English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

6:03 PM

Bats are way at the bottom here; rodents near the top:

Cerberus

Yes, I was browsering Wikipaedia as well.

I saw vleermuizen are closer to humans than to muizen.

To be honest, they don't really look like mice anyway.

tchrist

No, they look much more like vampires. :)

It's impossible to piece out names of taxa without Greek.

Cerberus

It seems their being a source of deadly viruses is not related to their vampyric habits.

tchrist

Eutherians, metatherians, monotremes.

@Cerberus Bats have curious immune systems.

Cerberus

Yes, I have just read about it.

tchrist

6:15 PM

NY Times: How do bats live with so many viruses?

> It turns out that they may have an immune system that lets them coexist with many disease-causing viruses.

> One bat can host many different viruses without getting sick. They are the natural reservoir for the Marburg virus, and Nipah and Hendra viruses, which have caused human disease and outbreaks in Africa, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Australia. They are thought to be the natural reservoir for the Ebola virus. They also carry the rabies virus, but in that case the bats are affected by the disease.

> Their tolerance of viruses, which surpasses that of other mammals, is one of their many distinctive qualities. They are the only flying mammals, they devour disease-carrying insects by the ton, and they are essential in the pollination of many fruits, like bananas, avocados and mangoes.

> Learning how they carry and survive so many viruses has been a deep question for science, and new research suggests that the answer may be how the bats’ evolutionary adaptations to flight changed their immune systems.

> The energy demands of flight are so great that cells in the body break down and release bits of DNA that are then floating around where they shouldn’t be. Mammals, including bats, have ways to identify and respond to such bits of DNA, which might indicate an invasion of a disease-causing organism. But in bats, they found, evolution has weakened that system, which would normally cause inflammation as it fought the viruses.

Bats have lost some genes involved in that response, which makes sense because the inflammation itself can be very damaging to the body. They have a weakened response b…

Cerberus

6:29 PM

nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/02/07/…

The Dutch article has quite a bit more information.

Lectoribus praesentibus futurisque.

tchrist

Through the eye? Like of a needle?

still reading

> Ze veroorzaken snotneuzen en keelpijn maar leiden zelden tot ernstige ziekte bij mensen

"Runny noses" I guess.

Cerberus

@tchrist Het oog van de naald = the eye of the needle, yes. When you have crept through that, you are incredibly lucky to have avoided danger.

tchrist

Or entered the kingdom of heaven.

Cerberus

@tchrist Yup. Snotty noses.

@tchrist Umm not in Dutch!

I didn't know you read Dutch that well!

tchrist

@Cerberus Matthew 19:24: And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

It's a very long article.

We really know so little about the new virus now at the beginning.

Are there superspreaders? What's the R0? Is there asymptomatic transmission? Are some more affected than others, and why?

What's the incubation period?

What's happening in North Korea?

Oh that article is from two days ago. Viral generations ago.

Hamreen Ahmad

6:43 PM

hi guys

tchrist

Hi ho the derry-o.

Hamreen Ahmad

i have a question

tchrist

Of course you do.

Ask and be not silent.

Cerberus

@tchrist Oh, religious stuff.

@tchrist Yeah, it's not about latest developments, but about the origin.

Hamreen Ahmad

some of the users of stackoverflow are seeing in the chat rooms day and night

tchrist

6:45 PM

@Cerberus I don't understand how you can be a pale grapher without familiarity with middle aged literature.

Hamreen Ahmad

is it a kind of job

or what

Cerberus

@tchrist Well, I would say it is praemediaeval.

tchrist

Where are your periods, my good sir? Or question marks, perhaps.

Cerberus

But your quotation did sound familiar, I must admit.

tchrist

@HamreenAhmad The only people whose job it is are the employees.

Cerberus

6:47 PM

I never actually studied Mediaeval literature.

Hamreen Ahmad

how to be employed?

Cerberus

Did some Mediaeval Latin and Mediaeval history in the course of my studies, of course.

Hamreen Ahmad

i like to share information with others

tchrist

@HamreenAhmad ?

That isn't the job of employees.

They neither create content nor curate it.

They just sell things.

Or hope to.

Are you a saleswoman?

A few of them help run their computers, but decreasingly many.

Hamreen Ahmad

iam male and iam cs graduated

and iam also a programmer assistant in my university

i like to do online jobs

especially in my speciality in SO

tchrist

6:50 PM

@HamreenAhmad iam iam cedant tristia

The majority of the company doesn't use the site. They are not programmers.

The community is not the company.

Anymore.

If ever.

The company itself does not create content. Nor curate it.

So if those are things you like to do, there is no paid position for it.

Hamreen Ahmad

whose those people in the chat rooms that answering questions of people?

Cerberus

Just people like yourself.

Hamreen Ahmad

i dont believe they were volunteer

tchrist

yuraitrung

It's "I" not "i". It's "don't" not "dont". It's probably "are" not "were". It's "volunteers" not "volunteer". And you need a period at the end of your sentence.

Hamreen Ahmad

iam poor in english

:d

tchrist

7:00 PM

But you're deliberately doing the wrong thing. Please don't.

Latin has a word "iam" but English does not.

Hamreen Ahmad

tchrist

And "english" means something you do in a billiards game. The word you meant to write is "English".

@HamreenAhmad = "Why are you writing it wrong?"

Hamreen Ahmad

i didnt know that

tchrist

@HamreenAhmad There is no word "i" in English, nor "didnt". And you still are forgetting your final full stop.

Whoever taught you to write like that didn't know English.

If you make punctuation mistakes in a programming language, the compiler won't do what you want it to do.

Same for errors in capitalization.

Hamreen Ahmad

English is my foreign language, its normal to make such mistakes

in programing language we have KeyWords

not punctuations

tchrist

7:04 PM

The contraction is spelled "it's".

I know no programming languages lacking marks of punctuation.

Semicolons, commas, quotation marks, parentheses, brackets, asterisks.

Cerberus

Yeah, cola and commata are common enough.

Robusto

9:07 PM

@tchrist Not snowing here. Pretty nice day, in fact.

RegDwigнt

> [name] posted the contest "Make the worst piece humanly possible" to "Classical Music Contests"
Must be more than 5 minutes
Make it sound horrible
Must be for viola, piccolo, & double bass
Winner gets a follow & promoted

tchrist

gross

RegDwigнt

9:36 PM

I'd be half-tempted to actually write a beautiful piece for that instrumentation just to troll everyone. Except that that group only has 37 members, so it's literally not worth the effort.

Five minutes is a lot. I'd need two weeks to a month for that.

(The composing, that is. The writing always takes exactly one minute, no matter the piece length.)

tchrist

agree

RegDwigнt

11:00 PM

Demolition à la russe:

Эксперты: при сносе СКК "Петербургский" были допущены фатальные ошибки

►

tchrist

@RegDwigнt Did they lose one?

RegDwigнt

@tchrist well, he literally — literally literally — spent the last hours of his life cutting off the branch he was sitting on. 130 feet above ground.

tchrist

Lossy operations aren't sustainable.

RegDwigнt

He did have a rope with him. But it was too short so he just left it dangling in the wind.

Also, as you can see in the video, he almost made it back into safety. Literally inches away from grabbing his colleague's hand and staying alive. He didn't make it because he spent a good second jumping over a fence. A fence that he could have easily cut down first, before starting his work.

Dude was 29 years old.

Youth is wasted on the young.

Cerberus

I heard "membrane" and "tragedy".

RegDwigнt

11:06 PM

It's a video. You can watch in addition to listening.

Cerberus

So the roof was supposed to go down, but it went too early?

Or what were they doing?

I watched.

RegDwigнt

Frankly I have no idea what it was supposed to do. And frankly I doubt any of the people involved had any idea.

Cerberus

Hmm.

One would expect people to plan such a demolition.

RegDwigнt

Basically the building was quite a marvel of engineering. Like 60 pillars along the perimeter, or however many. And to each of these pillars the roof was connected. Freely suspended from 60 attachment points.

Saint Petersburg Sports and Concert Complex

The Saint Petersburg Sports and Concert Complex (Russian: Спортивно-концертный комплекс «Петербургский», romanized: Sportivno-kontsertnyy kompleks «Peterburgskiy») was an arena in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In Soviet time, it was called V. I. Lenin Sport & Concert Complex (Russian: Спортивно-концертный комплекс им. В. И. Ленина, romanized: Sportivno-kontsertnyy kompleks im. V. I. Lenin). The complex was completed in 1979 and opened on May 19, 1980. Besides concerts, the arena was used for various sports, notably tennis, as it was the location of the St. Petersburg Open. Other sports events hosted...

You can see it really well in this picture.

So what they did, what they started doing, is cut off all those connections, one by one. But not like in a symmetric pattern, right. Not one here, then the one exactly opposite of it. No, just one at a time in a row.

So naturally when they disconnected like 10, all on the same side next to each other, the load was so skewed it had to collapse.

Cerberus

Then why did they do it that way...

RegDwigнt

11:12 PM

Keep in mind that there were no pillars inside or anything. It's a giant stadium. Those connections they were cutting, that was all that held the roof in place.

@Cerberus it's a great question, isn't it.

Cerberus

One would image such a big demolition to be planned in advance.

tchrist

Only if they had a camera.

RegDwigнt

That worker actually had a Go Pro attached to his helmet. I've seen the footage.

Anyway, yeah, that's why you heard membrane.

Because that roof was very much like a membrane on a kettle drum, say.

«Фонтанка» показывает глазами погибшего рабочего, как крышу СКК отпиливали за час до обрушения

►

There. Just a couple hours prior.

Watch through his own eyes how he decides to not attach the safety rope, and to not cut down the stupid fence that cost him the one second that made all the difference.

Cerberus

Alas.

Can't watch that, requires an account.

RegDwigнt

Dafuq, what really?

Oh because of the age restriction.

That'd also explain why there's not a single comment even though the comments are not disabled by the owner.

Well, get an account then. It's literally free and literally everyone has like five. For free.

tchrist

11:22 PM

This is too horrible.

RegDwigнt

I'm not sure how Cerberus is posting anyway. There's an actual hurricane sweeping across the Netherlands right now.

tchrist

You mean a bomb cyclone?

RegDwigнt

I'm sitting here behind two-foot-thick stone walls, in the middle of a street in the middle of a city made of stone. And even I am almost getting carried off to Kansas.

And he's sitting in the middle of 400 miles of open space where the highest mountain is lower than the lowest tree.

Cerberus

Oh, it's fine here.

It would be rather odd if this house suddenly collapsed after 350 years because of a storm.

RegDwigнt

Well. That's how wear and tear works. It doesn't work by working immediately. It works by working all of a sudden after 350 years.

But yeah. I'm actually not sure what path the storm has even taken.

I only heard of it a couple hours ago for the first time. Because I had to close the windows after things in the garden started to fall over and shatter into a thousand pieces.

I don't watch the news. And I most certainly don't check the weather.

I check the weather by going outside.

So anyway, now I did check the forecast, and it draws like two paths for the strongest winds, one in the north and one in the south, with a corridor in-between.

So if I mentally extend the two paths back west, Holland is pretty much in the corridor rather than on either of the paths.

But I dunno. No idea how any of it works.

Cerberus

11:35 PM

Oh, yeah, we've had warnings on the news for days.

RegDwigнt

Tomorrow is my younger godson's birthday, so the storm better calm down till then.

Cerberus

Today was code orange.

But I have just stayed inside.

RegDwigнt

Isn't it always code orange in the Netherlands?

Cerberus

I suppose it ought to be!

RegDwigнt

Cerberus

11:36 PM

@RegDwigнt Not if you inspect and repair every semicentury or so.

@RegDwigнt Ugh.

RegDwigнt

Yeah. Look at that one France fan. Hideous!

Allez home, les bleus !

Anyway yeah. I never understood being a fan of a sports team. Of a particular sportsman, yes. But football is not about being a fan of particular people. It's about being a fan of a piece of fabric.

The actual people playing change all the time. One day Joe Hisaishi plays for your team and you love him. The next day he plays for Manchester United and you suddenly hate him.

That's beyond retarded.

And that picture above just reminds me of that scene in The Life of Brian where a thousand people all shout in unison "yes, we are all different".

@Cerberus I'm not talking about houses collapsing anyway. This is not the US. Our houses have withstood hurricanes and fires and the plague and carpet bombings in world wars. They won't be knocked down by a gust of wind.

Cerberus

Yeah, I don't understand fanaticism about sports at all.

It's so utterly boring and plebeian.

RegDwigнt

I'm talking about the inconvenience of not being able to go to the store next corner. Because you go to the store next corner and you blink and you're in a Walmart in Kansas.

Cerberus

@RegDwigнt Exactly.

RegDwigнt

Or the inconvenience of public transport not working or whatever.

Cerberus

11:46 PM

@RegDwigнt I don't know about Kansas, but I went to a shop this afternoon. In the evening, though, it was quite a bit worse. But I stayed inside.

@RegDwigнt Sure. Or having to cycle. So it is nice of Zeus to do his act on a Sunday.

RegDwigнt

I can stay inside for another 14 hours. But then the little boy needs his birthday present.

@Cerberus is it Zeus? Not Poseidon?

Cerberus

@RegDwigнt He rules the sea.

But Zeus rains.

RegDwigнt

Yeah but what about the wind. Especially wind coming specifically from the seas.

Cerberus

In Greek, you can say "it rains", or "Zeus rains", with the same meaning.

RegDwigнt

Or is that the domain of some other guy altogether, like Apollo or what do I know.

Cerberus

11:48 PM

Zeus also sends lightning.

RegDwigнt

Yes, yes. All nice. But this is wind.

Cerberus

Apollo is mostly of the sun.

Aeolus is of the winds.

RegDwigнt

Ah. There you go.

Of course.

Well he better use this occasion to play his harp. I'm not hearing any music!

Cerberus

Aeolus (Odyssey)

In Greek mythology, Aeolus (; Ancient Greek: Αἴολος, Aiolos [a͜ɪ́olos], Modern Greek: [ˈe.o.los] (listen) "quick-moving, nimble") was the keeper of the winds and king of the island of Aeolia, one of the abrupt rocky Lipara islands close to Sicily. Later classical writers regarded him as a god. == Family == Aeolus was the son of Hippotes, son of Mimas, a son of Aeolus, son of Hellen. He was most frequently conflated with Aeolus, the son of Poseidon, god of the sea. According to some accounts, Hippotes married the same Melanippe who was the mother of Arne.Like Aeolus, the son of Poseidon, this Aeolus...

RegDwigнt

Aeolian harp

An Aeolian harp (also wind harp) is a musical instrument that is played by the wind. Named for Aeolus, the ancient Greek god of the wind, the traditional Aeolian harp is essentially a wooden box including a sounding board, with strings stretched lengthwise across two bridges. It is often placed in a slightly opened window where the wind can blow across the strings to produce sounds. The strings can be made of different materials (or thicknesses) and all be tuned to the same pitch, or identical strings can be tuned to different pitches. Besides being the only strung instrument played solely by the...

Cerberus

11:50 PM

I hope he plays the harp.

RegDwigнt

That harp looks like a coffin.

Cerberus

Ah, those.

RegDwigнt

Well I've never seen this model.

Usually them's just harps standing outside in public places.

Something like this.

Or even this.

Cerberus

Fancy.

RegDwigнt

Yeah.

Or you just take your regular harp and put it outside.

I believe that's La Manche in the background.

Cerberus

11:54 PM

Hmm does it make a sound that way?

RegDwigнt

Well yes.

You just need to agitate the strings.

The sound from the strings is very faint anyway. That's what you have the resonance body for.

Cerberus

And the wind is enough, for a normal harp?

RegDwigнt

Well I still don't own a harp myself, alas. But this wouldn't be the perfect weather to check anyway.

In this kind of wind, even my violin or guitar would make a lot of noise.

In a fainter wind, certainly not.

Well maybe the violin a little.

I mean, you have to keep in mind that that's how the Ancient Greeks noticed it in the first place.

They just took their little regular harp outside and suddenly it would play in the wind.

Cerberus

I didn't know that was possible.

RegDwigнt

And the concert harps these days are specifically manufactured to hold their ground against a 120-strong symphony orchestra, so I wouldn't be surprised if they worked much better in the wind as well.

They're just generally much louder. Because of the huge resonance body.

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