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1:51 AM
@Robusto > The temperature in Denver reached or surpassed 90 degrees on Monday for the 73rd time this year, tying a record set in 2012.
Boulder averages only 28 such days.
That's 261% of our average. So far. And do you really think we won't see another day of 90 yet this year? It's only the 7th of September, so this seems possible. Despite the encroaching blizzard.
 
 
3 hours later…
4:35 AM
@Robusto That must have been a very unusual school, to teach a language so rarely used in America
In Russian schools, the most commonly taught languages are English and German
After them, it's French, and probably Spanish (I'm not sure, I only met people who learned English, German or French)
 
 
1 hour later…
6:04 AM
Word of the day: reluctance motor
 
 
1 hour later…
7:14 AM
So zodiac is from Greek zodiaion, diminutive of zoion. Are there similar words in English from the same Greek diminutive form/suffix?
 
I have eyestrain again.
what factors determine the readiness of eyestrain when reading on an electronic device?
 
@tchrist Thank you for the explanation. I'm not sure why you decided to discuss \b in detail (I might be missing some context), but in any case, I suppose \b is part of some standard? Unlike \< and \>, apparently.
Which suggests I avoid \< and \> in general, I suppose.
@M.A.R. I wonder what people using these words think they mean.
 
why does eyestrain occur to me so readily some times but not so readily other times?
 
Maybe they've become expletives devoid of meaning, like those popular words for excrement and sexual intercourse so beloved of Hollywood scriptwriters.
 
eyestrain is so frustrating
you just find a lot of interesting texts, but eyestrain comes to obtrude you from reading them.
why does printing in a convenience store become so expensive?
doesn't this act prevent us from reading?
printing one page costs 3 dollars.
then if I want to read 20 pages, it will cost me 60 dollars, which can buy me a meal.
 
7:32 AM
@FaheemMitha Hey, you remember right. It's going fine. How are you?
 
you know environment protection can't be compatible with a lot of things.
if we read on computer screen to protect environment, our eyes will be hurt.
our eyes don't feel comfortable with reading long technical articles on computer screen.
or the computer engineers haven't invented computer screen or phone which can effectively prevent from eyestrain.
 
8:01 AM
@CowperKettle Aha, the world is preparing for 2020 the sequel
 
8:17 AM
@CaptainBohemian sure they have
 
8:33 AM
@Færd Not great. Things are in chaos over there. Partly, but not entirely the pandemic.
 
ants are so pervasive.
 
9:08 AM
people caring about you would help you clear obstacles.
if you feel you are filled with obstacles, that means nobody cares about you.
but if you find you have few obstacles, that doesn't necessarily mean there are people caring about you.
 
9:31 AM
Word of the day: empty
 
so hungry now
what should I eat?
 
I recommend a healthy diet of food
 
9:46 AM
in the neighborhood eateries like to serve meals with hams or minced pork, not beans; very strange.
my father helped clear obstacles often, so he cared about me. Like now, I am reading a kind of very interesting correspondence, and if my father is around, he would bring me a meal.
 
My father is a great man.
 
If you are interested,the correspondence is about Klein quadric.
 
10:12 AM
In mathematics, the lines of a 3-dimensional projective space, S, can be viewed as points of a 5-dimensional projective space, T. In that 5-space, the points that represent each line in S lie on a quadric, Q known as the Klein quadric. If the underlying vector space of S is the 4-dimensional vector space V, then T has as the underlying vector space the 6-dimensional exterior square Λ2V of V. The line coordinates obtained this way are known as Plücker coordinates. These Plücker coordinates satisfy the quadratic relation p 12...
Oh, I'm too dense for that, and that would not increase my revenues, so I'd better not read it
 
10:42 AM
Russia's second covid vaccine, soon to finish the safety studies.
Developed in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia
 
 
1 hour later…
12:20 PM
0
Q: Meaning of the word "term" in a psychiatry article (depression biomarkers)

CopperKettleFrom Prognosis and improved outcomes in major depression: a review I don't understand the meaning of term - does it have the "time meaning" (particular stage in the course of disease) or the "terminology meaning" (a particular set of markers would be called "predisposition markers" and so on)?...

 
12:40 PM
@CowperKettle It was a Catholic prep school. Boys on one side, girls on the other. Some classes (advanced math, physics, bio, etc.) were mixed, because they didn't want to spend money duplicating teachers for classes likely to be small. I took Russian because I heard there would be girls in that class. Same for calculus, AP physics, etc.
I was always good at languages, so it was easy for me. They only offered Russian the one year, though, so that's all I took.
@tchrist Yeah. And things aren't going to even think about moving in the other direction till Trump and his anti-science bullshit are gone.
We're moderate here today at 99. It won't take much to go orange, though.
Overnight the whole Western US filled up with smoke.
 
1:13 PM
@Robusto A sex-divided school, I would not like to be in such a school
In Russia, classes were sex-divided but thankfully they switched to the mixed system many decades ago
Stalin tried to reintroduce separate classes in 1941, but that affected no more than 2% of all schoolchildren, and the experiment was considered a failure and cancelled in 1954, after Stalin's death
 
@CowperKettle It was a different time. Interestingly, the mixed classes were on the boys' side, all except for typing, which I had to take on the girls' side. The library, cafeteria and lounge were co-ed, though.
 
@Robusto In my school, the only sex-divided subject was "Arts and crafts", with boys making different items out of wood or metal using handplanes, saws and even woodworking and metalworking lathes.
The lathes we had were manufactured in 1940s, they were ancient, but powerful.
 
1:29 PM
Prep schools didn't have shop classes. The subjects were all college-oriented.
 
Once I nearly lost my toes on the foot. I forgot to remove the key from the metalworking lathe's chuck, and pushed the start button. They metal key (used to tighten the chuck) flew directly into the wooden floor beside me, a couple of cm from my foot, leaving a dent there.
 
Yeah. You fuck up with power tools at your peril.
 
The teacher was iridescent at me.
 
I think you mean incandescent?
 
Yes
The other time me and another boy used a huge pair of scissors to cut a sheet of thin metal.
 
1:30 PM
But I suppose a case could be made for iridescent. It just sounds funny.
 
I put my big finger on the line of the cut, and he nearly cut off the top of my big finger. I had a black nail on the finger for weeks after that.
The other time we all watched the Star Wars for the first time on TV, and the next morning there was the Arts and Crafts class.
 
I got shit from some people for taking typing, which was considered a "girls skill" back then, but I'm glad I did. Not only were there a lot of girls in the class, but it's a skill I've used to good effect my entire life. Much more useful than, say, physics has been.
 
And we took a couple of big files, maybe 50 cm long, and used them like the light sabers. It was so cool, they emitted pieces of sparkling metal!
And the teacher suddenly came in.
 
Haha. Boys will be boys.
 
And he threw us two out of the class, telling not to come again ever.
 
1:32 PM
I can imagine.
 
My parents had to buy a couple of new files.
I had a girlfriend who, during the Soviet times, refused to attend the girl-oriented Arts and Crafts.
She insisted that they put her into the boys' class, and they did.
So she was the only girl there, working with the lathes and metalworking tools.
 
Me, I got kicked out of a religion class for logically disproving one of Thomas Aquinas's proofs of the existence of God.
 
Later on, as she grew up, she was a lesbian for some time, as I gathered from the things she was telling me.
She indeed was looking manly.
 
She probably had been a lesbian all along.
 
Probably. But after some time, she repented and is now considering gayness a great sin and a pathology.
 
1:36 PM
Wow.
 
She ditched me because I was against Putin and too pro-Western.
 
Russia has a special place in hell for gays, apparently.
 
For some reason many people here consider homosexuality as something very bad.
 
If you think of it as a pathology, at least it's one you're not likely to catch.
 
There is a law in Russia prohibiting the "propaganda of homosexuality"
It's very ambiguous, you could assign a lot of activities as being "promoting homosexuality".
 
1:39 PM
Yeah. I suppose that's how they try to stifle groups like Pussy Riot.
 
This is the purpose of such laws, they are adopted to make people uneasy and constantly afraid of making a mistake.
99% of time you would not be punished, but now and then somebody is randomly punished just to intimidate the rest.
 
> Everything that is not compulsory is forbidden.
@CowperKettle Less random than designed to punish someone for getting too much attention, I'll wager.
There is a saying in Japanese, 出る釘を打たれる (deru kugi wo utareru), meaning "The nail that sticks out gets hammered ."
That probably applies here.
 
Yes
In Russian, "инициатива наказуема" (an initiative gets punished)
When someone in a company of friends says let's do this or that, let's take out the garbage, let's wash dishes, etc. Someone replies "An initiative is grounds for punishment, so it's you who has to do it"
 
2:17 PM
Do they mean "Sequential scheme of treatment optimization" or "Scheme of sequential treatment optimization"?
I think it's the latter.
 
@CowperKettle They mean 'a treatment optimization scheme that is sequential'. The scheme is sequential (rather than in parallel). But it would also be reasonable to say the treatment is sequential.
In no way is the optimization sequential.
Because you're trying to optimize something that is sequential.
Unless of course how you do the optimization is incremental and therefor sequential.
Then you'd have a "sequential optimizaton of the sequential treatment scheme".
or "sequential optimization of the 'treatment scheme' sequence".
That is the sequence of optimization of the sequential semantics of that sentence.
And that is the subject of the sequence of sentences on sequentiality of schemes.
 
2:49 PM
sequential optimisation of the sequential scheme of sequential treatment (j/k)
 
3:13 PM
@MattE.Эллен This guy really gets it.
 
@CowperKettle Interesting.
 
4:10 PM
@Mitch Thank you!
@Robusto It was also a kind of tongue-in-cheek critique of the Soviet system under which it was not very wise to stick one's head out, because even if your input in your job was lackluster, you were unlikely to be fired anyway.
If someone in a factory tried to increase his output, it was sometimes frowned upon because that might result in increased plan for the next year.
In this way, he was increasing the strain of his coworkers, who would still get the same salary but would have to work harder.
@Robusto An outstanding movie. The scene of beach landing was outstanding. I watched it with two friends the first time.
After the scene, I said aloud, no way I would go to war, no matter for what reason.
 
4:31 PM
I was wondering, if Trump really made insulting remarks about soldiers who died in the line of duty or whatever it was, why didn't someone get it on video? Or even audio?
 
Word of the evening: irish twins en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Irish_twin
In Russian we have the term pogodki, but it's not pejorative like "irish twins"
I don't know if there is a term like "irish twins" in English but without a disparaging connotation
Also apparently catholic twins, I wonder if it's less pejorative
> Auntie Selia calls us “Catholic twins” because I am only ten months older than Isaiah. At least we are not in the same class at school, but Isaiah loves nothing better than those two months out of the year when we are exactly the same age.
 
4:56 PM
@CowperKettle looking at that diagram, the word 'term' just seems ... empty, with no meaning. I would suggest using something common to all the elements below the lable which seems to be 'marker'
@CowperKettle there's an ELU question about exactly this, search for it.
@FaheemMitha in the 2016 campaign he made famously and widely publicized remarks about John McCain being a loser for being a captured POW.
 
@Mitch That's very thoughtful of him. How about 2020?
 
I think the latest brouhaha (or kerfuffle if that's your preference) is maybe a book somebody has published in the past couple weeks. I forget... Cohen maybe? His previous personal lawyer and fixer so it's not like it is a new thing about Trump, just more.
 
@Mitch I got the impression that it was in a speech or something he had made recently.
Though I have not paying attention, of course. Life is too short for Trump.
 
But really, everyone in the world knows exactly what his character is. It's pretty consistent. If anything happens out of character, he somehow does something immediately afterwards that nullifies it and reinforces what everyone knew all along.
@FaheemMitha things happen so fast in the news that I may have missed the exact trigger for this latest. But his poor relationship with the military is not a new thing.
 
@Mitch I don't really feel I know much about him. Except that he's loathsome and disgusting, of course. But that's pretty much a given. Also, tautological.
 
5:10 PM
Some people like -something- about him. Even now. But those people are idiots
 
I hope he gets voited out of office soon.
 
@CowperKettle Amen to that.
Not that the option is much better. But at least it doesn't contain Trump.
@Mitch To me it's a mystery why anyone votes Republican any more. Then get worse and worse all the time.
Though the Democrats are pretty horrible too. From the international perspective there isn't that much to distinguish them. Take Obama for example.
 
Are there any politicians in the USA who have tried to reform the system so as to allow more parties to exist than two?
Maybe the system should be reworked away from a dual-party one.
 
5:25 PM
@CowperKettle There are people trying to change all sorts of things within the US system. But as I understand it, the people who run things largely like things the way they are.
That's of course true of many other places and things.
One sore point is the electoral college. Without it the Republicans would be hard put to win any elections.
 
@Robusto It's not just Trump's anti-science bullshit. For one thing, a large portion of the masses who vote for his party have been conditioned to say that science doesn't count, so it conditions and antedates his coronation; it is not a property peculiar to him but rather to his. One that is all his own though is his anti-competence bullshit. That's because Trump is nothing but a transparent and incompetent bullshitter and competence interferes with his bullshitting. So he has to diss it.
 
5:41 PM
> If you were to take two pieces of sub-critical fissile and smack them together with your hands to make a critical mass, it would be very bad for you and everyone nearby, but it would not cause a nuclear blast.
2
A: Would an atomic bomb detonate a uranium stockpile?

SchwernTo supplement niels's answer, the hardest part about a nuclear bomb is to prevent it from blowing itself apart before it has completed fission (or fusion). If a nuclear bomb does detonate, any nearby potential fission/fusion fuel will simply be blown away and not fizz. To understand why we need t...

Interesting. I was sure that a nuclear explosion would follow. Turns out it's quite hard to make a nuclear explosion.
> And this is why nuclear weapons are considered "safe". Unlike conventional explosives which can be detonated by a simple fire, a nuclear bomb must work perfectly to go off. This is why they are often referred to as a "device". Any damage to the bomb makes it safer.
So there was basically absolutely no chance for a true nuclear explosion at the Chermobyl plant, it turns out.
 
@CowperKettle That's why the US military and their pet scientists labored for years in the New Mexico desert to create the most dangerous weapon in history. It didn't just happen.
We should clearly all be very grateful.
 
5:57 PM
The Nazis were well on their way, too.
 
@Cerberus No, they weren't. They didn't even get started.
 
If the Americans hadn't made one, and Germany had remained able to continue research and development for a few years, I'm sure they would have made one.
The Americans used lots of German scientists to get their bomb to work.
 
@Cerberus That's such a general assertion it's impossible to say. But it's unlikely they would have made real progress during the war. For one thing, German science was in shambles, because most of their best scientists has either been driven out or were not allowed to work. Quite aside from the issues of fighting a war on two fronts.
By 1940 the US had considerable resources to bring to bear on this. They had some of the best scientists in the world to help them. And North America was not under attack.
Maybe someone else would eventually have built one. Given what humans are like, it's quite likely. But we know who did, in fact.
 
Any sentient being would have built it because we know what sentient beings are like.
 
@CowperKettle Only the ones that live on this planet.
And some days I think the term sentient is pushing it.
 
6:09 PM
@CowperKettle It turns out? With an initial enrichment of only 2 % and considering all the foreign material in the core, that should be obvious for everybody who is only halfway interested in the topic.
 
in Language Overflow, 13 mins ago, by Rand al'Thor
@M.A.R. I seem to recall you're Iranian ... know anything about the Shahnameh? Literature SE has an ongoing topic challenge about it this month.
cc @Færd
 
@CowperKettle Yeah, that's common even in the West. So-called efficiency experts trying to wring the last gram of effort out of the workers.
I'm All Right Jack is a 1959 British comedy film directed and produced by John and Roy Boulting from a script by Frank Harvey, John Boulting and Alan Hackney based on the 1958 novel Private Life by Hackney.The film is a sequel to the Boultings' 1956 film Private's Progress and Ian Carmichael, Dennis Price, Richard Attenborough, Terry-Thomas and Miles Malleson reprise their characters. Peter Sellers played one of his best-known roles, as the trades union shop steward Fred Kite and won a BAFTA Best Actor Award. The rest of the cast included many well-known British comedy actors of the time.The film...
This was a film lampooning that practice, and the workers involved.
 
@FadedGiant I'm not a nuclear scientist
 
@CowperKettle I wondered how anyone could do aught but run away screaming. Then when I read Stephen Ambrose's book about D-Day I realized that, due to time constraints, Spielberg was showing us the "Disney" version. The reality was just as bad, and worse, but much, much longer.
 
I don't get this joke
 
6:21 PM
@CowperKettle Do you understand what 69 means?
 
@Robusto A sex position?
 
@CowperKettle Boys say 'nice' to that?
 
@CowperKettle Yes, It's two people performing oral sex on one another. At the same time.
 
So it must be not a very intellectual joke.
 
Decidedly not.
 
6:22 PM
@CowperKettle No, it's just trying to get a chuckle because "omg sex, so offensive, nobody knows about it"
 
@CowperKettle That's beside the point. What made Chernobyl so bad was the amount of radiation being released, which was the equivalent of a nuclear bomb's fallout every few hours? (I'm unsure about the period, but you get the idea.)
@tchrist Yeah, but he's the cheerleader for the Luddite anti-intellectual unwashed masses.
 
@Robusto Apparently there are a lot of Luddite anti-intellectual unwashed masses.
 
@FaheemMitha Indeed.
 
That's probably bad grammar. Masses is uncountable. So is a lot.
Can one have a lot of masses?
 
6:27 PM
@FaheemMitha Sure. Especially if you're Catholic.
 
(I wouldn't normally bring this up, but after all, it's still the ELU Chat Room.)
 
@CowperKettle Nice play on an ancient meme.
And a physics joke for the chatroom. Well done!
See, this is what I got from taking physics in high school. I think I still got more long-lasting benefit from learning touch-typing.
I love YouTube videos where a real chef shows you how to make something you've been fucking up all your life.
Case in point:
Very informative.
 
Physics is useful too.
 
@FaheemMitha Sure, but the most use I get out of it is in understanding certain things that involve physics.
Every fucking day I use touch-typing. For everything. Like right now.
 
@Robusto But those things are quite important.
Even if one is not building a nuclear bomb. Which one hopes one is not.
 
6:41 PM
Well, if anyone is building a nuclear bomb, it's not me. I don't like bombs, and I don't like nukes, and I don't hate anybody so much that I would try to blow them up.
 
@Robusto Glad to hear it.
Without physics, we wouldn't know what causes the tides. And perhaps almost as importantly, we wouldn't be able to predict them.
Though the math and physics behind the tides is actually relatively simple.
 
Physics has been mainly of use to me in understanding certain features of astronomy, though I certainly don't understand them on the level of an astrophysicist.
I'm more on the level of "parabolic reflectors are superior in certain ways to refracting lenses."
 
@Robusto Fancy. Are you an astronomer?
 
Physics and math became unintelligible long ago
I don't remember where I was reading this, but someone was making a good point that many physicists now don't know math and many mathematicians don't know physics. Every once in a while someone reads more and puts two and two together from things we already know and comes up with a novel discovery.
 
@FaheemMitha I am interested in the subject, but I'm certainly not an astronomer. Some people I ride with are, and I've gone out with them to look at the heavens through their telescopes off and on, but I generally don't like staying up late at night to look at stars in the cold.
 
6:49 PM
@M.A.R. It's not quite that bad. But physics and applied math people have a very cavalier attitude towards mathematics, which drives actual mathematicians crazy.
 
@M.A.R. Yeah, I would say that may be true. Still, physics is the most purely math-based science.
 
I remember taking an applied math class once. It was quite stressful.
Particularly the part where I had to be polite to the lecturer.
 
BTW, full disclosure, I do know and ride with someone who is a nuclear physicist, as in bombs. But I don't ask him any questions about that and he doesn't tell me any lies.
I really have no interest in knowing those things.
I wish we could put the nuclear genie back in its bottle.
 
7:32 PM
user image
2
 
7:59 PM
@FaheemMitha Heh, every Indian I've met on SE has despised their university lecturer
I think if Iranians frequented these chats more often, we would have heard the same from Iranians
 
@M.A.R. That was in North Carolina, actually. Chapel Hill.
He was probably perfectly pleasant, but we didn't particularly get along. I've learned since to be more accepting.
And I've had some good lecturers too. In Chapel Hill and elsewhere.
@M.A.R. lecturer, single?
I got 2 downvotes for the U&L question I was discussing here yesterday. I'm a bit peeved.
No doubt it's petty of me.
 
 
2 hours later…
9:50 PM
@FaheemMitha it's often been singular, yes. But by contrast, anyone I've met on SE who studies in the UK mentions the lecturer they liked, not the one they despised
sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100315104030.htm -- Asking for a couple of friends here that have twice or more my age: Is our generation selfish?
(The UK people I've met have been from many different places)
 
10:08 PM
@M.A.R. *from, haha
 
10:21 PM
@Robusto This is all well and good, but windmills are a real threat.
 
@Cerberus If you are a bird.
 
@FaheemMitha Exactly!
> [About a computer game:] Your party will burn food and hope, two incredibly important resources that without you will have your followers dropping like flies.
2
How do y'all like this relative pronoun?
 
 
1 hour later…
11:33 PM
@Cerberus I know.. They might be giants.
 
11:53 PM
@Cerberus So odd. Do you know the native language of the writer?
 
”that without” instead of “without which”
 
@Xanne American.
Or at least he sounds 100% like a native speaker of American English.
It's odd, isn't it?
 
@Robusto Windmills go around, and we all know that what goes around comes around.
 
@Xanne You gotta go along to get along.
 
11:56 PM
@Cerberus Hard to believe.
 

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