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Jasper
Jasper
01:03
@ColleenV I don't get the joke. Why metric?
ColleenV
ColleenV
01:42
@Jasper Because the US has a terrible bastardized system that’s partially transitioned but is never going to be fully metric en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States
 
2 hours later…
Anonymous
03:26
I use metric. Mostly. I still need to use miles per hour when I'm driving, though.
Anonymous
Also, I end up having to convert to Fahrenheit when I'm talking to people a lot.
Jasper
Jasper
03:45
@snailboat I thought the whole US uses Fahrenheit!
I remember learning how to convert between Celsius, Fahrenheit, and Kelvin in elementary school. Note that KFC = Kentucky Fried Chicken and CKF = Calvin Klein Fragrance.
Anonymous
04:03
@Jasper Oh, we do. I'm just being contrarian.
Anonymous
A couple decades back, I tried to teach myself to use Celsius. Like, it's easy to convert, but you don't really have an intuitive sense of what a temperature means until you've used it for a while without converting.
Anonymous
My original plan was just to be able to use both intuitively without having to convert either way in my head. I ended up just staying with Celsius because I liked it.
Anonymous
But I really just want to be able to communicate with people easily in an international setting. Part of that is using metric.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
04:19
Word of the morn: cathartic abuse
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
04:33
@snailboat On behalf of all metric-users, spasibo. You're helping us communists take you over.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
05:22
Word of the day: ARHGAP11B (human-specific gene; causes neocortex folding in mice)
Jasper
Jasper
@snailboat I have no intuition of Fahrenheit. In fact, I have never used it in real life.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
05:59
@Jasper - how come your registration on the site dates back only 10 days?
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
06:14
23
Q: Explain why "Who is she playing the piano?" is incorrect

HojoA teacher asked me this question and I am having a hard time finding a simple way to explain it for her to share with her students. I`m looking for the easiest way to explain it to her because she teaches Junior High School English in Japan. The students were given a picture prompt and expected...

sentence-structure pronouns
In Shakespeare's times, she could be used as a noun meaning woman
> As any she belied with false compare.
But could it be preceded by the?
> Who is the she playing the piano? (--would this be okay circa 1600 AD?)
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
06:49
-7
Q: Did dinosaurs exist?

BelieverI find it hard to believe that dinosaurs ever existed. They were never mentioned and totally skipped in the holy books (Old Testament, New Testament, Qur'an) although these books do contain stories as old as it gets (to Adam and Eve, Noah, The Great Flood, and Ibrahim). How can we know dinosaurs ...

fossil-record paleontology
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
07:21
@CowperKettle Skeptics is a fun HNQ site but frequenting it empties your soul thanks to the morons
Jasper
Jasper
07:57
@CowperKettle Oh, because I delete my accounts now and then. Currently I have only one SE account, which is this relatively new ELL account. And I get the 100 bonus because I got more than 200 non-bonus points on this ELL site using this email address before.
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
08:16
@Jasper All I know about Fahrenheit is 100 degrees Fahrenheit isn't as serious as it sounds
SmokeDetector
SmokeDetector
09:03
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword with email in answer (86): Is gerund after "lead + object pronoun + to" possible by a deleted user on ell.SE
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
@SmokeDetector Email?
@SmokeDetector Why
This is about the 4th question you've posted on a section within this passage essentially asking for it to be explained/paraphrased to you. Why not combine these into one multipart question? — rpeinhardt Jan 2 at 4:15
Does this guy listen? Ugh
As if the questions aren't annoying enough
Jasper
Jasper
09:28
@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ I do know how to convert between C and F and K though.
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
09:54
@Jasper 'course but it's not the same as "getting" the units though, is it? When I'm told "40 deg C" I immediately know what to think of and I kinda feel it, but 104 deg F is Greek to me
Phrase of the day: Just-so story
I'm thinking of writing a meta FAQ
Sounds like it'd be some hassle so I'll do it as a separate post, not in ELL guide
P.S. can't spend too much time on it so ETA a week maybe
Jasper
Jasper
10:41
@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ Greek is not as hard as Japanese. You should say 'is Japanese to me' instead.
 
1 hour later…
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
11:41
> On Bullshit (2005), by philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, is an essay that presents a theory of bullshit that defines the concept and analyzes the applications of bullshit in the context of communication.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
12:02
Word of the eve: candy stripers (hospital volunteers)
Anonymous
12:28
That term is somewhat outdated now – the uniforms that resembled candy canes haven’t been in common use for quite a while.
userr2684291
userr2684291
13:19
@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ Well I disagree with the comment underneath that says you shouldn't "flood" the queue with the same kind of question. Or about the same paragraph (but not the same phrase). Ask whatever you want. Sometimes I have 3 questions for a simple sentence. If the community thinks you're not investing enough effort into researching the questions beforehand, however, the appropriate close reason exists.
@Jasper If the entire US suddenly switched from pounds to kilograms, there would be mass confusion.
4
Lol.
Anonymous
The most questions you can ask in a given fine period is, generally speaking, limited by how many good questions you can ask in that time period.
Anonymous
Darn, my phone really likes fine period. I caught it once, but not the other time.
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
@userr2684291 Hehe for some reason I laughed™
Something between the International Internet Exhale and giggling
userr2684291
userr2684291
Haha.
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
@userr2684291 Well I think I already exhausted five reviews disagreeing with them that they're duplicates
About the recurrence, well, if you do ask five questions about a single paragraph in the span of an hour there's very little chance that they're good. Maybe 1 or 2 out of 5
So you're right, and that commenter (Lou A? Can't be bothered to check)
yesterday, by M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
FWIW, I'd like to see five thought-provoking questions about only one paragraph than five "what is the meaning of this sentence and everything around it" questions.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
13:33
@userr2684291 "Mass confusion", good pun
userr2684291
userr2684291
Thanks. I wish I could take credit for it. I just remembered it the moment I saw the metric thing, lol.
I starred snail's message but it's not showing as a starred message for some reason, while when I star other messages, they show.
I managed to finish another team project in just 3 days, so I'm happy.
I came to the presentation, and there were teams of 4, 5, or 3, and I noticed the more people there were in a team, the less they'd done, lol.
Anonymous
Someone should do a group project on the social psychology of group projects.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
Word of the eve: xanthochromia (yellowish appearance of cerebrospinal fluid that occurs several hours after bleeding into the subarachnoid space)
Anonymous
Also the color people turn after reading too much Piers Anthony.
userr2684291
userr2684291
You're on a roll.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
13:48
I've never read him
> He is most famous for his long-running novel series set in the fictional realm of Xanth.
What is HNQ
userr2684291
userr2684291
It's a TLA.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
"Hit it 'N Quit it"
HNQ is a TLA, but chaps are not duds
userr2684291
userr2684291
Oh, I can see the starred thing now.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
@M.A.R.ಠ_ಠ "Not High Quality"?
Nefarious Highlander Quidditch?
userr2684291
userr2684291
High (up), Not Quality would work.
Anonymous
14:03
Hmm. Not quite.
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
14:31
HNQ not NHQ
Thermal Network Questions.
userr2684291
userr2684291
There are some interesting answers here: ell.stackexchange.com/questions/192194/….
Oh.
Cowper linked to that, yes.
But yeah, take a look at it. The accepted answer seems "out-and-out wrong", as ruakh puts it.
And again we're helpless. God damn it.
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
HNQ syndrome no doubt
Look at all the "I came from an irrelevant site but I'm suddenly an expert and this is the only right answer" comments.
userr2684291
userr2684291
That's your average Lightness, minus the obligatory BrE ≫ AmE, haha.
Jasper
Jasper
14:53
@CowperKettle OMG, initially I thought you wrote candy strippers, LOL.
@userr2684291 OMG, I only realised the pun after I saw it got 2 stars.
 
1 hour later…
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
16:16
45 minutes from now, AMD will present its 7nm CPUs for workstations PCs
non-laptops
I'll probably upgrade my PC to such a CPU in the summer
Anonymous
16:54
Yep, the accepted answer is simply wrong.
Anonymous
I like that question, though. It’s a great opportunity to talk about how we end up with ungrammatical structures in our target language when we try to use words the same way we do in our native languages.
2
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
17:33
It is wrong?
Why so many upvotes then?
> Of course, it is an awkward and formal phrasing that a native English speaker probably wouldn't use. They would more likely say "the girl playing the piano". But that doesn't make it wrong.
I thought that a wrong answer would be heavily downvoted
 
1 hour later…
userr2684291
userr2684291
18:44
Yeah, some answers there are nice. HNQ is a double-edged sword.
@CowperKettle Awkward and formal is a weird way to spell flat out wrong.
So it's a spelling issue, really.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
Ah. Hot Network Questions.
Good night.
Beautiful word of the midnight: subniveal fauna (includes small mammals such as mice, voles, shrews, and lemmings that must rely on winter snow cover for survival)
I snapped a picture of a cute subniveal mouse the other day in the park.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
19:13
Royal Game of Ur
The Royal Game of Ur, also known as the Game of Twenty Squares or simply the Game of Ur, is a two-player strategy race board game that was first played in ancient Mesopotamia during the early third millennium BC. The game was popular across the Middle East among people of all social strata and boards for playing it have been found at locations as far away from Mesopotamia as Crete and Sri Lanka. At the height of its popularity, the game acquired spiritual significance, and events in the game were believed to reflect a player's future and convey messages from deities or other supernatural beings...
Amazing. It's almost 5000 years old.
Anonymous
@CowperKettle I have no idea. I can only explain my own votes, not other people's.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
user image
Document containing signature of queen Cleopatra
Anonymous
I do think there is a bit of a psychological element in piling on upvotes or downvotes. I think a lot of us feel very ready to downvote things that have been downvoted a lot, or to upvote things that have been upvoted a lot.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
> What has excited interest is the subscript in a different hand: γινέσθωι ("make it happen"). There is little doubt that this is the writing of the queen herself, as there was a tradition in Ptolemaic Egypt of countersigning by the monarch, in part to avoid forgery of official documents.
Anonymous
Even before we read it, we see "Oh gosh, this answer's greyed out and at -7" and it colors how we perceive what we read.
CowperKettle
CowperKettle
19:23
nods
Don't be a desultory moggy, and read before upvoting.
Anonymous
I mean, I think that sort of bias affects me. I have to consciously act against that sort of impulse.
userr2684291
userr2684291
agrees because snailboat wrote it
2
Anonymous
Yay!
Anonymous
I think humans really like heuristics. We like stuff that leads to quick and easy decisions, even if they're wrong some of the time, because it saves us lots of time and mental effort.
Anonymous
And, without really thinking about it, we come up with and apply heuristics like that all the time, for better or for worse.
userr2684291
userr2684291
19:32
Yep. Heuristics, or patterns, or categories. We like to generalize because storing all the instances of some behavior and always consciously making a decision based on them is difficult and annoying. [citation needed]
ColleenV
ColleenV
19:54
@userr2684291 how many of us actually have the ability to recall all instances when we might need to make a decision? Not sure you need a citation...
 
1 hour later…
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
M.A.R. ಠ_ಠ
21:13
I don't wanna be rude but come on, 4.1k on SO and posts on meta?
Then again, there was this 60k user who didn't know what the shiny icons with numbers besides the rep points meant
@userr2684291 20 bucks says your gravatar didn't change on purpose
I like the new one though
Bookish feeling to it
@userr2684291 Spelling is easy fix, go for it
I might or might not help you in the edit frontlines, however
@snailboat Oh that cook vs. chef thing
Speaking of which, I never got to finish that WaitButWhy article
@ColleenV Me me me
Right now with the brain boost I've got if you push me hard enough I might solve world hunger. And government shutdown
Sooo . . . I might be missing something obvious but how did the CV queue shrink from 30-something items to 8 this morning? Does Varun have binding votes or did they age away?
Not that I'm complaining. I have better (read worse) things to complain about
Like how antacids taste. I need to take some after taking corticosteroids or whatever they're called over there (who knew medical science differs from region to region) and they have the potential to screw stomach
And Gosh, they always feel like they're made by the Russian witch in Brave.

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