English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

12:28 AM

@Mitch The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 prevented the sale of radioactive beverages.

12:41 AM

That must have been tough on people.

12:59 AM

It gives “light me up” a whole new meaning.

1:57 AM

isn't it nice if there are more hours in a day?

5:51 AM

Watch the countdown to the launch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon

7:52 AM

►

8:07 AM

Countries with the greatest installed capacity of wind power, in megawatts:

China - 236k
United States - 105k
Germany - 61k
India - 37k
Spain - 26k
United Kingdom - 24k
France - 17k
Brazil - 15k
Canada - 13k
Italy - 11k

I hope that China's economic improvement will be followed by a grassroots movement to throw off the criminal Communist regime and restore democracy.

9:19 AM

Official Russian Embassy comments in this way. This is the degradation of foreign relations services in Russia.

Thugocracy.

RegDwigнt

@Mitch alas, sum ppl need moar, akshully

> is there anyone be able to teach me piano especially in music sheets and I'm relay good at improvisation and free this would be awesome

10:00 AM

@RegDwigнt I have a lot of talent and I know it because I always work hard and am generally just a great guy. Can you teach me music? Like, not from the ground up, you literally have to dig the ground and put the foundations in

But I assure you that after you teach me everything, I will be very hardworking. 👍

10:19 AM

@M.A.R. What instrument do you want to play?

Soyuz vs. Crew Dragon: Why does SpaceX take so long to dock with the ISS?

11:14 AM

►

> Technically, the internal pressurized volume on Soyuz is 15% larger than on Crew Dragon. It's just split into 2 modules.

From comments section. So .. Soyuz is 50 years old and still very, very cool.

12:17 PM

I lack energy but feel reluctant to go get food to eat.

12:34 PM

People who prefer sensing tend to pay a great deal of attention to reality, particularly to what they can learn from their own senses. They tend to focus on facts and details and enjoy getting hands-on experience. Those who prefer intuition pay more attention to things like patterns and impressions. They enjoy thinking about possibilities, imagining the future, and abstract theories.

12:46 PM

I think I am an intuitional person.

I am not much interested in mundane things.

I am interested in fundamental sciences.

Myers–Briggs Type Indicator

12:59 PM

Giraffe weevil

The giraffe weevil (Trachelophorus giraffa) is a weevil endemic to Madagascar. It derives its name from an extended neck, much like that of a giraffe. The giraffe weevil is sexually dimorphic, with the neck of the male typically being 2 to 3 times the length of that of the female. Most of the body is black with distinctive red elytra covering the flying wings. The total body length of the males is just under an inch (2.5 cm), among the longest for any attelabid species. The extended neck is an adaptation that assists in nest building and fighting. To breed, females roll and secure a leaf of the...

The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective self-report questionnaire indicating differing psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. The test attempts to assign four categories: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. One letter from each category is taken to produce a four-letter test result, like "INFJ" or "ENFP". Most of the research supporting the MBTI's validity has been produced by the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, an organization run by the Myers-Briggs Foundation...

> Independent sources have called the test "little more than a Chinese fortune cookie",[5] "pretty much meaningless",[6] "one of the worst personality tests in existence,"[7] and "the fad that won't die".[8]

if you want food, you still need to wait it to be heated.

1:34 PM

@CowperKettle yeah pretty annoying TBH

@CowperKettle I was kidding, I was mocking people like the one Reg quoted

@CowperKettle imagine evolving to consider longer necks sexy

> In the U.S., more than one-fourth of the population has been fully vaccinated and supplies are so robust that some states are turning down shipments. The access gap is prompting calls for the U.S. to start shipping vaccine supplies to poorer countries.

This is good. India clearly needs all the vaccine it can get.

Yeah everyone honestly

But when the US is giving aid it's often everyone - Iran

but still

10 Things People Say in Appalachia

2:27 PM

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I do think "kilt" is the past tense of "kill" in Appalachian—not an affix to the present tense.

2:42 PM

@CowperKettle A noble sentiment, but I can't imagine what kind of a movement would be needed to loose those shackles. It would likely involve death and mayhem on a scale unmatched even by the Taiping Rebellion.

Has America shipped any vaccines to other countries yet?

3:37 PM

@Cerberus I see lots of editorials to do so.. but I haven't heard of them doing it yet.

@CowperKettle As with any measure, it is oversimplified. So in its extremes it can be 'accurate' (eg if you score consistently in the 4 directions then it is somewhat predictive of other things. But unfortunately it is binary rather than continuous so there's little accounting for 'in the middle'.

Like BMI, if you're over 40 then it's highly correlated of problems (like hypertension, heart disease, type II diabetes. But body builders can also have high BMI (muscle mass giving them high weight). So you just have to be aware of extremes and context.

OCEAN (or Big 5 Personality traits is supposedly more scientific. It starts from Meyers Briggs (which was basically an educated guess by Jung) but then (however it was set up) used scientifically discovered dimensions of personality. Also it is continuous.

@Xanne Government intervention! Restricting freedoms!

1906? I didn't know they knew of the health problems of radioactivity by then. I thought it was only by the 30's that they realized.

@Xanne What? How dare you!

What gave you that impression? Did I do something to you?

4:02 PM

@Mitch Later than that doctors gave my sister radium treatments for a birthmark when she was a child.

4:15 PM

@Mitch OK I didn't think so either.

4:50 PM

> در رود
ماهی است
در من
تنهائی
علیرضا روشن

A poem in Farsi

"There is fish in the river, there is loneliness in me"

@CowperKettle More grammatical: "There are fish in the river ..." Fish is singular and plural, but when used in the singular it requires an article: "There is a fish in the river ..." etc.

Certain animal names are used as singular and plural, without much rhyme or reason. For example, you can have 15 deer or 15 fish or 15 elk, but you have 15 monkeys or 15 turtles or 15 owls.

Looks like irregular heartbeat is more commonly used than heartbeats

5:05 PM

Yeah, but heartbeat is—I don't know the term—some kind of emblematic usage.

For example, someone might say "He went to Canada to hunt bear" but "He killed two bears there."

When referring to a class the singular is often used, as in heartbeat vs. heartbeats.

do you like to study at dorm? No.

where else can you go to sit to study? unknown.

the institute is far from the dorm so that you wouldn't want to take a bus to there.

5:21 PM

@Cerberus Anger and envy over US vaccine abundance

the best thing is to be given utilizable time.

5:37 PM

How many Putin's policemen does it take to arrest a single old lady..

In my city, an old woman was arrested in a similar manner for standing with a sign.

Meanwhile, the city is pockmarked with illegal parking lots where the mob forces people to pay for parking overnight, and the police does nothing. This is Putin's rule of law for you. This is "stability".

> In March, the United States, Britain and members of the European Union blocked a World Trade Organization proposal backed by roughly 80 nations, including India and South Africa, to waive patent protections for coronavirus vaccines.

This is indeed outrageous.

Apr 17 at 16:10, by Cerberus

> Overall, 77 million doses have been [exported] from the European Union since early December, 88 million will have been distributed internally by the end of the week, and 62 million shots have been administered within the bloc, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.

While Europe has exported more than 20 million doses to Britain — no longer an E.U member — the bloc has so far sent fewer than 16 million doses to Germany, which is more populous.

Britain has exported no vaccine doses back to the European Union, according to E.U. officials.

Of those 77 million doses, I think I read 16 million had been sent to Covax, but I might misremember.

So I think the big vaccine exporters, India and Europe, are right to complain about the American export ban; but the destructive behaviour of Europe (and others) regarding patents is worse than an export ban, because no countries gain anything from that, it's just like...vandalism.

Or I suppose a few rich people at those pharmaceutical multinationals get even richer from this vandalism.

6:01 PM

I'm going to tell a joke about paper.
On a second thought, I won't.
It's tearable.

6:14 PM

Putin's terror: 26-yo activist from Vladivostok arrested under trumped-up charges, may face two convictions

Řídící

6:43 PM

Must 'trimming' mean a reduction if you are talking about a financial holding? Or can it be an increase as well (cf. sailing)?

And, if only used for reduction, what would be the antonym?

So, I'm looking for the word that means 'increasing something to get it just right'.

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in title (98): What's the proper name for this pectoral muscles movement? by Matt Pelvin on english.SE

7:27 PM

@Řídící If you use it that way, it would be advisable to state the context, either overtly or as an explicitly nautical reference.

@CowperKettle Apparently everyone wanted ownership in the "collar" ... so they can be seen as loyal little lickspittles to Putin's terror regime.

7:39 PM

@Cerberus Intellectual property . . . not protecting it reduces its creation.

Anyway this idea that if you send us vaccine, we should send you vaccine is just weird. What makes this a reciprocal relationship? WHO seems tno do some good work but is heavily devoted to extracting from the rich to give to the poor and calling China poor.

@Xanne That is a kind of myth.

It can be a means to that end, but an extremely inefficient means.

In most cases, it reduces innovation.

@Xanne One idea behind this is that total production is the most efficient if each manufacturer does what he does best.

So you could e.g. have some raw materials sent from China to Europe, where the vaccine is produced using some catalyst from America, and then it is bottled in India.

That is how medical supply chains often work.

Currently, those chains are being disrupted.

Oh, of course.

Whether rightly so or wrongly, it is not always easy to say.

But it is why those bans reduce production.

And there is also the spirit of coöperation and the concerted effort of humanity that is being compromised.

Of course nobody expected the rich countries to share all vaccines aequally from the beginning.

But.

It is a national defense responsibility to protect supply chains, which many nations ignore. Then they cry over it when the gas pipelines get shut down.

In peacetime, the supply chains of medicines are in urgent need to reëvaluation.

The current system as used in the production of normal medicines is too vulnerable.

But I would say this is not the time to go overboard with nationalism.

7:51 PM

@Cerberus Ursula vdL is trying to justify poor decisions. She should admit, apologize, fix, go on from there.

What decisions?

Perhaps Europe has been too nice, exporting 77 million doses while only administering fewer than that to its own citizens.

Well, it is hard in a crisis to say just what is the perfect response.

And perhaps Europe should have taken more control of production lines and factories.

But it is hard to do that, when the member states don't really want it.

Remember, Brussels does not have much power.

“Europe” does not export anything. Governments regulate, interfere, prevent fulfillment of contracts, embargo, whatever. They can make contracts for delivery. The EU was late to make contracts.

You don’t want to accept that sometimes the wonderful EU makes mistakes.

I don't understand.

Mar 26 at 20:30, by Cerberus

@Xanne Perhaps nobody has a complete picture yet. But it seems 77 vaccine doses have been exported from the EU (of which 21 million to Britain, and how many to Israel and America?), while only 66 million have been administered in the EU. And no vaccines have been allowed to be exported to the EU (all countries mentioned have export blocks, I believe, not only of vaccines but probably also of components). So perhaps you can understand why the EU is finally making a fist like the other blocs.

This is what I read in the papers.

7:57 PM

Never mind. Sorry.

@Xanne Late contracts: I believe the contract with A-Z was signed the day before Britain's contract.

And I certainly do think the EU makes mistakes.

One is CETA and TTIP.

Another is the so called Right to Forget.

Another is the weakened Internet Neutrality.

Maybe A-Z, not Pfizer & Moderna.

Biontech (Pfizer) has been reliable in its deliveries, I believe.

No problems there.

Moderna is coming from outside Europe, so I don't think anybody expected much larger quantities?

Actually, it must be produced here, or it would not be allowed to ship outside America.

Even so, I've not heard anyone complain about Moderna's deliveries.

Nor about Janssen (J&J).

The US contracted with six firms to whether or not the vaccine was successful in May 2020. You have to filter or figure out what is anti-Trump vs. what is true. This is difficult, but media bias is not new.

Trump?

What does this have to do with Trump?

8:03 PM

@Cerberus but usually news tells you bad things and forgets to update you on the good things that have started to happen.

I don't know how many producers the EU contracted, but it must be at least Biontech, A-Z, Janssen, Moderna. Probably others.

@Mitch Very true.

@Robusto cripes. like doctors in the fifties saying 'smoking is good for you', or that snorting asbestos gets rid of allergies.

Oh, I'm pretty sure the EU has also contracted Cure Vac.

@Cerberus The leader at the time is blamed for bad things. Covid bad -> Trump bad. But the news (usually) fails to mention that US vaccine production started and was aided under the T-man.

@Mitch The 1906 act is more concerned with fraud, cheating—with diluting the snake oil rather than whether it works. Like most controls, it’s interested in the protection of existing businesses (in this case farmers) than anything else. Maybe you teach math?

8:06 PM

Don't get me wrong, that guy was awful for almost every reason.

The 1906 act is Department of Agriculture, after all.

@Mitch Sure, but what are you saying? Nobody thinks America was sitting on its hands under Trump, at least not with respect to the preparation of vaccine production.

@CowperKettle at some point it's not Putin himself that is 'afraid'. But it is a whole set of people in government at high and low levels who feel like being bullies. That said, I figure the build up near Ukraine is all Putin.

I’m just trying to say that because European firms export vaccine to GB, GB should export vaccine to them. What is this, Valentine’s Day?

@Xanne That's very cynical but that does sound very "early 1900's"

@Xanne But yes, I do (sometimes) teach mathy things (stats and ML).

8:12 PM

@Mitch ML?

@Xanne machine learning

Oh heavy.

@Mitch Certainly there are other considerations, but regulatory capture is well-established, and not just in the early 20th.

I mean, I don’t want beef from Chernobyl.

Not deep math ML, closer to "here's a picture that's sorta like how it works, go figure out the single Python command that has all that under the hood" ML

@Xanne So what you are saying is, needlessly circulating vaccines between countries doesn't make sense, right?

@Xanne Well...certainly not beef liver.

8:16 PM

So you’re a programmer?

No mad cow from GB either.

@Cerberus Not really. I’m saying that the expectation that because X exports to Y, Y should export to X makes no sense.

@Xanne well... sort of... I've devolved from practicing to aspirational. More of a concepts guy than actually practical.

@Xanne Or camel breath from Oman.

ew

Is camel's breath usually bad? I think it's usually bad.

@Mitch A concepts guy . . . like a consultant? Here’s how you might do it if you want to put your nose to the grindstone?

@Xanne So you are saying Europe should have banned exports to England?

@Xanne I explain what happens inside the black box using pictures and hand waving, then students are told to go use the black box in almost identical ways to all the other black boxes they're using.

I have no experience with camel’s breath, but I avoid Chipotle.

Handwaving! Always an effective method.

8:26 PM

eg "SVM is like putting a line between two sets of points so that it minimizes the distance of the nearest points to the line. Look up the docs for calling it but it's something like SVM(X, Y, some hyperparameters)" (pretty much the same for other methods).

Sounds like statistics.

@Xanne Failing memory tells me I've been face-to-face with a camel and the most striking thing is how ugly they are up close, like every face in the Star Wars cantina all mushed together, so ugly that if they had bad breath it'd probably make them more likeable.

@Xanne It -is- statistics (a kind of stats). Except people who label themselves ML tend to deny it or at least make a big deal out of listing the differences.

I have a picture of myself riding an elephant in Thailand, but no memory of it.

@Mitch I think I’m getting the idea.

it's basically "regression that is not least squares that was invented by people outside of stats departments and has no theory to support its quality"

But...

the ML methods tend to outshine the basic stats methods

@Mitch I remember you said once the machine processes given data but not new data, which surprised me. That’s why an algorithm developed to select programmers rejected women per se and had to be junked.

9:03 PM

@Cerberus map of Netherlands at 1st century AD (left) and 10th c (right). sea level rising, but also identifiable cities.

@Xanne 1) most methods nowadays are still 'give it a single data set all at once and compute the model (the line that fits it)'. There are some methods that are 'incremental' (one instance at a time, but those aren't that common.

2) I think the reason behind the 'favoring dudes over dudettes' thing was due to sampling bias (also called selection bias), that the sample of programmers used for training was highly skewed male (because the population is highly skewed that way (hm, so maybe it is called 'population bias' or 'historical bias', and the model 'learned' that maleness was a predictor of quality). I don't know if the population has changed much since then (past ten years?).

So the fix would be to be more balanced in the sample in case the population hasn't changed (if the population is changing then yes certainly having an 'on-line' algorithm would help with a stale model.

@Mitch Yes, I'm not so sure it was the sea rising at that moment: the sea had risen earlier, and it was still busy pounding away all the land that it claimed for itself.

There was a large breach of the sea into the the Almere (the large semi-closed lake in the middle of the map) in the 11th century which accelerated things.

But by then engineering has progressed enough to keep most of the land, and in the 13th century large areas were reclaimed, I believe.

Actually, it was a complex process of may stages.

RegDwigнt

9:39 PM

@Cerberus what would be an idiomatic way of saying in Dutch, "Dutch lyrics by X"?

Right now I have "Nederlandse tekst van Arie Van Der Ent".

I'm not sure about the preposition, and I'm not sure about the rest.

Thanks.

(Doesn't have to be "lyrics", can be "translation".)

@M.A.R. I can teach you anything at all that I'm better at than yourself, but I'm finding this Internet thingie exceptionally useless for that purpose.

Music in particular is a very hands-on thing.

One hour with a meh teacher sitting next to you may well teach you more than two months' worth of chatting with Daniel Barenboim.

And I'm not even Daniel Barenboim.

10:20 PM

@RegDwigнt Sounds OK. Tekst is commonly used with song texts. In case there might be confusion as to whether it is about the text of a song or something else, you could use liedtekst. For operas you would probably use libretto.

The praeposition van suggests origin. The praeposition door would suggest an effort was made to produce the text, because it emphasises the action of writing.

For the translation of a book, your would certainly use door.

If you received the text from Arie, and you're not sure who wrote it, or it doesn't matter, then use van.

If Arie is Flemish, write Van; if Dutch, van.

10:46 PM

codereview.stackexchange.com is a SE network for code review. Is there an analogous SE site for reviewing English writing?

10:57 PM

@jsuth I don't think so: you would normally have to pay someone to do that.

@Cerberus Thanks–it didn't seem like such a thing existed but I figured I'd check. It's interesting if people are willing to review code for free but not English writing.

11:21 PM

@jsuth Yes, I wonder why that is.

Perhaps because it's harder to correct natural language, because it is so much more complex?

Or because spotting an error in code is more rewarding, as it is very clear when you 'solve' a problem?

@Cerberus I'm not a skilled enough writer for my opinion to be worth much, but I'd guess that it could work effectively for a certain scope. Reviewing beginner to intermediate writing (thinking of ESL folks) of limited length probably involves fairly common objective errors.

I don't see why they would be that different.

Yes, simple errors should be simple enough to spot.

But they are boring.

Maybe reviewing code is more interesting for the reviewer.

I can certainly imagine and remember instances being boring though

Haha yes.

Then again, simple programming errors aren't very interesting either.

But I suspect the fact that something either works or it doesn't in code makes it more rewarding to solve the problem.

Maybe I should find a skilled writing reviewer who wants coding help and do an exchange.

11:36 PM

With language, the 'client' will probably not appreciate how good your improvements are.

Haha I'll contact you when I need code reviewed!

How does 10,000 lines of spaghetti code sound to you?

Sounds like another day at the office

Fun.

Sometimes the code review post will ask why something doesn't work but often it will be that they implemented something in a way where the design could be improved. There's a lack of abstractions. Or they aren't familiar with certain language features. There's a lot of overlap with aspects of writing skills.

I suppose so.