The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Oh so Lit still does story-ID?

7:27 AM

@Jenayah Indeed.

Q: Short story where a scientist discovers all the secrets of the universe as he is dying

ok!

Zaphod

8:11 AM

12

I read this story around 3 years ago, but it might have been written much earlier. The premise of the story is this: A scientist has spent his whole life researching some aspect of the universe but is never able to find what he wants to. But when he's dying, his soul (?) discovers all the secret...

8:30 AM

Imgur back up properly yet?

Damn @Jenayah, scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/192764/… was the one story-id question I could answer! xD

Nice FGITW race there though haha

Hmm... what should I do with my redundant answer then?

Leave it

You were 20 seconds apart, fine to leave it up

24 seconds to be precise

@lephe ahah, welcome to a trope of SE: the fastest gun in the west :p

I upvoted anyways

8:35 AM

Thanks!

I thought it might happen, so I did as fast as I could, but still not fast enough. ;D

Q: Story about a girl whose thoughts magically happen

^^

For the record, that happened to me when I first signed up here ahah

(yes, I repeat that story a lot)

I used to lurk, and only signed up when I knew the answer for a story-id

...and the guy self-answered 5 minutes before I did :(

7

I just started to search for a series of books I read about 10 years ago. I read it in French, but don't know if it was from a French author. It tells the story of a girl (and probably her friend, not sure if it's this story or another one) who can magically make things become real just by think...

story-identification books

La quête d'Ewilan, which you might know if you can read French... Definitely my top 1 fantasy book series ;D

I think I read and liked the first trilogy, but gave up on the later tomes (Les Mondes d'Ewilan) as I found them less interesting.

Granted, Les Mondes d'Ewilan is a bit less entertaining

Have you read Ellana?

Those are dope

No, I didn't. Are these from the same universe?

Yup!

As you can guess, they focus on *drumroll* Ellana's character

And they're really good!

...The bandes dessinées suck though. Don't read those. They were only made to make money on the nostalgia

Les Âmes Croisées, Bottero's last novel, was supposed to be linked to that universe too. Several points tend to show it.

Unfortunately, Bottero died in a motorbike accident 10 years ago, and now if you excuse me I have to go grieve somewhere else sobs

(have you read L'Autre by Pierre Bottero?)

Beware, @lephe, I'm gonna force-feed you each and every book Bottero ever wrote :D

8:49 AM

Oh wait, a motorbike accident reminds me of A comme Association.

L'Autre is also closely linked to Ewilan's universe by the way. Especially, you understand why a certain character in La quête d'Ewilan has a certain unexplained power, and it all connects

Indeed.

Oh well, I can force-feed you with books from Erik L'Homme I guess?

Erik L'Homme wrote that as a tribute.

Ahah already read a lot of those

Le Livre des Étoiles for the win

though honestly, even if they're not that comparable, well

Phaenomen

just Phaenomen

Clarence Amalric bordel

@Jenayah That sounds like it'd ruin the book with water damage... :D

Such an epic character

@Mithrandir meh

8:53 AM

I probably can't beat you at fantasy books anyway T_T

@lephe that's not a given

Le Livre des Étoiles is definitely entertaining. Really liked it.

there's so much fantasy literature out there that we might very well have read different stuff eheh

What about The Chronicles of Amber then?

even if we're bound to have read similar stuff in our youth, since we both read French translations I guess :)

8:56 AM

You guessed right. ^^

Nope, doesn't ring a bell. You recommend it?

Yes, I recommend it. It has a feeling of a normal world turning fantastic, and the characters of the so-called princes of Amber are well-developed.

Judging from Amazon summary, sounds nice. Travel between worlds etc. If I get my hands on a copy, I'll read it ;D

there, it's on my phone's post-its

... and that's all there is on my shelf apart from mainstream series.

Ahah, never been much on my shelf, libraries for the win

9:02 AM

But then you end up on SFF.SE because you've forgotten the title xD

...

I used to drive my mother nuts

Because I kept every library ticket

I still have them

I check them from times to times to see if that reminds me of something good I watched/read/listened and forgot :D

I didn't have such thing as a library ticket... wish I had :(

They're all electronic?

Or does your library just not hand tickets?

There wasn't any tickets. Somewhere around 2008 they started a web service; you could see your current books there, but no history, and we didn't use it much.

It's more environment-friendly, I guess

My city was never much into this ahah

9:10 AM

And in the end, a forgotten book is a question on SFF.SE. Which isn't that bad :3

^^

Funny enough, there's a book the title of which I don't remember

But, I could tell you exactly on which shelf it was at the library

(if they didn't move the shelves that is)

@Jenayah Some good libraries have a web access form that lets you see your own history of past loans. Some other libraries don't, but give you printed tickets. Of the libraries that have paper-only loan, I've never seen a permanent ticket given, only a signature and date for the cardboard in the copy of the book only.

I don't even care about the book, just that I can't seem to find it again ahah

That cardboard is kept in a pocket of the book when the book is in the library, but in your registry folder of the library when you have loaned a book so they can see what books are still on your name.

That was a decent system, quick to work with.

Hard to recover from if data is lost though.

@b_jonas oh yeah, that system's well spread and kinda easy to put in place

9:13 AM

The digital systems have limits of how many years long they store your data though, because of government laws.

So I don't think you can query back forever, though I haven't really tried.

These days even in libraries where some books are not yet in the digital catalog, they still use the digital system for checkouts.

oh so they have the backend but not the front one? That what you mean?

(more or less)

@Jenayah No. I mean they have the full system for loans, but have a large amount of old books that are very rarely accessed, and haven't had the resources to put their catalog entries in the digital catalog yet, so you have to look them up in the paper catalog.

@b_jonas oh, alright

Or, in one case, the catalog slips are already scanned and OCRed and searchable online, but not yet converted to a proper record format for the digital catalog.

Since those old books are rarely accessed, this simply isn't a priority, and the libraries are poor.

tell me about it

libraries have it dire nowadays

9:19 AM

I'd like to add that most of those libraries count as charitable organizations, so people or companies can make a donation to them under the rules for charities, but those rules no longer allow private individuals to donate large amounts to a charity in Hungary and refund income tax for the donation, like they used to. I don't know about companies donating.

@b_jonas wait. Most Hungarian libraries aren't public service, you mean?

So most libraries only have enough money to maintain their existing collection in an, uh, sustainable state, and maintain some reasonable level of services to readers, but not enough to make much improvements and especially not enough to buy more books or more space.

@Jenayah They are public service in that most are accessible to anyone, and most are either very public and supposed to be supported by the government somewhat, or are maintained by a university.

@b_jonas and these fundings aren't enough, I guess.

There are some less open ones maintained by research institutes or academies or museums, but even they have rules such that they do help anyone who actually wants to do research as long as it doesn't risk damaging valuable old books.

@Jenayah Not only that. There was some very nasty stuff going on when the state can hurt them in ways that are worse than just not giving them enough funds.

It seems to happen more with museums than libraries currently, but they're treated all the same, and could happen with a library easily.

Gotta hate it when politics get in the way of culture and education.

FFS debate and argue all you want but let the people have access to books in a decent manner.

9:30 AM

Of course, some collections are damaged during the world war II and the 1956 revolution, because bombing cities or shooting with tanks and causing fire can do that, but that's a different part. That didn't seem to be malice specifically directed at any library or museum, just general damage to all the city.

I'd like to tell a short tale about the Természettudományi Múzeum's ("http://nhmus.hu/") recent plights. (Recent, because it had suffered from the 1956 too.)

Basically, the museum has a huge collection, among others one of the best collection of dead biological specimens in Europe, and very hard to replace. So it's immensely valuable and hard to replace later even if someone coughed up the money.

@b_jonas having worked at an history museum for a short time, I can easily see what you mean.

The museum also has a nice library of journals in natural sciences by the way.

The museum with all its storage rooms and exhibit was in a wing of the military university that was known Zrínyi, which was physically on a very nice big green spot of Budapest.

A "green spot"?

You mean like a garden area, or does it refer to the military uniform?

(though your adjective "very nice" might rather tend to the former)

Yes, a garden. An area with parks and trees and vegetation. Very rare in Budapest, it's the least green city anywhere I've been.

It took me a while to realize. At first I just assumed my grandmother and parents liked to vacation to places that have lots of vegetation, which is definitely true, but even now that I decide where I travel on my own, and I do decide to visit big cities of Europe, anywhere I go I find that the city is more green than Budapest.

There are some cities in South America and East Asia that are reputed to be worse, mind you, but as Europe goes, it's the worst I've seen.

Wait, your last assumption "less green than Budapest" would mean that there's a lot of green spaces in Budapest right? I'm getting confused.

9:41 AM

same ^

Ah ;D

Sorry, typo.

alright :)

Haven't visited much of Europe but that's curious. I guess I'll be navigating through Budapest on Google Street View tonight :)

So anyway, most of these nice big valuable green spots in Budapest are formally either owned directly by the town government or a district government, because they had at some point decided to leave it as a green spot and not allow to build anything there, or under the control by a government-controlled organization such as a certain Hospital in north-Buda that had suffered a similarly gruesome fate.

damn, hospitals too :(

9:45 AM

So basically, the city decides that these spots are very valuable and they could gain a lot of money by razing any ugly buildings that are already on it, kicking out the former long-time users from the nice buildings, building new big modern buildings on the remaining green areas, and either selling them to private owners from lots of money.

This had happened to the Lipótmező in north-Buda (I'm often using informal or former place names here), formerly used by a big mental hospital; an unused green area on the south side of the Árpád-híd where they built three successive layers of office buildings each with "view to the river";

and later to that big nice green spot near Nagyvárad tér, called the Ludovika, formerly partly used by the Zrínyi military university and partly as a public park.

Closing health facilities to build office ones. Yeah, that sounds nice. :(

They decided to build huge buildings, a big university that takes the rules of the Zrínyi but also a university to educate public servants. They apparently didn't realize that old museums and old libraries tend to have big private collections that are very hard to move without damage, and demanded that the museum give them much of the area it used to use, since technically the buildings were owned by the Zrínyi university.

@Jenayah No, that one doesn't have offices. Sorry, I didn't finish a sentence up there.

"either selling them to private owners from lots of money" ... or giving it to people or organizations close to the government in some corrupt way. The hospital and the Ludovika suffered the latter fate.

The part to the south of the Pest side of Árpád-híd suffered the former.

@b_jonas Oh, so that's even more ironic. "We're gonna build stuff to educate people, but first, let's rush everyone already there and jeopardize culture, books etc"

But where did they move the collection?

10:01 AM

@lephe Dunno, but the government didn't offer them much help to get a new place, or much time to move out either.

They're also building some nasty stuff in the Városliget now, without even razing the ugliest and most useless buildings there, which hurts me a lot because that's basically where I grew up. No tall office buildings in there (at least not that I know of), but still stupid things to build.

And with a campaign about why it's making the park better for us.

They did raze some of the good stuff.

And I'm not talking about just that one little playground equipment that I called the "hedgehog" which had metal spikes (totally rounded and thick) and where the spikes were entirely sawn off and smoothed so now it's just a little concrete hill with nothing interesting but some visible round metal stems in it. That's just sentimental, it happens everywhere with the playgrounds and EU regulations.

Are there some public protests against these actions?

@Jenayah Yes, there are, but sadly they're done in the stupid way, by environmentalists that bring a shame to everyone's name.

@b_jonas oh, I think I see what kind of environmentalists you mean...

You know, making a human chain around areas, complaining whenever a tree is cut, all D&D druid stuff.

Oh okay so not the same.

10:07 AM

So the government does the sensible thing if they ignore those protests.

Because they protest against everything, even good stuff.

Feels like a crazy urban plan. Do they never try to build outside the city?

You're talking about the convicted, yet silly ones, whose actions unlegitimize the main goal.

Mind you, there are also a few changes in the Városliget that are in the good direction. In particular, they expand the area of the city zoo, which is a really useful institution, in favor of moving the easier to move modern equipment of the theme park next to it, while at the same time keeping the few old and historically valuable equipment like the wooden-frame roller-coaster there.

@lephe Sure, and it happens in towns other than Budapest too, I just know a bit more about Budapest.

@Jenayah Yes.

@b_jonas yeah, they'd be adorable if they weren't such a burden.

@b_jonas is that the zoo which animals you posted some photos of three days ago?

@Jenayah Not only are they unsympathetic, their protests also make it harder to take anyone else protesting more seriously, and even their their physical presence in the park (camping there in tents) renders it slightly less enjoyable before the city even starts to do anything.

@Jenayah No, those are from zoos in Sweden... let me check which ones I posted exactly to be sure.

10:13 AM

@b_jonas so they're doing a "sitting" like 24/7 to protest?

Reminds me of Notre-Dame des Landes airport...

Sorry for interrupting... could someone explain briefly when and why are chat messages starred?

@Jenayah Some of them, among others.

Aéroport du Grand Ouest

The Grand Ouest Airport, or Aéroport du Grand Ouest Project was a project for a new airport, to be situated 30 km (20 mi) to the north-west of the French city of Nantes in the commune of Notre-Dame-des-Landes. It was intended for the new airport to replace Nantes Atlantique Airport as the airport for Nantes, but also to serve as an international gateway for western France.The €580 million project was approved in February 2008, with construction expected to start in 2014 and an opening date in 2017. Initially the airport was planned to have a capacity of four million passengers a year, increasing...

Notre-Dame-des-Landes

Notre-Dame-des-Landes is a commune in the Loire-Atlantique department in western France, around 20 km north-west of Nantes. The commune was the planned site of the new Aéroport du Grand Ouest, intended to replace Nantes Atlantique Airport. The €580 million project was approved in February 2008, with construction then expected to start in 2012 and an opening date in 2015. It was abandoned by the government of Emmanuel Macron on 17 January 2018 in the face of strenuous local opposition.In an ongoing week-long incident in April 2018 more than 2,500 riot police were deployed to remove the occupants...

@Jenayah Oh but Notre-Dame des Landes was a 50-year old unsolved case... and I'm not sure people there would've been "adorable" anyway.

Yup, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orsa-rovdjurspark-lynx.jpg commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orsa-rovdjurspark-leopard.jpg from Orsa Rovdjurspark near Grönklitt, Ursa; and commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wolverine_fed_jarvzoo.JPG commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arctic_fox_fed_jarvzoo.JPG from Järvzoo in Järvsö, both zoos in Sweden.

10:16 AM

@lephe no problem. Users "star" messages they find interesting or due to have more attention (for instance there was a GoFundMe campaign for an user who needs a new set of lungs, so it was pinned there to have more visibility)

Since SFF.SE isn't exactly a "help" SE, most of the messages starred are the "funny ones" though!

@lephe Uh... basically most people who can write chat messages also can give any chat message posted by another user, and then those messages stick to the starboard for a while, for longer if they get multiple stars; but it gets more complicated because room mods have some extra powers like unstarring messages or pinning messages to the starboard.

@lephe yeah no, as of now this is becoming more of an urban war than a protest...

@lephe You can star messages too in rooms you can speak in, but note that starring a message is public and anyone can in theory tell that you starred it, even though this information is pretty well hidden so you won't see it.

Oh?

I thought starring was anonymous.

Pretty sure I saw something like this in main meta?

@lephe You can also star rooms, but that is entirely different, that is still public but more importantly it puts the room into your own list of favourite rooms for convenient access later.

10:19 AM

Though if there's a (legal) tweak well, why not :p

@Jenayah Yeah, Meta is where people have crazy reverse engineering skills to guess things about how SE works that the devs don't tell them, sometimes (but not in this case) from very little information.

In this case it was pretty clear, the information already went through your network connection when you were in a room, just not rendered by the interface.

So what is the technical thingy you look at?

I'm more interested in the technical stuff tbh, than knowing who starred what

@Jenayah Probably the traffic the browsers make, such as with xhtml requests and stuff. Browsers have convenient debug interfaces for web developers and extra plugins for watching that sort of stuff, but you can also use proxies and other methods.

'cause if starring is supposed to be anonymous, but the info is still contained in underwater or something, that's funny

Ok yeah so it's underwater

@Jenayah The SE overlords said, at least after this became public, that it was never intended to be secret.

10:23 AM

Well once the thing is revealed they all say that it was never a secret... :D

If you want to know about the technical aspects, then Meta SE's or StackApps's chatrooms might be better places to ask.

pretty sure that was removed, actually

@Mithrandir Was it?

Hadn't heard of that part then. I'm not too interested in chat message stars.

Alright, thanks for the valuable info! So it's a pinboard. I thought it had an influence on the transcriptions. :)

But chat room owners can still unstar and pin messages, right? Or at least chat mods?

10:26 AM

@lephe what kind of influence?

@b_jonas I think so. A bunch was removed some time ago.

Well, I don't really know how transcripts are generated, but the tooltip for the stars reads "mark as useful for the transcript". I thought it could stay longer in the chat history, for instance.

@lephe FYI, everything you type here is "public", indexed by Google via the room's transcripts

(Does the chat history disappear if no transcript is made by the way?)

As far as I know, the transcript is auto-generated.

For this room, at least.

Better not talk ill about your boss then :)

@lephe well it stays longer on the pinboard

Not that I have any boss though (except the state) :)

10:28 AM

@lephe your momma then :p

there's an automatic transcript at /transcript/<roomID>

@b_jonas both

@lephe That entirely chat history stays public forever, unless a room owner or chat mod deletes or edits the message or deletes old revisions of the messages, or the whole room gets hidden or deleted by mods, or the room gets deleted automatically because it had very little activity.

But the transcripts have a bit inconvenient interface. All of chat has, to tell the truth.

There's always a transcript, that's where the chat history is.

@lephe That tooltip for the star is confusing. Perhaps it means the long version of the starboard, which you can view by clicking "show all" above the starboard, and shows all the messages that were ever starred in this room I think.

(Except as unstarred or deleted by mods, you know.)

So chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/58631/… for this room. Link is on the right of "starred"

Do we have statistics on those starred messages? I think it's reasonable to say at least 10% are floofs, 20% are XKCD x)

@Jenayah how many are fucks?

@b_jonas dunno, those are generally deleted I think :D

except when it comes to bashing SQL; that is public service.

10:43 AM

@Jenayah I think you haven't heard of that old chat meme that we got rid of. "saying fuck in chat brings stars"

@b_jonas ah? then no.

And I'd say this is kind of against the "be nice" policy...

..even though I fully acknowledge that I'm one of the swearing ones around here, so that's a bit hypocritical to say.

12

A: The many memes of SFF.SE

Meme: "Saying 'crap' gets stars in chat" Scope: SFF Chat room (Mos Eisley) Originator: TangoOversway Cultural Height: Early 2012 First Occurrence: TangoOversway Jan 19 '12 6:50 PM There are times I make sure I include a full sentence here, to give something funny to be starred, then peopl...

It was actually "crap", not "fuck"

It was probably worth to let that go.

kinda, yeah

Apparently it was mostly Tango saying "crap" that got starred, and Tango occurs less here now.

I think s/he was here some days ago.

plop

Aug 3 at 18:04, by Tango

Wow. So nice to drop back in here and see an actual concersation going on.

11:01 AM

Thanks for the insights about SE's chat... and the memes. This will help me for sure ;D

Well what we said above is mainly for this room actually

The memes and starring policies probably vary from site to site

Starring XKCD is universally OK though

@b_jonas We don't want this on the starboard, whether true or not swearing is not tolerated here

(Well tolerated to a point but the latter word certainly isn't)

@TheLethalCarrot maybe ping a RO/mod then

Who owns this room?

Nevermind found it

Well, this Star Wars question is going to sparkle another meta wars innit

Not necessarily, me and Ed are just concerned about the sorts of comments/answers it is likely to invite and all the hassle that will come with it

Couldn't that be taken down to answers such as "I want a quote from Lucas/producer/other involved in the making along the lines of code based alien race on American tribe XYZ because their family model/scheme/organization is what we were looking for?"

@TheLethalCarrot true dat

I thought of it too but well, that's what flags are for. If there is indeed a WoG say on the matter, it's relevant.

If we had to remove every question that could trigger polemics and controversy, Skeptics and History would never have made it out of Area 51 ahah

11:16 AM

Oh sure, but the wording is inviting opinions and WoG which is the problem and of course we have tools in place to deal with bad actors but it's better to try and mitigate the problem

Stupid people will be stupid anyways :/

Stereotypes also vary from country to country so that's worse ahah

Like, everyone outside of France think French people are rude, but if you ask a Frenchy about it, he'll tell you to shut the hell up... :P

Exactly!

Oh no, maybe I could be more tactful...

@Jenayah Worse in what sense?

I guess stereotypes aren't really any better for being varied....

Well nation X has its stereotypes about nation Y, but nation Z has other stereotypes about nation Y

Take a not-too-much-polemical topic for instance:

Stereotypes aren't really true, anyway.

11:22 AM

Those are just fries

Yeah.

But I've heard a lot of people call them "French fries"

As a French person, I can tell you everyone here will tell you fries are a Belgian thing

@Jenayah Heh.

Yes, that's interesting.

I think George Lucas was mainly working from US stereotypes.

I think there are a couple more examples like this, the first that comes to mind is so-called Turkish toilets, but I'm not posting pictures of those on lunch break.

So where are fries even from originally?

11:25 AM

Dunno. Let's ask Wikipedia.

fries

Noun: fries

plural of fry

Verb: fries

Third-person singular simple present indicative form of fry
friēs
second-person singular present active subjunctive of friō...

Wikipedia claims that fries are either from France or Belgium.

But that which is uncertain.

Ahah, they don't want a civil war.

There's also a lot of expressions like filer à l'anglaise (sneak out).

@lephe Interesting.

Which wouldn't be civil since that's two different countries, though.

11:27 AM

Looks like they say take French leave o_o

filer à l'anglaise

Verb: filer à l'anglaise

(idiomatic) to take French leave...

Oh yeah, the rosbifs say "flee like a French person"

Or something

Yeah that

So much friendliness between those countries of ours ahah

Poke @TheLethalCarrot

I guess there's distinction to my mind between phrases that are based on accurate origin (like "Indian food" is actually food from India), phrases based on an inaccurate origin (like Jerusalem artichokes have nothing to do with Jerusalem), and phrases based on a stereotype (like that self-same "French leave").

@Adamant soooo... What about native American food? Is this Indian food too? :D

@Jenayah What's up, was in a meeting

By the way, do I have it right guessing you're from the US?

@TheLethalCarrot oh sorry, nothing important go back to your meeting :)

11:30 AM

@Jenayah I suppose one could use that term...It would be a little confusing.

@Jenayah Not in it any more, start of my lunch break now

@Jenayah Are you asking me?

If you are...I don't really put any personal information in my profile because I don't want to share any, unfortunately.

I know, silly of me, but I've been burned before so....

@TheLethalCarrot ok then, we were just discussing the friendly relationships between UK and France (you guys say "take the French leave", we say "flee like an Englishman", etc etc) ^^

@Adamant oh no problem, totally fine if you don't want to share. I'm not blaming anyone not wanting to share personal info on the net ;D

As for the food, well now I'm in the mood for a curry. Blame you guys :p

Or a Turkish kebab. Which might very well come from Germany, even if we French tend to call those a "Greek". The best I've tasted were Syrian, though. Great, now my orienteering sense is lost.

11:48 AM

I love a good curry

Not heard that phrase but we do like to say "surrender like the French" and things along similar lines

Yeah, the French surrendering is a big meme

A lot of memes are based on stereotypes it seems, sadly.

Still, at least most are just out of context quotes and poorly photoshopped images.

:)