The Reading Room

Q: Looking for the author of a story I read in school

1:44 AM

Many years back, in school, I read a story about a tourist who goes to a new country and gets a tattoo from a renowned artist. When the artist dies, the two countries fight for the rights to the tattoo on the back and the tourist is detained. A diplomatic crisis ensues. Finally, a fanatic throws ...

5 hours later…

b_jonas

6:40 AM

@Randal'Thor Ok let's make this clear. B is not my family name or surname, and I don't recommend Jonas B, because "b_jonas" is pretty unique but "jonas_b" occurs in other contexts on the internet, and people still occasionally ask me if I'm named of the Jonas Brothers (which is apparently some musical band).

b_jonas

6:54 AM

@Tsundoku Look at scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/8075/4918

@Tsundoku As well as four different users named of the Dark Lord who answer Harry Potter questions on SE: scifi.stackexchange.com/users/64888/the-dark-lord scifi.stackexchange.com/users/1660/voldemort scifi.stackexchange.com/users/54107/lord-voldemort , and the tag scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/voldemort .

@Tsundoku Oh yeah, the best example is scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/thaddeus-howze because that's actually about the user, not their namesake, and they're the most prominent such writer user.

Mithical

7:20 AM

@Tsundoku I was working at a winery... but I fail to see how that was relevant to the discussion at the time.

@Randal'Thor That isn't common knowledge? That's surprising to me.

2 hours later…

Knight

9:27 AM

IP addresses can be extremely useful in catching sockpuppetry. If a clever puppeteer learns to use different IPs for different accounts, but at some point slipped up and had both on the same IP, should the system discard that information just because it was a while ago? — Rand al'Thor Aug 8 at 15:06

Is IP address test the only way of catching the sock-puppets?

If someone is banned, he/she can easily move to a new place or change his/her ISP and can easily create a new account? How big sites like Twitter or Facebook manage the banned users?

Rand al'Thor

@b_jonas It was just a joke. Sorry for any offence.

@Mithical Maybe in the US it is?

@Knight No, but we don't talk publicly about how sockpuppets are caught (because then sockpuppeteers could learn how to evade whatever tools and methods we use).

Knight

@Randal'Thor Ah! Yeah that's a good thing.

3 hours later…

Q: Torah is written without vowels?

12:29 PM

In the book "Moonwalking with einstein" by Joshua Foer In chapter 7 "The end of Remembering" he writes: One of the last places where this tradition of recitation still survives is in the reading of the Torah, an ancient handwritten scroll that can take upward of a year to inscribe. The Torah is ...

history-of-literature

Mithical

12:45 PM

@Bookworm don't have time to get too deep into this today, but threw a quick answer together

I thought you would take that question.

I would have referred to the category of writing systems known as abjads, but I don't know anything about the punctuation.

Mithical

> However, most modern abjads, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Pahlavi, are "impure" abjads – that is, they also contain symbols for some of the vowel phonemes, although the said non-diacritic vowel letters are also used to write certain consonants, particularly approximants that sound similar to long vowels.

Niqqud

In Hebrew orthography, niqqud or nikud (Hebrew: נִקּוּד‎, Modern: nikud, Tiberian: niqqud, "dotting, pointing" or Hebrew: נְקֻדּוֹת‎, Modern: nekuddot, Tiberian: nəquddôṯ, "dots") is a system of diacritical signs used to represent vowels or distinguish between alternative pronunciations of letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Several such diacritical systems were developed in the Early Middle Ages. The most widespread system, and the only one still used to a significant degree today, was created by the Masoretes of Tiberias in the second half of the first millennium AD in the Land of Israel (se...

Napoleon Wilson

1:06 PM

So like in Tengwar. ;-)

b_jonas

1:31 PM

@Randal'Thor No problem. It's not offensive, and I don't mind much if someone calls me Jonas B, I'm just saying it's not a too good idea and could cause confusion.

Q: If Sauron made The One ring, why couldn't he just make another, even better, instead of searching for the first?

2:08 PM

As all of us who have read Silmarillion know, Sauron wasn't the original "Lord of Darkness". In fact, he is a much lesser, and later, one. Melkor (AKA "Morgoth") was the original. Knowing this, it's almost difficult to take Sauron seriously, since he wasn't one of the original beings from the ver...

j-r-r-tolkien the-lord-of-the-rings the-silmarillion

3 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

4:54 PM

@North Easy tag for you: vietnamese-literature.

Q: What is the significance of 36 in the Vietnamese poem "Learning Late Letters"?

"Learning Late Letters", a poem originally written in Vietnamese by Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên, was one of the winners of the 2020 Words Without Borders Academy of Americans Poets Poems in Translation Contest. The narrator is remembering their dead father and his letters. The middle part of the text cons...

poetry symbolism cultural-context vietnamese-literature nguyen-hoang-quyen

5:18 PM

@Randal'Thor Done with the tags

2 hours later…

7:30 PM

@NorthLæraðr The emporer? Have you touched the vodka again? :-P

@Tsundoku Whoops

I'm not sure we should add guidance such as "Questions about his works should be tagged appropriately" to tag wiki excerpts. If you know how to do tag works appropriately, you don't need the guidance. If you don't know it, that guidance is rather unhelpful, I would say.

hm, that's true

I'm beginning to think I can no longer speel English words correctly.

@Tsundoku I am infecting you

7:35 PM

Where's that desinfectant? looks around

its nowear too b fownd