English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:42 AM

@tchrist: We had over a thousand new cases today. That is a record now.

12:57 AM

@Mitch “Why are you asking me” : well there are three reasons for that, one is that you were discussing something about Article 15 which I read afterwards and found something new. The second reason is that I really want to read and understand the constitution bcoz they say whole government works by following the rules of The Constitution. The third reason is that you concurred to talk about it.

Regarding your point number 1, I tried reading the constitution but the terms used in it are quite hard to comprehend by yourself and it is very theoretical too. Law books are sometimes easier to read than the actual constitution. Did you have any similar experience?

SmokeDetector

2:15 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, offensive body detected, offensive title detected, potentially bad keyword in body, potentially bad keyword in title, +1 more (251): (potentially offensive title -- see MS for details) by user404097 on english.SE

tchrist

3:07 AM

@Robusto Yeah, yesterday was incredibly bad, and the exploding growth continues unabated.

Gee you'd think that might affect voters who have yet to vote.

Meanwhile, Russia is attacking all our hospitals. I mean it.

SmokeDetector

4:39 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Few unique characters in answer, mostly punctuation marks in answer, repeating characters in answer (203): How would you describe poor/bad family relations? by wdsawdsa wadsawdsa on english.SE

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SmokeDetector

5:37 AM

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CowperKettle

10:17 AM

> In some patients allopurinol is ineffective even in its maximum dose.

in or at its maximum dose?

@tchrist Russia is attacking hospitals?

CowperKettle

10:36 AM

CowperKettle

10:57 AM

Word of the day: QD (once daily; quaque die)

Matt E. Эллен

sounds like a duck based thriller: Quack Quack, Die

CowperKettle

11:12 AM

Apparently quaque is "once"

I wonder how it is pronounced

Matt E. Эллен

I would guess /kwɒ'kweɪ/ but I have no idea.

I mean, Latin is dead, so you can pronounce it how you like, there are no native speakers to correct you

Don't tell @Cerberus I said that

Mitch

11:31 AM

@Robusto @Cerberus All this information has been brought to you by "I'M TOTALLY MAKING THIS SHIT UP AS I GO ALONG" Thursdays.

Friday is 'anything goes'

@KnightwantsLoongback All very reasonable.

But just so you get the context 'Article 15' is in reference to the Indian Constitution or rather my only awareness of it through the movie Article 15 which was totally about the difficulties of the caste system in terms of a very particular crime investigation.

So my mention of Article 15 has very little to do with the US Constitution, which I gather was your intention.

But the context way well be irrelevant since you are concerned about rules and laws and such as to whether you can read them.

@KnightwantsLoongback My experience is that the (or any constitution) is just as hard to read as any other legal document, with all their presumed definitions and weird outdated vocabulary.

RegDwigнt

12:40 PM

So for comparison,

Oct 12 at 11:37, by RegDwigнt

Matt E. Эллен

I see they moved all the infected people into one place

the surrounding areas are cleared of infection now, right?

tchrist

1:14 PM

@CowperKettle Crazy, I know.

Robusto

1:25 PM

@tchrist How?

Oh, ransomware attacks.

That is low, even for them.

Faheem Mitha

1:58 PM

@Mitch Apparently someone appointed you to Constitution support duty.

CowperKettle

@tchrist How does Russia attack hospitals? Is it some joke?

@MattE.Эллен There must be some specialists who know how the ancient Latins pronounced it.

tchrist

@CowperKettle Apparently it’s some sort of criminal computer strike force from there.

> Russian-speaking cybercriminals in recent days have launched a coordinated attack targeting U.S. hospitals already stressed by the coronavirus pandemic with ransomware that analysts worry could lead to fatalities.

In the space of 24 hours beginning Monday, six hospitals from California to New York have been hit by the Ryuk ransomware, which encrypts data on computer systems, forcing the hospitals in some cases to disrupt patient care and cancel noncritical surgeries, analysts said.

The criminals have demanded a ransom ranging upward of $1 million to unlock the system, and some hospitals…

There's more to the article than that. And you can find coverage about it in other newspapers.

Captain Bohemian

Do you like working remotely?

CowperKettle

@tchrist Can't the hospitals just set up a firewall?

@CaptainBohemian No.

tchrist

@CowperKettle They aren't as good at that as the Trickbot gang is at disrupting them.

Captain Bohemian

2:08 PM

I prefer to work in office.

tchrist

@CaptainBohemian Probably the assumed element missing from that simple statement is “...with lots of other people physically present at that same office.”

> A woman in Germany died last month when the hospital she went to for emergency care turned her away because it had suffered a ransomware attack. She died en route to another facility. It is unclear whether Ryuk was involved in that case, which is said to represent the first death linked to ransomware.

The attacks have shut down some procedures at Sky Lakes Medical Center in Klamath Falls, Ore., spokesman Tom Hottman said. The hospital is unable to offer cancer treatments that are computer-controlled, and the attack has curbed some diagnostic imaging as well. Doctors and nurses have turne…

CowperKettle

@CaptainBohemian I would prefer not to work. If I had a lot of money, I would just study.

tchrist

The trials and tribulations of traditional office work have been poignantly satirized by the Dilbert comic strip by Scott Adams.

9

A: What do we know about Vulgar Latin pronunciation?

It turns out, we know quite a bit about this! There are three main sources for Vulgar Latin pronunciations: Classical texts imitating (or mocking or correcting) Vulgar speech, graffiti from actual plebs, and reconstruction from the Romance languages. For the first of those, we have bits by Petr...

Appendix Probi

The Appendix Probi ("Probus' Appendix") is a palimpsest appended to the Instituta Artium, a work written in the 3rd or 4th century AD. The text survives only in a carelessly transcribed water-damaged manuscript of the 7th or 8th century. In the past, it was attributed to Valerius Probus, but that is now considered wrong. The surviving manuscript is believed to have been transcribed at Bobbio Abbey, and it is currently kept at the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III.The Appendix lists common mistakes in the written Latin of the time. In those mistakes, tendencies in the grammar, spelling...

Many of the “mistakes” which that ancient document importunes against indeed became standard in Latin’s modern-day descendents.

> porphireticum marmor non purpureticum marmur
tolonium non toloneum
speculum non speclum
masculus non masclus
vetulus non veclus
vitulus non viclus
vernaculus non vernaclus
articulus non articlus
baculus non vaclus
angulus non anglus
iugulus non iuglus
calcostegis non calcosteis
septizonium non septidonium
vacua non vaqua
vacui non vaqui
cultellum non cuntellum
Marsias non Marsuas
cannelam nun canianus
Hercules non Herculens
columna non colomna
pecten non pectinis
aquaeductus non aquiductus
cithara non citera

So something like baculus non vaclus shows that (1) b and v were conflated (2) the short u between c and l was being lost in proparoxytonic words (meaning those whose stress fell on the antepenult, as was the norm in Latin).

Knight wants Loong back

2:31 PM

@Mitch Thanks. That helped me a lot, maybe you don’t realise that but your words “it is as hard as any other legal document” said it all in very less words.

Cerberus

2:49 PM

@MattE.Эллен !!! How dare you.

@CowperKettle It means something like "any, every". Both words, quaque die, are in the ablative, together meaning "on every day".

It is pronounced like /'kwa.kwe 'di.e/.

(The exact vowels I'm not sure about.)

Cerberus

3:03 PM

Excess deaths.

The short peak around week 30ish is from the summer heat.

But the current peak is that of the second wave of the epidemic.

Blue line: expected deaths
Red line: actual deaths

JTP - Apologise to Monica

3:17 PM

The concept first came to my attention after a hurricane hit Puerto Rico. Initial deaths seemed low, but week later, the number of "excess deaths" were released. The same issue with total Covid deaths in the US, the true number is probably far higher than reported.

CowperKettle

@Cerberus Thank you!

Mitch

@CowperKettle "Where have you been for a week back?" is not grammatical English nowadays (I don't recognize it but maybe it's OK in the UK?

CowperKettle

In the Russian city of Omsk, ambulances staged an impromptu demonstration by driving to the center, to the local Health Ministry building, and waiting there, because they carried covid sufferers for whom there was no beds available in all of Omsk.

The next day, the Ministry of Health issued an order prohibiting all healthcare workers from making any public statements about covid.

Mitch

To say what I think is it trying to say is "Where have you been for the past week?" or "Where have you been this week?". You would not say "Where have you been since a week?" (not grammatical). You might say "Where have you been for a week?" but that's a bit iffy.

CowperKettle

@Mitch It's from a Twitter account that posts 19th century British jokes from old newspapers

Mitch

3:29 PM

@CowperKettle I would also point out that sometimes jokes take liberties in order to force the joke. It may well have been ungrammatical then too in the UK.

Knock knock jokes are awful in this regard.

@CowperKettle There's kind of that situation in the US but by 'other means'. Supposedly lots of health care workers have 'non-disclosure' agreements with their employers meaning they can't give out work-place info to the public or they might be sued. But that doesn't stop nurses from making anonymous statements to journalists.

CowperKettle

I came across a journal that somewhy is not indexed by PubMed longdom.org/brain-disorders-therapy.html

The article I came across though is well-written. Strange.

Mitch

@KnightwantsLoongback Glad I could help.

CowperKettle

@Mitch Russian doctors cannot make public any details of a person's health status, but this new order concerns even the general kinds of statements about covid.

For instance, statements about hospitals being overloaded and so on.

Mitch

@FaheemMitha I think the main guy had to step down because of some scandal. I'm just an Acting Constitutional Scholar, with no confirmation process in place or expected.

Matt E. Эллен

@Mitch not OK in the UK

Mitch

3:38 PM

@CowperKettle Oh yeah sure there are all sorts of American laws about restricting making public any individual's health status (HIPAA compliance). But I don't think there are any laws here restricting info about like whether all the ICUs are full.

@MattE.Эллен makes notes

@KnightwantsLoongback I actually find the (US) constitution easier to read than every day legal documents like a rental agreement or non-disclosure agreement. The vocab in the later and the manner of elocution get pretty convoluted, all presumably in order to be explicit about meaning but it ends up being only legible by lawyers.

Matt E. Эллен

Peck's Bad Boy And His Pa, 1883, Chapter XIV

> "Where have you been for a week back," asked the grocery man of the bad boy.

they talked weird back then

and it's not a joke about a weak back, either :(

that's the only hit in all of duckduckgo

RegDwigнt

3:55 PM

Boby Lapointe Ta Katie t'a quitté (sur scène)

►

@Robusto this is fucking fantastic. You don't need to understand French. In fact it's even better if you don't. Wait for the refrain.

Robusto

4:08 PM

@Cerberus: "Always the same, always new" => semper idem, semper novum?

@RegDwigнt French patter song?

I am the very model of a modern major general!

►

An excellent patter song in English. And it's better if you do understand English. ^_^

Faheem Mitha

@Robusto Gilbert and Sullivan. Not dead, just resting.

Robusto

@FaheemMitha Indeed.

Mitch

4:44 PM

Voting: How it works and why it doesn't (2020)

►

Faheem Mitha

5:20 PM

@Mitch Or, how systems are lousy, and why we can't change them.

Mitch

@FaheemMitha The flip side of "plurality voting tends towards two party systems" is that none of those problems happen with two parties (ie Arrow's and Giibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility thms are only for 3 or mare candidates.

Faheem Mitha

@Mitch I don't understand what that sentence means, but I haven't actually watched the video.

And I know almost nothing about voting systems, except they don't usually work very well.

Apparently the system Debian uses is good though. Though I suppose it would be.

Mitch

6:06 PM

@FaheemMitha Oh. I'm referring to the contents, not what you think the title means.

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Mostly non-latin title, mostly punctuation marks in title, potentially bad keyword in body (113): __________ of rage by MaximumRIdeChick on english.SE

Faheem Mitha

6:20 PM

@Mitch Fair enough. Maybe I'll watch it eventually.

RegDwigнt

7:30 PM

@Robusto yeah the best I can tell, it's a tongue twister, but gosh darn it's the fineliest crafted I ever seen.

Which is why I said you best not understand a word. Only more impressive that way.

@Robusto that is fucking funny on even more levels than you will think, because I only first heard that melody from Randy Rainbow just a couple weeks ago, and now I know hwere it's from.

Mitch

Tom Lehrer: The Elements (concert live) (1959)

►

RegDwigнt

Tom Lehrer is old news. And has been for decades.

But yeah.

I consider myself quite knowledgeable about musicals, because I am, but it's just like with LEGO all over again.

No matter the size of your collection, there's always much bigger fish in the sea.

You own a thousand LEGO pieces? Whoa mate, there's only a hundred million people out there who own as many.

Wait, you say it's ten thousand now? Well, look, you're not even on the 10000th user page on Brickset sorted by the number of pieces.

Huh, what, it's a hundred thousand, you say? Look, dude, this guy right here has built the Cologne Cathedral out of twice that many pieces, and they all had to be in very specific colors, and yours are all over the place.

Okay, okay, you say you own a million now. Fine. Here's a link to someone who goes through ten times as many every single month. And his sculptures are in the Central Park in NY, and yours are not. Happy now?

Robusto

9:01 PM

@RegDwigнt Yeah, I saw the Randy Rainbow parody and knew immediately where it came from.

Robusto

9:27 PM

M.A.R.

@Robusto oh, speaking of that, any good updates as to what's happening, or has everything halted and everyone's dying of anticipation?

Normally these would be really, really important days right?

Robusto

@M.A.R. I am just so weary of all of it. I want 1) to get the results of the vote, 2) to have that vote elect Joe Biden, and 3) to bid adieu to the would-be dictator and his minions.

M.A.R.

One and two sound very likely, and three very unlikely.

But there would probably not be an imbecile like Trump anymore to fan the flames. Who knows, these things shift pretty fast.

What people care about will probably change in as soon as a decade. And who knows whether a life-changing major scientific revolution would arrive and keep people occupied

Robusto

9:45 PM

@M.A.R. Yeah. I have to hope for #3.

M.A.R.

@Robusto You could say as long as people still care too much about what others think or do, we'd be in roughly the same situation

Robusto

@M.A.R. I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

M.A.R.

@Robusto I mean it seems to me we're exposed way more often to what every random schmuck thinks, and naturally the more extreme views stand out, and people's reaction to this has been to care even more. Even slight variations in the ideologies people believe in are considered outrageous, some outright denounced

And it's just not social media per se, it's literally just how we live now. It sounds like the major focus for the general populace to improve in the world has shifted everywhere, except some parts in Africa and Asia, to differences in viewpoints, and people tolerate less simply because it's the moral thing to do now

Robusto

Oh, you're talking about social media? I don't have an opinion about that. I never ever wanted to have 5,000 "friends," so ...

@M.A.R. I think we are exposed right now to the random thoughts and predations of one person's (very dim, very malignant) world view. I don't care what a lot of people I don't know think about me or what I stand for.

Jan 30 '13 at 16:21, by Robusto

I just don't want to have "friends" like that. A friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend is someone who will help you move a body. A Facebook friend is someone who will find out where you moved the body and report you.

2

But I have to go start making dinner. We can talk more later.

M.A.R.

@Robusto Yeah, a big part of this in my opinion. I shouldn't give two shits what someone who hasn't seen Thai people thinks about them 2000 miles away, but people still do

@Robusto Cya

I should sleep too

RegDwigнt

10:34 PM

@Robusto the ratio of up- to downvotes of 18000 to 200 is well-deserved. An in every particular wonderful song, in every particular flawlessly delivered. I am envy.

> God, imagine rehearsing to THIS LEVEL of perfection only for your show to flop.

Word.

I always wondered where Randy Rainbow got all those incredible melodies from. The song writing is top-notch, and at an absurdly steady rate.

Thanks to you I now know. He just has many more LEGO pieces than me.

Cerberus

10:54 PM

@JTP-ApologisetoMonica Yeah, excess deaths are often the most reliable figure.

@Robusto Yes, that sounds good. Novum is neuter, idem is neuter or masculine; so this would apply to a neuter thing, "it".

Robusto

11:39 PM

@Cerberus Thanks!

Cerberus

What will you use this for?

Robusto

@Cerberus I was responding to a friend's email about two new songs by Elvis Costello. I said EC was "always the same, yet always new — semper idem, semper novum ." It sounded right to me at the time, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't a solecism.

Cerberus

Ah, I see.

No, it would sound fine to me.

Robusto

Good.

Muy bueno.

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