English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Robusto

01:11

> Congratulations! You solved Redactle Unlimited in 33 guesses with 75.76% accuracy and a time of 00:17:14!

I should have got this one sooner.

CowperKettle

01:57

Yale put on YouTube a course of lectures dedicated to the Special Operation. By prof. Timothy Snyder, published on 3 Sept.

Cerberus

#Worldle #234 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

CowperKettle

#Worldle #234 2/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨➡️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

Sheer luck

Cerberus

I understand, it's so far away from your country.

> He’s never going to resile from the ideas and passionate convictions, but the way he will bring them into his role as a constitutional monarch will be completely different.

CowperKettle

I remember the town of Ventspils in Latvia, because my grandfather arrived there with the Soviet army in late 1939.

Otherwise, I always confuse the three Baltic states

Happy New 1940, Wentspils

For some reason they wrote Wentspils instead of Ventspils

Cerberus

02:13

Your grandfather?

CowperKettle

Yes, Alexander Lukin

Captain of aviation

He flew a bombing mission over Germany right after the invasion in June 1941

I uploaded this New Year postcard he sent, to Wikimedia, for history's sake commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/…

Cerberus

I don't remember whether or not you resemble him.

CowperKettle

Facially, I resemble my Ukrainian grandma, at least used to resemble her in youth

Jilia Davis on Twitter is a great source of well-translated latest snaps of Putin's TV

Cerberus

Interesting.

CowperKettle

In the latest TV snaps, "analysts" on TV are stressing the lack of manpower in the Special Operation. Might be preparing public opinion for mobilization

Cerberus

02:30

Yeah.

Or just stretching their feelers out.

Robusto

03:43

@CowperKettle Just remember they're arranged from top to bottom in alphabetical order: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. It was very considerate of somebody to arrange them like that.

Cerberus

True.

I have them memorised phonetically, though.

From north to south, yes.

Robusto

It's a Baltic layer cake.

Kind of funny that in the game of Monopoly the cheapest properties on the board are Baltic and Mediterranean. These are the slums.

Nobody batted an eye at that. It was just understood that the slums were not for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Cerberus

What version of Monopoly is that?

And why would the Mediterranean be cheap?

Robusto

Italians.

That version of Monopoly is the original, which is still played in the US.

I'm sure they've adapted the street names to other countries' predilections.

Cerberus

The only version I know has Dutch cities, each with 2 or 3 streets.

Robusto

03:56

In 1930s America, Italians were often recent immigrants who resided in places like Hell's Kitchen in New York, and so on.

But actually the Monopoly streets were all streets in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

If I remember correctly.

Cerberus

I think Barcelona, Saint Tropez, Monaco, Portofino, the Amalfi coast, Myconos, Athens, Tel Aviv are not exactly cheap, by the way.

Robusto

> Parker Brothers began marketing the game on November 5, 1935.[11] Cartoonist F. O. Alexander contributed the design.[12] U. S. patent number US 2026082 A was issued to Charles Darrow on December 31, 1935, for the game board design and was assigned to Parker Brothers Inc.[13] The original version of the game in this format was based on the streets of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Cerberus

@Robusto Or, so there are streets in America named after Baltic countries/cities?

Robusto

@Cerberus No. Just the name Baltic.

Baltic Avenue or whatever.

Cerberus

Ahh.

Robusto

03:59

Mediterranean Avenue.

Cerberus

OK.

Then it's probably accidental.

Robusto

Well ...

The high-rent district included Park Place and Boardwalk.

Cerberus

So non-descript names?

Robusto

No. Actual names.

That's the original game board.

The British version has Whitechapel instead of Baltic. Which is/was a low-class area of London.

Cerberus

OK what I meant is that "Park" and "Boardwalk" are generic words, not proper names like "Baltic" or "Pennsylvenia".

I didn't mean they weren't real places in that city.

Robusto

04:11

OK.

But there is a tony redolence to Park Place and Boardwalk nonetheless.

Cerberus

By the way, the purple streets are actually not places in the Dutch version: "village street" and "village square", roughly.

Robusto

Hmm.

Cerberus

And each colour is a city, but purple is simply named "the village".

Tony?

Robusto

High-toned. "Marked by an elegant or exclusive manner or quality: a tony country club."

Cerberus

The blue city is Amsterdam, by the way.

Robusto

04:13

Of course.

Cerberus

Funnily, the two steets, Kalverstraat and Leidsestraat, used to be expensive shopping streets, but are now shopping streets with only chains.

And of course tons of tourist junk food.

So not at all the streets you'd put on the board now.

Robusto

Leidestraat? Cognate with German for "Sorrow Street"?

Cerberus

Cognate with the city of Leiden.

Leading to the Leidseplein, which faces Leiden 40 km to the south-west.

Robusto

Does that mean sorrows, as in Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers?

Cerberus

I suspect there was a Leidse poort there: gates were often named after cities they led towards.

@Robusto The word leiden kan mean that. But in this case it is the city of Leiden, from Latin Lugdunum, most probably unrelated.

Robusto

04:17

Ah, OK.

Cerberus

The Latin could be from a Celtic name.

So the street doesn't even have a romantic name, sorry.

Robusto

What a disappointment. I think I'll go to bed then.

Cerberus

By the way, did you also remove the cards where you had to pay a high amount per house/hotel?

Robusto

Remove the cards how?

Cerberus

Just not use them, keep them out of the chance/community chest stacks.

Robusto

04:19

When you have to mortgage properties you turn the cards over.

@Cerberus Oh, no. That would be doctoring the game.

Cerberus

We always did.

Robusto

The only doctoring we would do was to place all the fines under Free Parking, and a person who landed on it harvested those moneys.

Cerberus

And did you also play with the house rule that any money paid because of cards or squares on the board was put in the centre of the board, to be given to whoever landed on free parking?

Ah, yes, that.

Was that ever in the rules?

Robusto

I don't think so. It was just understood.

Cerberus

If not, how come everybody plays by that rule?

Robusto

04:22

Because people like to do that, I guess.

Popular modifications stick.

Cerberus

But how?

Robusto

Anyway, I'm off to bed. G'night!

Cerberus

They must be passed on somehow.

Sleep well.

CowperKettle

04:41

I Designed My Own 16-bit CPU

►

CowperKettle

06:46

Neural network created this musical video clip: twitter.com/TomLikesRobots/status/1568865124148039680

CowperKettle

07:30

From "The Psychology of Money" goodreads.com/book/show/41881472-the-psychology-of-money

Mitch

12:22

@CowperKettle The way I remember it is Estonia is near Finland (because E is near F) and Latvia and Lithuania are the other ones. Good luck distInguishing those two twins!

@Cerberus Because it's money just sitting there!

Also never trust the banker

@Robusto They sort of remind me of Atlantic City. Glitzy and gross at the same time.

Robusto

13:21

#Worldle #234 2/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜➡️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

🌎 Sept 12, 2022 🌍
🔥 12 | Avg. Guesses: 6.34
⬜🟨🟧🟧🟥🟩 = 6

#globle

Wordle 450 5/6

⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟩⬜🟩
⬜⬜🟩⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

jlliagre

13:52

Wordle 450 5/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩⬜⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

#Worldle #234 6/6 (100%)
🟩🟨⬜⬜⬜↖️
🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜↖️
🟩🟩🟨⬜⬜↗️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨⬆️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨⬆️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

🌎 Sept 12, 2022 🌍
🔥 5 | Avg. Guesses: 7.97
⬜🟥🟩 = 3

#globle

CowperKettle

Word of the day: infant head lag

Cerberus

14:26

@Mitch Well, without that rule, you'd put the money in the back, I praesume?

Mitch

I think the behavior probably arose from it being an annoying thing for the banker to do, to take money and have to file it away without giving something back (like a house or title). So just put it into a pot (and then naturally it leads to the pot being giving to someone who is a winner of something).

Cerberus

Ah, could be.

Even so, how did this spread around the world?

CowperKettle

Last night's explosion in Kharkiv looked a lot like the fertilizer explozion in Beirut. The same visible ball of blast air

Cerberus

Oh, that sounds bad.

CowperKettle

In the midday, there was another powerful attack, and the subway turned off. People were filmed walking on their feet to the stations along rails.

Half an hour ago, they relaunched the subway

Looks like big power plants and substations are very vulnerable. Large surface area, known coordinates.

I wonder if they could be vaulted underground.

Cerberus

14:38

I am not surprised those should be vulnerable.

The only thing that surprises me is that the Russian army didn't attack those much earlier in the war, as soon as it was clear that they couldn't win quickly.

Mitch

@Cerberus It's a cultural universal. All cultures have music, fire, marriage, death rites, and winner-takes all pots in gambling games.

CowperKettle

And infant head lag

Mitch

@CowperKettle !! what is that?

CowperKettle

It's when small infants can't keep up with movement of their bodies.

Mitch

@CowperKettle OMG

looks in mirror

But that's not what I would call a -cultural- universal. More of a medical recognition.

But I wonder what the prevalence of ASD across the world.

CowperKettle

14:49

Without precise tests, nobody knows.

Mitch

Also that infographic equates 'social and communication delay' with ASD risk

which I feel leaves a lot out of it.

CowperKettle

Keanu Leaves

Created by an AI

Cerberus

@Mitch OK if you say so.

Mitch

Good for AI

@Cerberus Oh. Yes. I did say so.

CowperKettle

@Mitch This new "stable diffusion" engine is all over Twitter

Tons of generated images.

Cerberus

14:52

@Mitch You did indeed.

Mitch

@CowperKettle Yeah. It's open-sourced DALLE so anybody can do it.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle OMG something is all over Twitter!! Then it must be important.

Mitch

@Cerberus I may do it again.

CowperKettle

twitter.com/GanWeaving/status/1568893498895601665

Cerberus

@CowperKettle Sorry.

Mitch

14:54

@Cerberus No need to be sorry, it wasn't your fault.

Mostly

CowperKettle

@Mitch My friend, who is a systems operator, asked his programmer colleague to install it, and generated some images of "cosmic Yekaterinburg" and "hamster robots" and stuff

Mitch

@CowperKettle Also I've heard that Stable Diffusion doesn't have the NSFW keyword restrictions that DALLE has, so that people are using prompts in order to get more 'racy' things.

@CowperKettle Yeah it's a fun to make a prompt of normally unrelated things to see what you get.

eg "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

and "the vorpal blade went snicker-snack":

Robusto

> “We know Rumsfeld!” the woman said, snorting at the name. “He was supporting Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. He was supporting Saddam! He was telling us to do the same!” From their home in Kirkuk her family had observed Donald Rumsfeld paddling palms and pinching fingers with Saddam, and selling him weapons, among them land mines. The Iranian response was to send small children—because children are numerous, portable, and expendable—running, tripping into the minefields to detonate the bombs with their tiny feet, to be blown to pieces.

CowperKettle

I went to vote yesterday, and there were nobody in the voting station, except me.

The turnout was extremely small.

Cerberus

I can imagine.

Robusto

15:07

An Iraqi-Turkish woman, confronting the author of the book. ^^^

CowperKettle

Because all "alternative" candidates weren't really alternative, except maybe the governor candidate from the Communist Party.

Robusto

@M.A.R. Is that true about the minefields? (See above quotation.)

Cerberus

@Robusto Seems unlikely.

Robusto

Doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Cerberus

@CowperKettle At least some pretence of democracy is held up.

Better than none.

CowperKettle

15:08

Yes.

Cerberus

In case change should come, it is better to have democracy still in the minds of the Russian people.

Mitch

15:26

@Cerberus I've heard several stories like that from Iranians

Cerberus

Whose children, then, one wonders, and how did they get them?

Mitch

But things like that can be 'it happened once accidentally to one kid' or 'it was a thing that happened all the time and was supported by the armed services as a strategy' (and there's a lot of room in between.

CowperKettle

Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh

Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh (Persian: محمد حسین فهمیده; (1967-05-06)6 May 1967 – (1980-10-30)30 October 1980) was an Iranian child soldier and an icon of the Iran–Iraq War. During the First Battle of Khorramshahr in 1980, he served with the Basij and fought invading Iraqi forces in and around the city of Khorramshahr. Fahmideh is credited with having halted the advance of an Iraqi tank column after he jumped underneath an Iraqi tank and detonated a full grenade belt, killing himself in the process. He is celebrated as a war hero in Iran. == Background == In September 1980, Iraq launched a full-scale...

Fahmideh is credited with having halted the advance of an Iraqi tank column after he jumped underneath an Iraqi tank and detonated a full grenade belt, killing himself in the process.

Cerberus

@Mitch It's just that most stories like that on the Internet turn out to be less exciting than their headlines.

Robusto

Yes, that's certainly true.

Mitch

15:31

@Cerberus Iran is supposedly still covered with memorial murals of heroic child soldiers like this. 1/2 memorial s to the Iran-Iraq war, 1/2 Khomeini

CowperKettle

Basij

The Basij (Persian: بسيج, lit. "The Mobilization"), Niru-ye Moghāvemat-e Basij (Persian: نیروی مقاومت بسیج, "Resistance Mobilization Force"), full name Sâzmân-e Basij-e Mostaz'afin (Persian: سازمان بسیج مستضعفین, "The Organization for Mobilization of the Oppressed"), is one of the five forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The force is named Basij; an individual member is called basiji. As of July 2019, Gholamreza Soleimani is the commander of the Basij. A paramilitary volunteer militia established in Iran in 1979 by order of Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution...

Mitch

@Cerberus Sure. @M.A.R. may have more knowledge (though he's way too young to have experience of that war)

CowperKettle

> During the Iran–Iraq War hundreds of thousands volunteered for the Basij, including children as young as 12 and unemployed old men, some in their eighties. These volunteers were swept up in Shi'a love of martyrdom and the atmosphere of patriotism of the war mobilization; most often they came from poor, peasant backgrounds.

Cerberus

@Mitch Pubescent child-soldiers already sound more likely than sending numerous much younger children into minefields to be blown up.

Mitch

@Cerberus The age is unspecified in the word 'children'

could be referring to 5 year olds, could be 12 year olds

Cerberus

15:33

@CowperKettle Yes, child-soldiers over 12 are not uncommon in poor countries around the world.

@Mitch Disagree: it says "young children".

Which does not suggest 12.

Mitch

The population explosion in Iran didn't really start until later in the 1980's so those 'numerous' children in the street didn't really appear until the 1990's or 2000's

Cerberus

Right.

Mitch

@Cerberus the message gets changed on each retelling.

Cerberus

And those children are still someone's children. Can you imagine mothers letting their young children be sent into minefields deliberately? Or even the Iranian state taking them?

@Mitch Exactly.

Robusto

@Cerberus What about orphans?

Cerberus

15:36

Which is why I said what was stated there seemed unlikely, as it was stated.

Mitch

But Basijis 12 and older in the 80's, the story is definitely that they went expecting to martyr themselves.

Robusto

Plenty of orphans to go around during a war.

Cerberus

@Robusto Slightly less unlikely but still very unlikely, in my opinion.

In addition, young children may be too light to trigger the mines anyway.

Robusto

Which is why I am interested in verification.

Cerberus

I know.

Mitch

15:38

I haven't heard this story about -every- war, only about the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war.

Cerberus

And I gave my intuitive estimation based on the kinds of things one sees written around the Internet, and even in newspaper headlines, before you investigate and find out what it was really about.

Robusto

Whatever the abomination, it would not surprise me to find out that such a thing was practiced by human beings.

Mitch

And this story was well established before the internet (in the 90's is when I heard of it)

@Robusto as awful as it might be, there's worse.

Cerberus

@Mitch I have never heard a serious account of sending young children into minefields as anything other than an accident or a one-time crazy act.

@Robusto It would surprise me.

CowperKettle

hormone secreted into the blood during endurance, or aerobic, exercise reduces levels of a protein linked to Parkinson's disease and halts movement problems in mice

The famous irisin.

Cerberus

15:41

Not even the Islamic State did that, nor Mao, nor Hitler, so far as I know. And I'm sure we'd know, because it would be the juiciest story, wouldn't it?

Mitch

@Cerberus it could be the retelling. Possibly children (>12) were sent out as 'reconnaissance' and accidentally went through a mine field and then the army was blamed for doing it intentionally, or maybe the army totally did this on purpose not knowing what to do with the thousands of untrained volunteers

Cerberus

@Mitch Yes, exactly.

When something seems unlikely, it probably did not happen exactly as suggested.

Robusto

@Cerberus You mean like the Nazi concentration camps?

Mitch

There's lots of evidence for that

Cerberus

@Robusto If those were not widely known by now, and someone told you they had existed, you should not have believed him.

Robusto

15:43

People do deny the Holocaust even now.

Cerberus

People deny the earth is round.

Mitch

To @Cerberus's point, people didn't believe it in the 30's- 40's, it was so outrageous.

Cerberus

Extraordinary assertions require extraordinary evidence.

Mitch

I personally have very little evidence about whether the earth is round.

Cerberus

When something extraordinary is said to be happening right now, then perhaps the evidence just has not had time to become widely known.

Robusto

15:45

@Mitch That's also my point, strangely enough.

Cerberus

But the war between Iran and Iraq was many decades ago.

Robusto

@Mitch Evidence that the earth is round is ... all around you.

Mitch

@M.A.R. speak of the devil and he appears.

M.A.R.

@Robusto What the fuck, no, never heard of it. Why would they do that?

Mitch

or rather ping him enough

M.A.R.

15:46

@Mitch boo

Cerberus

All I'm saying is it seems unlikely.

Robusto

@M.A.R. I don't know why anyone would do that.

Cerberus

I await evidence or a more elaborate account with context.

Mitch

@Robusto There are flat earthers all around the worl... uhhh...

3

Cerberus

@Mitch Oops.

M.A.R.

15:47

Buuut as far as authenticity goes, now you know the sort of crazy stuff people on this side of the pond can believe

Cerberus

@Mitch This room is supposed to be a safe space. We do not wish to offend those with different opinions, so we'd prefer if you said all on the world here, a more neutral, inoffensive term.

M.A.R.

I mean, I have never been able to pinpoint it, but the sort of conspiracy people around me might believe in, it's been different from what, say, English speakers believe.

Robusto

@M.A.R. Please elaborate.

Cerberus

@M.A.R. People believe in mangled half-truths and conspiracies all on the world.

Mitch

@Cerberus There's a lot to not believe in

M.A.R.

15:50

It always feels less subtle, if that's possible. Like how Western productions depict China brainwashing soldiers, something like that.

Cerberus

@Mitch Indeed.

M.A.R.

There is evil for the sake of evil, like, yes, sending childs to trip on bombs

Mitch

@M.A.R. So are you saying that people in Iran talk about child minefield martyrs, but that there is no evidence for it?

M.A.R.

It sometimes sounds pathological. They hear unpleasant things about something, but their embellishments invokes their own worst nightmares. A mom that holds her kids dear pictures kids running around on minefields, and makes that the new reality about the war

Cerberus

> UNICEF is extremely concerned about an appalling increase in the cruel and calculated use of children, especially girls, as ‘human bombs’ in northeast Nigeria.

The truth is bad enough.

From UNICEF's own website.

M.A.R.

15:54

@Mitch not exactly that. I'm saying everyone envisions their own nightmares, like they're coming up with ideas for a horror movie. And then insists that's what happened. Or happens in Palestine. Or Ukraine. Whatever they want.

Mitch

That's not unheard of here.

Robusto

BTW, the context of that quotation is that the book was published in 2006, very much during the Iraq War II, with Bush still president, etc. And the author was a guest of honor at a conference in Turkey, where he was, as an American, confronted by an Iraqi expatriate.

@Cerberus Yes, but that truth is indistinguishable from the assertion about children in minefields.

Mitch

But I've definitely heard of child-minefield-martyrs during the Iran-Iras war (pre-Internet).

with my usual disclaimer

Cerberus

@Robusto Exactly.

M.A.R.

I think Iraq has been through enough that you can probably find plenty of Iraqi people who hate each one of Iraq's neighbors

Cerberus

15:57

UNICEF is talking about something that happens now; they name numbers; the UN has soldiers there; it is a trustworthy orginsation.

M.A.R.

@Mitch Fahmideh is famous, his story proudly represented in elementary school textbooks.

Mitch

I am telling you faithfully of what !) I think 2) I remember what I have 3) heard

M.A.R.

But it never occurred to me that someone told him to go lie down in front of an approaching tank

Regardless of whether he understood what was gonna happen or not

Robusto

@M.A.R. His story is not necessarily what the assertion is about.

Mitch

We're going to have a hard time separating what actually happened from the infinite varieties of half-speculation.

M.A.R.

16:00

Surely not that

As far as I know the bulk of the Iranian resistance against Saddam's advance consisted of teenagers

jlliagre

@Mitch I guess you meant aux quatre coins du monde ;-)

M.A.R.

(Sorry for the typos, this tablet hates my fingers)

It wasn't hardened military generals with 30 medals who didn't care about the lamb they sent to slaughter; they had mostly fled two years prior

Cerberus

@Robusto I am still trying to find sources for the assertion.

I found one on a strongly pro-Israel website.

Another one by a journalist from Eastern Europe during the actual war, as retold by an American journalist in the New York Times in 1984.

M.A.R.

Link? The second one, I don't want to be put on a watchlist

Cerberus

nytimes.com/1984/02/12/magazine/…

M.A.R.

16:06

Technical difficulties

Should I put my tinfoil hat on

Cerberus

> In dozens of interviews conducted by this reporter in recent weeks with Iranian exiles, academics and government and intelligence officials in the United States and Europe, the blind faith of these teen-age martyrs was frequently cited as symbolic of the fanaticism that is part of life today in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

An East European journalist who witnessed one of these human-wave assaults, in which tens of thousands of young Iranians have gone willingly to their deaths, could hardly believe what he was seeing, as first one boy, and then another, detonated a mine and was hurled i…

For such a huge thing, I'd have expected more sources to have surfaced by now.

M.A.R.

Iranian exiles are not unbiased.

Cerberus

Exactly.

M.A.R.

Besides, how were they going to pass through the minefield? You send volunteers to walk a straight line, several get blown up, until one gets across. This has been depicted several times in state-sponsored movies

In WW2, many soldiers threw themselves on grenades to save their comrades. Was that fanaticism? Sacrifice? Both?

Cerberus

@M.A.R. Yeah, it hardly seems practical.

washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1988/01/18/…

Also heard from others.

> Our sources also agree that the boy soldiers get little training and are used as a shield for Khomeini's fanatical Revolutionary Guards Corps fighting at the front or as mine sweepers whose lives are expendable. Children are Khomeini's cannon fodder.

Mitch

16:14

@jlliagre Exactly. Just look at the map. It's flat and square.

Cerberus

I would expect a more detailed account, by someone who saw it herself, to exist over such a monstrous practice.

M.A.R.

But "Khomeini's fanatical Revolutionary Guards Corps" were themselves kids younger than me, as far as I know

Cerberus

Yes, I think the child soldiers are well corroborated.

But sending young children? And deliberately using them to trigger mines, as policy rather than an incident?

M.A.R.

@Cerberus So the cannon fodder argument falls apart for me, or that they were some kool aid nuts that liked being blown apart.

Cerberus

I read that groups of unarmed, pubescent boys were sent towards Iraqi tank columns.

But perhaps the idea was that the Iraqis would not fire at unarmed children.

Robusto

16:17

0

Q: During the Iran-Iraq war, did the Iranians use children to blow up landmines planted by Iraq?

I'm reading one of Paul Theroux's books, which was published in 2006 during the height of the second Gulf War, and there is a passage in it in which the author apparently claims the activity described in the title of this question: “We were a Turkoman family in Iraq,” a woman said to me, and int...

Why do your own work when you can have an SE site do it for you?

M.A.R.

@Cerberus Probably happened. I've read the initial resistance against Iraqi soldiers was with sticks and stones

Cerberus

@Robusto Perhaps "small" children should be added?

@Robusto They'll love it there.

@M.A.R. Yes, it seems more like than the mine thing, and it comes from many sources.

M.A.R.

@Robusto to HNQ with ye

CowperKettle

Sacred Cod

The Sacred Cod is a four-foot-eleven-inch (150 cm) carved-wood effigy of an Atlantic codfish, "painted to the life", hanging in the House of Representatives chamber of Boston's Massachusetts State House‍—‌"a memorial of the importance of the Cod-Fishery to the welfare of this Commonwealth" (i.e. Massachusetts, of which cod is officially the "historic and continuing symbol"). The Sacred Cod has gone through as many as three incarnations over three centuries: the first (if it really existed‍—‌the authoritative source calling it a "prehistoric creature of tradition") was lost in a 1747 fire; the second...

Mitch

@Robusto Shouldn't that be asked on History?

Robusto

16:20

@Mitch It could be asked on Board Games, for all I know. Skeptics was the first thought that came to mind.

M.A.R.

@Mitch History is boring. We'll get, like, boring papers and stuff as answer.

Skeptics folks always answer the question as if it was posed by Watson to Sherlock

Mitch

@Robusto wondering if Board Games really is the right place

M.A.R.

It's like chess if the pawns get blown to pieces

Mitch

@M.A.R. So Skeptics are all hopped up on heroin?

M.A.R.

And there's a couple million here, and a couple thousand hooks over there

@Mitch just look around that place

Mitch

16:24

looks around

ewww

M.A.R.

My foremost criteria for an acceptable answer to that question is if it names names, or events, so I can compare it to the halal version of the story by Iranian sources

If it's just some other horrified dude it probably wouldn't count

Robusto

@M.A.R. That's kinda the standard practice on SE sites, innit?

Mitch

Welcome Hot Network Question Readers: Here at Skeptics.SE, we actively DO NOT WANT your opinions or your anecdotes in the comments. Comments are for clarifying the question. Answer boxes are for fully-referenced answers. — Oddthinking ♦ 2 days ago

M.A.R.

Given that Vitruvius wrote this about 2 centuries after Archimedes, we are unlikely to get anything 20 centuries later showing it is legend rather than history — Henry 2 days ago

@Mitch I do NOT envy that guy

He's a machine

Anyway, to this date, I dunno what the flat Earthers are selling

Mitch

Maps.

THey're selling maps

M.A.R.

16:31

I mean, all the alternative medicine charlatans are peddling something

Robusto

Maps are flat, ergo what they represent is flat. QED

Mitch

Look at the... god. dam. map.

it's flat

Robusto

Jinx

Mitch

what don't you people get?

M.A.R.

@Mitch but surely the round earthers also do that, except they advice you to turn the map into a ball

Cerberus

16:32

@M.A.R. They have rocket projects to prove that the Earth is flat by recording from the rocket. They collect donations for those projects, can be substantial amounts of money. In addition, they 'sell' views of their Youtube channels. Attention = money.

M.A.R.

Wow, they're capable of subtlety?

Cerberus

What subtlety?

M.A.R.

But they were present before YouTube and GoFundMe?

Mitch

@M.A.R. round earthers are charlatans... trying to sell you this 'globe' thing like it's some fancy 3-d ball you can spin in your hand and dunk in a basket.

what a sham

M.A.R.

I mean, before 2010 and after 200 BC

Cerberus

16:34

@M.A.R. All I know is that those two means of getting money out of people are used by Flat Earthers.

It is a recent American movement, isn't it?

Mitch

@Cerberus That business model seems to describe a lot of nonsense news.

Cerberus

@M.A.R. I don't remember ever hearing of it during that time.

@Mitch Yeah. Except the rocket projects.

Mitch

@Cerberus I'm pretty sure Americans -invented- movement

M.A.R.

Is it a fat joke

Mitch

@Cerberus What I heard is that one guy did the rocket experiment and it showed some curvature to the earth and it actually changed his mind, he stopped believing in a flat earth.

But that was one guy.

@M.A.R. no, it was a poop joke.

Cerberus

16:36

@Mitch I've not heard that!

Sounds pretty crazy.

M.A.R.

@Mitch you are a one-trick pony

Cerberus

So he must have seen the curvature of the disc.

Mitch

@Cerberus I've also heard that if you look across Lake Ontario to the North, you can see just the top halves of the skyscrapers in Toronto.

Cerberus

Mitch

But that seems implausible.

@M.A.R. Look man, you asked. If you hadn't asked you would have been happy in your ignorance

Cerberus

16:38

Perhaps Toronto or where those towers are is at a lower elevation.

Mitch

@Cerberus i know, right?

Cerberus

Or perhaps the towers are retractable, and the mechanism is used whenever they fear someone from across the lake might be looking.

Mitch

It seems pretty complicated to suggest something as complicated and frankly outlandish as a huge ball.

Cerberus

Exactly.

Occam's razor suggests retractable towers.

Mitch

@Cerberus Yes, the scheduling of the lowering is problematic, but with sufficient surveillance it is surely possible.

Cerberus

16:40

You can just dig a deep, square hole underneath and nobody would notice.

@Mitch So are you saying we should donate to your tower-surveillance project?

Mitch

@Cerberus Why bother with retractable. All the people in Toronto are at the same level as the bottom of the hole.

Cerberus

Fair enough.

Lowering the urban area is less noticeable than lowering just the towers, good point.

Mitch

@Cerberus Sure. I mean you can just donate to me directly, I'll put it in the bucket 'Toronto Elevator Surveillance project'

Cerberus

How good of you.

Mitch

@Cerberus Yeah. Too complicated one for each tower.

@Cerberus I'm like that

Robusto

17:41

@Cerberus It's turtles all the way down.

Cerberus

@Robusto So far as we know.

Will you sponsor my rocket project that intends to dive down under the earth to see what's below the turtle?

Robusto

Of course.

Cerberus

Good.

Of course something will happen that will require another flight.

Robusto

18:04

We remain prepared for any eventuality in the pursuit of truth.

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