English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2024-03-30

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12:00 AM

There they have petrified REDWOODS!

Florissant Formation

The Florissant Formation is a sedimentary geologic formation outcropping around Florissant, Teller County, Colorado. The formation is noted for the abundant and exceptionally preserved insect and plant fossils that are found in the mudstones and shales. Based on argon radiometric dating, the formation is Eocene (approximately 34 million years old ) in age and has been interpreted as a lake environment. The fossils have been preserved because of the interaction of the volcanic ash from the nearby Thirtynine Mile volcanic field with diatoms in the lake, causing a diatom bloom. As the diatoms fell...

The volcano blew up and buried them in ash. Deep. So all that remains.

That's a Sequoia stump.

> The majority of the stumps have been identified as belonging to Sequoia affinis, a close relative of the modern coast redwood (S. sempervirens).[20] These trees could have been as tall as 60 m (200 ft) until they were killed by lahars suffocating the oxygen supply to their roots. Dendrochronological examination of the tree rings has resulted in estimated ages of 500–700 years old when the trees were killed and buried.

Xander Henderson

@tchrist Yeah, I've been there, too. It's... fine. :P

12:38 AM

@tchrist California superbloom

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@NickAlexeev The aliens are gaining on us.

Xander Henderson

@NickAlexeev Where in Cali?

1:08 AM

@XanderHenderson That photo is from Walker Canyon. Here's the entire blog post with more photos (it's not my blog).

Xander Henderson

Oh, over by Lake Elsinore, right?

And the blog says that is the 2017 superbloom. I remember that! I went out towards J Tree for that one.

1:19 AM

@XanderHenderson I've been there for those, too.

7 hours later…

8:42 AM

Average - From Middle French avarie, from Old French avarie, from Old Italian avaria (which is possibly from Arabic عَوَارِيَّة (ʕawāriyya, “damaged goods”), from عَوَار (ʕawār, “fault, blemish, defect, flaw”), from عَوِرَ (ʕawira, “to lose an eye”)) + English suffix -age.

O_o

1 hour later…

9:42 AM

@XanderHenderson no just hypersupersaturated

Not all the fakery on the internet is an AI's fault

9:57 AM

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I'm so glad that South Korea has multi-party system.

The bottom row is candidates for the election district; the other rows are parties in proportional representation.

1 hour later…

11:02 AM

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- Well.. you have beer and crackers deficiency.
- Just what I thought..

11:35 AM

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2 hours later…

2:03 PM

Wordle 1,015 3/6

🟨⬛⬛🟨⬛
⬛🟨🟩⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Daily Octordle #796
4️⃣🕚
6️⃣3️⃣
5️⃣9️⃣
🕛8️⃣
Score: 58

Daily Sequence Octordle #796
3️⃣5️⃣
6️⃣7️⃣
9️⃣🔟
🕚🕛
Score: 63

#WhenTaken #32 (30.03.2024)

I scored 587/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 1611 km - 🗓️ 3 yrs - ⚡ 144 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 3722 km - 🗓️ 25 yrs - ⚡ 65 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 276 km - 🗓️ 0 yrs - ⚡ 181 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 16981 km - 🗓️ 6 yrs - ⚡ 93 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 9042 km - 🗓️ 0 yrs - ⚡ 104 / 200

https://whentaken.com

That was awful. Worst score yet.

Xander Henderson

15 hours ago, by Xander Henderson

Or maybe it's been 'shopped.

2:20 PM

@XanderHenderson Colors may have been tweaked, but nowadays smartphone cameras goose the colors anyway.

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Xander Henderson

@Robusto I mean, I was kind of playing a character, and making an extended joke. Context, like, matters.

Non-tweaked.

@XanderHenderson Context can be obscure too.

Xander Henderson

@Robusto Yes, but I am aware of what cameras can do. I was joking.

You're a new character in this chat's dramatis personae, so your humor hasn't been calibrated yet.

Give us a few days.

Xander Henderson

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For the record, that is what my phone did in the parking lot of my grocery store.

With virtually no tweaking.

2:29 PM

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That's my DSLR with a 300 mm lens. No tweaking.

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Same night. Other direction.

Xander Henderson

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Using my phone.

@XanderHenderson What phone do you have?

Xander Henderson

(And a small telescope).

Pixel 7 and a cheap Celestron refractor.

Saying it was shot with your phone is somewhat misleading. :)

Xander Henderson

@tchrist Yeah, that was kind of my intention. :P

BUT! I added the parenthetical immediately.

2:33 PM

My Galaxy S23 Ultra cheats on moon shots and subs ready-made pix of the moon instead of what it actually sees. Very disappointing.

Xander Henderson

@Robusto Is that out by JTree?

@Robusto Seriously?!

@XanderHenderson That was shot in Rio Rancho, NM a few years ago.

Xander Henderson

Ah! Okay. Those are maybe soaptree yucca, not Josua trees.

Or cholla.

Hard to see in the dark.

Probably cholla.

The moon is only about 32 minutes wide.

@XanderHenderson Yes. Unless you have some foreground stuff that is clearly displayed it will do that. If you just point it at the moon straight up you get a fake image.

2:36 PM

Then again, so is the sun.

@XanderHenderson The Sandía crest is about 11 miles from where I took that picture. I'm not sure what plants those are.

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That was the annular eclipse last year.

The rule of thumb is that your fist is around 10 degrees, so like 20 moons. I don't know whether the thumb is included in the rule.

@Robusto When getting an annulment was a bright idea.

Xander Henderson

@Robusto I went to Chaco for that.

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@XanderHenderson Thanks: now I have a permanent hole in my screen.

Xander Henderson

Heh.

Unfortunately, I am not going to be able to make it to next week's eclipse. The HLC is coming out, and I have to be on campus. :/

2:44 PM

@XanderHenderson That's insanely wrong.

Oct 14, 2023 at 17:06, by Robusto

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Same time as the other photo was shot.

Xander Henderson

We tried to convince them to change the date of their visit (the college is going to be shut down for a large part of the day, given indigenous feelings about eclipses), but they decided that was the day.

I am quite disappointed. :/

I am trying to get them to change the date of the eclipse and move it farther west, but so far no luck.

Xander Henderson

Heh.

On the other hand, I will be driving home late tomorrow, and should be in the middle of nowhere on the 40 just after sunset, so I am going to try to get a picture of the comets.

@XanderHenderson Very nice area. If you want to camp there you have to win a lottery.

@XanderHenderson Are you from California originally?

2:46 PM

No, Iowa.

Xander Henderson

@tchrist No, Arizona. ;P

heh

I'll be in Dallas, or thereabouts.

People who use the definite article for highway numbers are usually from CA.

Xander Henderson

My family moved around a lot. Before I was three, we lived in Tucson, Tuba City (in a hogan), Phoenix, Tucson again, and Tempe.

I make trips to Tucson to cycle once or twice a year.

2:48 PM

I lived in Ogden when I was one but I hardly think that counts.

Xander Henderson

When I was 10 we moved to Iowa. We spent a summer living in Princeton, and a year living in Cortez CO (near Four Corners). When I was 16, I lived in Siberia for 5 months, and then my family moved to Nevada---I stayed in Iowa to finish my last year of high school.

Tucson is nice. Phoenix, not.

@XanderHenderson See, I knew your speech habits were Iowan.

Xander Henderson

Then I spent two years in SoCal, failing out of college, then moved to Reno, where I finished a BA and MS. In 2014, I moved to R'Side for a PhD, and now live in northern Arizona.

@tchrist Phoenix has some great rides if you're into cycling.

Xander Henderson

@tchrist Most tests for regionality have a really hard time with my idiosyncrasies. Most often, I am told that I come from the Central Valley, e.g. near Fresno.

2:51 PM

@XanderHenderson It's because your humor tends towards the cornier end than it does towards the drier end, O child of the corn.

Xander Henderson

I have intentionally added a few regionalisms to my speech just to confuse things further (e.g. I worked hard to use "pop" rather than "soda", and I will use "fountain" and "bubbler" interchangeably; I also really like the southern "needs done", as in "The laundry needs done", and have incorporated that).

@XanderHenderson That's Western Pennsylvanian.

A Hopi story: The Hopis live in Colorado on the First, Second and Third Mesa. Many moons ago (ahem), I was hired to interpret and drive a group of them around Paris in a Kombi! [VW van or Microbus for the young 'ens], invited by a crazy French anthropologist who thought rapprochement between Amerindians and French people would change the world.

Xander Henderson

@tchrist Indeed. I work with younger people. I also work very hard to (1) know what the current slang is, and (2) use it incorrectly.

@Lambie First, Second, and Third Mesa are all in Arizona.

(we have a campus at the base of Second Mesa---I like teaching out there).

No DST for the Hopi.

For they would rather die than be confused for Navajo.

Xander Henderson

2:53 PM

@tchrist Yes, but the Diné do have DST. Which means that when I drive to the Hopi Campus in the summer, my clocks change several times.

I'll never forget the look of surprise on people's faces when they saw them dressed to the nines in their traditional outfits sitting in the van. [YES: OF COURSE< ARIZONA, haven't woken up yet!!]

Xander Henderson

@tchrist Yeah, there is no lost love between them.

Yes, I also drove/interpreted for the Navajo via the same guy. The Hopi mesas are inside or surrounded by the Navajo, The Hopi are a much smaller tribe than the Navajo. Both equally cool. It was quite an experience.

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Genuine phone pic. Note objects in foreground, forcing the phone to actually shoot the moon.

2:56 PM

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Your phone will never, ever get that right.

And, likely, neither will you.

Xander Henderson

@Robusto All the hearts and the Queen of Spades? Lucky...

Notice the nested islands of time zones there.

Both included an older woman. Each of whom gave me a ring which I still have. The Hopi one was silver and the Navajo one was turquoise.

@tchrist I'm glad I didn't have to deal with time zones (much) back when I was working.

@XanderHenderson That's more of a Pennsylvania thing.

@tchrist The Hopi mesas are surrounded by the Navajo Nation LAND. Notice that.

Xander Henderson

3:02 PM

@Robusto Interesting. I learned it from an Atlantan. I always assumed it was southern.

Atlanta has people from all over.

My brother-in-law was a CompSci professor at Georgia Tech, and he's from Chicago.

Xander Henderson

Every big city has people from all over. I was just explaining where my misconception came from.

I understood that.

No condescension intended. ;-)

Pittsburghers use this in many other ways besides just needs washed. They omit being/to be before a past participle all over the place, where the rest of us cannot do so.

Specifically, it's not just with need.

Western Pennsylvania English

Western Pennsylvania English, known more narrowly as Pittsburgh English or popularly as Pittsburghese, is a dialect of American English native primarily to the western half of Pennsylvania, centered on the city of Pittsburgh, but potentially appearing in some speakers as far north as Erie County, as far west as Youngstown, Ohio, and as far south as Clarksburg, West Virginia. Commonly associated with the working class of Pittsburgh, users of the dialect are colloquially known as "Yinzers". == Overview == Scots-Irish, Pennsylvania Dutch, Polish, Ukrainian and Croatian immigrants to the area...

This shows up seemingly daily in Slack at work. I should capture some of the non-needs examples.

3:19 PM

Wordle 1,015 4/6

⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
🟨⬛⬛⬛⬛
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2 hours later…

5:17 PM

Evermore conviewzhuns betwonxt the unwary and the unweary. Not to Menschen the clothes boaters.

@tchrist Closed as dupe. I'd +1 your fine answer but I apparently did that ten years ago already.

5:43 PM

@XanderHenderson Brazilian flag green. [haha]

@Robusto Worst score too while yesterday's was my best.

#WhenTaken #32 (30.03.2024)

I scored 492/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 2325 km - 🗓️ 11 yrs - ⚡ 120 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 18628 km - 🗓️ 21 yrs - ⚡ 51 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 9641 km - 🗓️ 0 yrs - ⚡ 101 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 12717 km - 🗓️ 11 yrs - ⚡ 82 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 1992 km - 🗓️ 6 yrs - ⚡ 138 / 200

https://whentaken.com

Wordle 1,015 5/6

⬛🟩⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟨🟨⬛⬛
⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛
🟨🟩⬛🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Daily Octordle #796
5️⃣🟥
🔟🟥
🕛8️⃣
7️⃣🕐
Score: 83

6:11 PM

@jlliagre This was just a guessing game. No actual clues.

@jlliagre Too much drinking last night? ;-)

@Robusto I don't remember...

^_^

@Robusto #4 had a clue but I didn't believe it.

#1 had "Boston" somewhere but that street didn't look like it ;-)

6:24 PM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive body detected (47): Is there a value-neutral word for Brandolini's law?‭ by Tangent‭ on english.SE

Is English just badly pronounced French?

7:09 PM

Munchies for the crunchies

7:39 PM

@jlliagre Yeah, I was on the other side of the world with that one. Geezis.

@jlliagre I like to think I'd recognize Boston, at least, since I lived and worked there for over a quarter century.

Xander Henderson

@Robusto Geographically, I way pretty close on that one. But off by 20 years. The Kodak sign really threw me.

8:00 PM

> Trump is one emperor you hope never shows up with no clothes on.

Jan 16 at 21:32, by Robusto

@jlliagre C'mon, English is really just country French.

8:35 PM

The End of Foreign-Language Education

8:59 PM

@Robusto On Star Trek no one but the linguistic knows any language other than their own, because of the Universal Translator.

And Picard, because Belgians are weird.

@Mitch I see many more misunderstandings between cultures in our future. I mean, even more than there are now, which is saying something.

9:29 PM

@Robusto Douglas Adams, in THHGTTG, uses the concept of the Babelfish (a fish you put in your ear that translates any language to your own) to:

1) prove the non existence of God

( first the existence of the Babelfish is so extraordinary only a god could have created it. Therefore a God exists, then proof denies faith (an axiom), and lastly, since we've proved God exists and proof denies faith, God cannot exist. QED)

2) but more relevantly, once the Babelfish was used by everybody, then everybody could understand exactly what people were saying in another language, and that's when the really bad intergalactic wars started.

Xander Henderson

@Mitch "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

As someone who is a polytheist, vanishment of one god wouldn't affect my faith that thoroughly.

"Got skeptical about Axiom of Choice? Go for Axiom of Determinacy!"

@Mitch Well, the point here is that language is an expression of a culture. It's not just a lot of words that match up in a 1:1 relationship to the words of a different culture.

> The truth is that there is no single right or correct way to transpose a sentence from French to Russian or any other language—it’s an art rather than a science. “Students will ask, ‘How do you say this in Spanish?’ and I’ll say, ‘You just don’t say it the same way in Spanish; the way you would approach it is different,’” Deborah Cohn ... told me.

9:49 PM

@Robusto oh. I thought the point was that instead of promoting peace, contrarily, understanding led to anger and war.

@Mitch I think we are speaking at cross purposes. And it's making me very cross.

@Robusto now that we understand each other, I'm angry too.

How dare you!

apoplexes

@DannyuNDos what math subject was your master's in?

Was it logic?

I learnt algebraic topology, but I ended up writing a dissertation about general (point-set) topology.

9:55 PM

You'll find no logic here.

@DannyuNDos Oh. My deepest sympathies.

What part of repeats in robot voice point-set topology?

Complete metric spaces.

Banach spaces and such?

I can't remember the containment relation.

Not specifically for vector spaces like that, but metric spaces that are Cauchy-complete in general.

Oh.

No judgement.

And as for my theology... Is it peculiar to believe in infinitely many gods?

10:00 PM

Can you be more specific as.to cardinality?

No cardinality; they form a proper class.

Nice. Very... theological

But yeah it would be considered very peculiar in the European or Middle Eastern cultures. They fall all over themselves proclaiming how great it is that they have only one god.

And go to war over which one it is.

And never realized it is the same single one.

I think it's still peculiar in non-western cultures. Japaneses got 8 million gods, and Hindi people got 0.3 billion.

@DannyuNDos oh. That's closer to infinity than just one.

But one could also say, with probably more justification, that a few billion is closer to 1 than infinity.

I have one negative god.

I owe y'all a god.

-1 isn't a cardinality tho

10:07 PM

My one negative god says it is, so...

It goes by a non standard set of set axioms.

One where sets can have negative cardinality.

And sets of set axioms can be counted.

With cardinality.

Anti-material sets. What the heck.

There are stronger words for it but yes.

Good luck finding what ∞ + (-∞) is.

Oh that's easy..you just add in a symbol for 'undefined'.

What about exp ∞, ln ∞, or sin ∞?

10:14 PM

First two are Infinity, the last one undefined.

I'm not sure about ln -infinity

Few days ago, I tried to represent ln ∞ as a series over ∞, and miserably failed.

I mean, exp and sin have Taylor series expansions that converges everywhere, but ln?

@DannyuNDos I just happened to see a Michael Penn YouTube about infinity and undefined today. Otherwise I wouldn't be so quick and articulate about it.

@DannyuNDos convergence schmonvergence. Just evaluate it symbolically.

@Mitch That would be ∞ + πi.

1 hour later…

11:19 PM

“I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” — Woody Allen.

11:52 PM

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These clouds were made with Filo dough and then laminated.

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Mar30

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…

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