English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

9:00 AM

@RegDwight: hi

Moin-moin.

Good Morning all, I know it's morning for both of you.

@AlainPannetier isn't it morning to you?

@F'x, it is. And I'm back to Paris next week probably.
In case of collision of 2 concurrent editions of the same post, it seems that the system keeps track of the the last edition only.

your location says "Paris, France" and last time I looked out the window, it was definitely morning (and a beautiful one, at that)

have I overwritten anything of yours?

9:07 AM

I'm just trying to avoid broadcasting a "good morning all" when there are active chatters from remote TZ hanging around.

OK, written a long answer on this puberty question, now going back to some real work

see you

@F'x, I'm afraid it's the other way around. When I committed a change to my last pet-post I saw a top of the page banner mentioning "be aware someone has just the same post in the meantime" (probably better worded than that actually).

A: What are the parameters for determining if a question gets tweeted?

anyway, I hope I'll get away with this "not-an-answer" answer in meta

0

Our StackExchange overlords have programmed a giant AI, capable of understanding (and answering) every SE question. You may have heard of the “Watson” prototype that they resold to IBM because it was performing well below expectations. Now, they don't allow it to actually answer questions,[1] be...

11:48 AM

America's Lost Decade: Bin Laden's death comes 10 years too late

12:11 PM

@RegDwight — Well, better late than never.

Q: What is a linguistic framework?

12:36 PM

Yes, but that's not the point. The lost decade is still lost. It can't be undone. Skim the article in case you haven't. "[W]ith his escape [in the caves of Tora Bora in 2001, bin Laden] likely caused the Americans more damage than through anything else since 9/11."

Billare

12:58 PM

please close this question

4

I'm reading some textbook selections for my linguistics class and the author mentioned a "linguistic framework" and I don't know what that term is referring to. I've tried checking on Google but every site it sends me to talks about a particular linguistic framework but none have an actual defini...

@Billare Voted

idem

I'm not sure it's off-topic.

It's asking for a definition of a term, and it's tagged meaning.

Not everything with the word "linguistic" in it is automatically a better fit for Linguistics.

1:14 PM

@RegDwight Fair enough. How far down the technical rabbit hole are we willing to go?

And really, honestly, the OP should just go ask the professor.

It's not about technical rabbit holes. It's just that I fail to see a fundamental difference between asking "what does 'banging 7-gram rocks' mean" and "what does 'linguistic framework' mean".

@MrHen That's like saying that that other OP should go ask Charlie Sheen.

@RegDwight I don't know the reference.

Q: "I took more than anybody could survive. Banging 7 gram rocks. That's how I roll. I have one speed and one gear: Go." What does this mean?

3

Today’s Quote of Time.com (TIME@time.chtah.com) carries the following line of Charlie Sheen’s remark. Being totally ignorant of the background of CBS and Warner Brothers’ cancellation of the production of the program, I have no idea about the phrase, ‘bang 7 gram rock.’ I understand the line af...

phrases

(But the ask a prof bit was more advice than a reason to close.)

Ah, I see.

@RegDwight But really, technical questions about math are all forward to Math.SE

Yes?

I don't really have a problem with the Linguistic frameworks question.

It was borderline for me and I was in a bad mood when I found it.

Yes. But that site exists. If it weren't live, many of the questions would have stayed here, open.

Not all, mind you.

1:20 PM

@RegDwight Okay. I am fine with that. I am happy to keep defining linguistics terms here until Linguistics.SE opens.

Anyhow, if someone asked "where do I get a linguistic framework / 7-gram rocks" or "how do linguistic frameworks / 7-gram rocks work", or "is this thing here a linguistic framework / 7-gram rock", etc., that would be off-topic.

@RegDwight Good point.

But simply asking for a definition is fine; you could make a case closing some of such questions as general reference, but not off-topic.

And in this particular case, the OP seems to have looked for the general reference himself.

@RegDwight Also a good point.

That's how I roll.

1:24 PM

@RegDwight Go (away).

?

Wrooooommmmmm....

@Billare: I have mixed feelings about your edit here: english.stackexchange.com/posts/23587/revisions

The title is rather unspecific now.

And the original phrase is no longer mentioned anywhere at all.

Q: What are the arguments behind the "literally"/"figuratively" usage divide? When should one use either word?

0

I remember reading, some time in grad school, that there was a controversy about proper usage of figuratively and literally when used to denote meaning of a word in its strictest sense — but I've totally forgotten what those arguments said. Some my questions are: What are those argument...

word-choice

What is the question asking?

Is it asking about not specified arguments, that we should read in a crystal ball?

2:21 PM

@RegDwight — No use crying over spilt milk.

Semper idem, semper fidelis ...

Yeah, but then again, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Like Dubya proposing to put that missile shield in Turkey. I mean, why not look up what happened the last time the US did that, in 1962?

2:40 PM

@RegDwight — Hey, I'm a Santayana fan myself, but I'm also feeling very pessimistic at the moment. I don't think anybody learns from history. Evar.

That is, sadly, very true.

"Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." — Ben Franklin

And we are in the hands of fools, dear friend.

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." — Kurt Vonnegut

2

Hahaha so true. I found out a couple of years ago that Rick Santorum went to my high school. Yikes.

Rick Santorum

Richard John "Rick" Santorum (born May 10, 1958) is a former United States Senator from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Santorum is a member of the Republican Party and was the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference. Santorum is considered both a social and fiscal conservative. He is particularly known for his stances on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Social Security, intelligent design, homosexuality, and the Terri Schiavo case. In March 2007, Santorum joined the law firm Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, LLC. He was to primarily practice law in the firm’s Pittsburgh and Washington,...

Wow, that's an impressive résumé.

Q: Choice of Registrator, Registrar, or Registry when describing the responsibility of managing registration related activities.

2:46 PM

I can't think of a bigger asshat on the national scene at present. Leaving aside obvious screaming morons like Sarah Palin et al.

_____________

0

When naming a class in an object oriented programming language I came a across a case where there were a few proposed names for describing a component that is responsible for abstracting registration related actions. Candidate names: ApplicationRegistrator ApplicationRegistrar ApplicationRegi...

programming

@RegDwight: Is this really an EL&U question?

Lemme scratch my head a little...

Ugh.

I dunno, my spontaneous answer would be, why do you care, I just name all my functions gafd(), blubb(), and k(), and they work!

I really don't think function-naming is the province of EL&U.

I wonder if Programmers.SE would like it...

Why not?

NFO

I just voted to close.

I voted to close too.

I wonder why they think there is a relation between a class name and English.

Do they think CakePHP is really a cake?

3:04 PM

Apr 30 at 0:41, by Robusto

My next question: "Is Python a snake or a programming language? If it's a programming language, why is it choking my dog?"

Okay, just for the record, I have asked around, and it's not really a good fit for Programmers. It also might get much worse answers there. Along the lines of my "why do you care" here in chat.

Well, this kind of question makes me feel like we're being asked to use a violin as a paperweight. Yeah, it will hold the paper down, but that's not really where it shines.

3:24 PM

The point is that there isn't any relation between a function name, and English grammar or usage.

I could call a function er4f(), and the compiler would not tell me "Error; you are not using English grammar correctly."

yes, but good function naming is an important part of readability

and it drives me nuts when grammatical or spelling errors get into class or function names

That's what Code Review is there for.))))

103

Code Review – codereview.stackexchange.com

Beta Q&A site for feedback on projects you're working on, by sharing your code with fellow programmers and getting extensive feedback/review of best practices, design pattern usage, application UI, security, etc.

Currently in public beta.

sure, then move it over there

wevs

I was just in the middle of writing, "before anybody suggests to move it over there, that was a joke".

(i don't participate on cr.se. i do enough code review at work)

3:36 PM

@JSBangs We have a table with a column named "SKIPED". (It's supposed to be "Skipped".) Drives me nuts, but it would be too much work to change it. Ditto for the page called "Sheduling.asp".

@Martha Yeah, should be sheduling.ASAP.

@Martha for a few years i had to regularly call page.excecute()

@JSBangs Ouch. At least with "skiped", I can pronounce it like it's spelled, and thus have some chance of not getting a compile error.

i think that IDEs encourage this garbage. since all of the function names are auto-completed for you, you don't have to experience the pain of typing it out all the time. you might not even notice

The person who came up with "Skiped" (and "Sheduling") can't blame an IDE. I suppose he can blame not having English as a native language, but I still rag on him every chance I get. (He's mostly retired now.)

4:07 PM

@JSBangs That doesn't mean EL&U is the right place to ask for a function name to use.

After all, there are many Java methods that use words that would not be correct in English.

@kiamlaluno this is true. i'm just peeving here, mostly

For example, Java has a Activatable class, but activatable is not an English word.

that's a contentious statement

"activatable" might not be in dictionaries, but it's a semantically obvious neologism following a productive morphological pattern

in that case i don't think that it's accurate to say that it's "not a word"

4:22 PM

@JSBangs I can agree with that; still, you cannot pretend a correct answer from who is not a programmer.

Say activatable to a person who is not a programmer, and you will probably get a "You mean 'active table', don't you?"

@kiamlaluno it would be very odd to mishear activatable as active table

the stress goes on a different syllable, and there are different numbers of syllables

@JSBangs It probably is, but activatable is not a word you hear all days.

As a matter of fact, it is not reported from the dictionary I have.

@JSBangs — Auto-completion is a mixed blessing. When there's latency it can give you the wrong completion. I hate when that happens.

i said in my very first comment that "activatable" is probably not in dictionaries, but this should not be considered a definitive proof that it isn't a valid word

@JSBangs It is probably a proof that is not a so much used word.

4:37 PM

true. that's why i called it a neologism

4:52 PM

english.stackexchange.com/questions/23665/…

It has been already deleted by the OP.

By the way, is I an article? :-)

If somebody says "that is not overly helpful," does he mean he wanted an excess of help?

that was actually an interesting question

because there are conflicting senses of the word "word

and the answer is different depending on what you consider a word to be

plus, it would be a good chance to add words

@kiamlaluno overly = very in this case. i.e. "that isn't very helpful" = "thanks for nothing, you unhelpful jerk"

5:08 PM

@JSBangs It could mean excessively, but my question was not really a question. :-)

I could have said, "if somebody says 'that is not very useful' does he mean he could not be happy with an helpful only question?"

Q: Methods, methodologies, paradigms and buzzwords

6:14 PM

i'm not sure what to do with this

0

I try to avoid using terms like "methodology" and "paradigm" because they are so often misused. For example, I regularly see "methodology" used where "method," "procedure," or "algorithm" would be more appropriate, among others. That's like saying "biology" when you mean "person," and to my ear...

technical buzzword

move it to writers? close as off-topic? argumentative? leave it alone?

@JSBangs I'd say leave it alone

it's about differences in meaning and usage, more than advice for writing

@JSBangs Well, I'm not sure we want to keep the first paragraph.

But the rest seems okay.

yeah, the first paragraph is the problematic part

well, someone who asks "how to use X and Y?" shouldn't start by "People so often misuse X and Y"

I'll edit

unless you've already started on it

Nah, go ahead.

6:19 PM

I'll remove the buzzword keyword while I'm at it

should I leave the technical?

Yeah, why not.

well, in the end, it's not really "technical"

i think that technical is fine. add word-choice

ok, thanks!

Don't forget to fix the sentence where he accidentally the whole verb.

6:22 PM

@RegDwight hey, I think you're missing a... no, wait

Apr 30 at 14:04, by F'x

on another topic, my commitment to BCG is still not considered fulfilled, even though I asked 5 upvoted questions and submitted 5 answers (not all upvoted)

Apr 30 at 14:04, by F'x

do you happen to know what's the (hidden) criterion?

A: Commitment fulfilled seems to act erratic on area 51

@Fx I am not aware of any.

Other than the script might not be running too often.

A few searches of MSO and a quick glance at the Area51 FAQ didn't turn up anything of notice.

1

The commitment isn't fulfilled until about a day after the site enters public beta. This is because it's especially important for people who committed to the site to be on at the beginning of the public beta. Edit The other criteria is that you post 10 questions or answers.

@Robusto: looks like someone wasn't satisfied with your answer to his rainbow question, so he posted it again.

1

Q: Do humans everywhere see the seven VIBGYOR colours in the rainbow?

From the wikipedia page on rainbows: A rainbow spans a continuous spectrum of colours—there are no "bands." The apparent discreteness is an artefact of the photopigments in the human eye and of the neural processing of our photoreceptor outputs in the brain. Because the peak respo...

perception euro-centrism

Also, while we're at it:

-2

Q: Is Paul McCartney dead?

Is it true that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-a-like, or was this really just a conspiracy theory? Is there any proof either way, or all just speculation?

history

6:47 PM

@RegDwight — What color is the sky in his world?

@Robusto: just wanted to pop in real quick to get the joke explained:

"these two terms have become inextricably yoked together (ha ha) over the years, blurring the distinctions and our ability to articulate them (again, ha ha)."

@Robusto Eleven.

zeugma and yoke (but not yolk) share an etymology. so hilarious.right?

but I didn't get the connection there for 'articulate'?

@Mitch: articulate = "Composed of distinct, meaningful syllables or words, as human speech."

I am using one verb (blur) to cover two cases, as in zeugma or syllepsis.

he was wearing a blue shirt and an expression of triumph

6:56 PM

I never said it was a really funny joke. That's the best you can get from me at 5:45 a.m., or whenever it was that I wrote that.

In fact, had you listened closely, you would have heard distinct tones of irony in the "ha ha" and the "again, ha ha" ...

we should make love and the dishes

ah...'blur'

I get it (said in monotone) (and hilarity ensues)

We should fire our guns and whoever asked that question in the first place.

I was concentrating on 'syllepsis' itself.

'and' or 'at'?

@Mitch think again

@Robusto whomever

7:02 PM

@Mitch Is it an example of syllepsis?

gah. too much thinking.

I'll have a pizza with ricotta and Charles

@Fx — Whatever.

hey, @Reg, in членом is the ч pronounced as [S] ?

Anyway, whomever would be barbarous in that case.

7:04 PM

after cheating his wife and death by conjugal strangulation

"whoever asked that question" is a syntactic segment that requires the nominative subject, so there ...

NNS

@Robusto /me hides

You can run, but you can't hide.

Looks like all the SE sites are down.

@Robusto … he said on the SE chat?!

So, question for the day: Is the sentence "F*ck you and the horse you rode in on!" an example of zeugma or syllepsis? Discuss.

7:08 PM

She and they have promised to come.

@JSBangs /tʃ/

@Robusto I'm more interested in "Fuck you and off"

@Fx — Well, see, you just don't know how to play this game, do you?

@Robusto it's pushing it a bit, but it's not restricted to a verb applying to two objects

@Robusto I think it's an example of a polite Irish greeting.

7:10 PM

Hey, did @mitch ever get the joke?

I hope the Irish people and weather will be warm

9

Q: Mysterious Butt

I was attempting to answer a question today on SO and include some screenshots to help illustrate what I was talking about. Everything was fine until I went to upload my fourth image. Here is what the post screen looked like before I selected to upload: Once I pressed the Image button I got t...

bug images buttocks

@Fx Haha, that's a funny yoke.

@RegDwight really? so that cluster is [tʃl]? I thought that [tʃ] got simplified in this case

@RegDwight I thought about that excuse once (I was posting work-related files and this NSFW image appeared out of the blue), but I never thought it would fly

7:12 PM

@JSBangs not in the Russian I know.

anyway, a question too trivial for the site but to which I might as well get an answer

I was translating a toast for an American colleague, and I'm missing a word

You do have /ʃl/ in шлемом, for example.

what verb can you use that describes both mounting a steed and have intercourse with a woman? I used ride, I think it fits, but maybe there's a better choice

Mount.

"Hop on"?

7:16 PM

The toast is to our women, our horses, and those who ride them

You can mount a horse or a woman. No, really.

Yeah.

The horse version is considerably less fun.

You raise me up so I can stand on mount-ains.

@Robusto couldn't say, I only ever did the horse one, it was fun :)

7:18 PM

This zeugma/syllepsis would be rather obscene... I am surprised you would use such a figure of speech in a toast!

Well, you must be some kind of chevalier then.

@Robusto but does ride also work?

@Cerberus it's reportedly the toast commonly given by former French president Chirac with friends or fellow politicians (including his wife)

Ride sounds less outrageous than mount...

Not as well. It's not a common expression, but it would probably be understood as well as any verb would. Many verbs can be used to mean "fuck" — know what I mean? Wink, wink.

@F'x: Ah! Really? Funny... I'd never dream of giving such a toast in my little Calvinist country.

7:20 PM

@Cerberus yeah, really. Only 2.17% of my posts are outright lies, and I've used up my quota today

Oh you got the badge too?

if you want the double entendre to be visible, use mount

if you used ride, the joke might go over my head, because ride is an uncommon synonym for fuck

@Fx — Does that statement fall within the 2.17%?

@JSBangs — I thought I just made that point.

@Robusto you probably did

I'll just link to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox before @RegDwight quotes it

7:22 PM

i was merely reaffirming your statement

Feb 16 at 16:19, by Robusto

Ah, the Madoff Paradox.

@JSBangs — As you hadn't affirmed it, how could you reaffirm it?

@Robusto re-thwack

how do that re-feel?

refreshing

I resent your attitude and your email.

Now there's a zeugma for you. Top that, byatches.

30 mins ago, by F'x

we should make love and the dishes

7:29 PM

Clearly inferior.

Tastes and colors needn't be argued

Wait, you did say you were French, right?

do you have a reliable quote on that?

@Robusto Yeah, I got it. I felt misdirected (I was looking for the parallel zeugma:yoke::syllepsis:articulate) but that's not where the parallel was.

That's why we go over this stuff.

I don't think I got enough love for that zeugma answer.

8:00 PM

@RegDwight: I'm at the point now where I want to say "Kill it with FireFox!!!"

8:14 PM

11

A: Mysterious Butt

YOU's excellent work and the OP's detailed screenshots made it pretty easy to get to the bottom of this: You'll note in the screenshot (the one that Daniel censored away) that the image definition is pretty broken; you see something like ![![![bla][3]][ etc. This utterly wrong markdown causes th...

"Just go to the edit screen for the post in question and insert a lonely <b> at the beginning."

Marvellous.

That is a pretty amazing bit of bug-hunting.

In other news, I miss the niece.

4:15 a.m. on Friday was a long time ago.

awwwww

And I won't get to see her until Sunday late evening. Hmph.

(It doesn't help that I can't even just call up my sister like I usually do about this time every day. Stupid international cell phone rates.)

8:31 PM

@Martha that's what Skype is for; it has quite good rates

that and keeping connection for small kids: my son, aged 2, doesn't like speaking on the phone but loves videochatting with his grandparents

@Fx Skype requires internet. :/

@Martha do you mean you can chat here because you have physical access to the servers? that's one cool story!

presumably it's the sister/niece who lack internet

@JSBangs Precisely.

i assume this is because they've been banished to the wilderness of Unguristan

8:34 PM

@JSBangs ah! if so, not at all

skype.com/intl/en-us/features/allfeatures/…

what makes you think that the wilderness of Unguristan has cell phone coverage?

@Fx That requires my sister to have a working cell phone that doesn't charge out the wazoo for roaming.

@Martha ok, ok, I give up

if you're out in the wild, don't have any sort of landline access, didn't buy a SIM card from a local provider, then you're probably screwed, yeah

but you're also sort of looking for it :)

psmears

@Fx Also remember that not all US mobiles can even accept standard SIM cards...

Hungary, like most of Europe, actually has better cell (ahem, sorry, mobile) phone coverage than the US, but it's devilishly difficult to access said coverage from the US.

8:39 PM

@Martha sorry, I must be thick, but what's difficult about it?

It's also very hard to get a Hungarian mobile provider to sell you a mobile plan, even a pay-as-you-go one. Or at least, that has been my mother's experience. They keep wanting her to provide the Hungarian equivalent of a Social Security number, which of course she doesn't have. (My barely-11-day stay wasn't long enough to include a visit to a cell phone store.)

@Fx Ok, ok, not difficult, but expensive. Right now, I can call my mom's cell pretty cheaply, but it uses up her minutes something fierce.

@Martha sorry for you, then, that's an annoyance

It was pretty easy to get my iPhone to work in Europe (both Hungary and England, more specifically Heathrow airport), but even the relatively-cheaper roaming rates you get if you pay the extra $6 a month are basically a dollar a minute. And my sister's T-Mobile phone doesn't work at all there.

(Even though theoretically T-Mobile uses the same type of network as Europe.)

@Fx The biggest annoyance was that they refused to give my mother her old mobile number back, because she hadn't used it in over a year. And it's not that they gave it to someone else already or anything. It just seems like pointless bureaucracy.

8:59 PM

@Martha Looks like Russia did leave a print on Hungary after all.

I gave up trying to deal with Russian providers years ago.

So what do you use by way of phone?

My usual foreign mobile with my usual foreign number / SIM card.

It's not cheap, but I'm ready to pay that price for not having to deal with morons.

Oh, and of course the Internet is ubiquitous, at least in the parts of Russia I frequent, so Skype/ICQ/Google Chat is always an option.

It's weird how the internet providers are so much more, uh, civilized than the phone companies.

Historical reasons.

Historical monopolies.

Historical bureaucracy.

(In Harta, which really isn't a large town, we called up the local internet guys - I swear, they were teenagers - at 9:00 a.m., and by noon, we had both internet and cable TV.)

9:10 PM

See, now let them turn 50 and take over 50% of the market, and bam! You will have created AT&T Hungary.

But the thing is, the phone companies in Hungary don't have much more history than the internet companies. During Soviet rule, almost nobody had a phone line, and mobile phones were the stuff of science fiction.

(Harta is my dad's hometown in Hungary, in case it wasn't clear.)

@Martha Well, almost nobody having a phone line is not the opposite of a monopoly, it's just a different incarnation of a monopoly.

0

Q: cirrculam vitae

I’m a fresh student wanted to do job along with my studies, so that I can visualize & appraised my career development unanimously

grammaticality

@RegDwight I suppose. :/

@MrDisappointment NARQ.

9:14 PM

@RegDwight Ayup. So voted.

Ayup, so closed.

I wonder if it was another test by the folks from MSO.

@RegDwight Ya, I can't vote to close, thought I'd bring it to your attention seeing you were active here.

@MrDisappointment Much appreciated.

Now go get those 1981 points.

Hah.

Oh, and a test? Like to keep you on your toes, do they? Well, I could imagine.

Q: Is really simple not simple enough?

@MrDisappointment Yeah.

2

After listening to the discussion on the podcast this week, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what sort of questions could be considered too simple for SO. For example, I would have thought that the question What is a Subclass would be the perfect contender. However, with a bunch of answers...

discussion asking-questions

"I've asked this question on English. Let's see how it fares over there, shall we? 'What is a sentence?' Update: The good people over at English closed my question within 10 minutes."

9:29 PM

I hadn't realized that the sentence "question" was trolling.

Neither had I until it was pointed out to me in the Teachers' Lounge.

I can smell NARQs from a mile away.

I mean, some people were unhappy with my closing it as NARQ rather than General Reference, but in hindsight, I was 100% right.

@RegDwight That sly dog! It is pretty vigilant over here though, from what I've seen.

The best part is what you don't see. Get to 10k and you will be able so see our mad skillz in their full glory.

Some really funny stuff gets deleted before anyone sees it.

Except for the 10k users, that is.

I'm too damn lazy, don't think I'll even gather a collective rep. that high any time soon, but maybe I should aspire to it.

word-choice grammaticality grammar grammatical-number pronunciation vocabulary idioms

Well, Ex-User will be at 10k in no time without posting anything unless we actually listen to his request and delete his account.

delete

6.1k 11 27

Rep graph.

9:38 PM

Actually, I'm not insanely far off of 10k - it is possible... -checking this curious stuff out-

If I continue to collect passive rep at the same rate as while I was away, it'll take me another 20 weeks to reach 10K. :/

@RegDwight What the deuce!?

Is this a system account?

I can only reckon so.

@MrDisappointment It's an actual account by an actual user.

No, it's a user who was active early on, then got in a huff and left, then came back temporarily, and now apparently wants to leave permanently.

He seems to want to get off a few other sites, too.

9:43 PM

Oh, I can piece that together now ..I think.

I see "Delete this account" on Pro Webmasters, too.

I've come across instances of people wanting to get rid of accounts, disassociate et cetera. they'll all have reasons, to be sure, but I can't say I can fathom them TBH.

I mean, if, for instance, your employer is querying data.SE to determine name changes (possible?) in attempts to continue to monitor your contributions, that's a very strong approach indeed.

I'd be more concerned with my employer than washing my contributions, in such circumstances.

@MrDisappointment Well, yeah. But it could be somebody outside your control/knowledge: once someone has found your profile and memorized your user ID, no amount of changing your display name will hide you from them.

(And SE makes it quite difficult to maintain two different identities/profiles. Most of the "log out" links do nothing of the sort, as my sister & I found out when she wanted to sign up for EL&U.)

I see; I wasn't sure whether user IDs were exposed.

For example, until/unless they change the whole auto-login thing, I refuse to log in to SE on a public computer, because I can't be sure that pressing "log out" will actually prevent the next user of that computer from accessing my account.

9:57 PM

Is there an 'open ticket' about this on any meta?

@MrDisappointment There might be, I dunno. Mostly, they tend to get closed as "status-bydesign".

Well thanks for the info, never had this problem personally but glad I can avoid it.

10:13 PM

@Martha — Why would you ever use a public computer anyway?

Q: in special cases, can you use "one such family are" vs. "one such family is"?

10:24 PM

Looks like a question for @Cerberus:

0

Is it correct to say "one such family are..." as opposed to "one such family is..." in some circumstances? Say, for instance as used in the article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_family [...] One such family are the genes for human haemoglobin subunits; [...] The problem occurs wh...

expressions

@RegDwight — Well, now I got some mod on my ass for that question, telling me it's not properly referenced. I told him to go ahead and delete it if it ain't good enough. I'm a frickin' expert on rainbows, and I am skeptical of sites that can't take common sense for an answer. I sure don't need another time sink.

Q: How do I determine subject and subject complement in "A side-effect is the spread of commercialese to other domains."?

5

Consider this example: Commercialese is an instrument of art, designed to enrich and invigorate our language—surely you will all agree with this—, and we should encourage newcomers to learn it. However, a side-effect is the spread of commercialese to other domains. This we must obje...

grammar numbers subject inversion complement

@Robusto Matches my experience perfectly.

Apr 27 at 14:03, by RegDwight

I answered one question there, got downvoted by mods, and upvoted by everyone else.

Yeah, I told him to delete it and he did. So screw him. I don't need that site.

Q: What is the difference between "photo" and "image"?

2

What is the difference between photo and image ?

word-choice differences nouns

0

Q: Difference between "picture" and "photo"

When should I use one or the other?

word-choice nouns

How do I unassociate my account with that site?

10:30 PM

Ugh.

You're asking things...

Forbidden things.

I have no idea short of disassociating all accounts and then re-associating everything except Skeptics.

Seriously, there must be away.

A: How to dissociate associated accounts?

@Robusto Well, here's an easy walk-through:

5

There is now a disassociate button on the user page, accounts tab. To use it, you'll take the following steps: Change your OpenID on the site you wish to associate. Change it to something you aren't using on any other Stack Exchange sites†. If you have an alternate OpenID, change that too. If y...

It's so easy, I can't breathe...

And the best part is hidden in the comments.

"you'll need to use two different OpenIDs if you don't want an auto-association"

Oh, for f*ck's sake. I work all day, and now I come home and gotta do that kinda shit all over again.

10:34 PM

ROFLMAO.

@RegDwight — They're only the smartest people around because they say they are. Sorry, I'm in a bad mood and I'm going to go eat dinner before I just trash this whole SE thing forevah.

Well, see you after the dinner/trashing.

Actually, see you tomorrow, cause ich bin müde.

It must be the Disaster syndrome.

It's the Skeptics syndrome.

Apr 27 at 14:04, by RegDwight

You see, I didn't include any NASA pictures, I just used common sense.

@Robusto was smarter than me in that he did include a picture, but he also wasn't smart enough in that he forgot to shop a "(c) NASA/JPL" into one of its corners.

So there you have it.

NASA pictures or no pictures at all. Wimps and posers, leave the hall.

Speaking of which, I'm out!

Greetings.

And, @Martha, welcome back!

10:47 PM

Why, thank you.

I assume you've already gone through the chat logs and thwacked where appropriate?

Actually, I took one look at all my pings from chat, and decided it was too much like work and gave up on the concept of catching up.

Yay!

I never catch up on chat logs, and I'm often chided for that...

I'm trying the whole not-catching-up thing now, as in I didn't read what happened this morning before I joined in, and so far, I don't think I've missed much.

(I admit I did have chat open for most of today, and religiously read everything that was posted, but that's different, isn't it?)

Billare

@RegDwight Skeptics is a site for leading questions.

@RegDwight Mostly the questions that are answered there are 1) easy enough to be trivial 2) answered by other, official skeptics themselves.

@RegDwight If it's not duh-obvious like, "do ghosts exist", there's a high chance it won't get answered...or if it is, it's answered via unenlightening copy & paste.