The Sphinx's Lair - 2014-12-30

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10:50 AM

@Emrakul - How come you don't have a Strunk & White badge on Puzzling? You've edited more posts than I have, but I'm the only person to have the S&W badge. Seems a bit odd...

11:27 AM

0

Q: Please vote on whether to make [logic] a synonym of [logic-puzzle]

I'm not sure if a meta question is an appropriate way to advertise my suggested synonymisation, but there is a precedent. Surely it's obvious that the tags [logic] and [logic-puzzle] should be synonyms? They mean exactly the same in the context of this site. You can vote on it here.

discussion tag-synonyms

3 hours later…

1:59 PM

0

Q: How to make a new Tag?

How can I make a new Tag on Puzzling Beta ? I was doing some Knights and Knave Puzzles by Smullyan and was slightly disappointed that there was no tag to differentiate these puzzles from the others ... Some help would be appreciated ...

feature-request support

2:42 PM

0

Q: Can we do something about this?

The highest rated question on the site is an issue. How can we fight against lateral thinking puzzles when one of them is held up as an example? Here's the link While I agree that it's the best lateral thinking question I've ever seen, I don't think that means much. They're not really puzzles....

3 hours later…

user61230

5:36 PM

/shrug. I'm not that worried about it, honestly. I'm probably close, and something isn't being counted.

user61230

Probably edits on my own posts.

5:49 PM

But I've made plenty of edits on my own posts, and got the S&W only very soon after 80 edits. You're already on 97!

user61230

I'm not worried :] It'll award when it awards.

Silly thing to worry about ;-)

Does editing work differently when you're a mod?

user61230

Not really? I don't think being a moderator changes editing much, beyond giving full edit permissions everywhere.

user61230

And yeah, normally I'd look into it, but I'm a little much occupied, and badges are just not that high importance to me :P

occupied with Christmassy things?

I see you've managed to earn a fair few hats though

#3 on Puzzling for hats, last I checked

6:05 PM

@Emrakul I know some badges are impossible as a mod

that may be one of them

Interesting. Which ones?

I don't recall, but it is normally because they are badges that normally require other user support and we don't need other user support

but I don't remember which they are

"we don't need other user support" - makes you sound very brave and macho :-)

Mods = Lone Warriors

haha, I just mean that some of them are about consensus building, but since mod actions go immediately, we don't get credit for them. I think some of the review queue ones are ungettable, I'm not sure about editing related ones

heck, I'm not even 100% sure it is accurate, I just know I was told that by some other mods once

and it's a blurry memory at best

but you're eligible for all possible hats? :-p

6:09 PM

not sure

@randal'thor about the only difference is editing comments

I am so proud of "Amphibian surmounts physicist" :)

a high enough rep user can edit questions or answers without support from other users

0

Q: Small cryptic-ish crossword for 30 December 2014. Contains some neologisms, all of them to be found in the OED

Across 3. Amphibian surmounts physicist 4. Hilarious partner 5. Spurn a guilty plea outside Aquidneck Island 6. Performing a quick number in the head of an adult insect. 7. Sightless, tailless, expensive and suitable for general audiences 9. Blur's life, not your jumping around. 11. Denni...

crosswords cryptic-crosswords

@AJHenderson Can mods edit any user's comment?

@randal'thor yes, edit or delete

which can be dangerous as there is no revision history if we make an error

6:11 PM

@AE Nice! I know 10 down and of course 3 across :-)

@rand thanks! :)

@randal'thor and we have no 5 minute limit

normally you can only edit your own comments for 5 minutes

5 down and 8 down also ought to be pretty unchallenging. :)

mods can edit comments at any time

best freaking thing about being a mod

correcting those typos you find in your comments at 5 minutes and 3 seconds

@AJHenderson Indeed! I've seen whole swathes of comments deleted on meta just because the mods wanted to cover up what was really going on, notably on TMBMP

Can mods edit other people's chat posts as well? Nope of course not

If so, demonstrate :->

6:13 PM

err...

TMBMP?

Teenage mutant bitmap?

@AJHenderson "the mods' big meta post"

ah, I figured that was probably it but couldn't piece the words together

That's what they're all saying, at least

I think I came up with that acronym originally, and others have adopted it

I've also seen 'The Day' referred to :-p

I prefer postgate personally, but maybe I'm just old school

6:17 PM

3 December will never be the same again...

was it really less than a month ago... wow, buying a house has really screwed with my perception of time

@AJHenderson Sounds like someone's name. Oliver Postgate?

Buying a house over Christmas? Must've been stressful...

or perhaps having my wife go back to work leaving me with the baby at night

yeah, it would have been less stressful if it had happened when it was originally supposed to, but instead we closed on the 24th and did most of the moving on Saturday. Doing last minute movement stuff tonight before the walkthrough to be out of the apartment entirely tommorow morning

but then we'll be free and clear of the apartment for good and I can finally relax

ouch! busy life

have no internet at home yet though

which kind of sucks

and no mirrors in the bathrooms yet

so I haven't shaved in like a week

6:20 PM

a mirror isn't absolutely necessary to shave :-p

I prefer not bleeding out ;)

@AJHenderson How old's the baby?

oh yeah, that's the other thing mods can edit that normal users can't. If someone's username is in violation of TOS or something, they can alter that too. Basically, mods have the ability to alter anything that they might need to to remove content that violates the TOS

@AE 3 and a half months?

born Sep 10th

so whatever that makes it now

@AJHenderson Aw, little titch! Congratulations!

Sleeping starts to improve from now.

And improves more at the 6-month mark.

well, he's been pretty good at going back to sleep after feeding

6:24 PM

@AJHenderson yeah? excellent.

but getting up and prepping a bottle 2 times during the night can be rough on getting good deep sleep

@AJHenderson yeah, don't I know it.

@AE yeah, actually since birth he has liked his sleep pretty well. He doesn't like initially going to sleep, but once he is sleeping, he doesn't like waking up

Still, if the little one goes straight back to sleep after feeding then he/she is doing well.

which, I suppose isn't that different from me

he also doesn't like sitting still at all. So we are very eagerly looking forward to when he becomes self-mobile

6:26 PM

With our first daughter I got through most of Heroes staying up with her in the night. With subtitles, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to hear it over the crying. She took a lot of soothing.

@AJHenderson Not long now!

yeah, it's funny because he could stand assisted at under 2 months, but still can't figure out how to get up on 4s

and he's had pretty decent neck control even since birth

@AJHenderson ah yeah, the little-baby-standing thing. They all seem to do that.

And then it goes away again.

apparently it's normally around 2 to 4 months they are supposed to develop that, so he did it a week or two early, but then he seems to be having trouble figuring out how the knees work

:) :)

Maybe he'll be a bum-shuffler rather than a crawler

or do what I did, apparently I walked upright on my knees

he did manage to figure out he could tip over his car seat by arching his back though

so that became a new game

(not when it is in the car or he is strapped in mind you, but if he is just sitting there casually)

Undo the Snowman

6:53 PM

@AJHenderson Sounds like a flaw in the seat design :/

nah, if he is strapped in he is fine

he just figured out that he can slide down until he tips the center of gravity

when loose

Undo the Snowman

he's gonna grow up to be a pilot or something

@UndotheSnowman I see you're a Software Recommendations mod. We were talking about SR in here a while back; can I ask you a few things that might help us in our development of Puzzling?

Undo the Snowman

@randal'thor Go for it :)

Are a lot of the questions there the kind of thing that might be considered 'primarily opinion-based' on other SEs?

'recommendations' makes me think that

7:05 PM

They do have very, very strict quality requirements to combat that though. Right @Undo?

Undo the Snowman

@randal'thor Yeah, we're really an experiment to see if recommendation-type (opinion based) questions can possibly work on a site that is dedicated to it.

Interesting. So could questions of the type proposed here be considered on-topic at SR?

Undo the Snowman

@randal'thor reading it now, but immediate feedback is not for books. Books aren't software.

BTW that link you gave is a downvoted question closed as a duplicate. ???

Undo the Snowman

@randal'thor ... oops

That's what I get for trying to cut corners copying links :P

22

Q: What is required for an answer to be high quality?

This is the answer edition of What is required for a question to contain "enough information"? As a continuation of the above, the second key problem that I see Software Recommendations having, is people answering questions in a manner that is extremely low quality and not very useful for future...

discussion faq answers answer-quality

^ There it is

7:09 PM

OK, thanks :-)

@UndotheSnowman What's the important difference between books and software? Are SR questions more like 'how to do this?' rather than requests for repositories of knowledge?

Undo the Snowman

Just a minute, typing

Don't worry, I have some patience :-)

Undo the Snowman

Okay, thoughts on that: (1) I can't speak for your community, SR is special so don't use it as an argument for these questions to be on topic here. (2) Books are off topic on SR, (3) As for puzzling sites, probably not. There was a debate about websites vs. webapps, and we ultimately decided that we want webapp recommendations, not website recs. See meta.softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/a/219/46 for more info on that. (4) Games: Maybe, see (cont.)

25

A: Are video game related questions on topic?

As far as I know, there is no common definition of software by which video games would not be considered software. Wikipedia explicitly includes video games as a form of "application software". The term "entertainment software" is a common technical term for video games. It is true that games wou...

Games are tough to spec out fully, but some people manage to pull it off

By puzzling sites I'm thinking, "thirty sudoku puzzles every day" type sites

</done>

There's a lot of different puzzling sites on the internet. None I've seen seems as good as P.SE...

That meta question wasn't mine, and I'm not really interested in book-recommendation questions, but I'll convey your words to BmyGuest :-)

@UndotheSnowman " I can't speak for your community, SR is special" - It's been more or less agreed that Puzzling is also 'special', and we can break a few rules (within reason, of course). See the answer to TMBMP. But it'll be easier to convince sceptics if we already have a precedent like PPCG or SR to wave at them; hence my questions about how things work on SR.

Thanks for your help Undo! :-)

I can't think of anything else to ask ATM

Undo the Snowman

7:25 PM

No problem, but please remember that SR puts all its energy into pruning down bad recommendation questions and bad answers. It's tough to do that if it's not your #1 focus.

And please don't wave stuff at other people, that never goes over well.

@UndotheSnowman Yes, I've heard that the sites which by nature seem to be the most liberal actually have the toughest moderation.

I think it was SR that somebody said had the second toughest moderation of any SE after Skeptics.

Undo the Snowman

SO takes first place just because of volume, SR has low enough volume that it's fairly relaxing.

SO can seem quite ridiculous to people whose SE experience is mainly in betas like this one. People with 750k rep - WTF?!

Well OK, one person

and Jon Skeet is seen as some kind of god :-p

welcome back @AE

I'm looking at your crossword :-)

waves

8:06 PM

Hello? Is anybody on chat?

hi @JamesLynch

:-P

1

Q: Can we remove or combine puzzles covering multiple posts?

I find it really annoying and inconvenient that users post puzzles that are horrendously long and take up anywhere from 2-4 posts. I also find it to be a clutter. Can we do something about this please?

Woah. How did that get there?

Apparently it's called an RSS feed - anything that goes up in meta automatically appears here.

Also what does it mean for a puzzle to take up 2-4 posts?

Congrats on Babingtonites BTW @JamesLynch. What does it mean?

8:22 PM

Babingtonites is actually a type of material kind of like NaCL i think.

Ah yes, OK.

And there was a "SE murder" puzzle that covered 3 posts. It was kind of cool, but still overly complicated and long.

What do you mean by 'covered 3 posts'? Was that the one I wrote?

No. It was another. Hold on and I will add a link.

Oh yeah. It is The SErial Killer series.

9:38 PM

@JamesLynch I don't have any problem with multi-part puzzles (which the famous spaghetti thing wasn't; that was many different people being inspired to write distinct puzzles similar to each other), but let's see how people respond to your meta post.

10:12 PM

Sometimes I wish people weren't so much in favour of banning this or that type of question. What happened to 'live and let live'? There are types of puzzle I don't like, but I've no objection to other people posting and solving them. @AE - got a picture meme to go with your sprouts analogy? :-)

11:03 PM

@randal'thor photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6093/724/1600/…

See also:

6

Q: Origin of "one man's trash is another man's treasure"

This might be tough considering the gesture is iterated so many ways, but it's worth a shot. What is the origin of the expression one man's trash is another man's treasure?

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Dec '1430

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