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Eddie Kal

00:08

@AIQ Congratulations!! A good start!

At a university or in the industry?

AIQ

@EddieKal Thank you! Yes, it's quite a relief ...

@EddieKal At the university ...

Eddie Kal

That's great!

AIQ

This gives me some time at least to look for something while having money to afford rent and food

Eddie Kal

When do you start?

AIQ

Already started ... :D

Eddie Kal

00:12

That's awesome. Guess it must mean you still have time to hang out here

AIQ

Of course, ... tabs are always open on my browser ...

Featured Questions

Q: Whichever or which?

There is something that has been bothering me: the nuance between "Whichever and Which" For instance: Choose which/ever time that suits you best to talk to me Take which/ever of these chocolates you would like. Strike out which/ever option is not good for you. What's the differe...

10 hours later…

Anonymous

10:19

@AIQ Glad to hear it!

Anonymous

10:32

@By137 See The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum 2002), page 95 under section (d).

CowperKettle

@snailplane Glad to see you!

Anonymous

Hello!

CowperKettle

I hope all is well in California!

Anonymous

What does your new picture say?

CowperKettle

@snailplane Long live Belarus! )))

It's about the ongoing protest in Belarus)

Anonymous

10:33

Ah, I see.

CowperKettle

2020 Belarusian protests

The 2020 Belarusian protests are a series of ongoing political demonstrations and protests against the Belarusian government and President Alexander Lukashenko. The demonstrations, which are part of the Belarusian democracy movement, began in the lead-up to and during the 2020 presidential election, in which Lukashenko sought a sixth term in office. In response, a number of relatively small pro-Lukashenko demonstrations were held.Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, an opposition candidate in the election who claims she received 60–70% of the votes, announced the creation of the Coordination Council, with...

Anonymous

Things are okay here, though with the fires the air is once again unbreathable.

CowperKettle

There are some fires in Russia too, but far away from me

We are having the last warm days before the mud and rain.

Where warm means +15°C

Haha

Anonymous

We've had some weird times.

Anonymous

Back in August, we had a record heatwave, and during that heatwave the remnants of a hurricane brought dry lightning storms.

Anonymous

10:43

The lightning struck over ten thousand times, but we hardly saw any rain.

Anonymous

I woke up in the middle of the night to those storms. The gusts reached 120 kph, and they hit our house loud.

Anonymous

But then, the wind abruptly stopped, and it was eerily calm.

Anonymous

Then the air smelled of rain, then of smoke. A fire started not far from here, but a small amount of rain helped keep it from spreading.

Anonymous

I didn't go back to sleep that night. The series of lightning strikes, the rolling thunder, and the sense of dread kept me up.

Anonymous

The next day, things seemed mostly fine, but what I didn't realize is that the lightning had started a large number of fires, and as those progressed in the next few days the air began to smell with smoke. I started checking the fire trackers online, and saw the fires increasing in acreage rapidly, until before long we had the largest fires in state history.

Anonymous

10:48

Those fires are still going, but most of the major fires around here are almost entirely contained. There are some new fires still going, though.

Anonymous

What was really weird was about four weeks into the fires, when the sky turned orange.

CowperKettle

I saw some photos online!

Anonymous

Yeah, it turned red further north, but it was orange here.

Anonymous

A blanket of smoke covered the entire state of California. More than the entire state.

Anonymous

Overall, I've been doing fine, although we've had to change the air filters regularly. I've been able to stay indoors where the air isn't as bad.

CowperKettle

10:51

I thought that California did not have much wild forests, because in the West people usually use up every inch of ground. ))

Anonymous

But the house isn't hermetically sealed, so even with air filters, sometimes it's smelled like an unpleasant barbeque indoors.

Anonymous

@CowperKettle Naw, we have lots of space.

CowperKettle

We have some peat fires not and then. At this times, the Yekaterinburg smells like my hometown of Noyabrsk, in Siberia. Back in Siberia, there were a lot of peat bogs and also fires.

It's a somewhat pleasant smell.

Anonymous

There were three very large fires near me, more or less surrounding me. The one to the east, which was the closest, burned an almost entirely unpopulated area.

CowperKettle

I read about Californian squirrels that sometimes carry the bubonic plague.

Anonymous

10:54

It's weird, because usually negligence by PG&E is responsible for burning down California. This year it was lightning.

Anonymous

There was a "gender reveal party" (new term for me!) that made it into the news because it started a significant fire as well, but that accounted for less than 1% of the acreage burned over the past few weeks. I find it puzzling that so many people seem to believe that party is responsible for all or most of the California fires.

Anonymous

I suppose that simple narrative is less disquieting.

CowperKettle

I saw a gender reveal party video recently. )) On YouTube. A couple spent thousands of dollars to make a party on a skyscraper.

Anonymous

@CowperKettle Well, it is 2020.

CowperKettle

I was listening to a book about all kinds of epidemics, and there was a chapter on California and its squirrels. ))

There was a chapter on AIDS, very interesting, an on Legionaire's disease. And on parrot fever.

Okay! I'd better go working! Need to translate two documents into English by 19:00 ))

I hope to see you here sometimes!

vanishes

2 hours later…

M.A.R.

12:32

@snailplane aw, that sucks

CowperKettle

12:58

Scanning the medical news, I notice that a lot of genetic tests are proposed for this or that. It will be a nightmare for the clinicians when these tests are all adopted. It will be impossible to remember all the specifics.

2 hours later…