The two comments under this question seem the epitome of chatty to me, but maybe the first one is saying something deep? Are they adding anything of value?
(I should add that the reason I bring it up in chat instead of flagging is I remember seeing other comments like these on other stacks, but was confused why they were there)
(comments of the second type)
(the first one there is just unintelligible to me)
Well, I simply flagged the second, it's the kind of useless comment that can go right away. But I wouldn't be surprised if it survives. Flagging and removing comments can be somewhat of a site-by-site lottery.
For the first one I'm probably just too dumb, too.
@bobble I flagged them both. The first is apparently the type of thing one does if someone says “Macbeth” in the theatre: debag the individual and tweak his genitals. (The language is pretty gender specific; not sure what they’d do if the person who said it was female)
@bobble The first comment was a quote from the TV series Blackadder the Third. It's something two superstitious actors say each time someone pronounces Macbeth.(CC @NapoleonWilson )
I have noticed a serious lack of British high culture in this chatroom :-P
Now if people had flagged that comment because it should have read "Hot potato, orchestra stalls, Puck will make amends.", that would be a different matter.
This context is from The children's bach by Helen Garner
They all walked out on the summer afternoon. The men took Arthur to bowl
and bat, deep in the park near the drinking fountain, but the women kept
going, with Billy between them, as far as the big cemetery and in through
the turnstile. Bill...
In this excellent answer on Literature Stack Exchange, a quote from Alexander Leggatt's 'William Shakespeare's Macbeth' states:
The sense that evil forces are at work in Macbeth may be a product of
the aftermath of the First World War, whose horrific death toll
produced a new interest in the spi...
I was listening a rap and I heard this sentence:
Each shiver will deliver us deliverance in time
Burn the innocents for penitence if we preempt the crime
What does that even mean? Deliverance in time? I thought deliver is to provide or hand over something, like food or cargo. And burning the in...
I just asked a new Fontane question (although I still have fewer than @bobble), which may, if some wordplay is lost in translation, be easy for a German speaker like @NapoleonWilson to answer.
In Chapter 3 of Theodor Fontane's novel Effi Briest, which I've started reading online, there seems to be some kind of foreshadowing when Effi's future husband Baron von Innstetten is talking with (or being talked at by) her father:
He turned his gaze again and again, as though spellbound, to th...
It seems to hinge entirely on the previous incident it refers to, so without having read the book it would be rather unanswerable and if anything I'd search for someone who read the book rather than someone who merely speaks the language it's been written in.
Here are the first eighteen lines of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer:
When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein (of the plants) in such liquid
By which power the flower is created;
When the West Wind als...
This class is, officially, a college class. As in I get a college transcript (doesn't appear on high school transcript) for it and it doesn't count towards my high school GPA.
I was ridiculously proud that I could do multi-digit multiplication and subtraction in my head. In elementary school. Once we were allowed to use calculators I lost that skill
@bobble At least Euler had a lot of years to do it in. The even more incredible people are those who made massive contributions to their fields and still died young.
@bobble I was deliberately being ambiguous, to not give too big a hint already.
@PrinceNorthLæraðr You don't need to use any advanced knowledge, but the method is interesting, maybe a different way of thinking from what you're used to in maths proofs.
You have x (our irrational number) raise to y (irrational) equals rational number z. If you Take the irrational root of rational number z, you would get irrational number x?
I like how the tagging system here makes more sense than Puzzling's. I also like going to old questions and retagging them. And writing tag excerpts. Is something wrong with me?
EITHER (sqrt2)^(sqrt2) is rational, then the problem is solved with this number, OR it's irrational, then the problem is solved by (that irrational number)^(sqrt2) = 2.
Assume sqrt(2) is rational, say p/q where p,q are positive integers (natural numbers). Then 2 = p^2 / q^2, so p^2 = 2q^2. This is an equation between natural numbers, so both sides must have the same prime factorisation. But the left hand side has an even number of each prime factor (it's a square), in particular an even power of 2 in the prime factorisation, while the right hand side has an odd power of 2 in the prime factorisation. Contradiction!
The same method, btw, works to show that the square root of any non-square natural number must be irrational.
Well, the FTA says that the final factorisation into primes that you end up with is a unique determination of the number: every number has exactly one prime factorisation.
@Randal'Thor The way I learned it was "every polynomial has the same number of roots the power is raised to - except the roots might be imaginary and comes in conjugate pairs"
Better to know that complex numbers exist without learning much about them than to learn "negative numbers don't have square roots" and then later "actually they do but we didn't tell you about them before".
I've seen it a few times before, someone casting hundreds of votes, getting Electorate badges all over the network, and then it turned out to be all scripted and not genuine votes at all.
@Sid Had I realised which question you were thinking about self-answering, I would've mentioned that self-answers to identification questions are always welcome. For most questions a self-answer could still be a poor answer like any other, but for ID questions a self-answer is self-confirming as the correct answer, and can be improved by others if necessary as to detail.
@Sciborg Look, I can try this on bobble, and she'll fall all over for me. By that, I mean she'll run away from me as fast as she could that she might trip
I can understand why Virgil would like to use standard devices like chiasmus and synchysis to create poetic effect in the Aened. But sometimes the word order is scrambled up so much, I can't work out what poetic effect would be achieved with this?
I understand that Latin has a much freer word ord...
I got off practically unscathed in the Great Rep Loss caused by the user's being removed; just 10 rep. I guess they were upvoting the more sci-fi or fantasy type stuff? Since the most affected people appear to be the ones who had considerable rep based on posts about those.
It feels like cheating to be this close to EJoshuaS. That Randolph should have lost so much rep would be terrible too, except he can afford it.
@Randal'Thor that still seems a bit optimistic. He posts on topics that get a lot of hits, like Ayn Rand and Tolkien. His audience is way wider than mine. Like, who cares about Georgian Poetry.
@Tsundoku Is that a rule? That you have to contribute in ways other than voting?
@verbose I lost 380 rep, and I have written next to nothing about sci-fi or fantasy.
@verbose It's not a written rule that I know of. But it was a huge amount of votes in a short span of time. And also across sites in at least five different languages, including Russian SO, Spanish SO, Portuguese SO, Japanese SO and other language-specific sites. Almost as if they voted on things they didn't even read.
As a consequence of the Great Rep Loss, the number of users with 200+ reps went down from 441 to 435. There was no change in the number of 2000+ rep users or 3000+ rep users.
Oh, and we have been in public beta for exactly 1500 days now.
A draft of a tag wiki for [dragonriders-of-pern]. Not sure what else to add that would be important, and trying to avoid quoting large amounts of wikipedia/fandom stuff
(for stupid reasons, I can't paste large text thingies into the chatbox, and I prefer to not have the message split up. So picture of text. Sorry.)