English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2020-10-20

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12:42 AM

@RegDwigнt Tell them what they really need help with is the reception speech when they win an award for the piece. Just skip all the movements and go straight to the end.

1 hour later…

1:48 AM

So it occurs to me that people believe conspiracy theories for the same reason they believe in god(s): it's scarier to believe that epidemics and natural catastrophes are random, because you can't fix random, but maybe you can appease a god. Without that you literally don't have a prayer.

3

If some evil government created CoViD, maybe they can be appeased, threatened, or bought off.

But random? Most people can't face that.

@tchrist: Haven't heard from you all day, which is worrisome. Let us know if you're OK. And I hope your house is out of the line of fire.

3

2:27 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in answer, bad keyword with email in answer, potentially bad keyword in answer (172): What do you call a lady being proposed to by a man by Greta on english.SE

user480696

2:47 AM

More and more people are going to believe in conspiracy theories because you can find anything you want to believe in on the Internet.

3:11 AM

Is something going on? I feel like something is going on.

user480696

3:29 AM

See^ the Internet makes people anxious

user480696

You can always find "something going on," on the Internet

6:53 AM

@Robusto You're right. My mistake.

@Robusto Not really, no. Both terms are equally "foreign" to me.

5 hours later…

11:46 AM

@Robusto watched this last night. Very interesting:

Glenn Gould - How Mozart Became a Bad Composer ("The Return of the Wizard")

And no, the title is no clickbait. This is half a century before clickbait was invented. That's his actual point that he argues.

He talks for like 20 minutes, then plays for another 20 a Mozart piece that's one of my most favorite Mozart pieces ever.

Even though (as so often with Gould) I strongly disagree with his interpretation.

12:06 PM

user image

12:37 PM

user image

Matt E. Эллен

😂

12:49 PM

@RegDwigнt I'll check it out when I have time. Busy day today, might not get to it till tomorrow.

@RegDwigнt But I do like his Goldberg Variations.

@FaheemMitha I see. What is the equivalent in India?

2 hours later…

2:25 PM

@Robusto I drove all day yesterday and the day before. I arrived to a scene out of Apocalypse Now: firebombed countryside with smoke rising from countless spots in immediate view and low choppers and planes everywhere. Last night the mountains to my NNW glowed bright sunset orange all night, never darkening till dawn and even then only losing their red color not brightness, and at dawn's first light a great column of smoke rises and turns east. Hard to breathe here.

I expect their morning update will report that it grew overnight.

2:37 PM

> Darkness became a dreadful reality, as it spread out...and covered the lands...for many days. It caused despair... Eventually, however, a wind from the South broke it apart.

tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Darkness

> I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

Silly KJV with an extra "from". Mendelson's libretto omits it.

Even from a great distance, you can see nothing at all starting perhaps 10 miles to my north.

Christian mythos?

I do hope it will move away or diminish soon.

The songs of our ancestors.

I need to go look for the skin-friendly wound-dressing tape to tape down the edges of a 99%-mask to my face to let no befouled air into my struggling lungs.

Wise.

3:01 PM

Done. All taped down now along the top leading up to the bridge of the nose where air was leaking through per a foggy-glasses test. Cheeks and chin have a good fit already. I'm clearly done with coffee for the morning.

Such a fuss.

How is the air inside?

@Cerberus Smells just awful. It's like sitting close in around a smoky campfire being fed not just wood but dried leaves and pine needles, and pushed by a bellows punching air into the combustion makes it flare.

@tchrist Ugh, that's terrible.

Are you planning to stay there?

@Cerberus Until the evacuation order comes.

@Robusto I think that is very true: people believe in falsehoods when the truth is too hard to bear.

@tchrist I'm glad you have your masks and your oxygen!

How do other people do it?

3:17 PM

@Cerberus They stay indoors if they're sensitive.

Even while having to inhale campfire smoke night and day?

@Cerberus Especially then. You overestimate people's ability to randomly relocate themselves across the country to safety.

user image

So the Air Quality Index (AQI) is hovering a bit below 100 by me right now, but it's been rising all night.

The official advice is to stay inside with the windows closed.

But people still have to walk their dogs, etc.

> Moderate to heavy smoke can be expected Tuesday morning for locations in Larimer and Boulder counties near the Cameron Peak, Calwood, and Lefthand Canyon wildfires. Lesser, but moderate, amounts of smoke can be found below these fires along the Front Range Urban Corridor, particularly from Ft. Collins southward to Loveland, Longmont, and Boulder.

Depending on wildfire activity, smoke may increase across sections of the I-25 corridor Tuesday afternoon, with the best chance for smoke impacts from Ft. Collins southward to Boulder.

3:37 PM

@tchrist Yeah, I meant, it's terrible if people have to stay home even then.

The government doesn't provide any help/shelter?

@Robusto Um. Not sure if there is a standard term. The school I went to had Junior, Middle and Senior School divisions. It was run by something called the Anglo-Scottish Education Society. Or maybe Educational. Horrid place - hated it. Supposedly an elite school. Name of Cathedral and John Connon. It has a Wikipedia page, and probably also its own site. The most famous alumnus (at least in the West) is probably Salman Rushdie.

Anyway, there are multiple school systems in India, so I'm not sure if there are common terms. The vast majority are probably what are called Hindi medium.

India isn't really a country. It's a fractious group of sizeable communities, that often don't get along. Divided by culture, history and politics.

The Central Govt has tried to impose a common school system on this mess, with limited success. Common school leaving exams do exist, notably the SSC.

4:02 PM

Cathedral and John Connon School

The Cathedral & John Connon School is a co-educational private school founded in 1860 and located in Fort, Mumbai, Maharashtra. It has five sections: Pre-Primary, Infant, Junior, Middle and Senior Schools.The school also controls the 300-year-old St. Thomas Cathedral; CAJCS was founded to provide choristers to the Church. == History == In 1860 Bishop Harding and the Cathedral Chaplain opened a grammar school within the walled city of Bombay which, along with a smaller establishment for girls, were the first of many strands that have joined to form the Cathedral and John Connon School.A Choir School...

> There are four houses in the school - Barham, Palmer, Savage and Wilson

Reminds me of Harry Potter

> English is the medium of instruction. Hindi is taught as a second language and Marathi or Sanskrit are taught as third languages.

4:29 PM

@CowperKettle Reminds me of a lot of pain.

Matt E. Эллен

@CowperKettle Many people not from the UK don't realise that the house system is prevalent in the UK. Rowling didn't invent that one :D

@MattE.Эллен It's a fairly old British thing. Mostly a public school thing, though it may have been adopted by other school systems.

The British needed a way to get the kids to compete among themselves. This is termed "school spirit". When the alumni leave the school, this is helpful in conditioning them to regard the rest of the world as an enemy.

It probably worked quite well for a while.

Examples in fiction include the early novels of Wodehouse, though of course there any many others, mostly much worse.

@MattE.Эллен Is it a good system?

Electromagnetic theories of consciousness

The electromagnetic theories of consciousness propose that consciousness can be understood as an electromagnetic phenomenon. == Overview == Theorists differ in how they relate consciousness to electromagnetism. Electromagnetic field theories (or "EM field theories") of consciousness propose that consciousness results when a brain produces an electromagnetic field with specific characteristics. Susan Pockett and Johnjoe McFadden have proposed EM field theories; William Uttal has criticized McFadden's and other field theories. Some electromagnetic theories are also quantum mind theories of ...

Probably closely connected with the boarding school system, which took 10 year olds and stuck them in a hostile environment with a bunch of strangers.

In the Soviet Union, it was customary to create competition among several military contractors. It's curious that a non-market economy thus created a market-like island of competition in the area it valued most: the military sphere.

4:40 PM

This helped with the dehumanizing process deemed necessary for the British ruling classes.

2

@CowperKettle Even totalitarian systems have uses for competition.

Matt E. Эллен

@CowperKettle I don't know, as I haven't tried any others :D It seemed important to me when I was in a house, but now I can't tell you any benefit. I guess it could foster camaraderie vertically, if you're lucky, but usually it's just another reason to get picked on.

In the 1960s there were debates in the upper tier of the Soviet Union on the possibility of introducing competition into the economy. Sadly, at about that time huge oil fields were discovered in Siberia, and the Soviet Union chose the path towards degradation and reliance of extensive use of resources.

Nikita Khruschev, by the way, used to recollect in private that he had a better life in the Tsarist Russia as a factory worker compared with factory workers in the USSR.

@MattE.Эллен You're English? What school?

Matt E. Эллен

@FaheemMitha just a regular secondary school out in the countryside. Nowhere of note

@MattE.Эллен Oh.

Matt E. Эллен

4:46 PM

sorry :D

I've known some British people in the past. Mostly English. I don't recall any discussion of the house system. Perhaps they preferred to forget about it.

I've blotted out much of my school days. But scars still remain.

> Increases in the number of computations-per-joule-of-energy-dissipated must come to a halt by about 2050: because the limit implied by Landauer's principle will be reached by then, according to Koomey's law

Matt E. Эллен

@FaheemMitha Yeah, to be honest, until I saw Americans getting all dewy-eyed over Harry Potter houses, and how strange it was, I hadn't thought about it. As you say, secondary school was not the most fun time.

(Americans else where online)

@MattE.Эллен If people think Rowlings made it up, they must not be very familiar with British fiction. Particularly English fiction. It comes up a fair amount.

Matt E. Эллен

@FaheemMitha they have many-a Great American Novel to be getting on with, I suppose

4:51 PM

@MattE.Эллен Ah, yes. Or TV instead.

Matt E. Эллен

aye

Time to go!

5:42 PM

The number of people with pneumonia is 3.3 times higher than average for October in my region.

5:52 PM

@RegDwigнt Someone who didn't think much of Mozart's piano concertos. Or at least one of them. Hmm.

I think he should do a scathing critique of the B Minor Mass next. With particular attention to faults of construction.

JTP - Apologise to Monica

A mod might consider deleting the growing comments at This Question

6:51 PM

@JTP-ApologisetoMonica The question was closed. There is a tiny nugget of useful word semantics answerable in there ('source' vs 'object') but the huge question and the comment chain obscure that with tendention... tenditiousness... tendosity... whining. Better to ignore/vote to delete, than bother with preserving the comment chain.

@MattE.Эллен TO be honest, I had no idea that the 'houses' thing was a common thing in the UK.

@FaheemMitha I must not be reading the right things or noticing it. I don't remember any of that in Wodehouse.

@Mitch Early novels. Notably "Mike".

Harvard undersgrad has exactly this, 'houses', where each on has a dorm and a particular personality.

@Mitch British export.

@FaheemMitha oh...I don't think I ever read any Psmith or other early Wodehouse.

@FaheemMitha Yes, surely.

no where else in the US

JTP - Apologise to Monica

@Mitch - no prob. I tend to wipe out full comment threads that go in that direction. Will ignore.

6:57 PM

@Mitch gutenberg.org/ebooks/7423

All the Young Adult 'Scifi' of the 2000's and 2010's seemed to have this 'people are split up into essentialist groups' theme.

Divergent

Twilight

or whatever that vampire stuff is

He wrote quite a few schools stories. Mostly based on the fictional school of Wrykyn.

@JTP-ApologisetoMonica You can always flag. @tchrist is the one who usually takes care of migrating commenting threads but he's dealing with some things at the moment.

E.g. "The White Feather", "The Head of Kays". "The Gold Bat", "The Pothunters".

They are mostly what is often termed "light". Realism strictly not welcome.

Eric actually wrote quite an interesting essay on Wodehouse.

orwell.ru/library/reviews/plum/english/e_plum

If I ever get sick and stay in the hospital, I'll ask for some 'early wodehouse'

7:01 PM

Hmm, this looks like a very abbreviated version. Weird. Hang on, searching.

I hate abridged versions. Aaargh.

Ok, this one appears to be complete.

orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/…

> Mike, which is now a difficult book to obtain in an unabridged form, must be one of the best ‘light’ school stories in English.

This might be the most insightful essay about Wodehouse ever written.

isn't all wodehouse 'light'?

or rather, light?

like, not heavy -at all--

I'm not sure how much he's read today. I've read that he is, or used to be, very popular in India.

@Mitch Probably, depending on your definition of light.

There was the scene in the concentration camp though where the inmates were dining on a recently dead compatriot.

@Mitch ?

7:32 PM

Wodehouse was talking all the time about the fun times he had in POW camps, trapping rats and adding them to stew.

7:48 PM

@Mitch He was? What's your source?

1 hour later…

9:06 PM

@Mitch Vampire dairies

Ew

Like what's wrong with cow milk.

9:25 PM

@tchrist Glad to hear you're back safe and sound—if not exactly in heaven, at least you have a home.

1 hour later…

10:37 PM

@FaheemMitha It's all in his 'Camp Notebook'... I'm having trouble finding that as a specific publication, I may have read it as part of a compendium. It's what his wartime radio broadcasts were based on, though he didn't put the rat stuff in that.

@M.A.R. Cheese that sparkles in the daylight.

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