The Reading Room

12:18 AM

@PrinceNorthLæraðr hehe I'm further on Fanatic than you :D

Oh, you bastard :P

No need to rub it in ;-;

Today would've been the day I got my fanatic badge

Or actually, yesterday. Or the day before

Hey, the system was the one who suggested I track Fanatic. All I did was take a screenshot and draw a freehand circle and save the picture and post it in chat.

Riggghhht

(jerk) >:-/

don't you love your bobbling friend?

Hmph

Yes, I do love my bobbling friend

Even if she's sometimes a jerk >:-(

12:28 AM

she also marvels at your emoticon skills

she also types "marvels" and goes "dear goodness I want to watch SHIELD"

Of course, I would expect nothing less

Okay hold on, going to complain slightly about how my math teacher is doing stuff

Do I really need to write cos(x) as [(e^ix)+(e^-ix)]/2 and sin as [(e^ix)-(e^-ix)]/2?

And for that matter

Why do I need to use those values to prove that cos^2+sin^2=1???

you definitely don't need to "right" them

I'm pretty sure I proved this with deus a while back

yeah, I think your teacher is just checking for understanding

Q: Looking for a book. Action takes place in Spain

Well deus used e^0=e^(ia)*e(-ia) which was genius

(and then the sine/cosine formula stuff inside)

(rant endeth here)

Napoleon Wilson

12:43 AM

@Bookworm They're not actually banned at all. They're just pissed off at a stupid lawsuit and decided to play it out on the backs of the German readers.

7 hours later…

verbose

8:13 AM

@Mithical and all others who celebrate: Chag sameach! I saw my friend's Hanukkah 🕎 candle 🕯 this evening and it was LIT 🔥

I'll show myself out

6 hours later…

Mithical

2:00 PM

@verbose a double pun. Nice.

@PrinceNorthLæraðr it could be worse. It could be me teasing you about badges...

Bookworm

2:39 PM

So I'm looking for a name of a book I once read. Description: Action takes place in Spain. I'm 98% sure it was Andalusia. I'm not sure author was spanish, though. Narrator is a young woman that lives with her spouse in a small Spanish town. Her story begins when a large (at least 5 people, grand...

story-identification

Q: I'm looking for a book about children who go to live in the woods

2:51 PM

@verbose Hahaha

Bookworm

3:30 PM

I remember reading a beautifully illustrated book about some children going to live in the woods, when I was younger. The basic plot is that a few boys decide to go live in the woods, and it goes so well, that all of the other kids in the area join them. Kids end up living in tree-houses and unde...

story-identification

4:16 PM

Thanks for the bounty, Rand!

Also, my to-ask list is only 4 questions long, which is the shortest it's been in a while

hmm, I think I'll ask this question here as well:

in The Sphinx's Lair, Nov 30 at 18:50, by bobble

I have a list of books that my relatives are probably going to use to buy presents for me - any recommendations to put on it?

in The Sphinx's Lair, Nov 30 at 18:52, by bobble

hmm, probably would be a better question for the Lit chat (though they're probably recommend some fancy-smanchy literary theory book or the like)

b_jonas

4:33 PM

@PrinceNorthLæraðr Those or the power series. It's more or less the definition of sin and cos, you have to use them the first time you want to prove basic identifies about sin and cos. Later you can of course use the simpler identities to prove the more complicated ones.

4 hours later…

8:59 PM

@PrinceNorthLæraðr It was merely intended as an anecdote, really.

@bobble I can, but something tells me you're looking for something else ;-)

@bobble My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad was the subject of a topic challenge last year. We didn't get any questions about it but it was great fun to read.

I'll look that up, thanks!

Nalo Hopkinson's novel Midnight Robber (see the August 2018 topic challenge) was a great discovery for me.

But it's hard to make recommendations to people you don't really know. I'm basically giving you a blind date with a few books.

I've already read all the books recommended by people I know, that's the problem

As a student, I greatly enjoyed Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, but you may have read that already.

If you're interested in non-fiction about China: My Country and My People by Lin Yutang. After reading that, all those modern China-for-foreigners books will look shallow and poorly written.

9:17 PM

I have some secondhand memories of China (through a parent), but the only nonfiction I've read about it was so poorly written I stopped halfway through.

I believe Lin Yutang's name was suggested for the Nobel Prize in Literature, so no worries there :-)

Witi Ihimaera: The Whale Rider.

Unless you count the AP World History textbook, which thought that China was the only important power in East Asia and that everyone around could be described in terms of their relationships with China. (Until Japan's Meiji Restoration) Which... yeah, China's big, but there are other important world-history developments 'round there.

Q: Identifying the Name of a Short Story

Some cultures, e.g. some of the nomadic ones, didn't produce a lot of history writing of their own, so we know them more from the Chinese point of view than from their own. That creates a distorted view, obviously.

Non-fiction: Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram. About one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology.

1 hour later…

Bookworm

10:44 PM

I remember reading a short story about a married couple where a man was always obsessed with the news (I think it was on the radio) until his wife was so exasperated with him she nagged him and drove him away. Much later he was found living a solitary life (I think in the mountains) and now just ...

story-identification