Wow, I'm looking at some apartments, and they are very expensive.

The city must be booming!

In Edmonton?

We are certainly a growing city.

Oh, I get to vote for the first time on May 5. Exciting!

Anyway, I'm off to have supper and do some things around the house. Nice chatting, I'll be back sometime soon. Adios!

Oh, whom will you vote for?

I hope you will eat well. Still veganist?

@Mahnax I see prices are actually quite similar to here. It seems rents have risen...

Hmm prices are the same in Euros, and I underestimated the Euro, so Eddi is actually cheaper. But still expensive!

@Cerberus Just vegetarian for the time.

@Cerberus NDP, probably.

@Mahnax That sounds easier...

NDP?

New Democratic Party. They're the only left-wing party with a chance in this province.

We've had a coservative government in Alberta for 30 years.

@Mahnax Ah OK, good luck!

@Cerberus Haha, thanks.

If I may offer a philosophic point of view:

Sure.

Your individual vote is very unlikely to make any difference anyway

So why not vote for a party that doesn't stand a chance, if it matches your opinions better?

This party matches my opinions best, actually.

Oh, okay.

Then go for it!

Yeah. So no worries there :)

Heh.

For the federal election in October, it's a different story.

Is that the party led by the charming Québécois?

He's cute, but I don't trust Trudeau.

Hmmm.

I have just read up on Canadian parliamentary history.

So the Liberals were long the natural ruling party.

Harper has a bad reputation, at least from my perspective.

Harper is god awful.

If he gets re-elected, I'm moving to the Netherlands :-)

You can show me around!

Yay!

What say the polls, will he be reëlected?

When are the next elections?

I don't think he will be.

October.

Ooh, last mark is in!!!

A+.

Final grades:

GPA: 3.98.

Wow, very nice!

So an A counts as how much?

An A is 4.0.

A+ is also 4.0.

A- is 3.7.

Oh, I see.

We don't have letters, only a simple scale from 0 to 10.

They are weighted based on credits, but each class is the same number of credits in my case, so you can simply take the average of these.

@Cerberus Much simpler.

OK.

I once got an 11+, though...

How?!

But in high school.

Well, there were bonus questions.

A plus counts as +0,25.

Aha.

But you got A+es!

I never got a perfect 10 at university.

Only a 10- once.

Or is there something higher than A+?

You only get a 10 at university if you haven't made a single mistake.

@Cerberus I got straight As except for one A- in grad school.

@Robusto Wowie!

A straight A is either A or A+?

Such things do not happen here.

So how many errors are you allowed to have to get an A+?

@Cerberus Yes. But you can't get A+ for a course, only for individual assignments within a course.

I see.

I used to routinely get A+ on papers. In fact, if I didn't get one I was a little let down.

So how are those grades awarded?

I have never, ever seen anyone get a 10 on a paper.

What do you mean, how? The professor reviews the work and assigns a grade.

For papers, professors often don't have specific criteria.

@Cerberus You need to hang around with smarter people.

Hah. Hah.

A paper just cannot be perfect.

@Cerberus And my papers were in literature, which is a squishy topic.

Well, so were many of mine.

Let's say you have an exam consisting of 5 questions or problems. Then each question will give you e.g. 2 points if your answer is perfect.

Then you get a 10.

But that is rare.

So I wonder how your grade system works for exams.

(Papers are admittedly vaguer.)

I didn't get perfect scores on all exams, but I always did well enough for an A.

So you didn't know?

How they came to their grades, the professors.

Sometimes they published rubrics and the like, rationales, but not always.

No distribition of points over the (sub)questions?

Sometimes.

Lotta pressure, yeah?

In high school, they either use the same method as at university, or they do it like this: no errors is a 10, subtract 0,5 points for each error. Something like that.

Our exams were graded usually so that a perfect score was 100.

Oh?

And did people often get a 100?

Not too often. Sometimes.

Of course it depends on the subject.

It's easier with, say, math.

At least in high school.

This kid who was in my freshman high school algebra class ALWAYS got 100 on exams, which ruined the curve for everyone else.

The curve?

Yeah, sometimes teachers would grade on a curve.

So the highest grade in the class was where you started with A. If the highest grade was 73/100, then that was an A.

Ah, I see.

But this was not always what they based the letters on?

But John C. always got 100, so fuck everyone with their 73.

We don't have such a thing, except incidentally.

Heh.

Here, everyone would get a 7,3 no matter what John got.

Incidentally a teacher would give everyone an extra 0,5 or so if many people failed the test.

Or they would be allowed to retake it.

But that was all rather arbitrary.

It's all arbitrary.

In a different way.

@tchrist now we know who to blame next time Randy stays out late.

so I looked on the news and apparently the French military consists 100% of horrible pederasts

someone should stop them. I bet Robert Downey Jr. would do a good job stopping them.

@tchrist: To the best of your recollection, did Littlefinger ever have it in mind to arrange the marriage of Sansa Stark to Ramsay Bolton? The HBO series introduced that and I couldn't remember if that was in the books.

@Robusto Of course not.

Yeah, didn't think so.

They didn’t have a handy stand-in for Arya.

No Jeyne Poole.

Yeah. I feel like I checked out the wrong branch from github.

Cuneiform has 99 numeric code points. Were these people obsessed with counting, or what?

Well, they didn't have an internet, so . . .

They also have no metric. Only rational fractions with non-ten denominators.

U+1245A ‭ 𒑚  GC=Nl    1/3=NV  SC=Cuneiform    CUNEIFORM NUMERIC SIGN ONE THIRD DISH
U+1245B ‭ 𒑛  GC=Nl    2/3=NV  SC=Cuneiform    CUNEIFORM NUMERIC SIGN TWO THIRDS DISH
U+1245C ‭ 𒑜  GC=Nl    5/6=NV  SC=Cuneiform    CUNEIFORM NUMERIC SIGN FIVE SIXTHS DISH
U+1245D ‭ 𒑝  GC=Nl    1/3=NV  SC=Cuneiform    CUNEIFORM NUMERIC SIGN ONE THIRD VARIANT FORM A
U+1245E ‭ 𒑞  GC=Nl    2/3=NV  SC=Cuneiform    CUNEIFORM NUMERIC SIGN TWO THIRDS VARIANT FORM A
U+1245F ‭ 𒑟  GC=Nl    1/8=NV  SC=Cuneiform    CUNEIFORM NUMERIC SIGN ONE EIGHTH ASH

@Robusto Sometimes you can reason out why the showrunners do things in a particular way given their very real resource constraints of time, money, and the very limited capacity of their viewership to hold more than three names or faces in their minds for the space of a week.

And sometimes you can’t.

Well, to be fair, I think Martin asks you to hold a few more than three names in your head.

He rivals Pasternak for confusing the reader with names, in fact.

They got together with Martin for a long week and plotted out the entire tapestry of plot arcs from beginning to end. Of course there was way too much. So they then rewove stuff to use fewer threads to get to the same finale.

They kill off either 4 or 5 characters in S05 who don’t get killed in the books.

But anything that abridges books 4 and 5 is a good thing.

I’m very much hoping the entire Ironborn line is excised.

Which one is Ironborn again?

Exactly.

Theon Greyjoy’s people.

Oh. I don't think they can get rid of that one. Theon is Ramsay's stooge now.

Or victim, or however you want to call it.

You might say the Greyjoy disease has metastasized.

His uncles. Damphair the crazy priest. Euron the one-eyed madman who hired a faceless man to kill Balon, Theon's dad. Victarion the halfwit sailing to meet Dany with a dragon-controlling horn that kills its blower.

But yeah, I hated that whole thread. Just a bunch of S&M crap.

I’m not sure how she’s going to get her army to Westeros without Victarion’s fleet though.

Euron's lips are blue from drinking that stuff the warlocks drink. Not a good sign.

It's so obvious what the conclusion of this has to involve, yet they keep stringing us along, waiting for . . . what, exactly?

Should have been three books.

Has Martin learned nothing from Tolkien? Apparently that's the case.

Tolkien’s craft improved as he grew older.

Martin’s has deteriorated.

Well, he never had any craft to start with.

Which tells you there was no craft there to start with.

jinx

Just an imagination and no memory.

He never worked on a story line, he just invented new stuff to tack onto it.

I blame some of it on word processors.

As Truman Capote said about another writer, "That's not writing, that's typing."

That.

I once did some semi-off-the-cuff corpus analytics on the first five books. It is clear that Martin is getting much worse, much more repetitive, much more hackneyed.

By "clear", I mean I have numbers to back up that position, not just my own intuition.

Where do you get the text to crunch? Is that available online?

Russia.

Heh. Of course.

@Robusto I consider it a great craft, and even magic, to write up a whopping five million pages where every single sentence has the exact same grammatical structure.

If that ain't craftsmanship, then nothing is.

Always the contrarian.

John said blah. Paul looked grimly. They rode on. Lights shone in the distance. The winter was coming.

I couldn't keep that up even for just one page.

I'm already exhausted.

It takes a wordsmith to smith one million identical sentences.

@Robusto Martin and Pasternak combined ain't got nothing on Solzhenitsyn. Try The Gulag Archipelago. A giant phone book, the size of five giant phone books, and all the names are Russian. Torture.

@RegDwigнt I read it in English. Maybe they sanitized it by then.

Or maybe you were already insane by then.

To comma or not to comma?

I'm leaning towards the first.

@RegDwigнt That possibility cannot be overlooked.

@terdon 1

But clearly that makes you squeamish, so try "We never rank p-values, but simply use a threshold below which those values are considered significant."

Or the or whatever.

Or such values, etc.

@Robusto Ah, yes. That's better, thanks.

@terdon You might also want to say "below which those values are considered not significant."

Or insignificant.

Because I think that's what you really mean.

All solid advice, but really you should just write "We never rank p-values, but simply use a threshold below which nobody even reads this shit so what do I care".

@RegDwigнt I wish. Unfortunately, this is in reply to a reviewer who actually will read it.

It's bad enough that everyone sends everyone else their WFH messages in email, but when you send "WFH <eom>" as the title, why bother to include a message body? Do you not know what <eom> is supposed to mean?

It is supposed to mean "meow", but people can't spehl.

Spehl should somehow be a German word.

Well, if that's your threshold, every word is a German word somehow.

Below that threshold, nobody even ranks p-values.

Schlank Shady

@RegDwigнt No: 'quince' will never be a German word. Never.

It is an Austrian word, however, so you can't prevent it from going back Heim ins Reich.

Ich quince, du quinst, er wird gequincet worden sein.

@RegDwigнt Oder er wird gequincet worden werden.

meine Kreditkarte am meisten funktioniert nicht, 's gibt keinen Giropay für Deutsche Bank, und ich weiß nicht was the fuck ist 'Sofort'

warum ist es mir so schwer in Deutschland zu zahlen

Seriously, why ask us?

möchten die Leute nicht mein Geld?

alle möchten BAR

@GeorgePompidou It means "right now, immediately" . . .

das ist nicht so klug! für die Deutsche, nonetheless

I know what sofort fucking means

I meant as a payment method

Bargeld ist zu alt

Bar jeder Hoffnung.

@GeorgePompidou Rule of thumb: if you know what something means, don't say you don't know what it means. QED

ich habe kein Bargeld

I do not know what Sofort means

I know what sofort means

rule of thumb, if you want to tell me what something means, don't pick a different thing than what I asked about

@GeorgePompidou well, you Doofie, next time just catch up on the transcript here, willya. I've been telling people for years that credit cards do not exist in Germany.

why the fuck not, they're so much better

I mean, who the fuck has a credit card, seriously? Only fat Americans do.

also, they for sure exist. I pay for all my Deutsche Bahn tickets with my credit card.

@GeorgePompidou they are not better, they make everything much more expensive for everyone. Even for people who don't have them.

mit Kreditkarte gibt es Sicherheit

It's really another Ponzi scheme.

Redistributing from the pockets of everyone into the pockets of three companies.

und sie sind bequem

@GeorgePompidou Ja, Sicherheit, daß Du beschissen wirst.

@GeorgePompidou eine Kreditkarte ist kein bißchen bequemer als keine.