@MετάEd Trump of Doom, or Trump of Bafoon: your call. No baboons need apply.

Dworkin's mad scribblings will surely bring us all to ruin ere the epoch turn.

Trump o chump?

Today's analysis suggested that Trump might not win his nomination, after his defeat in Wisconsin.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 What's the modern Mandarin gender-neutral ta? Isn't it the same as the character for the masculine ta?

Haha, simultaneous answer-posting for the win.

nice

as Nanda maintains, ‘Deconstructing central structural concepts in American society such as race, gender, religion, and ethnicity is an essential component of teaching cultural anthropology as cultural critique and most explicitly requires consideration of encounters and power’ (Nanda 1997: 118). But the intellectual atmosphere of Iran inhibits anthropologists from deconstructing and defamiliarizing these dominant concepts of gender, race, politics, ethnicity and religion;

whats does “requires consideration of encounters and power” mean?

My first instinct would be to say it's talking about conflicts between groups and who had the upper hand in them.

@yorgun Welcome to chat :) ! Have the resources around the website been useful to you?

@KitZ.Fox How are you doing with the Mindstorms set?

Lego Mindstorm, Lawrence?

Awesome.

Yes, Lego Mindstorm.

Our HNC Computer Science group project was to make a lego robot that could navigate a maze.

I figured out how to display the raw sensor input yesterday so I could do diagnostics

We made this instead.

(we did have the maze thing almost down but this was more fun)

@KitZ.Fox We wired ours up, then played around with the visual programming environment for a bit. You sound like you've been able to get a lot further with yours :) .

Are you using the default coding environment or something like LeJOS?

I have some prior experience with robotics and Scratch.

hello, chat

Hello, Andrew.

@JohnClifford The default environment. It's been mothballed for a while.

Hello, Andrew.

Hi Andrew.

Ah, cool. We used LeJOS for ours.

It's pretty neat.

how's everyone? hope you don't mind i've only dropped in to ask a quick question...

Though interestingly enough despite the Java implementation of the self-balancing code being functionally -identical- to the one from the default environment, it never worked exactly the same way.

@KitZ.Fox What age are you pitching at in your class?

Go ahead, Andrew, that's what we're here for. :)

@Lawrence Um. It's not for class.

@JohnClifford I'll go look it up. How's it different?

@KitZ.Fox Oh, sorry.

My boys are 5 and 8.

Lawrence: You write the code in Java, then use the LeJOS software to upload it to the brick.

Oh, I would like it if I could write actual code.

It's pretty easy to do, there are quite a few online guides on setting the brick up and getting the software downloaded.

i am the pro tem moderator of beer.stackexchange.com. we would like to expand our site to covering beer, wine, and spirits. but it's more about the culture of brewing / fermenting / distilling, the search, and the tasting, so "alcohol.stackexchange.com" seems... <word-request> (sterile?) anywho, would it be valid to ask in meta.english.stackexchange for help with names? that seems a bit wrong to me since it's not really about english.stackexchange.com.

I think asking in chat is appropriate.

What Kit said.

On our Meta is a bit weird. It should be on your Meta.

The programmers chat is also big into that, so they might have some good suggestions.

haha, agreed. but you understand, i wanted your meta for your experts. but okay, meta.english.se didn't feel right to me either, thanks.

that's a good suggestion—i hadn't thought of going to a completely unrelated chat.

adultbeverages.SE

@KitZ.Fox That sounds great. Similar here - around 8-9 years old. The initial fun was seeing the programming translate into action. Now I'm looking for something more. What did you find sparked their interest most? I.e. how did they respond differently to the robotics compared to, say wind-up or pre-packaged electric toys?

@Lawrence They liked being able to change the logic.

Make it do stuff.

@JohnClifford Now I'll definitely need to look into it.

We displayed our robots at the university science fair as well, @Lawrence.

They went down really well with the public.

There were a few kids said it made them want to do computing when they finished school.

@KitZ.Fox Mm, I'll need to fire up the imagination, then :) .

It's exciting when you start playing with the different sensors and seeing the ways you can use them.

@JohnClifford Hey, that's great! We need people who actually want to do this stuff, not just 'cause.

@JohnClifford What did you do with your robots?

We made a little guard dog robot at one point, which detected anything a certain distance in front of it and rapidly shot towards it for a bit before moving slowly back.

We also had them follows lines using a light sensor.

The ultrasound sensors were the main ones we used for the maze following robots. Ours had one mounted front and one left, and we used the left-turn-first algorithm to find the way out.

I had intended on adding some code that made the robot store its path and then calculate the shortest one after its first journey, but we ran out of time. I had the logic there, though.

Which ones got the most attention from people already familiar with robotics (though not necessarily proficient at it)?

Well the only thing we had on show at the fair was the maze-following ones.

@JohnClifford I remember the A* algorithm ... well, I remember the name of the A* algorithm :) .

I've used the A* algorithm in pathfinding for the RPG I'm making, but for the robots it seemed overkill. We only had little mazes.

I think with an informal class of half a dozen or so pre-teens, I might work on a guard-dog style setup.

@JohnClifford Did you get audience participation?

We let the kids pick the robots up and place them in various parts of the maze, yeah.

Lemme see if I've got the videos from that day.

Thanks, I'll have a look at it now.

These are from when we were building them rather than the fair, but you can see the kind of stuff we were doing.

Haha. I like how it 'tried' to break out of a dead-end :) .

Yeah, they had a few teething problems. XD

I see the props came from the Art dept :) . Nice to see the inter-department cooperation. What age range was your audience?

There were too many people there for me to determine a particular range. We had all sorts from little kids to the elderly.

Did you use a follow-the-left-wall algorithm for this robot?

Yes.

Great. That simplifies things :) .

I'll need to get my EV3 set out and check if it has ultrasonic sensors. I don't recall using them before.

I love that accent.

@Lawrence I don't think the base kit does. It has some kind of motion sensor. Might be an IR sensor.

I can't remember off the top of my head.

But now I've a reason to make one.

The base kit has one ultrasonic sensor, IIRC.

@KitZ.Fox You're into EE as well?

A little. I'm trying to get my boys interested.

Which means I have to learn it.

@JohnClifford Going off to hunt for that kit.

Which is funny to me because I spent a lot of time programming things like daq boards, but none with actually making them.

So I have exactly zero knowledge of how to do it.

@KitZ.Fox Ah, I see. I didn't really get into the soldering. I tried alligator clips with wires instead :) . Ok for large pieces, but not really useful at the circuit-board level.

It's quite intuitive to pick up.

@KitZ.Fox I thought you were into Turtle-graphics and system administration from your previous chats :) .

@JohnClifford Watching others solder makes it look so easy.

I suppose I should give it a go.

@JohnClifford I've found the box. It says it's got an IR sensor, a touch sensor and a colour sensor. That should be enough for this, even without the ultrasonic sensor.

@Lawrence I was, about thirty years ago.

@KitZ.Fox I'm sure the chats weren't that long ago :) .

@Lawrence I know there are different types of kits, I think the ones we got had an ultrasonic.

@Lawrence funneh

@KitZ.Fox I remember not having an alarm clock and programming up a few loops in Turtle-graphics as a make-shift one in high school. Those were the days :) .

good times, good times.

@JohnClifford At the time, it was hard enough just to find a Mindstorms kit for sale :) . I'll make do, and maybe get the guys at the office to give me a primer on soldering. Still hoping that if I just use big blocks for functional components, I can get away with alligator clips :) .

@Lawrence yes, except that because there is now a feminine ta, the neutral ta defaults to male even more strongly because it also means male. So where before you only had the hidden sexism of any unspecified person being male, now you have the explicit sexism of the default being male and female requiring a marker in writing.

How long does the battery last on your Mindstorms sets?

Ours was made entirely out of lego, we didn't have to solder anything. :)

I can't remember. Couple hours?

@Lawrence What about using a breadboard?

@JohnClifford Haha :) . I was referring to Ms Fox's earlier comments about more exotic bolt-ons.

Ah.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yes, that makes sense. I thought you meant there was a different character for the gender-neutral version. Is there any natural language that has a real gender-neutral pronoun?

@Lawrence well, Mandarin did, in that it used to have only one pronoun.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yup, got that, too :) . No soldering :) :) .

and spoken, they're both the same, so speakers don't code for gender when selecting a pronoun.

There is a neuter ta used for non-humans, non-animals.

Is specifying gender in everyday language useful? I mean that as a thought exercise. It was my first reaction, but I'm not sure if it is true.

Sure, it can be useful.

Is it useful to be able to say "Ask her" as opposed to "Ask him"?

I can discuss my children's conversations with other people without ever mentioning their names, just "he said this, she said that"

I wonder if you would end up saying "The girl said this, the boy did that" if you had gender neutral pronouns.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yes, I'm familiar with that part. You mentioned that the variants only arose recently. Do you know how recently? I thought they were there since the start, well, at least since the unification of the spoken language. Would you know whether the traditional script (as it's now known) start about then, or did it significantly predate the unification?

@KitZ.Fox For that matter, in gendered languages, how are gendered nouns useful - or perhaps I should ask, more useful than non-gendered nouns in, say, English?

Or is it just something people 'just did' (either way - gendered or non-gendered) and then got used to culturally?

@JohnClifford Time to bring out the rechargeables. :)

@KitZ.Fox Someone mentioned they had different chat personas. How are the personas intended to be used, and how to we create them?

I'm not sure what you mean.

Let me see if I can find it.

Nope, I can't find it. Question withdrawn :) .

Hi ELU users, there is one issue: i have a sentence like this: the claim is equivalent to say that (some mathematical statement like: A is dense in B). Now my question is: is this correct, or do I have to use "equivalent to saying" instead of "equivalent to say" or is both accepted?

Thank you for an answer!

online research shows me that people usually use "saying" but still I am unsure if maybe the other version is also allowed.

I would use "saying".

since in my language i would use the infinitive in this situation, therefore the confusion

but does it really sounds wrong in your ears, when i use "say"

I would understand what was meant, but it's not the form we'd normally use there.

ok i see

@KitZ.Fox other than in clinical situations, it is useful for reducing ambiguity. If you specify gender pronoun, there should be fewer possible referents.

obviously names would be the least ambiguous

@user66288 Yes, it does sound odd to use "say" there. I'm not a linguist, but I think the "to" 'sticks' closer to "equivalent" than to "say/saying" - i.e. the 'phrasal unit' (if I've got the term right) is "equivalent to" rather than "to say".

but not entirely of course, and so that exposes that there is a continuum of ambiguity and so having a single non-gendered pronoun is an optimization to the other end of the spectrum.

I think that's pretty much how I'd think of it as well, Lawrence.

I agree @La

it is just that we are used to say: to + infinitve, but even in phrases like: I am looking forward to hearing from you, it seems to break the rule

@user66288 You mean, of course, that you are "used to saying ..." :P .

I don't have the words right now to explain why this context requires the present continuous form.

But it does. :P

i will change this mistake everywhere in my document... later on

@user66288 'to' is a prepostion there, not an infinitive marker

cya later

@skillpatrol bye

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yes, this is what I was getting at before, but you say it very succinctly.

My sources The degendering of the third person pronoun in Mandarin, He / she / it / none of the above

I feel like Mair had many more language Log posts than that on the subject, but there it is.

Yuck. I stoked the fire, but there's a bunch of backdraft because it's windy and the chimney needs cleaning.

What century are you living in?

Also, what month? Has it been that bad up there up to now or is it just because of a out of the ordinary locally cold April?

It snowed last night.

Also, isn't Language Log great? The only thing bad about it is that I wish there more of it. Like a Victor Mair for other languages (like Arabic or Spanish or all of India), and a Mike Lieberman for ... for everything else.

@KitZ.Fox Were schools closed?

no.

standout wood stove or built in chimney?

Yes.

It's a woodstove that feeds into a chimney.

(I meant by built in chimney a fireplace that is part of the chimney). Oh so a woodstove has similar problems as a chimney, like downdraft form the cold air outside dropping down? But hopefully the damper on a woodstove is not something you have to stick your head into the oven to figure out if it is open or closed.

That's the worst.

Right. No. There's a lever for that.

'Honey, there's smoke billowing out into the room. Did you forget to open the damper?'

You can poke it with a stick, you know.

'Can you stick your head into the fire place, while the fire is going at full and smoke is coming out at full, to look up through the smoke and fire and see if you can barely see the smallest sliver of sky?'

'Don't we have a chimney cap so you can't see the sky anyway?'

pats down burning hair

'Oh.'

pokes with stick

'Ow'

'Not me you idiot, the damper'

'Ow'

'Not with a burning stick you idiot'

hahaha

@Mitch Fascinating!

@Lawrence That's my line.

@Mitch In what century don't we like fireplaces?

No kind of century I want to be associated with.

I don't think I'm misunderstanding because too many negatives.

@MετάEd they were sort of not the mst popular in the 1300's, but I'd consider that just a fashion statement.

Pre-chimney invention.

I'm kind of new here. What do you guys talk about?

English and stuff.

Mostly stuff. Sometimes things as well.

Where does it show the no. of users online here?

It's that when I'm awake, most English speakers are asleep. I'm in India.

Also, the UI is pathetic.

Are you on mobile?

@KitZ.Fox Chrome/Win10

hello people , what is syntactic role? I know syntax in linguistics.

I'm not sure what you are asking. Are you confused by the meaning of "role"?

no probably people also call it syntactic relationship

probably this

syntactic function would be a synonym

How do you abbreviate a surname like (e.g.) McDonald? Wouldn't be "McD." better than just "M."?

Probably yes.

Mickey D's.

Eat At The Clown.

@MετάEd Fascinating! :)

@MετάEd Oh, I just noticed - what happened to the red egg?

And I'm sure this didn't change last June. :)

It was recent. Yesterday or the day before.

@NVZ Wait, there are better chat UIs? Do you have links?

@NVZ right side panel under room description, the row (or rows) of user icons tells you exactly who is logged in. and ordered by most recent activity. But it doesn' insure that theie eyes are on the transcript. Those towards the end probably just left a tab open for days and haven't come back to look in a while.

When the conversation is good, the road is not dusty.

cough cough

closes window and turns up AC

awkward

@Mitch I am no expert on UI/UX, and have no links defining a better chat UI. But this chat UI is, uhm, ancient, I think. My 2 cents, that is.

@Mitch thank you. :)

I'm never here.

@NVZ I'm interested in seeing what newer chats look like. so you must have experienced better ones. Links not necessary but at least an idea of what web site to look at.

Wha!? @Matt!

look, I'm not here right now!

@Mitch Kind of a "too broad" question that would be.

I feel like people are talking but ... nothing's being said

@NVZ well, just one or two examples.

does reddit have chat?

twitter doesn't.

There's Hangouts, but I guess that's getting nixed at some point, right?

I've tried slack and it made me yearn for SE chat

what's hangouts?

And that's not really a chat community like here.

@Mitch Google chat.

I kinda like the chat tech here.

I think slack is one I've tried.

@KitZ.Fox oh

And there's one that's text/video that I can't remember the name of.

one-ono-one chat there is prety good but chatrooms? SE gives you a choice of 'who you wanna hang out with'. Wait does google do that?

omegle?

@MattE.Эллен omerta

everyone sits around not saying anything

@Mitch I don't know.

It's harder to find if there is something like that.

Oh, there's Chatzy.

But you can't link or star messages.

yeah, I prefer SE chat over chatzy

does chatzy still exist?

@KitZ.Fox i didn't care for that interface. Too 1980's? that's the look, but it also didn't have great features

@MattE.Эллен Maybe?

yes it does

the SE model (communities with extra communication features) is a nice mix

what is the latest google thing called? not orkut. not waves.

circles?

they keep trying but they just never take off.

Yeah.

Google Plus.

Or something.

oh duh

wait... hold that duh.

Or maybe it was Revolv.

unhold... yeah it is g+

I believe circles are in Google Plus.

no it was Rubbe Sou

@Cerberus it's fine for chatting I guess, but having a random place (like here) that people can anonymously show up is nice too. informal. like Matt's pub metaphor.

Spreecast, that was the one.

was that any good?

Meh. Laggy.

@Mitch here are a few thoughts to improve this chat UI: 1. keep it simple. 2 to 10. reduce clutter.

I'd like a Spanish chat. Yes, SE has one. But it's not my gang so to speak.

@NVZ too much going on? which clutter? The stuff that I think could be called clutter is easy to ignore (I find)

It would be nice if I could collapse that -->

In addition to chatting, I kinda liked usenet with tree threading. All these web apps (slashdot, reddit, etc) are all trying to recreate that. But badly)

@KitZ.Fox the starboard?

And the other stuff. So I could see just the chat messages.

@Mitch This is good. Google Plus is...no idea, I've never used it. Google's attempts to force it on me annoyed me too much.

But did you hear about Revolv, owned by Google?

It is a home-automation hub that cost €300.

Lets you automate lights, cameras, and other devices inside and around your house.

@KitZ.Fox that sounds like NVZ's clutter

Google announced this month that they will pull the plug on the device. It will cease to function entirely in a couple of weeks.

@Cerberus That doesn't involve chat, does it?

They're shutting down the server, or something.

It doesn't.

@Mitch Yeah.

like nest or amazon ...is it echo? or alexa?

Just a random schandal related to Google's habit of abandoning things.

Yes, like Nest.

I think.

@Cerberus starts plans to buy one

@Cerberus cancels plans to by one

I wonder who would buy another object that depends on Google's servers in order to keep functioning, if Google has no qualms with disabling expensive, fairly recently bought devices.

@Cerberus weird. they're not a startup that needs to 'leanify'

Nope. Revolv was a startup that was bought up by Google, I believe.

Oh, and Google didn't even announce that they were going to disable people's lighting etc. in a few weeks' time to the owners of the devices: it was merely posted on the Revolv website.

@Cerberus they should opensource it, and then dump it, allowing users to administer themselves. Google = Britain, Revolv = India, Nigeria, pretty much everywhere ever.

Yes, absolutely.

@Mitch I think it's already opensource.

I think Britain has dumped India already...

revolv.com/licenses

@KitZ.Fox goddamit another idea stolen from me by timetravelers

But at any rate it's just bad manners to shut down people's expensive home-automation systems unless there is a pressing emergency or something.

@Cerberus we could follow the company merger/independence metaphor with countries only so far

@Mitch I apologize if I turned out to be the clutter. LOL

They haven't shut them down, just the service.

@Cerberus frankly they could do email the same way

@Mitch Perhaps we could install the Virgin Islands on SE.

@NVZ haha

@Mitch Shut down Gmail? Yes. But at least that was free.

I mean, if you end support, as in helpdesks and software updates, fine. But to cause the main function of the device to stop functioning? That's pretty bad.

@Cerberus I was annoyed by them shutting down Google Reader.

@Cerberus well, somebody has to pay for servers and maintenance staff.

@Cerberus Shut down Gmail? Not happening. That's why they keep Inbox and Gmail separate. I prefer Inbox, btw

Ah, yes, Reader. I heard about that.

@NVZ Not in the foreseeable future, no.

@Mitch If you sell such devices at a high price, that is your obligation. And servers should be very cheap. And how much maintenance do you need, if you simply stop updating the software?

I keep my page zoom to 175% for a better experience here.

@Cerberus Businesses go out of business. but yes 300E is a lot for it to be 'discontinued' so quickly.

Lots of IoT things are going to have that problem. The physical thing works but the central server software can be shut down rendering it useless.

@Mitch Yeah, exactly.

x2

@NVZ ?? what's Inbox? That's a google thing?

Yes.

An alternative to the Gmail app, also by Google.

@Mitch That's a better Gmail than Gmail.

@Cerberus There's also web version

Ah OK.

inbox.google.com

i don't see no 'Inbox' linkable from gmail or calendar.

@NVZ oh

@Mitch it started out as invite-only. I guess it's free for all now

just looking at it now.

on first impression...I don't get it. so what. I still want to see my email chronologicall because that's how it comes.

I know I know. I'm so old.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 i.imgur.com/sahRU12.png .

I really liked the tree view of files in Windows 3.1

not great image quality though :/

and you young whippersnappers have been ruing things ever since.

@Mitch Yes. Confusing initially. But addictive soon after. Then the old Gmail feels ancient

you 'milleniers'

You Gen Y'ings

talking about images quality (in french)

@crl great comment chain

youtube.com/watch?v=gsPTgKrJX8A crazy, I did plenty of planes when young, :), tried an aircraft too

@KitZ.Fox They're actually bricking the devices

@Lawrence The new ta variant characters were introduced in the early 20th century, so, relatively recent.

I suspect Google will soon announce that the servers will stay up after all.

@Lawrence Somebody raised an eyebrow. I took it as a call to arms.

@Cerberus They should do the responsible thing: provide an update that allows the devices to work without the servers, and announce the end of support.

I tried inbox a few months ago... meh, don't get the concept at all

they even make a 3d graph of your mails..

@MattE.Эллен yes

@Mitch It was a reference to walking with friends. :)

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I'm really surprised.

@MετάEd Ah, that explains it. As I recall, that somebody raised both shortly after.

@crl Maybe I'm old school with that. I'm happy being able to read and find mail. Papier-mâché is for junk mail :P .

I'm completely baffled by a grammatical prescription I found in an old book, and I wonder if anyone else understands it. The author recommends using "I knew it was he" and "I knew it to be him" and says that "I knew it was him" or "I knew it to be he" would be wrong. This seems inconsistent to me. Is there any rhyme or reason to it?

(link: books.google.com/…)

I'd think that someone who follows the rule "a noun phrase following the verb be should be in the nominative" would use it consistently, but apparently not.

@sumelic Yes!

I would agree with the author.

I knew it was he = I knew that it was he.

Oh, I just realized.

In the subordinate clause, it is the subject, he the subject complement.

Oh, OK.

It's because "it" is in the accusative in the second sentence.

Is that right?

Yes.

I guess it is logical. But not at all intuitive for an English speaker.

In I knew it to be him, it is the object of knew, as evidenced by I knew him to be crazy v. I knew he was crazy.

So the copula must connect two words in the same case, traditionally.

It becomes clearer if you use not it but a declensible(?) pronoun.

Now I wonder if there is any way to use it with another case besides nominative and accusative.

Hmm how do you mean?

Copulae generally only couple those two cases?

Yes, it seems to be impossible.

By the way, I'm a bit tipsy, so bear with me.

Ha, no problem!

I think style books are generally aimed at a certain part of the population anyway.