Wowie, I got three downvotes yesterday on different questions. I don't really care, just curious why all of a sudden Perhaps there is a PSQ downvoter around?
@copper.hat: what a little annoying is that some users who made reputations answering trivial questions and whose answers were overhyped now care a lot about PSQs and whatnot.
i don't know yet. i didn't want to disturb her while recovering or spook her (the exam setup is much more formal than i the usa). waiting for her to reply to my whatsapp.
@leslietownes im a worrier by nature and this is my daughter :-)
i had a severe migraine when taking a cs prelim at berkeley and did dismally as a consequence. it never occurred to me that one could ask for consideration. certainly was not an option when i attended college in ireland.
folks were willing to write me a letter of elaboration for my record but i never pursued that, didn't matter since academia was not a likely destination for me
anyway, i am almost at the point where i will go a church and pray. that is pretty far out for me :-)
I used to be very self-deprecating in my humor, but I realized after a while that it was either indicative of, or contributing to, genuine self-deprecating attitudes.
It can be a hard mode to get out of, particularly if your material conditions aren't exactly conducive to feeling positively about oneself. Difficult to have the ol' Positive Mental Attitude(tm) if you're living check-to-check, et cetera, yadda yadda.
At least, that was a big part of my own difficulties.
Yeah, having things to do, especially from elsewhere (elsewhom?), can be a big help as well. Large part of my life consisted in sinking into bouts of "blegh" due to a lack of routine.
@copper.hat The idea of exercising regularly was some of the best advice I ever got. I've never been too concerned with my physique or anything, but just the sheer bodily feeling of productive exhaustion is really good for breaking out of slumps.
Those talks have also sort of moved my spiritual perspective from "atheist" to "atheist, but syncretically this time", which has been an interesting side effect.
i knew someone who insisted that any humor had something as a target. like ted, i mentioned puns. and absurdist jokes in general. she said, there, the joke is that you think one thing and are misled by it. the target is the person you tell it to. i said, maybe therapy is a good option.
Similarly, I suppose part of what's funny about shaggy dog stories that aren't anti-jokes is that you're wasting the time of the listener, but that's usually only a small part. Like, the one about the moth at the podiatrist's office is funny by itself if told well.
Important also, in some settings, is the context itself. Context can be a large determiner of the target of a joke---the old "contour integral of Eastern Europe" joke can either be at the expense of Polish people, or at the expense of the rest of the Central/Eastern European powers in the 19th and 20th centuries, depending on who's telling and who's laughing.
Not something that can be blindly manipulated, though. I think it's better to be careful than not to be, at least personally, when it comes to this kind of context dependence.
It was accidental, but makes one question much of what spills out of one's mouth
Decades ago my sister (primary school teacher) had two kids in here class called Phuc & Duc. In Ireland this was a bit of a challenge, but folks were generally understanding. Names sometimes do not cross cultures well.
it's like the where's grandad thing. once in 7th grade we saw some video, supposedly to teach tolerance, where a boy was relentlessly mocked for bringing odd foods to school, but later reconciled with his classmates. of course we took this as an instructional video and identified whoever brought the weirdest lunch to school and called them by the name of the kid in the video.
Probably wouldn't be as difficult for people in the Anglosphere outside Ireland without the legacy of colonialism on the island, and ensuing shifts in places like the US (the old Ellis Island effect).
@AkivaWeinberger you know how there are crazy or silly or insert bad adjective people in every country. They can virtually all speak fluently. I take this to mean anyone can learn a language given enough time
I knew an Irish family that had triplets and they came to work in the USA illegally (summer work sort of thing). Two of them got caught & banned, so the evolved a complicated scheme where they would come in one by one through Canada.
Different times. I am glad that the Irish terrorism thing is behind us (fingers crossed), make travel easier.
@copper.hat No, writing is just one of the prohibited things on Shabbos
@leslietownes lol
Electricity isn't really one of the (explicitly) prohibited things, oddly enough, because (of course) it wasn't around when they were writing the rules
about two years ago i mostly worked with an orthodox jew and a hyper-observant christian. one of them was silent on email on saturdays, the other on sundays. it was paradise for me.
business arrangements for muslims who are serious about it can be tricky. there are various prohibitions on lending money to collect interest, but you can structure around that and it is sometimes a bit of work to ensure that the tax consequences are the same.
you can look at rules as, what's the purpose of this, etc. and it gets complicated. or you can say, if --- said don't do X, so as long i don't do X, i'm OK as to that.
one time i was in an apartment that had a mezuzah on the door, and i phoned around until i found someone who could take it away. i couldn't throw it out. they were happy to have it back. i wondered about the person who was so observant they installed it and not so observant that they left it there.
one time i met a guy at a family reunion, he was this really caustic person, insulting everyone who wasn't there. found out he was my dad's cousin and somehow also an episcopal priest. (most of my family is catholic.) heaven help his flock, wherever they are.
Huh, just found a link on the wheelchair thing. This apparently doesn't work based on randomized delay) but on changing the level of voltage (which is apparently less problematic than creating a new voltage). So the wheels are never fully off (always trying to turn)
i thought for a minute about working in VC, one of my friends went into it. we had a lunch. he gave me hypotheticals and i said, i wouldn't invest in any of this, it's all horseshit. he said, maybe this isn't for you.
akiva that's interesting. i don't know where the subtlety would be, but obviously there is some. i was involved in a bankruptcy proceeding once that turned entirely on real estate and i knew enough to know i was a minor player and kept to the side.
There was a little area to the side with a bit of chest-high stone wall to prevent you from falling off the mountain, and the top of the wall was covered in scratch graffiti
Like, people had scratched in their names and years and such
one of my friends got in trouble once for taking a photo in which he used forced perspective to make it look like he was licking the face of a portrait of the country's beloved leader that was prominently displayed in the town square. somehow it came up in his phone when he was looking for a photo of something like an ID card for a functionary.
it's not that anyone cares, but nobody wants to be seen as not caring, which somehow makes it worse than if everyone cared. that is how he described his situation after the fact.
it's a still from a video. i was taking footage from the second floor while my daughter observed from the first. she announces "ooh, it's looking at me!"
