English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2012-10-21 (page 1 of 2)

« first day (710 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (4212 days later) »

12:09 AM

Hi, does this sound right to you: I'm so susceptible to flu, I just got caught again (just not sure about the "got caught")

12:23 AM

@skullpatrol cool, my question was closed. Moderator said that I can ask it here.

-1

Q: The best book/books for self-education

My level is intermediate or upper-intermediate. I have speaking practice several times per week with native speaker(she is not teacher). I write short essays and my friends help me to check it. I read news/blogs in English almost freely and listen podcasts everyday. And of course I learn words, c...

2 hours later…

2:34 AM

0

Q: How can I affectionately name "Kindle"?

I want to translate my website about Kindle e-readers from Polish to English. The key of my "style" is special name of my Polish website, which use word Kundelek. Kundelek literally in Polish means "puppy". I don't know why but a lot of people in my country use this affectionately name. I am won...

Cute though we may be, we're not your naming monkeys ...

@Robusto but he is searching for a slang word!

@RegDwighт are you the only mod tonight? Generally he see waiwa966 during the night.

4 hours later…

user19161

6:57 AM

@Carlo_R. It is waiwai933, not 966.

user19161

7:30 AM

933 is a nice number. It is multiple of 3 and also a local radio channel.

user19161

11:30 AM

@matt Boo!!!

Matt Эллен

hi @JasperLoy

user19161

@MattЭллен How is your weekend? Of course, I am the same...

Matt Эллен

fine. I went to a hack day yesterday, but couldn't participate as my old netbook wouldn't get on the network. It was very interesting, none the less

12:10 PM

My new PC is teh awsum. Sunspider Javascript benchmarks are like half what they are on my old Mac.

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total:                 141.7ms +/- 2.1%
--------------------------------------------

My scores on the Mac range from 250 to 290 ms for the same suite of tests.

user19161

@Robusto Do they actually translate to anything tangible? Perhaps one would not feel any difference.

12:27 PM

Nortonn using a "fuck you" user id now?

0

Q: Follow Up Behind

Please teacher help me with this question: Book Shots rang out from every direction as the militia followed up behind him. How is "follow up" different from "follow"?

user19161

@tchrist Hmm, interesting. If Nortonn were a pretty girl, I don't mind...

@JasperLoy: What?

@tchrist That's strange!

And look at the other guy, he is trying to re-name Kindle, as if it's some sort of legal lawsuit.

@tchrist are you around, I have a question for you.

@Noah Somewhat.

some is here vs. some are here

It depends on whether some represents a mass noun or a count noun.

Some sugar is here vs some people are here.

12:35 PM

Omm, thanks. That's what I thought.

np

And we can say: some guy is here.

to mean anunknown person is here.

Sure.

That means some male person is here.

It probably shouldn’t be used for girls.

@tchrist Yeah, right.

Although "you guys" can be used to address an all-female set of people, at least informally.

My sister does this all the time.

But one of them stops being a guy. Can’t explain that.

Well, in terms of language. :)

12:37 PM

@tchrist Right, and that's what we do on day to day basis.

No sure why certain experssions are male dominant.

Omm, thanks. That's what I thought.

What if we say: some is here. @tchrist

without using one as in some one

If you are using "some" as a pronoun, then you must have a very clear antecedent.

It doesn’t sound quite right to me, but I’d have to understand what it is referring to.

Well, the question actually came from some is here vs. some are here.

Again, I would have to know what the some is referring to.

I was like, well, the is version is wrong. But then I kind of thought that I might be wrong.

Some is here cannot be used for a person.

It can only be some sort of mass noun reference.

12:42 PM

@tchrist omm, cool.

It only works when there is a very clear and close link to some antecedent.

Otherwise you need to qualify it.

Okay, like Don't you see the mess? Some is there and some is here

That does not sound right.

It’s messy here and it’s messy there.

so what would be a good example for some is?

Where did that hot oil splatter to? I need to clean it up. There’s some here behind the plate. Some has gotten on my fork. Some is too hard to reach.

You probably need "some of it" in most cases.

12:49 PM

So it's better to avoid some is?

Have you tried Google Books?

Yeah. Gives me pretty messy results.

> Some crystals are clustered. Most hornblende is fresh, but some is partly to completely altered to aggregates of granular magnetite. Some is resorbed or skeletal. Most of it is pleochroic in shades of green to brown, but some is reddish brown ...

> Some of the system can be considered major drainageways that carry large amounts of water, while some is relatively ... Some of the system is underground and out of sight, while some is on the surface, such as ditches, swales, and streams.

> The nomination in open meeting which has been advocated by some is here superseded by a plan possessing all the advantages,

> Some of the sexual art is creative, some is erotic, some reflects shifts in cultural boundaries. Some is titillating. ... Some is realism. Some is boring. Some is in bad taste. Taken together, a veritable smorgasbord of obsession for the addict exists.

@Noah False positive.

> But when there is a case when you know it but do not know what I have not brought forward, it is possible that of one term, some is known and some is not known.

12:52 PM

@tchrist Right.

> Some cough is fatal if untreated and some is chronic and some is temporary and some is seasonal. Some goes away on its own. Some is related to viral infection. What is cough? We have decided to define cough as a symptom of various ...

> The faces change, but the stories remain the same. Each of them comes at video game addiction and the digital world from a different angle. Some of what they offer is abstract, and some is quite practical. Some is from personal experience, ...

user19161

Cough is when one coughs. QED.

@tchrist thanks!

> Whereas the unstressed some only occurs with mass nouns (*sdme key), the stressed some is also used with singular count nouns: (26) (a) There's some man at the door to see you. (b) Some cat must have been digging in the garden.

Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Volume II: Descriptive Application - Page 110

@tchrist interesting. Thank you

1:13 PM

2

A: The use of e.g. at the end of a sentence

First: No. "E.G." is the abbreviated Latin phrase "exempli gratis," and it is used in place of "for example." "E.G." is used to introduce a set of examples, which mean it needs to be followed by the examples. It cannot be correctly used to mean "et cetera," or "etc." Here is a correct example ...

Ouch.

And that stood up for 13 months untouched.

cornbread ninja

1:26 PM

320

Q: Is the use of "utf8=✓" preferable to "utf8=true"?

I have recently seen a few URIs containing the query parameter "utf8=✓". My first impression (after thinking "mmm, looks cool") was that this could be used to detect a broken character encoding. So, is this a better way to resolve potential problems with character encoding, or is it just a deve...

validation http-request utf-8

What a hack.

Breaking the Internet, one day at a time.

user19161

@cornbreadninja Still getting used to seeing the new pic. =)

cornbread ninja

@JasperLoy it creeps me out! I might change it soon.

user19161

@cornbreadninja I think you look very beautiful. You should keep it.

cornbread ninja

@JasperLoy You are too kind.

user19161

1:34 PM

@cornbreadninja UTF=uncertain/true/false.

cornbread ninja

UTF=?

Somehow I always imagined an Aunt Jemima in stealth-garb wielding numchucks.

UTF=You’re Totally Fucked

cornbread ninja

@tchrist I can totally play that.

I can't believe how affordable this is.

sites.google.com/site/podupnorth

@cornbreadninja Yes, that looks quite reasonable for a week’s stay. The trick is picking a good week.

cornbread ninja

@tchrist It's almost to the UP, so not anywhere near winter.

user19161

1:38 PM

@cornbreadninja I can't believe Reg has not said "no flirting in this chat" yet!

cornbread ninja

@JasperLoy he may be watching telly.

user19161

@cornbreadninja Or teletubbies.

cornbread ninja

Yes, well, that's his prerogative.

It’s just above Rhinelander, between but not in national forests, and not too far below Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

Here.

-1

Q: Follow Up Behind

Please teacher help me with this question: Book Shots rang out from every direction as the militia followed up behind him. How is "follow up" different from "follow"?

Turned out to be Norty again.

1:42 PM

I thought so.

Hence my question earlier.

cornbread ninja

Why didn't that part get to be Wisconsin?

Which part?

You were right

The UP?

@JasperLoy Of course it does. I feel 110 to 150 improved. Duh.

cornbread ninja

1:44 PM

@tchrist yes

They traded it for part of Ohio.

@tchrist: As you mentioned, he did say f... u with a slight variation that sounded like a Chinese name.

The Toledo War (1835–1836), also known as the Michigan–Ohio War, was the almost entirely bloodless boundary dispute between the U.S. state of Ohio and the adjoining territory of Michigan. Originating from conflicting state and federal legislation passed between 1787 and 1805, the dispute resulted from poor understanding of geographical features of the Great Lakes at the time. Varying interpretations of the law caused the governments of Ohio and Michigan to both claim sovereignty over a region along the border, now known as the Toledo Strip. When Michigan sought statehood in the early ...

cornbread ninja

@tchrist Isn't it closer to a lake?

@tchrist Looks like a bad bargain. Wisconsin could have had all the rednecks in Michigan.

1:45 PM

@cornbreadninja That is just the address for Minoqua.

@Noah Vietnamese.

user image

> The Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Congress offered the region in red to the state of Michigan in exchange for the Toledo Strip, as a compromise.

They stole it from Wisconsin.

cornbread ninja

@Robusto except it was mineral-rich.

> The vast mineral riches of the land were unknown until the discovery of copper in the Keweenaw Peninsula and iron in the Western Upper Peninsula; this discovery led to a mining boom that lasted long into the 20th century.[54]

> Consequently, the only state that definitively lost was not even involved in the conflict. The mineral-rich land of the western Upper Peninsula would have most likely remained part of Wisconsin had Michigan not lost the Toledo Strip.

Beggars and thieves, all that lot.

Can someone remind me how to get Windows 7 to display file extensions, etc.? I have to search for this every time I get a new PC ...

1:50 PM

I dunno; ls always shows me the real filename.

cornbread ninja

LOL

So probably the fix is to install Cygwin.

Same on my Mac. ls -l

I like the extended attributes.

cornbread ninja

ls -af FTW

1:50 PM

I want to see filenames in explorer.

There is a preferences thing to hide extensions.

cornbread ninja

I wonder what happens on Isle Royale.

Starvation.

cornbread ninja

:<

I grew up pronouncing Isle Royale as though it were Isle royELL.

1:51 PM

I have ls -af aliased to laf

I alias ls to lf.

cornbread ninja

I have it aliased to ls.

I hate not seeing the type of the file.

i no rite

cornbread ninja

and ls -ls to ll

1:52 PM

I have ll aliased to 'ls -lh'

cornbread ninja

looks up *h*

I like the humanist perspective.

Before fonts got screwed up.

cornbread ninja

Hey.

Wait, for bash? My UNIX in a Nutshell is pre-bash

What does bash have to do with anything?

ls is a different program from bash.

Unless bash made it a builtin like tcsh did.

37 down, 3 to go. Need four more sentences, two capitalizations, and one possessive.

1:55 PM

Possessive should be easy to score.

Not when you've already turned the whole site upside down and applied it to the forehead of every single question, twice.

cornbread ninja

@tchrist I don't see -h under the entry for ls.

Seriously, fuck Microsoft. I'm trying to search their pathetic documentation for "windows 7" and "folder options" and I keep getting shunted to answers for Vista.

 -h      When used with the -l option, use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte,
         Terabyte and Petabyte in order to reduce the number of digits to three or less using
         base 2 for sizes.

Why do they call it Bing? "Because It's Not Good!"

cornbread ninja

1:56 PM

@Robusto show Details?

@Robusto Bing Is Not Google.

cornbread ninja

@Robusto dl.dropbox.com/u/8937679/show%20details.PNG

@RegDwighт Did you try the their/theirs and my/mine path?

Fcoz.

Ok, on to -orum/-arum then.

1:59 PM

@RegDwighт No shit.

Bastard Idiots Never Grasp the Internet.

There, I slapped it onto the singular-they question.

Found it. I'm amazed that Microsoft can find time to reorganize basic shit like the control panel every time they come out with a new version of Windows, but the Internet Properties in IE window has been the same little stupid unresizeable window it's been since IE 4.

There is some addon ui tool to twiddle all those for you.

Bugger Internet Newbie Geeklets

2:06 PM

I just spent a gruelling fumptimillion manhours unbuggering the biggest bit of royal clusterfuck code every conceived by an idiot summer intern. And it all came down to four pre-ultra-novice mistakes.

1. Not understanding that command lines have a finite size limit for wildcard expansion (the xargs things).

2. Hardcoding program paths like /usr/bin/ls (wrong) and /usr/local/bin/gzip (wrong again), and never checking that those actually exist.

3. Not checking the return values of things whose docs say they can fail (open, close, system, chdir, backticks).

4. Disabling/not-enabling warnings, causing failures from the first 3 to propagate undetected.

I hate these people so badly.

Two weeks ago my boss said he was going to rename me Mr Grumpy. Last week he said I was likely going to cut his throat before the next release.

My desk has a forehead-sized bloody broken spot on it.

@tchrist This is the worst offense, IMO. Other transgressions may be attributed to ignorance, but this is something a child should know not to do.

@Robusto Yes, literal paths have a code-smell to them.

Wow you still have a desk. Not enough headbanging. Bang harder.

The thing is, I know for certain that the moment I stepped out of college, I knew not to fuck up in each of those ways.

And they didn't.

Even I would know to be careful with those things.

2:12 PM

The other 3 leads on the project are old hands, and just shake their heads at how terrible the code is that got through without a proper code review.

Is it at least well commented?

It's no wonder a Google code search for the string "WTF" returns so many hits.

For example, one of the new guys was starting to explain rcs to me, and it turns out that I have been using rcs since before he was born.

@Cerberus NFW

Not for work?

No Fucking Way.

2:13 PM

Ah.

Sometimes you just want a quick solution that just works...but then you should know that you can't give it to other people.

If they had been contractors, I would have voted for their contracts not to have been renewed.

To err is human, but if you really want to fuck things up, hire an intern.

@tchrist In other words, GODDAMN I WOULD SO SACK THEM!!!

They do the same bloody stupid things in shell, perl, C, C++. It is a mentality flaw.

People usually only get sacked for accidentally exposing sensitive customer data.

But somebody got "made redundant" recently for reasons that were not entirely clear.

@Cerberus This is why my boss thinks to keep knives away from me.

The people who did this are five years, and twelve hours, away.

Which is the only thing that keeps them alive.

Right.

2:16 PM

Technically, it is eleven and a half hours.

India has a funny timezone.

How does it save the company money to have offshore Indian code monkeys crank out code that even a chimpanzee randomly beating away on a typewriter would do a better job at?

They live in a Pollyanniverse where everything always goes right.

I so want to pop their bubbles.

Journeyman Geek

lol

@tchrist: cause they want cheap, and nothing else

You get what you pay for.

The thing is, sloppy clumsy clueless programmers program bad code no matter what fucking programming language they use. It is stunningly terrible.

Journeyman Geek

lol

this is why I don't want to be a coder

tho, I've been learning python. I actually enjoy it

No, you don’t want to be a bad coder.

@JourneymanGeek Compared with what?

Journeyman Geek

C with openGL, java...

this is the first time I've tried to learn programming and enjoyed the process

C with opengl was a nightmare

I'm still a small desktop support guy who wants to be a sysadmin at heart tho

2:22 PM

Purgatory may seem a pleasant place to vacationing tourists come up from Hell, but no visitor come down from Heaven will ever view it as other than the penitential place that it is.

Journeyman Geek

well as I see it, its just another tool

(Purgatory, Hell, Heaven) = (Python, Java, Perl)

Journeyman Geek

I'm not a coder.

lol, perl looks intimidating to me

He who codes a coder is.

Journeyman Geek

There's different levels of coder-ness

2:24 PM

If your name isn’t Tim, than you need not fear Perl ever dating you.

Journeyman Geek

there's people like john carmac who do really clever things.

then there's the people who code utilities

then there's ... webdevs

well theres probably decent ones of the last

Merely "smart" programmers people do clever things.

Journeyman Geek

then there's folk like me who's learning python for coding little things no one will never see

But truly brilliant ones to simple things.

The world has too many would-be clever programmers.

Journeyman Geek

the world has too many programmers who arn't as good as they think they are ;p

2:26 PM

Serious Question: How many programmers of average skill does it take to equal one rock-star programmer?

Journeyman Geek

then again, I hang around SF

@tchrist: one

maybe half ;p

@tchrist None. You can't get there from here.

Rob has the right answer.

Something upper management will never understand.

That's like asking how many armadillos you have to have before they equal Gisele Bundchen.

Hullio.

2:27 PM

How many cats do you have to hitch to your sleigh to get it to the moon?

For English press nine.

Journeyman Geek

99999999999999999 NINENINENINTYNINE(((((((9!

Know what else management doesn't understand? That throwing bodies at a problem doesn't help. They think that if one woman can have a baby in nine months, nine women can have a baby in one month. They truly don't understand that extra people only add overhead unless the projects can be parsed into discrete tasks.

If you can hire nine homely women for the cost of one supermodel, your movie will still flop.

Journeyman Geek

lol

Actually, they don't teach that at management school

2:29 PM

@Robusto Pah, those women must not be working hard enough.

Journeyman Geek

Its my other major >_>

@Cerberus What do you expect from interns?

Journeyman Geek

they do seem to think outsourcing is the best thing since sliced bread tho

@Robusto Indeed.

@JourneymanGeek Depends on the kind of work, I guess.

It's funny how British colonialism came back to bite America in the behind again.

Journeyman Geek

lol

2:31 PM

Yeah, but they are finding out that it costs just as much to outsource jobs to India, say, given the loss of productivity due to poor communications. And it costs the same in real dollars, usually, since there are usually middlemen who soak up the excess money.

Journeyman Geek

isn't a huge fan of that

@Cerberus My boss is Canadian.

Journeyman Geek

@Robusto: and the fact that you get bottom of the barrel in many places

Because we never have foreign call centres.

@Cerberus Not to mention Dutch colonialism.

2:31 PM

@tchrist So...

Journeyman Geek

India is a lot more complicated tho

there's a lot of smart people

@Cerberus Well, in that case, it actually helped.

Journeyman Geek

and there's a lot of dumb people who think they are smart people

@Robusto We were traders more than settlers, so we didn't care as much about establishing a firm rule over our colonies, and it shows: nowhere do they still speak Dutch.

@JourneymanGeek This is the competency bug. It has some formal name.

The incompetent are also incompetent as self-assessment.

2:33 PM

@Cerberus Certainly not in Manhattan, esp. Harlem.

The competent realize their own limitations.

There is a name for this.

It was formally studied.

@tchrist Right, true. The American colonies were/are actually useful, because the original population came to be...few.

"One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision" — Bertrand Russell

Journeyman Geek

@tchrist: Dunning Kruger effect

@Robusto A trading post. Little attempt was made to expand our rule over adjacent territories?

2:34 PM

@Cerberus Few native speakers would number Canada amongst the American colonies.

@JourneymanGeek There you go. Thanks.

@tchrist Why?

It is/was a colony. It's in America.

@Cerberus You aren’t just trying to rile us up again, are you now?

The hemisphere/continent, not the country.

That is not how the word is used in English.

Sure it is.

2:35 PM

You’re miscalquing.

Not at all.

@Rob chime in.

You're modernising.

Britain had Asian, African, and American colonies.

Nope.

Nice try.

Try?

That's what I meant.

2:36 PM

That use is obsolete.

I just used it. There is no other convenient way to refer to British colonies in the Americas.

No native speaker would number Canada amongst the American colonies.

You just did.

Why not?

In English, "in the Americas" != "in America". I have written about this a million times.

Pah.

2:37 PM

It is a miscalquing.

Don’t do that.

You're just taking the prevalent sense and claiming that no other senses can be used.

Not if you want to be understood, no.

Particularly in English.

I expect some historical knowledge here.

In the Spanish of South America, it is different.

From people who can’t even check their system calls’ return values?

Stupid is as stupid does.

This discussion seems neither important nor fruitful.

2:40 PM

When translating Spanish to English, you must be sensitive to translate words that look like "en América" to "in the Americas" or "in the New World".

You must not mistranslate "en América" to "in America". It is one of the falsest of false friends.

It is a miscalqu-ulation.

As I was saying, the degree of British domination in India was just enough to leave its marks on their use of language, unlike most Dutch colonies, but not enough to truly anglicise or anglify society.

And now you're stuck with hard-to-understand call centres.

They don’t even understand each other.

Even so, Dutch call centres usually suck too.

I’ve watched it.

It is hilarious.

@Cerberus Surinam?

Call centres could theoretically be set up there...

But somehow it doesn't happen.

Perhaps people from India are just more industrious?

Surinam is also very small.

2:48 PM

That is probably it.

@Rob @Cerb @cornbreadninja @MattЭллен @Mitch If you’re feeling civically inclined today, there are a baker’s dozen of Nortonn_S questions teetering at the brink of oblivion on the delete queue, needing just one more delete vote to push them over the edge.

Journeyman Geek

@Cerberus: I'd guess one aspect is 'IT' is a respectable profession there

@JourneymanGeek Yeah, that's what I meant by industrious.

Journeyman Geek

BPOs are basically something that lets people have an 'IT' job with very little talent

BPO?

Journeyman Geek

business process outsourcing

2:54 PM

Ug.

So many abbreviations!

Journeyman Geek

The real IT folks can be really good at it thi

DGMS

STFU

@JourneymanGeek I'm sure.

But are they good at communicating?

Journeyman Geek

Some are

The corporate acronym list has hundreds of entries on it, not all unique.

Read: it is not in all cases a one-to-one mapping.

2:58 PM

Abbreviations are the curse of the modern age.

In chat, they do serve a purpose.

@tchrist Brought the hammer down on several.

So they are OK, if everyone knows what they mean.

In a normal written text, abbreviations are unneeded and bad style.

« first day (710 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (4212 days later) »

Transcript for

Oct '1221

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…

Not for the faint of heart or those easily triggered by Englis...

phrase-requests pronunciation single-word-requests synonyms

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile