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00:25
@jlliagre Cool. I did not expect "mettre" to mean "put on"
It reminded me of "meter" (unit of distance) only.
Interjection: merde alors !
  1. (somewhat vulgar) damn! bugger! dammit!
Literally "shit then"
Victor Hugo spends a whole page or two on discussing the interjection "merde" in his Les Miserables
@CowperKettle More idiomatic in English to say, "Well, shit!"
Mala tos le siento al gato.
Aug 6, 2012 at 15:48, by ΜετάEd
Merdre.
00:41
Scare of the day: "If mirror bacteria ever started growing outside a lab, they could be very hard to stop. Our immune systems wouldn't detect them well. Natural predators would struggle to attack them. The risk to human and ecological health seems unprecedented."
> Last Christmas Ich gave thee myne hearte
But the verye next daye ther came a wolf,
Wyth sinews of whispers - quiet as frost -
And the wolf stole my hearte, fled
To a tower out of tyme biyonde all the stars.
Seek now myne hearte,
Return it within a yeare and a daye:
Thys ys thy queste!
Connections
Puzzle #550
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01:16
@think_meaning_buildß Next year will be a special year, only the third such in America's existence. Its previous such year was 88 years ago, and its first one was 175 years ago. What makes next year special in this way, and when will be the next such?
2
@CowperKettle I'm sorry.
Probably "A person with a weird hairdo assumes an elected position"?
But their cravats looked cool
@CowperKettle Wigs were badass back then.
01:41
I googled "impact of lithium on cortisol levels" and found studies with contradictory findings. Some say it decreases, other say it increases cortisol.
It acts in a kind of bipolar fashion, it seems.
@CowperKettle ironic
02:39
@CowperKettle Li is pretty toxic. Leave it as a last resort.
And it has a very narrow TI, meaning it's easy to miss the therapeutic dose or cross the threshold into toxic doses. And it has a lot of interactions, not just with other drugs but also with your dietary salt intake.
@CowperKettle that's contradictory. It's basically saying that mirror life will find the numerous matches to targets in the human body normal life finds to establish an infection, yet immune systems and other organisms wouldn't find such targets within mirror life.
Cursed misspelling of the day: ataccked
03:02
@tchrist Impending war that, while not obvious at the time, will go on to kill hundreds of thousands of American troops?
@M.A.R. I've heard there's a trend of people "microdosing" lithium.
 
9 hours later…
12:31
> «Je m'appelle Marius Pontmercy. Porter mon cadavre chez mon grand-père M. Gillenormand, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, no 6, au Marais.»
La rue des Filles du Calvaire est une voie parisienne, située à l'extrémité nord-est du 3e arrondissement == Situation et accès == Elle est proche de la place de la République. Ce site est desservi par la station de métro Filles du Calvaire. == Origine du nom == Elle porte le nom du couvent des Filles-du-Calvaire qui y était situé en référence aux filles Sachot des Epesses. == Historique == Elle est ouverte le 7 août 1698 et reçoit son nom actuel à cette occasion. == Bâtiments remarquables et lieux de mémoire == No 6 : Dans Les Misérables, de Victor Hugo, lieu où habitent M.Gillenor...
"Daughters of Golgotha" (Calvary)
13:10
@CowperKettle While George Washington put an end to the Tories in America, it was the contentiousness of human slavery which finally brought down the Whigs a few generations later. This dissolution left a gap for the then-new Republican Party to form with its explicit anti-slavery platform—ironic, given how pro-slavery most Republicans are now.
14:12
#travle #730 +0 (Perfect)
✅✅✅
https://travle.earth
14:27
Wordle 1,273 6/6

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14:47
Connections
Puzzle #551
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Daily Octordle #1054
7️⃣3️⃣
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Score: 60
Daily Sequence Octordle #1054
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Score: 60
Fish skin grafts for.. wound dressing O_O
Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Dec. 13, 2024

T I G H T R O P E
✅ ✅ 💔 ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ 🎉

My Score: 2080
Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Dec. 13, 2024

T I G H T R O P E
✅ ✅ 💔 ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ 🎉

My Score: 2080
@M.A.R. Yes, sadly. One must measure its blood levels to make sure it stays within its narrow range
15:12
#travle #730 +0 (Perfect)
✅✅✅
https://travle.earth
#WhenTaken #290 (13.12.2024)

I scored 908/1000👑

1️⃣📍300 km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥇188/200
2️⃣📍1.0K km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥈167/200
3️⃣📍2.9 km - 🗓️13 yrs - 🥇176/200
4️⃣📍541 m - 🗓️12 yrs - 🥇179/200
5️⃣📍2.5 km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥇198/200

https://whentaken.com
15:30
#WhenTaken #290 (13.12.2024)

I scored 910/1000👑

1️⃣📍307 km - 🗓️3 yrs - 🥇187/200
2️⃣📍254 km - 🗓️10 yrs - 🥇176/200
3️⃣📍275 km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥇189/200
4️⃣📍393 km - 🗓️12 yrs - 🥈167/200
5️⃣📍181 km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥇191/200

https://whentaken.com
@Robusto Close!
@jlliagre Yes, another statistical tie. I didn't finish yesterday's because I got busy with something else, but mainly I just stalled on the first one.
Hmm, I wonder how Tightrope got pasted twice.
It's not that I'm particularly proud of that one.
@tchrist So may we be permitted to know how next year will be like 88 and 175 years ago in the United States?
@CowperKettle This hardly seems possible, so many people 'losing literacy'?
@CowperKettle hospitals stink to high heaven anyway. A fish smell would be a welcome change
15:43
@Cerberus Yes
@Robusto Yes, there was no real clues in that first picture except it's clearly not Alaska ;-)
@Cerberus is literacy defined as being able to read and write, or read and write in English?
If the latter, it's saying that 1/5th of Americans don't care about learning English
Wordle 1,273 4/6

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Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Dec. 13, 2024

T I G H T R O P E
✅ ✅ 💔 ✅ 💔 💔 ⎵ ⎵ ⎵ 🤕

My Score: 550
@M.A.R. Probably the latter?
But it is mainly the same people being interviewed again, so they should have lost their litracy?
15:58
Connections
Puzzle #551
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Wordle 1,273 4/6

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Strands #285
“One for the Swifties”
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@Cerberus I'm just saying in the country of immigrants the lingua franca has been losing its significance in the last decade or so.
It's certainly not as surprising as that many Americans being illiterate in every language.
Can you explain that?
Connections
Puzzle #551
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16:14
Just in time?
@Cerberus there's been less pressure on the Hispanics to learn English
It could be a cultural or political shift, I dunno. Probably both.
@Xanne Know you surely shall be able to no later than New Year's Day next when both years agos perforce autoincrement.
’Twould have made a fine hat to solve.
Now you've something to collectively ponder. Or correctively depending on your biases.
16:29
yesterday, by CowperKettle
> The survey was previously administered in 2017, when 19% of U.S. adults ranked at the lowest levels of literacy. In 2023, that figure increased to 28%, a change that NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr called “substantial” https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/survey-growing-number-us-adults-lack-literacy-skills-rcna183498
@M.A.R. So you are suggesting immigration is responsible for new people entering the country and taking down the rate of literacy?
Philosophy of the day: thick description en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_description
@CowperKettle I am making fun of your post because it makes me seem better by comparison.
Apropos of this, I got a lovely spam this morning, offering SEO services: find screwups in my competitor's SEO; create harmful, toxic links likely to break their SEO.
That sounds very old-fashioned!
I mean who still uses search engines?
16:46
@tchrist "The earliest known use of the name America dates to April 25, 1507" so I'm going to argue for 260 years ago also, plus others.
@Cerberus Google employees. It's in their contracts.
@Cerberus I wonder what it would be if Covid didn't happen.
Hmm.
Meanwhile, the Connections puzzle is hard.
@Cerberus Especially Google's SEO, but also their SFO, SIO, and SMO.
@Cerberus Yeah, it nearly got me.
Green and yellow are not so hard, except that yellow required 4 tries because there are 4 equal options for the category.
@Cerberus What do you use?
16:48
@Cerberus I had to solve purple to get blue and yellow.
@Lambie Doesn't everyone use GPT nowadays?
@MetaEd Funny, I noticed.
Purple is the hardest, isn't it?
As to yellow, you probably thought, 'that's too easy, can't be it'?
I don't use GPT by default. But neither Google nor GPT find the right material.
The right material tends to be from before the time when SEO became rampant.
I'm just not getting any associations with the last 8 tiles that make any sense.
Right, both have some similar issues.
@MetaEd If you please. Me, I find that Pangaea dealt poorly with imaginary roots of negative numbers.
GPT regurgitates information in a time-saving format. That's GPT's perceived virtue.
16:52
Connections
Puzzle #551
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I think yellow was unreasonable.
You had to try too many times.
As to blue, I just didn't know 3 out of 4 had that meaning.
Those do not exist here.
Purple is funny, and the thought had occurred to me for one of the words. But it is very hard to arrive at the thought at all.
@Cerberus I think it depends on what you are looking for, doesn't it?
I was half-joking.
But I think many people will just ask GPT instead of visiting any website to look something up.
I'm encouraged that Macron selected a prime minister whose name no American will ever be able to pronounce or even type.
It is not a hard name?
Isn't it /baɪ.ru/?
I probably got the a wrong, I can never remember the IPA a sounds.
@Cerberus I reckon they'll probably say /ˈfrenkojz ˈbejɹow/, disdaining the çurrender monkeys' cedilla as too prissy for red-blooded he-men to type or even consider.
17:07
Oh they can't even pronounce François, OK.
Frank Oyze Bay Row.
The rule is to disregard diacritics and anything you've ever known about French and pronounce foreign words as though they were English ones.
That way they need never learn anything new.
Geoff Lindsey seems to think this is the more authentic way to handle words imported into English. I understand his point but I disagree with it.
It's how he justifies the horrible mutilations that Brits but not Americans tend to do to words from Italian, Spanish, French, etc.
I don't know him.
17:15
Oh, he.
He also thinks you don't have to pronounce somebody's name like they do if you don't want to.
Which, I suppose, he may be right about.
I don't know.
If he'd had an R in his name, I would have a field day with that one.
@tchrist Of course he is right about that.
In my experience, most people who have been around the block know how to pronounce François. How about açai? Here, in the Boston area, I have seen more and more: acai bowls, with no accent mark. And here's a new semi-scam-type thing. There is a company called Menchie's [they sell yogurt]. That's the sign on the door etc. BUT, only online they use the name: Acai super fruits, yes, it says by Menchie's.
@Cerberus /paʁi/ the thought!
Just like I don't have to ignore the two R's in Harvard even if natives may.
Provincial of me, I know.
But when doing deliveries for grubhub, the address was only Acai Super Fruits. And that is not street visible. The owner told me that is only an online marketing company name. The name is NOT in the shop or on the shop. I guess it's a tax thing. Anyway, açai is very, very bitter but people have bought the "it's-good-for-you" thing, which it is I guess.
17:21
And Spokane is not a type of pipe organ.
@Lambie Curakow is the one that bugs me the most.
What's wrong with their cows that needs curing, you know?
Sorry, Iris, but a tornado rainbow is not a colorado.
I just haven't heard anyone talking about Curaçao even those who have quit going to Aruba. Seriously.
Probably because Grand Marnier is better.
The funniest is the French saying in French: Pernambuco. They just drop the o. Je suis allé à Pernambuc. [boo-k] And also their saying: Guadalajara, which comes out very often as: Guadalahaha. As for the Brits, there's always: Nica-rah-gewah. So funny. But with Ibiza, they insist on: Ibitha.
Brits don't believe in stress "ah"; they say it like we say the vowel in bag.
Brits don't believe in stressed "ah" that isn't followed by R; they say it like we say the vowel in bag.
Or in this case, in rag.
Well, it's gew as in gewgah.
It's the ending more than anything else that makes me laugh.
17:35
Mainly they like to say the FATHER vowel wherever we have the TRAP vowel and they also like to say the TRAP vowel wherever we have the FATHER vowel.
Tacos have the vowel from match for them.
We have the FATHER vowel there.
We have the TRAP vowel in raspberry but they use the FATHER vowel.
Yes, I know all this. You're preaching to the choir even though the choir doesn't particularly like reading music.
It's like deliberate ignorance by the porsher-than-thou.
Matchizmo.
Actually, I don't believe I've ever heard a British person talking about tacos. But I believe you. They just seem to go on and on about kebabs and takeaways andp
utting the kettle on. I have a running joke with family. Can you guess when a character will talk about putting the kettle on in a tv series? I can always see it coming. I'm usually about 85% right.
It's so funny because I can't think of one similar "iconic" line in AmE Tv shows.
@tchrist I remember the Toronado
17:55
@MetaEd I remember the Maine.
@Mitch I remember the Exxon Valdez.
@MetaEd I'd forgotten all about Enron.
@Mitch You lost the game.
@MetaEd But I'm winning the war.
Good Bye to All That.
@Mitch There are no sides to a war.
18:00
@MetaEd I never understood what's so great about a chicken dinner. I mean it's good sure, but nothing that special.
A war is lost when it's begun -- and lost again when it's won.
Well, chicken dinners ain't about cocks.
@Mitch What's so good about it? ---the chicken
I think the chicken might have a say.
It crossed the damn road! :)
Can't remember what came before. What was it again?
To get to the other side...
But Chicken Little thought the sky was fallin'.
18:05
@Lambie "He's right behind me, isn't he."
The egg came first. Once amphibians stayed on land and became reptiles, they developed hard shelled eggs, roughly in the late Permian, early Triassic. Then Birds developed in the mid-Cretaceous. Chickens (or the gallinaceous order) developed in the early Miocene (not that long ago). So, ergo, hence, then, ipso facto, obiter dictu, the egg came becore the chicken.
I had to do real research to say that.
You're welcome.
If it's a hen's egg, neither came first. There was neither a first hen's egg, nor a first chicken.
I had to do real research to say that too, but not today.
18:23
In the face of such learning, I throw up my hands in defeat.
 
2 hours later…
19:56
@tchrist I would suggest pronouncing his name as France whoa by who (or bayou).
Note that in France, there is no consensus about how to pronounce Bayrou.
Some say /be.ʁu/, other /baj.ʁu/ and even /ba.jə.ʁu/.
@tchrist This article strikes me as just...very strange.
It seems to insinuate that there's something bad--or even sinister--about holding political views that aren't particularly aligned with the orthodox left or right.
As if those are the only two legitimate or coherent or consistent political worldviews.
Why is it bad to follow authors from across the political spectrum? Surely someone who only follows writers from one side or the other ends up trapped in a bubble.
The author comes close outright calling himself an out-of-touch elite by expressing surprise at "what most non-elites consume."
Then there's this line:
> Unfortunately, if you’re reading this essay, you’re likely very, very out of touch.
So he apparently thinks essays in the Guardian are only consumed by elites, and out of touch ones at that? Strange. It's not the Economist or something, just a reasonably good center-left news source without a paywall.
> They found these Americans, predictably, defy conventional political categorization. They believe immigration should be decreased, abortion should be legal, the criminal justice system is not tough enough, the government should crack down on price-gouging, and same-sex marriage is just dandy. They practice hodgepodge politics, and they aren’t bothered by what elites would call ideological inconsistency.
If you think it's inconsistent to hold all those positions, you're not an elite, you're just, frankly, not very intelligent or not very well-educated or not very reflective or something.
Moreover, the very fact that these positions are widely held, and that someone who held them committed an act of violence, doesn't mean that those political views somehow lead to violence inevitably.
It would be extremely strange if they did, given that there's nothing in them that glorifies violence per se. It seems like he just happens to hold a somewhat unusual and complex set of political views; you'd have to be truly trapped in a bubble to find such people dangerous.
Just so weird, this article. I can't make heads or tails of it.
@tchrist I just heard /bɛj.ʁu/ too.
@alphabet What article?
20:32
@alphabet I don't know about that particular list of positions, if they're inconsistent or not or partially inconsistent (there are so many different positions) but 1) it's very very easy to think of everything as black and white for each position -and- one of those is the right/good choice for other people (because that's how voting works, and frnakly language itself (people say 'are for for against this?', not 'on a scale of 1-10, how for or against are you?'
-and- 2) for oneself think that everything is nuanced and problematic and unsure -and- not realize that you yourself are inconsistent.
hm that was all mixed up.
That proves my point!
well, just for me.
ANyway, people writing these opinion articles are often just being forced to take their inchoate feelings and force them into crisp words to fill up a column.
If you stare into the abyss, the abyss just couldn't give a rat's ass.
I find the Guardian's op-eds to often be (on the occasional time I happen to run pass them) ... sort of ... I don't know... stereotypically like...
I don't know.
presumptupus?
I don't know how that can be a stereotype of anybody. But it feels consistently that way.
@alphabet That's the whole direction of the commentary it seems: this guy who did this bad thing X, does this one totally random other thing Y. therefore Y causes X.
HIs parents are rich. Therefore he killed a guy.
He played D&D once. Therefore he killed a guy.
He smiled on camera. Therefore he killed a guy.
Before anybody says anything, I consider it very presumptupus to correct someones spelling or typos.
@Lambie Click the arrow to see what message I was replying to.
@alphabet Whereas, at least with the NYT staff op-ed writers, you know exactly where the author stands.
20:49
The worst part of having an apple addiction is the fact that you can't see a doctor about it.
@Mitch Now now, let's not get too pro-sumpsimus here. Otherwise next thing you know you'll have us all mumpsimussing in our sleepsimusses.
Sorry, I'm always getting your presumpsimus confused with my prosumpsimus.
@Mitch Bret Stephens stands on the island nobody dares travel to. Question: does anyone, anywhere on the political spectrum, like Bret Stephens?
@alphabet Or Ross Douthat or David Brooks or that other guy I've forgotten.
@jlliagre The Brits are always using a biro for everything.
all of those guys define the word 'ugh' for me.
20:54
@Mitch You forgot a b in your headgear.
/øχ/
@jlliagre The epenthetic vowel in your three-syllable version is curious.
@tchrist It's a legitimate alternate spelling of 'Onnet'
Chesterton of the day: "Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede"
@tchrist Southern France accent.
20:57
@Mitch Don your doubting hat, Russ.
@CowperKettle Is this one of those 'Harvard entrance exam' quiz questions?
@Mitch Surely there are readers who like those two. But Bret Stephens seems to hold a combination of views that I think everyone would find annoying for one reason or another.
Remember: he rails against cancel culture, but he tried to get a professor fired for jokingly calling him a "bedbug."
@alphabet Did he mean it as a cute bedbug or an ugly one? Context matters.
@jlliagre The Lisboetas also change their ei diphthongs into ai ones, making their milk leite sound more like English light than like English late. I wonder whether this is a general principle of some sort, given French. Or maybe it should never have made it into e anything when it was starting from something lactal in the first place and this is just retro. :)
21:02
@Mitch "Are you very wealthy? Did your parents donate us money for the new field hockey stadium? Alternatively, how do you feel about being a token minority?"
Perhaps I still suffer from getting my knuckles metaphorically rapt by a French teacher insistently reminding me that "there are no diphthongs in French".
@tchrist Yeah, same.
21:19
@tchrist We had triphthongs like eau. They just ended being pronounced a simpler way.
@jlliagre That kind of happens to all your vowels.
@alphabet I read through it quickly but what I see is that if more and more people become like Mangioni (as regards that list of issues the author lists in the article) and have no where no hang their hat (on a political party/movement), more individuals will become prone to direct, violent action. Is that your reading?
21:58
@Cerberus no no, I'm saying America's always been a pretty diverse country, and recently immigrants (possibly older immigrants) have stopped trying to learn English as much as before.
@M.A.R. But the immigrants who are already there still know as much English as they used to.
@Cerberus well then either a new demographic is being included in the polls (new citizenship? New generation?) or the constant wave of immigration into America has become statistically significant compared to when it didn't show up in the polls.
Either way I don't think there's anything extraordinary going on
@M.A.R. I can't imagine those resulting such a large quantitative change in such a short time.
Another option is: the statistics lie.
@Cerberus also possible. I don't think it's a coincidence that just as Trumpsters are about to rise to power again someone's raising a stink about this.
@M.A.R. Not sure I follow this.
But I had three beers.
22:12
Don't drink and try to derive meaning on the internet.
22:32
@tchrist are we sure they're not Germans?
23:07
Did you know: Every “C” in “Pacific Ocean” is pronounced differently.
2
23:19
@CowperKettle I just say Pacific Ocean. Who says Padifferentlyifidifferently Odifferentlyean?
@MetaEd You must not speak the standard dialedifferentlyt.
23:57
@M.A.R. What's odd about that survey is that nearly every country saw a decline in literacy rates over that time period. I suspect some sort of methodological problem, unless this is somehow a worldwide problem.
Like nearly 4/5 of all the countries they surveyed had a decline, some much larger than that of the US.
Yeah, the social science have this problem often.
Or rather, an increase in the % of people with the lowest levels of literacy.
They see numbers, but their conclusions cannot be supported by mere numbers.

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