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12:00 AM
@jlliagre That makes sense.
Funny, but I've always seen the Spanish royalty as Philip I, Philip II, etc., going back to my childhood. So that's what sticks in my mind.
Obviously I didn't think about it hard enough.
 
> The Leavenworth Times, Kansas, March 19, 1922
 
@Robusto Did you heard about Isabel II del Reino Unido?
 
@jlliagre Wasn't she in the 1800s sometime?
 
@Robusto Hmm, more of a 20th century person.
Died recently.
 
Paris cafees are romantic
 
12:08 AM
@CowperKettle We do our best to attract tourists.
 
@jlliagre Seems like there are dozens of Spanish queens named Isabella.
Queen Isabella may refer to: == People == Isabella of Hainault (1170–1190), queen consort of Philip II of France Isabella I of Jerusalem (1172–1205), queen regnant Isabella of Angoulême (1188–1246), queen consort of John of England Isabella II of Jerusalem (1212–1228), queen regnant, also known as Yolande Isabella of England (1214–1241), Holy Roman Empress to Frederick II and his queen consort of Germany and of Sicily Isabella, Queen of Armenia (died 1252), queen regnant Isabella of Aragon (1247–1271), queen consort of Philip III of France Isabella of Ibelin (1241–1324), queen consort of Hugh III...
 
@CowperKettle For some reason, Carlos III visit planned for this weekend was postponed.
@Robusto Who said she was Spanish?
 
@jlliagre He just wants to one-up King Charles of England, who ditched his plans for visiting France during all your everlasting turmoil.
@jlliagre My brain did. So there.
 
12:12 AM
That's the guy.
 
He still has the same look.
Maybe countries should swap royalties once in a while. Get a king from Africa to rule UK, send the UK king to rule some Asian country. They are just for show anyway.
Some randomising machine could be set up.
And a ceremony.
That will attract viewers on TV.
 
@CowperKettle It would be nice if countries could get royalties on their monarchs. In official visits to other countries, those countries would have to pay up, and therefore the monarchs could pay for themselves in some small way.
 
Yes.
> Key Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has lost his parliamentary seat after a court found him guilty of defamation over his remarks about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's surname and he was disqualified from the lawmaking body, a parliamentary statement said on Friday.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Modi :)
The same kind of trickery.
Sanjay Gandhi (14 December 1946 – 23 June 1980) was an Indian politician and the younger son of Indira Gandhi and Feroze Gandhi. He was a member of parliament, Lok Sabha and the Nehru–Gandhi family. During his lifetime, he was widely expected to succeed his mother as head of the Indian National Congress and Prime Minister of India, but following his early death in a plane crash his elder brother Rajiv became their mother's political heir and succeeded her as Prime Minister of India and President of the party after her assassination. His wife Maneka Gandhi and son Varun Gandhi are politicians in...
Died while performing an aerobatic maneuvre in a cool aircraft.
At least he wasn't assassinated.
Sultan Raziyyat-Ud-Dunya Wa Ud-Din (Persian: سلطان رضیة الدنیا والدین) (died 15 October 1240, r. 1236–1240), popularly known as Razia Sultana, was a ruler of the Delhi Sultanate in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. She was the first female Muslim ruler of the subcontinent, and the only female Muslim ruler of Delhi. A daughter of Mamluk Sultan Shamsuddin Iltutmish, Razia administered Delhi during 1231–1232 when her father was busy in the Gwalior campaign. According to a possibly apocryphal legend, impressed by her performance during this period, Iltutmish nominated Razia as his heir...
Oh. Indira Gandhi wasn't the first female ruler.
@Robusto And yet several centuries before that, streets were called "Gropecunt Lane" and stuff.
 
12:32 AM
Haha, I hope that was the red light district.
 
Maybe the propriety in the 19th century was only a thin veneer; life was so harsh that people sought to maintain something good at least in speech.
 
@jlliagre Ding!
 
Gropecunt Lane () was a street name found in English towns and cities during the Middle Ages, believed to be a reference to the prostitution centred on those areas; it was normal practice for a medieval street name to reflect the street's function or the economic activity taking place within it. Gropecunt, the earliest known use of which is in about 1230, appears to have been derived as a compound of the words grope and cunt. Streets with that name were often in the busiest parts of medieval towns and cities, and at least one appears to have been an important thoroughfare. Although the name was...
 
@Robusto I had to double check that I was right and there was no such island.
But there is no outlying island that could have been added and magnified for some reason, so I had to think.
Only then did I think of its being the capital.
Took a long time.
 
Yeah, I didn't work at it that hard.
I have morning brain, not evening brain.
Currently I have a cron job to write for the club website. So far it's taken months of agonizing about actually doing some work, but I still haven't psyched myself up to put in the half hour or so that the job would need. I'm too busy enjoying life.
 
12:37 AM
@Robusto We still have mostly diseases and religion (mild). Though we do of course have the genitals.
 
The cron command-line utility is a job scheduler on Unix-like operating systems. Users who set up and maintain software environments use cron to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts), also known as cron jobs, to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals. It typically automates system maintenance or administration—though its general-purpose nature makes it useful for things like downloading files from the Internet and downloading email at regular intervals.Cron is most suitable for scheduling repetitive tasks. Scheduling one-time tasks can be accomplished using the associated at utility...
 
@CowperKettle Yeah, but strictly speaking that wasn't profanity. It was a public-service announcement.
@Cerberus We couldn't survive without those.
@CowperKettle Yes, that kind of thing. All very routine, none of it at all interesting. Which is why I've been avoiding it.
 
I think I could but I'd rather not.
 
@Robusto You can ask ChatGPT to do it.
 
I would have to feed it the details, and it would be shorter for me to just write the goddamned thing.
 
12:44 AM
Timezone change in 16 minutes here. I don't like that one. It might confuse some cron jobs too.
DST I mean.
 
@jlliagre I don't run cron jobs during those questionable changeover hours if I can help it. Here that's between 2 and 3 a.m.
@jlliagre I understood what you meant.
@Cerberus OK, but it would be a matter of survival, not living a full life.
 
Germs, genitals and God
We swear by them.
The trinity.
The fucking rotten goddamn trinity :)
 
Profanity is subjective.
 
@jlliagre All subjects are subjective.
 
All objects are objective.
 
12:53 AM
> No product here the barren hills afford,
But we have germs, and genitals, and God;
Thus every good our native wilds impart
Imprints the patriot passion on our heart.
 
@jlliagre That settles everything. I'm glad we had this talk.
 
Goldsmith would hit me in the eye for this.
 
@Robusto No verb is verbive though.
 
@jlliagre But all predicates are predictable.
 
1:05 AM
@Robusto Some subjects are objectionable.
 
@CowperKettle Is this like EMDR?
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a form of psychotherapy devised by Francine Shapiro in the 1980s that was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). EMDR combines exposure therapy (recalling distressing experiences) with certain eye movements that have been criticized as having no scientific basis. The therapy has been aggressively promoted by its founder and other practitioners for the treatment of PTSD, employing untestable hypotheses to explain negative results in controlled studies....
@jlliagre And some objects are subject to further study.
 
1:25 AM
@Robusto EMDR is just snake oil:
> EMDR has been characterized as pseudoscience, because the underlying theory and primary therapeutic mechanism are unfalsifiable and non-scientific. EMDR's founder and other practitioners have used untestable hypotheses to explain studies which show no effect.[2] The results of the therapy are non-specific, especially if directed eye movements are irrelevant to the results. When these movements are removed, what remains is a broadly therapeutic interaction and deceptive marketing.
 
@alphabet That's why I was asking if it was the same thing.
Or same kind of thing.
 
1:36 AM
EMDR? 🙄 a incomplete anagram maybe.
 
@jlliagre You mean DREAM? (Sarcasm.)
 
MDR is French for LOL too (Mort de rire.)
 
@alphabet Well, "has been characterised", by some, right?
That same article says the WHO has accepted it as a therapy or part of a therapy.
 
1:52 AM
I'm puzzled by : because the underlying theory and primary therapeutic mechanism are unfalsifiable and non-scientific. It might be a false friend. I would have used unproveable.
 
That is a different thing, though.
To falsify is to prove false.
If a theory cannot be proved to be true, then it should at least be possible to prove that it is false; but even that is not possible here.
 
@Cerberus I believe that we only use infalsifiable in French for concrete things like a passport, a driver's license or a banknote, not abstract things like a theory or a mechanism.
 
Makes sense.
But it is often used in this way in philosophy in English.
 
2:36 AM
A proposed hypothesis should ideally be falsifiable through an experiment, otherwise it's very hard to prove that it's actually scientific.
It's a criterion proposed by Karl Popper for distinguishing between science and pseudoscience.
 
3:04 AM
Yes.
It mainly comes into play when an hypothesis isn't provable.
 
 
1 hour later…
4:07 AM
@CowperKettle I used it in some project.
The internet hasn't been working since/for two hours.
Since or for?
 
4:20 AM
For.
Since [moment], for [period].
 
@Vikas Great!
I never heard of it. Because I only rarely ever used Linux, let alone Unix :)
I once installed Ubuntu, but it had no necessary tools for translation.
It was not very compatible with Word, Excel, and totally incompatible with Trados.
 
Libre Office wasn't compatible enough?
I haven't used Microsoft Office in years.
 
And one could feel that it needed millions of man-hours to fine-tune all the small things, because it was clunky. The interface was a bit out of whack here and there. There were some odd error messages.
It's the thing that plagues Wikipedia. 80% of effort goes not to add content, but make it easily readable, to remove unnecessary stuff, to weed out some stuff, to remodel an article.
@Cerberus Maybe it is now, but 12 years ago it wasn't very compatible
 
OK.
 
If I feel better, I will try to install it again, after purchasing a bigger SSD.
 
4:26 AM
@jlliagre What are the semantics behinds avec ceci?
Is it like, "only with this?".
Why the avec?
@CowperKettle Or like writing a thesis.
 
I heard that in India, many people don't use toilet paper.
They use water every time.
My sister said that she felt weird back in Russia, because there was this toilet paper instead of washing appliances. She said the felt dirty at first.
"Using toilet paper is dirty" :)
Sometime I'm thinking of trying out some such appliance.
 
5:02 AM
I think they often use water bottles in India and other places in India?
And they use their left hand with the water.
Which explains why, in Asian cultures, the left hand is often considered unclean, and unfit for touching people.
 
5:16 AM
This should help me remember where Namibia is located.
I knew where Zimbabwe was, approximately.
Namibia has only 2.5m people.
So complicated.
The Khan Solar Power Station, is a 20 megawatts (27,000 hp) solar power plant under construction in Namibia. The project is owned and under development by Access Aussenkehr Solar One Namibia a Namibian independent power producer (IPP), based in Windhoek, the country's capital city. The energy generated here will be purchased by NamPower, the national electricity utility company, which is wholly owned by the government of Namibia. A 25-year power purchase agreement (PPA), governs the terms under which the energy will be sold and bought. == Location == The power station sits on 16 hectares (40 acres...
20 MW, to be commissioned this year. A good start.
 
5:45 AM
@CowperKettle Nice.
You should remember that the capital of Namibia is Windhoek, which is Afrikaans, a dialect of Dutch, because it borders on South Africa.
And of course it's windy by the sea.
 
6:07 AM
@Cerberus Yes, I remember reading about that city. I hope it's not extremely hot there.
Persian of the day: badgir (windcatcher) - باد‎ (bâd, “wind”) +‎ گیر‎ (gir, “catcher”)
In Russian: бадгир (derived from Farsi)
An interview given by Putin yesterday. "Russia will have 3 times more tanks than Ukraine, and 10 times more military aiplanes. And we will install tactical nuclear rockets in Belarus".
His plan is to rev up the industry, produce loads of tanks and planes.
I wonder how soon there will be a flow of tanks. Churchill wrote in his large book on WWII that it takes a couple of years before "a flood" of military gear is produced.
 
6:29 AM
@CowperKettle Aren't essential components sanctioned for jets, planes and other arms?
@Cerberus We were taught that since is used for "definite time" and for is for not so definite time.
"... since 2 o clock" would be correct?
I think I can understand it instinctively rather than remembering the rule.
 
6:53 AM
@Vikas We have large borders.
And access to the ocean.
 
@CowperKettle Not soon at all.
Especially not now.
@Vikas Yes.
@Vikas Yes.
I think that rule is inaccurate.
Since means, "starting from [x]", whereas for means "during [x]".
 
7:46 AM
@Robusto it doesn't matter how wacky it sounds. All that matters is objective evidence of therapeutic benefit
@jlliagre it's impossible to prove a negative, but a reliable randomized study can falsify the statement that "EMDR is helpful" by showing 'the help' not statistically significant. There hasn't been such studies, or they have proven to be inconclusive.
There's also the fact that WHO is sometimes lenient on alternative therapies because especially ones with a psychiatric component at least empower the patient to think they're doing something about their health.
Either that or the western population is sometimes so dependent on them that they would choose them over proper pharmacological or non-pharmacological treatment, so a wh . . . Grayish lie that one should take their pills and then maybe think about doing weird stuff to their body shows some benefit for the biggest crazies.
 
8:11 AM
@Cerberus OK
 
8:55 AM
> Florida principal resigns after parents decry Michelangelo’s David as pornography
For God's sake. Even 7-year olds have smartphones. They have access to everything.
I heard good things about EMDR, but I would not be surprised to find that it brings no benefit. My guess is that it brings some benefit to some persons, depending on the subtype of PTSD (genes/epigenetics/etc.)
Maybe in the coming decades there will be a better subrouping of diseases, that will help determine subtype-specific treatments.
 
 
1 hour later…
10:11 AM
Risk of suicide 4 times more likely with sleep apnea sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022395623001474
I wonder if treatment changes this hazard ratio
 
10:57 AM
Ukrainian TV channel is preparing to debut a TV series in which a Russian actor participated. He did not voice his opposition to the Special Operation, so they replaced his face with the face of a Ukrainian actor.
 
 
1 hour later…
12:10 PM
@CowperKettle EMDR does work, it's just that the eye movement part only helps via the placebo effect (if it helps at all). What helps is the working through traumatic memories, which is done alongside the magic eye movement stuff.
 
I just bought a knife that can cut bread into 8 pieces at once. It's a four loaf cleaver.
@alphabet Ah!
Purple hat therapy is a hypothetical medical practice in which an established form of therapy is mixed with an unlikely novel addition (such as wearing a purple hat) and then is claimed to be effective because of the novel addition, when in fact the effectiveness is due to the established component. == Origin and description == The term "purple hat therapy" was coined by Gerald Rosen and Gerald Davison in their 2003 paper, Psychology should list empirically supported principles of change (ESPs) and not credential trademarked therapies or other treatment packages. The therapy is accepted a...
 
@CowperKettle yeah I sometimes wonder about that. Given the speed of progress, doctors 30 years from now could be thinking how brutish our approach to medicine is right now
Similar to how we now think of preventable amputations in the past
@CowperKettle I'm hoping they also replaced the rest of his body as well? Because anything else would be too weird
 
12:26 PM
@M.A.R. Probably not :)
 
@CowperKettle I think they should just reset Florida with a clean game save. All the mods broke the place.
@CowperKettle this war is getting crazier by the minute!
 
Yes. Bakhmut has already turned into a mini-Verdun.
6+ months of fighting.
And there are still from 2 to 10 thousand peaceful citizens, unwilling to leave.
It's dangerous to even go outside there.
 
 
2 hours later…
2:12 PM
@CowperKettle I had to blow that up to 5000pt to figure out what that emoji is.
I think
 
2:58 PM
#Worldle #429 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐🏙️
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr
I hate island groups, even when I know the answer. It's too often impossible to figure out all their little flyspeck neighbors.
🌎 Mar 26, 2023 🌍
🔥 72 | Avg. Guesses: 4.77
🟨🟨🟧🟥🟩 = 5

globle-game.com
#globle
 
@Cerberus Avec ceci ? (or more casually [Et] avec ça ?) is an ellipsis for Et avec ceci, qu'est-ce que vous prendrez ? meaning 'What are you going to take/buy in addition of what you already did.'
I liked when she said she was confused by some questions she understood the words but not the meaning, and that she was worried about whether her answer was relevant or not, because the very same thing happened to me when I first went to a mall in the US and people asked me "How are you doing?" I had no idea what that meant and my attempts to answer were all clearly off the mark. I could see it in people's faces :-)
 
3:19 PM
Wordle 645 5/6

⬛⬛🟨🟨🟨
⬛🟨🟨⬛🟩
🟨⬛⬛🟨🟩
⬛🟨🟨⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Tough one today.
 
3:29 PM
Wordle 645 4/6

⬜⬜🟨🟨🟨
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟨🟨🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
I would have made it through three tries if it weren't for that pesky anagram.
 
Yeah, I also know too many words. The simplest ones are often the ones I think of last.
Daily Quordle 426
6️⃣4️⃣
8️⃣5️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle
 
3:56 PM
You likely know ten times if not one hundred times more English words than I know. I often try words I do not recognize but that look plausible enough English to me.
Daily Quordle 426
9️⃣7️⃣
5️⃣6️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle
 
@jlliagre I doubt it's 100 times more. You have a decent vocabulary. More to the point, you're good at games. A worthy rival!
@jlliagre There is this translation of Cyrano de Bergerac that renders his culminating insult to an oaf this way: "These, sir, are things you might have said, had you any article of letters or of wit; but wit, nay, you never had an atom, and as for letters you need but three to write you don: a-s-s." I'm curious: what is that in the original French?
* " ... write you down" not "don" ...
There are so many great usages of English in that statement that I wonder how much is in the translation and how much in the original.
Daily Octordle #426
3️⃣8️⃣
9️⃣🕛
6️⃣🕚
🕐🟥
Score: 76
 
4:17 PM
> Voilà ce qu’à peu près, mon cher, vous m’auriez dit
Si vous aviez un peu de lettres et d’esprit
Mais d’esprit, ô le plus lamentable des êtres,
Vous n’en eûtes jamais un atome, et de lettres
Vous n’avez que les trois qui forment le mot : sot !
 
@jlliagre Nice. A worthy translation then. Thanks!
 
Daily Octordle #426
🕚🕛
🔟9️⃣
3️⃣🕐
8️⃣5️⃣
Score: 71
 
 
3 hours later…
7:32 PM
@jlliagre Ahh thanks, that makes sense. Odd abbreviation, though.
 
@Cerberus Did you find your happiness ? ;-)
 
@jlliagre I interpreted that one correctly.
I mean, the context was such that one expects to hear only very few different messages.
I tried to listen to all the examples without looking at the text.
Most I guessed correctly or knew.
Like t'enquiète.
 
7:59 PM
@Cerberus Worry!
 
Exactly.
But it was clear to me.
 
@Cerberus There is actually no ambiguity with that one because T'inquiètes ! only matches T'inquiète pas ! An affirmative form would be Inquiète-toi !
 
@jlliagre Ah, I see, that makes it even more logical.
 
9:20 PM
> No association was found between continuous positive airway pressure treatment and suicide risk.
Interesting. Why is sleep apnea considered such a taboo?
"this dude has inherited or unlocked some old power related to the first man (Adam), and this allows him to see into and through peoples bodies like an X-ray" — that was my favourite bit of the Bible. — Paul D. Waite yesterday
 
@M.A.R. Because it prevents good sleep, inviting all kinds of other maladies.
 
Word of 02:32 am: sedan chair (" In Glasgow, the decline of the sedan chair is illustrated by licensing records which show twenty-seven sedan chairs in 1800, eighteen in 1817, and ten in 1828. During that same period the number of registered hackney carriages in Glasgow rose to one hundred and fifty.")
 
@CowperKettle Yay! Monkey servants!
 
9:35 PM
Etymology of 02:35 am: litter (From Middle English lytere, litere, from Anglo-Norman litiere (modern French litière), from Medieval Latin lectaria, from Latin lectus (“bed”); compare Ancient Greek λέκτρον (léktron). Had the sense ‘bed’ in very early English, but then came to mean ‘portable couch’, ‘bedding’, ‘strewn rushes (for animals)’, etc.)
 
@CowperKettle Litterally a bed. Interesting, I never thought that litter and litière were related.
 
I see those records of helicopters flying close to the frontline and launching unguided rockets, then turning shaprly to avoid being hit. I wonder - is it worth it, to expend the mechanically complicated resource (helicopter) to launch some rockets that may spread over a large territory.
A helicopter costs a lot, its upkeep costs a lot, the time of an experienced pilot costs a lot, the time of an experienced mechanic (maintenance) costs a lot.
And all to launch a bunch of rockets. Why not use several mortar squads instead. Maybe it's easier to locate and destroy a mortar squad with counterbattery fire?
The spread is enormous.
Plus-minus hundreds of meters
 
I heard the Ukrainians did it quite a lot.
The advantage of using a helicopter is that you can move your gun around the battlefield very quickly over fairly long distances.
 
Yes, this is a clear advantage
Maybe sometimes its worthwile even to lay a "scaring fire", not meaning to be precise.
@jlliagre According to Wiktionary litiere means the same as litter :)
Noun: litière f (plural litières)
  1. litter (for cattle, cats); bedding (for horses)
  2. litter (mode of transport)
  3. (ecology) litter, leaf litter
 
9:56 PM
@CowperKettle Because they don't have competent artillery, period.
@CowperKettle The only danger to the Ukrainians from such an "attack" is that they might die laughing.
 
10:25 PM
@CowperKettle The "mode of transport" meaning is obsolète. We say civière or brancard (stretcher).
We do not use litière for litter (as garbage, trash) which was the only meaning I was aware of.
 
We use brancard as well.
 
10:52 PM
Verb: ruer dans les brancards
  1. to kick over the traces, to jib (to become rebellious)
  2. Synonym: regimber
 

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