@RegDwigнt Bravo. You internalized my notes, made them your own, worked the problems, and presto ... out pops a lyric sheet! You're one shrewd motherfucker, Alex. Kudos.

And by shrewd I mean talented. /nod

@RegDwigнt QED

I just came across an eggcorn I haven't seen before: "ill-liquid stocks."

The original word is "illiquid", from in- + liquid, but "ill liquid" also has sense to it: "poorly liquid."

> I love telling jokes about elevators, they work on so many levels!

@Mitch Yeah!

And they don't get out of hand so easily as escalator jokes do.

@Malavika What makes you think there are two?

If I look in a mirror I only see one.

Let that be my epitaph.

Or, better, the other Mitch's epitaph.

That way I can laugh at my own expense.

Dance on my own grave.

I keep coming across situations where the relatively strict word order of English keeps me from saying what I want to say.

I want to write this: "I've been thinking about how works cash, by which I mean US dollars in the form of coins, notes and bank accounts."

But you can't do that. You have to do this: "I've been thinking about how cash, by which I mean US dollars in the form of coins, notes and bank accounts, works."

Or this: "I've been thinking about how cash works, where by 'cash' I mean US dollars in the form of coins, notes and bank accounts."

@Malavika Oh. No doubt about it, I'm Big Mitch.

@Malavika Don't believe that imposter. I'm Little Mitch.

@Malavika Both those guys are charlatans. It's just me, good ol' every day Mitch

Also @Gigili isn't here to defend herself, but she's deluded about how many Mitch's there are.

I wonder why all cats do that.

Walk backwards when their heads are covered.

My parents' cat did it too, last summer, when her head got stuck in a bag of cookies.

She walked herself off the window sill. Luckily, the window was closed, so she only fell onto lamps, night-stands, and the floor.

But it is a really stupid and dangerous reaction.

Just retract your head carefully and/or shake it; and, if that doesn't work, use your paws to get the thing off. Or scrape it against an object / the wall.

@Cerberus OK mr dog lover

@Cerberus Not how evolution works. :D

Okay, I've got a question.

I once read a paper that mentioned that every story has two versions: the fable and the xxxxx.

I'm pretty sure xxxxx was a French word of five letters.

One of the two words means the order of events as they actually occurred in the fictional world; the other word means the order that the events are presented in the narrative.

Anyone know what the other word might have been?

The place I saw this was a paper (a decently long one, probably more than 50 pages) about the computer program TALE-SPIN, an early attempt at creating artificial intelligence capable of writing stories in English.

@Mitch In reality, I'm a cat lover.

@TerranSwett Evolution walks backwards?

In Dutch, we call those vertelde tijd and verteltijd.

German Erzählzeit und Erzählte Zeit.

books.google.nl/…

Ceci?

@Cerberus Oh yeah, that's gotta be it!

And that led me to this Wikipedia page about it: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabula_and_syuzhet

The words in the paper were probably fable and sujet.

@Robusto well thank you. As I always say, there's no such thing as talent, there's only the hours of work you put into it. (And in this case it was you who put in the hours, or however much we even spent in here talking about it all. I had only put in like twenty minutes into it before showing it to you and letting it be your problem.)

So anyway it's public now.

Also someone told me they were working on an orchestration of The Fog.

I'll send you the link once I have it.

Should be interesting. They mentioned three trombones.

But it's one of only two people on MuseScore whom I trust with knowing what they're doing (the other one being myself).

Tomorrow I'll go listen to the German Requiem by Brahms (at least I think it will be the German Requiem by Brahms?). Not a piece I've heard before. One of the soloists will be from our choir, so we get special tickets for like one tenth the price, and pretty much the entire choir will be in the audience.

Oh and yeah, in the rehearsal tonight, the choir master confirmed the programme for the next year. The Mass in B minor is officially set.

Fun times.

@Cerberus They think they're backing out of a hole.

@RegDwigнt Talent is what makes the work turn out well. But the work must be done.

Any fool can work hard at something and produce crap.

Well yes, there's that.

I should point out that consistency != hard work.

And yeah you and I both know I'm being overly contrarian whenever I flat out say "talent does not exist". Which is like five times a day, and that's on a bad day.

@Robusto I would have found a better quote but I did not have the talent.

Or, apparently, the willingness to work hard to find it.

Well yes.

We could continue in this vein for hours.

Now that I have students, I'm certainly witnessing first-hand that some just have it in them, and others really don't.

Whatever "it" even is.

Well, we know it when we see it, don't we?

See, I did the work and produced a masterpiece.

But still, I do genuinely feel it's a slap in the face of a master to attribute their skill to talent. Which is all that people are actually doing, really.

You don't get served a Mass in B minor on a golden platter. You need to put in the years of hard work.

So yeah. I just say "Bach had no talent" and then watch jaws drop. And then I explain myself. Always a fun experiment.

Well, here's the thing. Bach could just improvise a fugue. Just for shits and grins.

On my best day I couldn't improvise a canon. Not reliably.

Yes, he could improvise it. Nobody else would do it for him. Not even God.

He would have to sit down himself and learn the basics and then learn the advanced stuff and then practice for decades.

And if there's no such thing as talent, and if work really matters, how does one explain Mozart?

Hah, I bet you puzzled over that one for a second or two.

Yes I did.

Yes, Bach worked hard to get to where he could do what he did ... but so did legions of mediocrities, without achieving the same result.

Yeah.

@TerranSwett Yippee!

Which is why I'm admitting I'm being oversimplistic for the sake of being contrarian. To drive a point home.

@Robusto So it seems. But how stupid is that?

For people who otherwise just wouldn't understand.

And why does it need to go so very fast?

It's like giving a 1 to Shawshank Redemption on IMDb.

@RegDwigнt Surprise!

@Cerberus Stupid ain't got nothin' to do with it. It's an instinctual behavior that has served that species well.

But no more!

@Cerberus Stop trying to litigate cat behavior. What was your question that Reg and you were talking about, potentially involving Japanese?

Whatcha mean, no more. That cat is fine. And it's out of the cup.

So whatever it did was perfectly fine.

Do you suggest walking forwards with a bucket on your head?

So in truth, YouTube should not be full of "cats making bad decisions" ... they aren't making decisions at all.

Well, YouTube is for people who make bad decisions titling their videos.

@Robusto Oh about the concept of words.

What, if anything, is a word to the Japanese?

@Cerberus Is that what that was?

Rush Limbaugh DESTROYS cat for walking backwards.

@Cerberus It's a kotoba.

That's Arabic for book.

More specifically, it's a 言葉.

How would they define a word?

That is not Arabic for book anymore.

Has it to do with word boundaries, i.e. spaces, as for us?

@Cerberus Pretty much the same way we would.

OK.

@Cerberus You mean visually define it in print?

So they use spacing?

No.

That's the hard part.

So when you have several characters in a sequence, how do you know where a word ends?

I would say, in praespatial Europe, it was probably all about word accent.

There are certain clues, sometimes. And they do have commas and periods. But you just have to know where one set of kanji ends a word and another set begins the next.

Count the words, Cerberus. If you're counting four, you're counting wrong.

See, that first line, for example, contains words in hiragana, kanji, and a kanji repeat character. Then there are particles, which are always in hiragana.

For instance the eye immediately sees の (the particle no, a possessive) and that demarcates words immediately.

Then the particle を (the subject marker) ends the line ... and so on. Do you see what I mean?

々 means repeat the previous kanji.

That turns 日 (hi, sun) into 日々(hibi, daily).

So "sun sun" means daily in Japanese, but it's pronounced hibi.

Link to the time stamp where the lines are sung.

@Robusto Noted.

We were talking about the definition of a word.

Isaidthataspacedoesnotawordmake.

You asked that specifically. I was trying to illustrate how to parse Japanese.

Doesn't even have to be Japanese. Can be German or Russian or Spanish. Three language families entirely separate from Japonic.

No Japanese would think 日々の was a word. They would understand immediately that it was a word and a particle.

Not unlike for damelo in Spanish.

Kinda.

Or Kontrollflußgraphvisualisierungssoftware in German.

Yes. Although I can grok katakana quicker than compound German words sometimes.

Well it's just control flow graph visualization software. Minus the spaces.

I understand. I have a lazy eye, however, which looks at all that and says, "Do I really want to go to all that effort?"

It's the exact same thing yet by one person's count that's one word and by another's it's five. Just because they were dumb enough to put four spaces right in the middle of the one word.

In my comment on the main site, which started this, I said you should count the English words in "S P A C E".

@Cerb's question also conflates the concept of a word visually with the essential philosophical (or philological) meaning.

A word is not a bunch of markings on a page. That is merely a representation.

Yeah is what I'm saying. Though of course Cerberus knows all that full well. He's just making conversation.

They have weird representations of things in Dutch, too.

And how wouldn't they, it's halfway between German and English. The worst of both worlds.

Mehr Deutsch als Englisch.

If you ever find that to be true anywhere in Dutchland, you just drive two miles to the next village, and then to the next, until it no longer is true.

They have that weird continuum that Kosmonaut explained once.

Or maybe JSBangs.

You do that in Russia, and you drive for days if not weeks and there's still no change at all.

@Robusto Well, we were discussing definitions, and it was my position that people nowadays often subconsciously define a word in English as something separated by spaces.

Speaking of that, did you get my question about the Russian (or Ukrainian) dirge in the Chernobyl series?

@Cerberus People nowadays often consciously define any piece of music as a "song". Doesn't make it right.

@Robusto who me? I missed it. Just like I did the entire series.

Hmm do they really?

I kind of hate the word word, by the way, precisely because it's so squishy. I frequently call things terms instead.

Perhaps as a generic word for a file on their phone, even when it's purely instrumental?

I have heard about it.

If you can look at a few minutes of one episide (only if you can do it for free, mind), I'd appreciate knowing what the song says.

@Cerberus have you been to the Internet? Every piece of music is a song.

Silly.

Even on MuseScore. And that's specifically for musicians. Even there fifty times a day someone will post a "song" and you click on it and it's a ballet.

BTW, it's a very powerful series. Well worth watching.

But yeah phones is where it started. iTunes.

And with that I have to go chow down. Laterz, all.

@Robusto I know I just don't have the time.

@Robusto well we'll discuss Tchernobyl later, then. Make a mental note.

But like half of it is on YouTube by now in one form or another, so you might actually be able to find your bit on there.

Or maybe I will if I'm bored later tonight.

And looking at the time, I might as well go off myself. Busy day tomorrow.

> Hello People, Do you know anybody ON MUSESCORE that is good at video editing? I am from the Piano For Us Group! We (the group admins) are making an Ensemble for lots of players. We need 1 Video Editor! This is what is going to happen: The Group Admins will assign a song and then we will create a Musescore of it. Once we have done the Musescore score, we will assign the song to everybody!

There. I just opened MuseScore just now and that is at the very top of my dashboard. I don't even have to search.

Someone running a piano competition and using "song" to mean "piece".

> I really like the baritone/euphonium and the french horn. To me, they are both a close follow to the flute and piano, both probably the easiest instruments to play (mostly piano)

And that's the very next post after that.

I am tempted to reply, "I own both a flute and a piano, and if you think either are easy to play, then you clearly don't."

Enough of this garbage. I'll go look for Rob's Tchernobyl bit on YouTube.

Nighty-night.