@RegDwigнt You're out of your depth, Donny.

@Xanne Nor did I! I should take my cat outside and find a piece of sandy ground to check it ))

Climate map of Australia

> Winds blowing from central Asia correlate with numbers of new cases of Kawasaki disease in Japan, Hawaii, and San Diego.

> In the United States, human feces has been regulated as an experimental drug since 2013.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in username (90): What do you call a person who searches for a specific clothing or food item everywhere and would not settle for similar items by Bella Rose on english.SE

@Cerberus I sure hope so!

@CowperKettle Which climate involves the most venomous snakes and spiders?

So India has only one climate now?

@FadedGiant Spicy

Tasmania has a nicer climate.

From April to September it's livable

@M.A.R. @CowperKettle Australia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia seem to have the most venomous snakes, although Africa has the black mamba. Wikipedia’s list of dangerous snakes is so well-written it’s poetic at times: If bitten, “severe neurotoxicity invariably ensues rapidly.”. By comparison America’s rattlers are more easily managed.

Dangerous spiders seem to be more common in North America—black widow, brown recluse, etc. I don’t think my husband and I carried anti-venom kits on our various trips to the back country in California.

Ah, my tarantula.

A small fuzzy animal from Northern California.

Word of the day: labradoodle

That's blatant ageism

@Xanne I'll take that one over a Goliath bird-eating spider or a funnel-web spider. Poor Australia.

@Xanne Looks nice!

For some reasong my cat's front paw jerks significantly when I give him a drink or sometimes when I stroke his head.

I wonder if that's some seizure activity

@M.A.R. You mention of TPRS was the first I've ever heard of it (but I am not in the language teaching business so there's that).

Looking it up, I am of several minds about it.

1) the progressive learning -in the language- with no explicit grammar teaching, is a commonly refound technique. Berlitz is famous for it (late 1800's?). On speed of acquisitino of a foreign language there's been lots of research, where for phonology (speakng without an accent and hearing all phonological distinctions, is easy before puberty, but takes many years of training -after- puberty.

But for syntax and vocab, one can be fluent in formal speech (almost moreso than native speakers), but that also takes a lot of higher education. I don't know the research on comparing different methods, but my guess is that there's no appreciable difference, and that most of the success in learning is with a) motivation of the student and b) availability of materials (books/media).

as an aside to the grammar vs no grammar, for adult learners, I feel like it would be impossible to get good grammar in the foreign language without some knowledge of the rules that are different, otherwise it is way to easy to do mental word for word translation in order which just sound awful in the new language. Doing -all- grammar is obviously a problem, but the 'burn it all down' mentality is not helping.

2) It sounds like the TPR of TPRS was rebranded from some bullshit aromatherapy horoscope scientology thing (Total Physical Response) to a fairly anodyne but reasonable method (Teaching Proficiency through Reading). I can't tell if the reasonable method still has anything to do with the older movement.

3) The Ørberg method that @Cerberus mentions I've only seen in Ørberg's Latin learning books. I really like it (I am halfway through 'Familia Romana' right now) but I've had intro to Latin and lots of French and Spanish (B1 and A2 respectively) so I am able to pick out a lot of the vocab without having to spend too much time with a dictionary/google translate). But the experience makes me wish all languages had such teaching texts.

It's very methodical - each chapter is a little story (2-4 pages), introduces by example a handful of vocab, a new grammar piece (eg agreement of adjectives and nouns). It's all -in- Latin. Usually the new vocab is explained -in- Latin.

If it were in English it would be awful exposition because sometimes sentences are repeated but in slightly different ways or a paragraph from another character's point of view where the language eg "John hit David at 3pm. David was hit by John in the afternoon".

But that's exactly the thing that would be great for a language learner, the small repetition of slightly different things.

Word of the evening epiphora (excessive tearing)

@Mitch it seems to

@Mitch that sounds very good. Order sounds important in language learning, and TPRS seems to allow little order

@Mitch that's in TPRS. They call it the POV method

@CowperKettle What about it is ageist?

It's just like MuseScore all over again.

Can I migrate a whole question to chat?

@Mitch "I am halfway through 'Familia Romana' right now"

!

Excellent.

@M.A.R. I just attempted to joke. My attempt was probably uncondign.

Is the programming term "docstring" generally considered to be language-agnostic?

Dosctring is a word that's eldritch to me.

And I was wondering if it applied to a comment one would make above*/*outside the function.

In Python it has sort of a technical meaning. It's embedded inside the function, I think. Though I've never paid much attention to how it was supposed to work.

@CowperKettle Huh?

> Python docstrings are the string literals that appear right after the definition of a function, method, class, or module.

Presumabloy so that it can easily be automatically extracted. Lua (which I'm currently writing) might have something similar. I'm not sure.

Ah!

Sigh. As normal for Lua, not in the core language. So maybe some ill-maintained third party library.

I continue to wonder why this piece of crippleware is so popular. And I'm hope I'm not hurting the feelings of any Lua fans who are here.

> In 1993, the only real contender was Tcl, which had been explicitly designed to be embedded into applications. However, Tcl had unfamiliar syntax, did not offer good support for data description, and ran only on Unix platforms.

@CowperKettle Is that relevant?

I just wanted to learn what Lua is

@CowperKettle It's just a scripting language. Popular for embedding.

Yes, I've read up. Interesting.

Possibly the most widely used embedded language in the world.

Can I migrate someone from chat to the main site?

Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?

Happy midnight all.

@CowperKettle Oh sorry, Poe's law

@FadedGiant I apologize for implying otherwise.

Alexander “Sasha” Zverev, known as the German.

The Spanish word tornado is a borrowing from the English word tornado. The English word is from earlier ternado, attested since the 1550s as a nautical term for a windy thunderstorm. From Spanish tronada (“thunderstorm”), from tronar (“to thunder”), from Latin tonō (“to thunder”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)tenh₂- (“to thunder”). The o and r were reversed in English (metathesis) under influence of Spanish tornar (“to twist, to turn”), from Latin tornō (“to turn”).