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00:04
@MattThrower It all depends on whether you can overtake Mith before verbose overtakes you :-)
00:33
@Randal'Thor My overtaking Mith was first mooted as a possibility some three years ago now. It hasn't happened.
Aside, I'm pretty glad someone finally upvoted this answer of mine. I was proud of it, it makes important points, and it languished unloved for years.
 
3 hours later…
03:54
0
Q: Euripides - mystai or evidence of higher-ranked status?

Arash HowaidaEuripedes has quite an extensive catalog on the so-called mystery cults. In the wiki, it does state the tragedian had some involvement in a mystery cult: He served for a short time as both dancer and torch-bearer at the rites of Apollo Zosterius From this we may glean he was at least a "mytsai"...

 
4 hours later…
08:12
0
Q: In Homer's Odyssey, how can the one-eyed Cyclops have multiple lids and brows?

Matt ThrowerWhen Odysseus meets the Cyclops, the text never explicitly states that he has only a single eye. However, the unfolding action in which Odysseus and his crew blind the Cyclops by pushing a stake into one eye implies that there is only one eye to blind. I was therefore surprised to find, in my tra...

@Bookworm um... I'd assume it's lids and brows in plural because there's an upper and lower lid on the eye, the upper closing from top down and the lower from bottom up, and eyelashes on both
 
1 hour later…
09:17
@Bookworm I see this has been deleted but it's a good question -- the original words in Od. 9.389 are βλέφαρ᾽ (eyelids/eyelashes) and ὀφρύας (eyebrows), but Homer always uses the former, and nearly always the latter, in the plural, suggesting that for him they were obligatory plurals, like "scissors" or "trousers" in English
 
3 hours later…
12:10
@verbose Ah, but weren't you inactive for like two and a half of those three years?
@GarethRees And I guess you can't vote to undelete it because this self-deletion is also a mod-deletion?
12:36
@Randal'Thor I'd leave it deleted for now anyway, the delete probably means that Matt wants to improve the question before undeleting.
 
4 hours later…
16:22
0
Q: Where does this German poem about entropy come from?

OverasycoSo I was searching for a German poem that deals with the subject of Entropy that I could use for a music composition. I was not able to find enough poems on goolge so I tried with chat-gpt. The bot outputed this poem entitled Entropie, saying that it was written by German poet Barbara Köhler (19...

16:48
@Bookworm should we even be allowing this? It's not like anyone of import has claimed the poem to exist...
17:09
So are all you England based folk going to the coronation. And/or reciting that pledge you’re invited to recite. Inquiring minds wanna know.
@bobble but how sure are we that anything exists
@bobble I'm of the opinion that we should disallow questions asking for the source of poems generated by large language models. These models are designed to generate arbitrary amounts of text that statistically resemble their training data. The "temperature" of the model is usually tuned to prevent it simply quoting from the training data, so there is every reason to think that the output of the models (including the confident citations) is novel.
@Randal'Thor only on here.
Perhaps you should ask a meta question so that we have something to refer to as policy. Many other Stack Exchange sites have banned questions and answers based on the output of language models (for example, Stack Overflow) for similar reasons
17:28
@Bookworm Any chance the effin' robot talked...I don't know...complete bullshit?
17:39
@verbose The surprise over the coronation oath demonstrates that nobody attends Church of England services any more. The coronation is a communion service, and the standard order of service has always included a promise to "faithfully serve, honour and humbly obey" the monarch
> The Past is such a curious Creature
To look her in the Face
A Transport may receipt us
Or a Disgrace —

Unarmed if any meet her
I charge him fly
Her faded Ammunition
Might yet reply.
Dickinson of the Day
18:35
@CowperKettle That use of "receipt" is odd to me--am I correct in guessing that it means, roughly, "give"?
@DLosc That's odd. I memorized this poem with reward in the place of receipt
Maybe there are two versions
@DLosc The required sense is "admit (a person or thing) to a state".
The OED has this as sense 4 of "receive", but I think this can be understood as part of the broader sense 1 of "receipt, v. To receive or harbour"
I think that by transport she means transported with joy (refers to this meaning)
This is an antonym of disgrace
Either a condition of being "transported with joy" from recalling the past, or a condition of feeling disgraced.
I first read it in 2012 and liked it.
Yes, that's right — Transport (personified) receipts (i.e. receives) us into a state (of transport = joy), and correspondingly for Disgrace
19:03
@CowperKettle As in the Fanny Crosby hymn "To God Be the Glory":
> But purer, and higher, and greater will be
Our wonder, our transport, when Jesus we see.
@GarethRees I had parsed it as "To look her in the face (subject) may receipt (verb) us (indirect object) a transport or a disgrace (direct object)"--is that different from what you're saying, or no?
19:26
@DLosc In my interpretation "us" is the direct object of "receipt": I interpret these lines as "(if we) look her in the face (then) a Transport may receipt (i.e. receive) us (into a state of transport), or a Disgrace (may receive us) (into a state of disgrace)".
Here "Transport" is a figure of personification, that is, it is imagined as a person who could receive us
 
3 hours later…
22:05
@GarethRees I guess it's a reminder that the UK and those commonwealth realms that accept the monarch as the head of state are constitutional theocracies. H'm too bad my father-in-law is dead. He was an Episcopal priest who moved to Canada, and he said he refused to intone the part about obeying the monarch when he was sworn in as a Canadian citizen, on the grounds that he was maintaining his US citizenship too, and to swear an oath to Elizabeth II would violate his American spirit.
But he conducted services in the Anglican church after his move ... so now I'm curious how he handled that bit about the monarch. I should ask my mother-in-law. She has been Canadian her entire life, and I'm sure she can both share what FIL was thinking, and has Thoughts™ of her own on the subject.
No pun intended on "subject"
I take that back, it's a great pun and I shall embrace it.
3
@verbose Not in a million years.
@verbose Another interesting case is the Sinn Fein MPs, who get voted in to represent Northern Ireland constituencies in the UK parliament, but refuse to take their seats in the latter because doing so would require taking an oath of loyalty to the monarch and they're devout republicans ("nationalists" in the NI parlance, i.e. basically Catholics).
Although there's only a few of them, their refusal to take their seats actually became important in the tightly balanced 2017-19 parliament (which someone should turn into a TV series, it was great entertainment while it lasted).
22:23
@Randal'Thor m yeah I remember that. It's weird that my UK sympathies are so republican when in the US, they're so ... not.
That word means very different things on different sides of the Atlantic :-)
that was kinda my point, Randolph 🙃
Sorry to ruin the joke.
I once surprised some Americans by declaring myself as a republican.
though it's odd that the Catholics are the anti monarchists now. I never thought the Catholics would be in bed with dear old Ollie Cromwell.
Ah, Cromwell. "No more kings! And yeah, my son Dickie gets to be lord protector of the realm after I'm dead."
@Randal'Thor haha yeah I can see how that would cause conster-Nation
Ireland has a different relation with Cromwell from Great Britain.
He's hated there for what he did in Ireland specifically, whereas English/Scottish/Welsh people's view of him is probably more correlated with their view of monarchy.
All right, time to catch this plane. Later.
22:32
@Randal'Thor what will you do with it once you've caught it?
I'm imagining a l'lle corkboard above your desk with pins stuck through airplanes (or aeroplanes)
From the point where I'm sitting, I need to join a line of people waiting for the plane, so clearly the next step is 3 dimensions.
22:47
0
Q: What is the name of a short story where a computer insists 2+2 is 5?

linter-purgatoryMany years ago in a US middle school, in an honors literature class we read a short story in English that has stuck with me since and I haven't been able to find it. Roughly: someone creates a computer (called an automaton or something? "as is tradition" the creator and someone he is showing it ...

23:18
@Bookworm Isn't that story called "Adventures in ChatGPT"?
@Randal'Thor well but you're doing all this at a certain time, so four dimensions surely?
23:33
@Randal'Thor which is about how long l'lle Chuckie was waiting to inherit the throne, I understand.

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