie, working on fringe languages is the kind of thing that will make you want to smash the computer against the wall sometimes.

And you just want to say "fine, let's hand the world's infrastructure over to JavaScript, which was designed in 10 days (and it shows)"

And then sob

Damkerng T.

It depends on what you mean by fringe languages, I think. :D

HostileFork

Well, Haskell is catching on, I'm happy about that

But it's been a long haul for that

Anonymous

Haskell is practically mainstream these days

HostileFork

Wasn't always so

Damkerng T.

6:39 AM

To be fair, I think any languages could make you want to do that. :)

I don't know much about Haskell.

How much of it is like Lisp?

Hmm... Looks like Lisp reborn with lots of special characters.

HostileFork

@DamkerngT. Haskell is a pure functional language; its constructs have strong parallels to math. It is not imperative.

Damkerng T.

nods

The factorial example on its Wikipedia page reminds me of Maxima.

(which is based on Lisp)

HostileFork

Functional programming has always been where academics have placed their bets on the future; it's really the only way to parallelize things and be sure of what you're doing.

Damkerng T.

nods

HostileFork

I'm in that camp

Damkerng T.

6:44 AM

I always believe functional programming makes better code. I think it fits perfectly in the parallel processing world.

HostileFork

But still, I find there to be something interesting in refining the old ways. Maybe just from an artistic standpoint. There's nothing foundational about fingers, or QWERTY keyboards, or bipeds, or any such stuff... but... it's a context. And so I like to think about what programming might look like if you really want to "be in that space"

Damkerng T.

Too bad that we have to wait for the latter reason to trigger its popularity.

HostileFork

Some humor from our last conference:

►

That would be me, with a fake beard. :-)

user08742

hi

@snailboat does "divaricate" carry currency today?

Damkerng T.

@HostileFork Hello, Doctor who has a very uncommon name. :)

Anonymous

6:53 AM

@user08742 Sure, but it's exceptionally rare

Anonymous

It's still part of modern English.

Anonymous

But you can't assume that everyone you're talking to will know the word.

Anonymous

It's at least a twenty-dollar word. :-)

Anonymous

corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=32998683

HostileFork

@user08742 I don't know that word. I'd have to guess. A process which splits something in two in order to create variance?

There is a fruit fly buzzing around and landing on my monitor. I will trade you the fruit fly for that word.

user08742

6:56 AM

I see. can I use it in my story or something like..."I was at that point in the road of life, where it divaricated into the blackest of the unknown." ?

Anonymous

I wouldn't personally, but that's just me.

Anonymous

The trick to using words like that without distracting your reader or making them grab a dictionary is using them in a context and in such a way that the meaning is obvious, even if they don't know it

Anonymous

People are really good at understanding stuff given the right context. After all, that's how we've learned most of the words we know.

Damkerng T.

@snailboat I concur.

Anonymous

And if you can make it understandable, then it's just a matter of style.

Anonymous

6:59 AM

(My personal style would be to never use that word.)

HostileFork

@DamkerngT. @snailboat If you are interested in buying some computer language Tupperware or a time share or, well, getting hooked on crack basically... I will invite you to a bot-powered demo of my pet "literate language" => Rebol and Red ... won't take too long!

Anonymous

(But then, I'm a cruddy writer.)

user08742

i see thank you

Damkerng T.

@HostileFork I can't reply you there. It says " You must have 20 reputation on Stack Overflow to talk here. See the faq.".

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. You should be able to get an association bonus on SO.

HostileFork

7:01 AM

@DamkerngT. It says you have 101 points, maybe it takes a little time for the account propagation.

I've noticed a delay

Damkerng T.

Oh, I pressed F5, and it looks different now.

HostileFork

7:46 AM

Funny story:

I took a writing seminar in college, and I picked it because I thought the list of books we'd be studying looked interesting.

And they were. Really interesting books. The guy had good taste.

He was also morbidly obese, had a massive beard, and was American but had spent apparently a couple of years studying at Oxford and came back with a massively affected way of speaking.

He loved marking things off on papers with red pen and taking off points for things he didn't like.

Damkerng T.

Haha! That, just within two years!?

Anonymous

After I moved to California, people complained that I started talking like a Californian.

Anonymous

It's really hard not to talk like everyone around you.

HostileFork

One was "dialog". I had written it without the "ue" and he downgraded my paper because I didn't put ue on it.

Damkerng T.

I learned that from here. (The difference between dialog and dialogue.)

Anonymous

7:48 AM

That's a funny one. It's usually dialogue in American English, but in computer stuff it's usually dialog, as in dialog box (almost never dialogue box)

HostileFork

And I pointed at it and said "everyone spells it like that, this is the age of computers" and he said "well, I'm from the age of dictionaries"

Damkerng T.

LOL

HostileFork

So I went, and got a dictionary, and brought it back to him and showed him that it was listed in the dictionary as an acceptable alternative.

And he refused to give me the points back and said "it's my class, and in my class it's dialogue"

Anonymous

Well, nothing like enforcing arbitrary rules to show who's boss.

HostileFork

"Your dictionaries don't mean so much to you, do they?"

Anyway, this guy also had a vendetta against passive voice.

If you ever used it in a paper, he'd mark it down. Even if it was totally reasonable. To him there was no valid usage of passive voice.

Anonymous

7:51 AM

They should probably not be teaching English

HostileFork

Basically, this guy and I were getting to a clear hating-each-others-guts territory

And I wasn't about to let him mess up my GPA

So I dropped the class, even though it meant I'd have to go restart another writing seminar the next semester.

Damkerng T.

I'm more interested in those interesting books. :)

HostileFork

But I had to get his signature on the paper so he would know I'd dropped it

So I went to his office hours.

Knocked on his door

Held up the paper

And said: "Your class was dropped."

(pause)

"By me"

Ice Boy

Ba dum tiss

HostileFork

He just sighed and signed it and said "well at least you know what the passive voice is" and we parted ways there.

Damkerng T.

7:54 AM

Hah!

HostileFork

I declare myself the winner in that one, though.

Ice Boy

Not really.

Anonymous

It may not have actually been a competition.

HostileFork

Well, if the competition was "who's more fat and pretentious", yeah, I lost.

He beat me by a mile.

Anyway, he's who I think of every time people go on a crusade against passive voice.

Ice Boy

Think about what has shaped his philosophy.

HostileFork

7:58 AM

And in science especially, when you're trying to talk about "what is", the obscuring of agency in passive voice is actually a benefit. It's not important who's doing; what's important is what happened.

As I said, he wasn't all bad, he had the best book selections of the seminars I thought.

Ice Boy

See, everybody has some good points

HostileFork

But wow, was he ever determined to pick fights, and not even back down... to cite the dictionary as your justification for marking down a student, and when they bring you a dictionary saying dialog is an acceptable alternate to dialogue just go "well, I don't care"... that's... really bad.

Nihilism in our schools that we pay money to go to.

Ice Boy

It is a tradition handed down over many generations.

The students are taught to adapt or prepare to fail.

That's the whole motivation behind getting students to memorize.

Those that refuse to memorize will not pass.

Damkerng T.

Having Google, Wikipedia, and the whole Internet, students might not need to memorize things as students in previous generations had to.

Students in the future might not need to memorize anything at all.

Though I'm not sure what they should do with their brains.

> a uncle, but an union

Probably typos. :)

Ice Boy

8:14 AM

I agree the internet is changing education.

The dictionary generation will not leave without a fight.

HostileFork

►

^-- everyone should watch that --^

Ice Boy

I don't mean to offend you @hostilfork :-)

HostileFork

Not offended. And tough to offend, in general. (Easy to irritate!)

Ice Boy

Ok, I'm not tryin to irritate you pal.

HostileFork

?

I must have missed what was supposed to irritate me. :-)

I'm busy worrying if french restaurant references ruffle the resident snailkeeper. :-)

Ice Boy

8:22 AM

Lol

She's a sweet heart :D

HostileFork

I once asked a futurist what being a futurist was.

They said "someone who contemplates the nature of the future, and what it might be like, in contrast to the present" (or a definition like that)

I asked "So is someone who believes in the Biblical rapture and predicts the second comig of Jesus and apocalyptic doom...are they a futurist?"

And they didn't quite know the answer to that.

Sort of a "maybe"

But when I think about the future, I do think it's interesting to contemplate these tools and connections; computers and Wikipedia and StackExchanges; Internets...

Ice Boy

No philosophy can have all the answers: past, present and future.

HostileFork

Flying Spaghetti Monster

The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) is the deity of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Pastafarianism (a portmanteau of pasta and Rastafarian), a movement that promotes a light-hearted view of religion and opposes the teaching of intelligent design and creationism in public schools. Although adherents describe Pastafarianism as a genuine religion, it is generally seen by the media as a parody religion. The "Flying Spaghetti Monster" was first described in a satirical open letter written by Bobby Henderson in 2005 to protest the Kansas State Board of Education decision to permit teaching...

Oh how wrong you are.

But his noodly appendage will someday reach you.

Damkerng T.

I don't know much about the future. My brain is still getting stuck at this:

> Why does he steal things while he could easily afford to buy them?

HostileFork

Your problem is the while/when?

Damkerng T.

8:28 AM

The original was when, and then an answer suggested while.

Yes.

HostileFork

Well, if you imagine his ability to purchase being punctuated... sometimes he can, sometimes he can't

Damkerng T.

The when was explained that it actually means if.

So, it sounds sort of okay; it could even be right.

HostileFork

"when" is natural if you are not trying to distinguish the affording period

Ice Boy

When sounds better.

HostileFork

if introduces a hypothetical tilt.

"IF he could", even if we can reverse the understanding to realize it's not hypothetical from context, is a less fitting construction than "when"

Damkerng T.

8:32 AM

So, to me, they all could probably be used, to mean somewhat different meanings. -- But I think they aren't really the same, and I can't tell how or why.

HostileFork

"while he could" really is suggesting a duration.

"Every second Tuesday the bagels were on sale. So while I could get in on the sweet deal, I did, and Tuesdays I ate my ham sandwiches on bagels."

Ice Boy

Answer the question: Why does he steal things?

HostileFork

Because paying is for chumps.

Damkerng T.

Even though he could easily afford to buy them.

HostileFork

If you sneak into a movie theater to watch the movie, it instantly is at least half a star better.

Damkerng T.

8:36 AM

Hah!

I've never tried that.

HostileFork

I had two opportunities to see the, er, whatever the third movie in the Star Wars new movie set was free.

happenask

ㅗㅑ

HostileFork

I skipped the first one because I had something else to do that night, and the second time the ticket machine didn't take my card and it was midway processing someone else's ticket.

happenask

hi

Damkerng T.

@happenask Hi!

HostileFork

8:37 AM

@happenask ㅗㅑ => Translation?

Ice Boy

Star Wars III

happenask

mistyping haha

HostileFork

I don't speak stick. :-)

Ice Boy

You speak fork

HostileFork

Those look like line-drawing characters, what language is that?

Korean, I guess.

happenask

8:46 AM

what meaning of inspiration in action ?

Damkerng T.

@HostileFork Very good guess!

HostileFork

@happenask That sounds like something a marketing person would say.

Ice Boy

@DamkerngT. Question: Why does he steal things? Answer: He could easily afford to buy them.

Damkerng T.

@IceBoy Hah!

@HostileFork Or an executive, or a politician.

happenask

when usually say 'in action'?

HostileFork

8:48 AM

@happenask If I made cakes for a living, I could try and talk up my cakes by calling it "dessert in action"... something to try and make the cake more exciting and more lively.

"poetry in motion" - there are a lot of phrases like this - I wouldn't say they actually mean anything. I'm sure such phrases have a name.

It's marketing talk.

Damkerng T.

Oh, that reminds me that dessert is another word that I usually misspell.

Ice Boy

Dessert has two s's because everybody wants two helpings of it.

Damkerng T.

Good tip!

Ice Boy

Elementary my dear Watson :-)

:D

8:56 AM

:-)

> If you are talking to your friend and want to mention the epicene, simply using person would work.

Hmm...

Probably saying "an epicene pronoun" might be better than saying just "the epicene".

Ice Boy

I agree.

Damkerng T.

-1

Q: How did 'subordinate' evolve?

What's an intuitive derivation behind ODO's definition 1 that helps to remember its meaning: 1. subordinate = Lower in rank or position Etymonline: mid-15c., "having an inferior rank," from Medieval Latin subordinatus "placed in a lower order, made subject", past participle of subordinar...

etymology

Migrated from ELU, going to be closed soon (I think) on ELL. Maybe we need an etymology stack.

Damkerng T.

9:45 AM

Ahh... I found anoter good example that can demonstrate the effect of commas:

> a) Our house, which has four bedrooms, is located in Ocean City.
b) Our house which has four bedrooms is located in Ocean City.

In b), I imagine that the speaker has one house. In a) possibly more than one.

Though that is not really necessary. Just a basic assumption before I can hear the next sentence.

HostileFork

Damkerng T.

Oh, no. I hope I didn't bore anyone. :)

HostileFork

No, just one of my favored ambiguity examples.

That works on either interpretation.

Damkerng T.

I knew. Just want to sound a little weenie. :)

@HostileFork True.

3

Q: Proper words to utter when shaking hands with others?

I want to know what might be proper ways to express our regards to others when shaking hands with others in occasions such as church? I found that when shaking hands with others, often I do not get any reply from others if I say "how are you doing" or "how is it going". So I am wondering why and...

sentence-usage politeness

HostileFork

"Howdy" hah

Damkerng T.

9:53 AM

I try to recall those occasions that I shook someone hands. I think most of them weren't really that long to say anything "during" the handshaking.

HostileFork

I lived in Texas, and no one in Texas even says that, except as a joke.

Damkerng T.

LOL

HostileFork

I guess the thing is that globalization has essentially eliminated the variations like that, so now if someone says "Howdy y'all!" it's such an obvious caricature when compared to the mainstream television/internet standard, that it just becomes a joke.

What a postmodernist society we live in.

Damkerng T.

I wonder, how often would you do handshaking these days? I mean, after several warnings about flu in the last decade (or two).

HostileFork

But no, people would laugh at you if you shook someone's hand and you said "howdy", but you could play on that as a joke if that's the direction you wanted. But if you're going to joke you could say lots of things. "Your hand... it's so... (awkward pause) soft..."

Damkerng T.

9:58 AM

Hahaha!

HostileFork

Awkward pauses and creepy glares can get one a long way in the humor department.

Up until that part where you get arrested.

have you been?

Who's asking? :-P

skullpatrol

No skulls here, man.

Well, one.

Ice Boy

10:01 AM

just checking :)

HostileFork

I haven't seen Big Jimmy in months and I don't know nothing about no shakedown so get off my back.

Ice Boy

i think "avoid boring people" is your mantra

HostileFork

I do like that it works both ways.

But I don't necessarily abide by it

On either interpretation.

Ice Boy

avoid-boring people, avoid boring-people

avoid-boring boring-people

HostileFork

10:20 AM

Well, I tried to tell LeP about the sentiment.

In a non-mean way, I hope.

LeP seems a nice person, I think it just seems a misunderstanding.

Some student asking "well if I can't ask here, where?" Maybe younger generations really do think the internet is powered by gnomes. Because it sort of is. Google isn't angry if you query it a lot.

There are throttling rates if you hit it with APIs, and you need an API key, etc.

But "human scale" questions, typed in at most a dozen or two per minute, aren't on the radar.

Damkerng T.

@HostileFork Sometimes I think the askers do think that the answerers owe them something. (This is not about LeP, though.)

HostileFork

@DamkerngT. I'm the eternal defender of the newbie, so it's always amazing when they backfire... one guy who I was helping on SO started calling me pitchfork and insisting how much money his company made and people should help him, he was illiterate and terrible, a true worst case scenario...

Which makes me feel a fool for defending the newbies. They're making me look bad, and then the stuffy people who insist "we must defend against the hordes" laugh at me and go "SEE!"

Stupid fork.

Damkerng T.

Oh, no!

I hope you won't give up on them.

HostileFork

Well what I like to remind people is that the person you cheat when you treat every new person through the filter of your perceptions is you.

You're just rehearsing your biases.

Might you be right? Well, patterns are drawn from data, sure. You could stereotype all day.

Damkerng T.

I usually try my best to separate a person from what they do.

HostileFork

10:33 AM

But what about the case you didn't predict?

I defend the outliers, and that's what I do, and I guess I'll die doing it.

Which will suck if the non-outliers got together and built a utopian society that had immortality machines and what-not.

Damkerng T.

Hah!

HostileFork

So I picked the losing team, but I'm okay with that, for some poetic reason.

Because I ask questions, shoot later.

Not vice versa.

►

Damkerng T.

Hey, that looks like me. :)

HostileFork

Seen that one?

Damkerng T.

Not yet. This is my first.

HostileFork

10:37 AM

Ah, well it's my favorite of the asimo videos to date.

But of course AI would not settle for such a thing, it's just... a... way of drawing a picture.

Damkerng T.

nods -- Though I wish robots in the future would be as friendly as Asimo. :)

HostileFork

Heh.

►

Damkerng T.

Better not build robots with red eyes.

HostileFork

No, that's the right color.

We've run the numbers, and agreed on it.

Damkerng T.

Hah!

HostileFork

10:43 AM

What motivates you to choose an Asimo avatar?

Damkerng T.

Oh, it was the last Hats season.

Or winterbash something.

I wanted something that could look nice with those hats.

HostileFork

Well still, not a pure chance choice.

Damkerng T.

And I'm a fan of Asimov.

HostileFork

Many avatars would work with the hats.

Mine was ok

Asimov wasn't a great writer, in terms of language use.

Damkerng T.

However, while searching for pictures of Isaac Asimov, I got this one, so hey, why not this one?

HostileFork

10:45 AM

I found his books to be tedious.

A lot of paraphrase, kind of junk.

Damkerng T.

@HostileFork His books made it a lot easier for me to understand English.

I've heard that about his prose before, though.

HostileFork

Interesting ideas, but I don't think the books stand as literature.

Want a great, free book?

Damkerng T.

What is that?

HostileFork

Accelerando

Accelerando is a 2005 science fiction novel consisting of a series of interconnected short stories by British author Charles Stross. As well as normal hardback and paperback editions, it was released as a free e-book under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Accelerando won the Locus Award in 2006, and was nominated for several other awards in 2005 and 2006, including the Hugo, Campbell, Clarke, and British Science Fiction Association Awards. == Title == In Italian, accelerando means "speeding up" and is used as a tempo marking in musical notation. In Stross' novel...

Damkerng T.

It's free!?

HostileFork

10:47 AM

Creative Commons

Damkerng T.

Great! Thanks!

HostileFork

He's a bit wordy, and I'm not going to point and say "literature" on that either, but I will say big ideas

Nice memorable book.

Damkerng T.

By the way, I'm inspired by two movies which make me want to build a real robot someday, if possible.