@Cerberus Something like "I come in triumph"?

@Robusto Venio triumphans?

Sounds good to me. Thank you.

@CowperKettle on account of Iran? Does China or Russia like us so much?

Anyways I didn't check our news to see if they covered these drone strikes.

But if true they didn't hit the city Tabriz, but the . . . Er, county? The division larger than a city but smaller than a province called Tabriz. So pretty far away

Shahr = city in Farsi (month in Arabic) Shahristan = includes one or more cities and several villages.

@M.A.R. Maybe it's about leaders and what they decide. Mussolini famously called Hitler "garrulous little monk" to his aides, and when Hitler invaded the USSR, said "I hope he singes his feathers". But they still banded together.

@FaheemMitha Well.

@M.A.R. Simple people are silenced in dictatorships, and dictators may act on a whim.

@Vikas ?

@FaheemMitha Well as in == achhaa (if you're familiar with Hindi).

> This multi-purpose word literally means "good". However, it also takes on a number of other meanings, depending on the intonation it’s given and where it’s positioned in a sentence. It could also mean "okay", "really?", "I understand", "oh!", or "I have a question".

@CowperKettle Yeah. I meant "I understand / Oh".

@Vikas "Well" in English is an ambiguous response. Yes, I know Hindi. But even अच्छा is ambiguous, IMO.

@FaheemMitha Yeah I agree.

Explained here:

I seem to recall a song with accha, accha, accha

I was shown sometimes in the USSR

@CowperKettle She says "aaja aaja aaja" (It means come, come, come) 😂

I heard it last year it became "popular" on Instagram reels filter.

Ah!

@Vikas Well, अच्छा is ambiguous at least in its written form. A great deal depends on the intonation.

@CowperKettle youtube.com/shorts/dNbBGwnZ21s

Interesting interview with Slavoj Žižek about his views on Russia. Easily translated into English by Chrome's right-button "translate to English" option. meduza.io/feature/2023/01/30/…

@CowperKettle well the Supreme leader's health is declining, so it's probably more competitive these days, but I get what you're saying.

Still, it's hard to imagine anything revolving around us being the excuse for a large-scale conflict.

I often notice neuroscientists lamenting their efforts lost on reviewing papers for profit-turning journals for free. What makes them accept review invitations at all, if they are not paid for this work?

I mean, I notice that on Twitter.

@M.A.R. It would be good if a large-scale conflict is avoided.

My friend is planning to visit Kazakhstan again. Probably another look-around in order to settle there. I wish him to do this before Putin shuts down borders.

@CowperKettle I read comments under that video you shared. Lots of Russian comments. Didn't know Bollywood has been popular in Russia. And I'm a bit surprised because most of the old movies weren't of good quality.

@CowperKettle During general mobilization, anyone can be mobilized? Irrespective of what is their profession? For example me. I have nothing to do with war. Neither in present nor in past. So can they ask me too?

@Vikas Women and people of simple tastes liked them, because it was a visual window into a different world. Songs, dances. One could never dream to go there in person, but at least one could watch it on the screen.

My uncle did not like them, because they were of poor quality and without a good plot and actors were sometimes not very good in their craft.

The more advanced Indian movies were not available, besides probably some specialized movie theaters and festivals in Moscow and St. Pete.

> Russia has surpassed China to clinch the title of Iran’s biggest foreign investor, Bloomberg reports, citing Iran’s Donya-e Eqtesad.

@Vikas Yes, if you are healthy enough, they would mobilize you and train you.

Word of the day: buck-and-wing (With his show-business background, Reagan was unusually deft at this type of verbal buck and wing.)

@CowperKettle And if you're not healthy, Wagner will hire you 😂

Damn, that was easy.

@Vikas I'll pass, thank you :)

Kind of a tough one.

Kind of very lucky.

Oh, there are so many countries around. I always forget them.

@CowperKettle You didn't forget that one. I suppose all Soviet children had to learn about it. ;-)

@Robusto Yes, and our first post-Soviet Prime Minister, the one who oversaw the rapid transfer to market economy, visited that country as a boy, in the midst of the hottest events.

His grandfather was a revolutionary, a Comissar exerting terror on peasants, and at the same time a talented children's writer. Thus the Prime Minister had the luxury of traveling a lot and reading and learning a lot, being of the celebrated revolutionary stock.

He studied economy deeply and tried as hard as he could to prevent the disaster of the dissolution of the USSR, but such theoreticians as he were not permitted close to the levers of power.

And in 1992 he only was a PM for a short time, before a matured Soviet apparatchik winkled him out in a court and PR intrigue.

In the early 2000s he predicted the path Russia might follow under Putin, and his prediction is now coming true.

He recalled that he left his room in the hotel, and went along the corridor, and saw a hotel cleaner woman place her Kalashnikof rifle agains the wall and start cleaning the floor with a broom :)

I have read the PM's autobiography twice, it covers the late Soviet and early post-Soviet years. And named the same as his grandfather's autibiography covering the revolutionary years.

To more than 50% of Russians he is evil incarnate, who destroyed USSR by command from the Anglo-Saxons.

@CowperKettle Well, they'll have to go back a thousand years and take it up with the Anglo-Saxons, then.

At 06:25

Apparently I got long COVID.

@CowperKettle Researchers have a great incentive to review others papers because they want their own papers to be reviewed. They've always been very incentivized to do it, not out of money but out of community. The profit-making publishing industry has built itself up out off of government supported grant money to do the research.

@Mitch "has built itself up out off of"?

Many of the difficulties around research reviewing are more about the accelerating throughput trend (research and publish). That trend is not caused or prevented by publishing costs.

@Robusto I tried to work in a couple more. Maybe something about Australia? 'built up out off of Down Under?'

"built up out off of Down Under's over-under" perhaps?

@Mitch Maybe the state should create a free state-operated online publisher that would pay all reviewers for their efforts, and post articles under the CC-BY license.

Otherwise, why a scientist would review others' papers and waste his time. He could just avoid it, and be a freerider.

I have a Windows phone, I so much liked its tile interface.

It broke a little.

@CowperKettle researchers are doing it for each other (not tit for tat but as a community service). If someone writes lots of papers without also doing reviewing, it looks bad and the author may not get published.

iPhone is also nice, and Androids are nice, I did not see much difference.

@Mitch How would anybody know that he is not reviewing, since it's anonymous?

@CowperKettle But yes it sure would be nice to have reviewing time paid for.

> .. glass frogs can turn 2-3x more transparent when they sleep by hiding almost all of its red blood cells in its liver

@CowperKettle That's not the point. The humor is in Microsoft's hubris.

@Robusto Yes, they are famoused for it :)

@CowperKettle The editor of the journal who publishes also knows who is reviewing. And they are also part of a community of researches who tend to know one another's works. So the paper may be given to a reviewr nominally anonymously (usually you can tell by the style or subject matter or bibliography) but the editor has to know who gets what.

@CowperKettle Um, "famoused"?

One of my fave sonnets. shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/25

@CowperKettle Yeah, that ain't how you say it normally.

or ever.

But I like it.

Language will adapt.

Shakespeare's English isn't the most correct English nowadays. It wasn't even the standard when he was writing.

@CowperKettle Yeah, but context is everything.

@Robusto LOL

@CowperKettle Me too. Nokia 630. I have decided to keep it safe always.

When we quote an idiosyncratic usage of Shakespeare's we usually make reference of that fact. "As Shakespeare put it" or "As the Bard might say" and so on.

Screen has a crack but it's fully working without issues.

@CowperKettle There's are a couple of trends nowadays for papers:

1) putting a 'pre-print' (a copy before published in paper at the journal) openly on the web (no login or fee required to view)

2) governments forcing publishers to make any paper created using government grants to be viewable by the public.

(I agree with you that the publishers, who make an f-ton of money off the labor of the writers and reviewers, should pay the reviewers.)

At least 44 died.

@Robusto "As Shakespeare said in his "inventive" English"

@parz just noticed or just diagnosed?

@Mitch diagnosed.

@parz Do you have any idea if Pavlovax or other COVID-targetted treatments might help?

@Mitch 😆

@Mitch That's the Zeitgeist these days.

I have a transposon joke but it’s kinda repetitive.

It's very. Distracting. To have enforced captioning. Where. Every caption has. At least one. Or two. Full stops.

@Mitch I thought that was the test for witches.

@Mitch Still a great deal of work to do for nothing. And it's a bit of a case of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", which assumes everyone is pulling their weight.

@FaheemMitha Yes, a lot of extra work.

@Robusto That. Was Messed. Up.

But even with all that, I only saw one solecism: "Deep Facto".

As in "So we have a deep facto global sanction"

@Mitch i dont know yet

@FaheemMitha a lot of work but not for nothing. By reviewing other papers you get a better view of the trends and ideas in the community.

But lots of things that are expected of academics are unpaid.

@Mitch Not for nothing. But there is no monetary recompense.

@Mitch Yes, I'm aware. Unlike the rest of society.

Well, OK. That's obviously not true.

Or rather the time that academics are expected to use on work related tasks is well-beyond some kind of moeny for time exchange

Parents bring up children for free, for example.

@FaheemMitha That's more of a 'pay it forward' situation.

@Mitch Agreed. Which is another way of say they are not sufficiently rewarded financially.

@Mitch My point was just that they aren't doing it for money.

@FaheemMitha I think it has gotten better for college level. But primary and secondary school could probably be paid a lot more.

And it isn't necessarily a rewarding situation either. They might not have a good parenting experience.

@Mitch They have a lot of people on short term contracts in universities. I think they call them adjuncts, at least in North America. It's a bad situation. You could also make a case that regular (tenured or tenure-track) faculty are also underpaid. At least some of the time. I don't know enough to say.

Rewards in a capitalist system are mostly financial in nature. That's the way the system is built.

@Mitch Do you do a lot of reviewing for journals?

@FaheemMitha Yes, that's a an unfortunate trend. But those adjuncts are usually only doing teaching, and no expectations for anything else. But also payed abysmally.

@Mitch I think some of them try to do research on the side. The poor creatures.

@FaheemMitha I don't do any.

@Mitch Oh. Do you ever get asked?

I wrote reviews a few times. It was super time-consuming. And nobody ever gave me so much as a thank you.

@FaheemMitha Yes. It's difficult to do research when you're teaching lots of classes (in order to make a living wage) and also don't have a lab or money for students or time to think.

@Mitch Quite so. It's horrible.

Maybe a genius could manage. But there aren't that many geniuses.

@FaheemMitha Not for awhile. Some things you just have to be -in- the university to do.

@Mitch OK. Well, I don't think editors care whether you are in a university or not.

In my experience they are mostly desperate, and not at all fussy.

@FaheemMitha The classic scientist (or historian or whatever) in any society was usually somebody from a rich family.

@Mitch That was then. This is now.

Actually I can't think of a lot of examples. Does Charles Darwin count?

@Mitch Couldn't understand it.

@FaheemMitha Rich

The modern government-sponsored system has some benefits

@Mitch That's cryptic. I don't know what you mean.

@FaheemMitha "...usually from a rich family." "Does Darwin Count?" "Rich"

@Mitch You mean to say that Darwin was rich?

Repeating what you've already written isn't helpful. I read it.

Apparently he got a grant of a thousand pounds once, but doesn't seem to have had a job. So maybe he had money.

@Vikas A clock measures time. I ate it. I consumed something having to do with time. 'Time consuming' means it took a while to do it, as one might suppose easting something that is not particularly edible.

"I went back for seconds" means I went back to the meal (of eating the clock) one more instance. Also 'seconds' is a measure of time. So "I went back for seconds" has two meanings, one meaning being "I went back to eat some smaller measures of time"

@FaheemMitha Yes

@FaheemMitha This is chat. I'm not writing War and Peace. I figure you can follow the thread of what people say without having to write every singly connecting word.

@Mitch Complete sentences help.

@FaheemMitha I figured out what you mean by that in context. I didn't have to say "What do you mean by that?"

> He was also immensely wealthy: by the late 1840s the Darwins had £80,000 invested; he was an absentee landlord of two large Lincolnshire farms; and in the 1850s he plowed tens of thousands of pounds into railway shares.

@Mitch Yes, but that was clearer than your one word.

Though possibly not a complete sentence.

From britannica.com/biography/Charles-Darwin/…

I remember reading a biography of Darwin once. It was quite interesting.

I can't remember who wrote it, though.

I wonder what the inflation rate at the time was.

@FaheemMitha You can fill in the gaps easily. Just reread.

@Mitch I read it already.

@FaheemMitha In general.

If you find you don't understand something, reread to see if there's something implied that you're missing.

According to a quick search, England in the 19th century actually experienced deflation.

@Mitch I prefer that people be explicit. As it is, it's easy to misunderstand people, without being forced to guess.

globalfinancialdata.com/the-century-of-inflation

Something about the gold standard.

@FaheemMitha What about it?

:)

@Mitch The article suggests the gold standard had something to do with price stability. But I don't understand economics.

The gold standard always smacked of witchcraft to me.

I accidentally came across this weird article - lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/Research/GEHN/…

An article about Indian deindustrialization which somehow manages not to talk about the main cause. Perhaps that's was British academics look like.

"begins with" applies the selected style to the cell when the cell contents begins with the text or number defined in the right text box. --- contents beginS - is this fine?

Likewise, is "a 20 cells range" a correct thing to say in English?

@MichaelRybkin "a 20 cell range" sounds more correct to me, but I couldn't tell you why.

@MichaelRybkin I don't understand what you are asking here, sorry.

Is it correct to say "contents begins"?

or maybe one should say "contents begin"

@MichaelRybkin This one. And "a 20-cell range."

@Robusto Thank you.

@Robusto Though I must say that I don't really understand the reason behind you posting that picture. It definitely seems like it has something to do with my first question, but I can't figure out how this picture answers it.