English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2021-07-26

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1:36 AM

@Robusto How the Lowly Mosquito Helped America Win Independence

@Robusto He had been working on something which required moving through grass an bushes around the house, in a dune-like area, which had a ton of ticks.

He was building a wall and/or cutting branches, that sort of thing.

His mother told this tale; perhaps she exaggerated.

But he did go to hospital.

In Russia we wear special anti-tick trousers that prevent them from crawling on the legs. There's a kind of elastic pocket at the bottoms of the trousers. These pockets will catch all upside crawling ticks.

Further, one usually sprays these trousers with a good dose of tick repellant.

Just to be sure.

Самый лучший противоэнцефалитный костюм Payer Элит Барьер

A counter-encephalite costume

An all-body anti-tick armor, sometimes impregnated with chemicals that repel ticks.

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The tick-catching contraption is visible at the bottom.

You put your feet inside the straps to make sure the ticks crawl on the black part. Even if they manage to crawl inside the trouser leg, the black part ends in a dead pocket, so they have to turn back.

And there are anti-tick berms above the knees to make it harder for ticks to crawl up.

The jacket has a similar anti-tick pocket, with the elastic band to be tucked under the trousers.

The fabric is usually monotonosly bright, to make ticks visible against a bright background.

But hunters still prefer protective-colored fabric.

2:00 AM

@CowperKettle That's pretty cool.

Does it work well?

I wonder, what makes the tick crawl into the pocket, rather than over it?

2:21 AM

> "I thought to myself, 'I've got to find a way of reading Harry Potter to myself with my eyes closed'. So it came to me, 'Why don't I just memorise them?'" And so, she did. Every line and every chapter of the entire, seven-book Harry Potter series. abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-18/…

@Cerberus Yes, it could be an overkill, and ticks may well be stopped just by elastic bands. I guess nobody did scientific studies on this ))

1 hour later…

3:36 AM

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4:15 AM

> A California man who mocked COVID-19 vaccines has died after becoming infected with the virus. Stephen Harmon, 34, died on Wednesday at Corona Regional Medical Center, about an hour east of Los Angeles.

3 hours later…

6:59 AM

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7:15 AM

David Begnaud spoke with a COVID-19 patient in a Louisiana hospital who says he won't vaccinate because there are too many issues with the vaccine.

7:37 AM

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1 hour later…

9:07 AM

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These are the paths of 800 unsteered bicycles obtained by CalTech's Matthew Cook

Matt E. Эллен

@CowperKettle someone should point out how much fluorine is in cigarettes. perhaps that would help them kick the habbit

4 hours later…

1:19 PM

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2:18 PM

50 websites associated with Alexey Navalny have been blocked today in Russia, allegedly for "promoting extremism". Putin's new laws permit the state to block sites on a whim.

@CowperKettle Now everything makes sense!

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Matt E. Эллен

jeanetic predisposition

2

2:39 PM

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> On this date in 1581, several provinces of the Netherlands denounced the ruling King of Spain as a tyrant. The Plakkaat van Verlatinghe (Act of Leave) made the case for human rights, popular sovereignty and freedom of thought.

Turns out Russian плакат (plakat) was borrowed into Russian by Peter the Great in 1704.

3:06 PM

> The study, published in NeuroImage on June 24, found that regions of the brain most vulnerable to aging were also the regions that benefitted most from aerobic exercise medicalxpress.com/news/…

3:37 PM

@CowperKettle Excellent!

2 hours later…

5:54 PM

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6:30 PM

@CowperKettle paranoia must be a really miserable state

@CowperKettle yeah it's a hot topic. Same parasite that decreased mice's aversion to cat piss so they're more likely to get eaten and pass the parasite.

@M.A.R. With a bad study 'proving' that humans with the parasite also behaved more recklessly.

@Cerberus there's lots of those everywhere

Parasites?

Bad studies. But yeah

Same thing.

6:43 PM

I'm just in the process of the horror dawning on me

Especially that my country is backwater enough to throw out standards, sometimes ethical ones

6:57 PM

What specific horror is bothering you?

2 hours later…

9:17 PM

> If these anti-vaxxers were alive in the 1950s we'd still have polio.

@CowperKettle Speaking of which, I haven't seen any runs from you on Strava lately. Are you nursing an injury?

9:33 PM

@Robusto I believe many people refused the new polio vaccines in those years.

It's nothing new.

Eventually, people will accept the vaccines.

@Cerberus They initially had a good reason to.

> There was one other big problem. Just weeks after the rollout of the vaccine, children who had been recently inoculated started coming down with polio. It turned out that one of the manufacturers, Cutter Laboratories, based in Berkeley, California, was making batches that somehow contained live virus instead of the killed-virus that Salk’s vaccine required. Cutter’s mistake was causing the polio outbreak.

9:49 PM

@Robusto Hmm pretty bad.

But it was the same with other vaccines: acceptance always rises with time.

Current developments mirror the smallpox vaccines of the 19th century. Distrust at first, then wide acceptation.

@Cerberus Except when people are willfully stupid.

Except that what took a century then now takes a couple of months here.

Nurse reveals how she pranks Covid deniers who call her a crisis actor

@Cerberus You'd like to think that with the rise of technical prowess, basic intelligence would follow suit. But alas, that is not to be.

Even so, acceptation of other vaccines was probably worse in the past, so do not despair yet.

2 hours later…

11:43 PM

@Cerberus I'm not familiar with acceptation as a word. I presume you meant acceptance?

Well, I learned something today.

acceptation 1. The usual or accepted meaning, as of a word or expression. 2. Favorable reception; approval.

Still sounds kinda weird to me. Oh well.

@Robusto I actually used both words in consecutive messages...

I kind of wonder how I could have lived this long and only now heard that term used.

I learned the two should have slightly different meanings, but I kind of forgot so I think I just mixed them up for fun...

Perhaps I was merely unobservant.

That would be hard to acceptate.

11:49 PM

I think acceptance is the word with the broader meaning, acceptation mainly limited to linguistic usage and/or customs or something.

It's generally 3-5 years between times I discover an English word I haven't heard before (setting aside specialized vocabularies and terms of art).

Then maybe go through all abstract words based on a verbal root but without the -ion suffix!

Many will have uncommon alternatives on -ion, not seldom with slightly different or limited meanings.

> 1. a. acceptation of persons n. now rare favouritism on personal grounds; undue partiality. Cf. acception n. 2.
b. = acceptance n. 2b. Now rare.

@Cerberus Yeah, but most of those went out of fashion centuries ago.

So did this.

11:51 PM

No doubt, but who cares.

> 2. The action or fact of receiving something favourably; (of a situation, action, or thing) the fact of being received favourably; positive reception, approval. Also: belief in or agreement with an idea, theory, statement, etc. Now rare.

> 3. = acceptance n. 5a. Now rare.

Oops overpaste. But they are all rare.

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Look, Burchfield has it.

> †4. The state, condition, or quality of being accepted or acceptable; = acceptance n. 6. Obsolete.

Baba Is You is a puzzle video game created by Finnish indie developer Arvi Teikari (known professionally as Hempuli), released on 13 March 2019 for PC and Nintendo Switch. Mobile versions were released in June 2021. The game centers around the manipulation of "rules"—represented by tiles with words written on them—in order to allow the player character, usually the titular Baba, to reach a specified goal. == Gameplay == The player usually controls a character known as Baba, with exceptions in some levels. Each level contains various movable word tiles, corresponding to specific types of objects...

The last two are not so marked.

11:53 PM

An interesting puzzle game.

I should have used acceptance in both messages. It was the exact same meaning.

I was just careless.

> 5. The sense in which a word or sentence is understood; the accepted meaning or purport of something.
6. Finance. The action or an act of formally accepting the liability to pay a bill of exchange when due. Also: a draft or bill of exchange that has been accepted. Cf. acceptance n. 7.

Those two are not marked obsolete or rare.

My son showed me that game when he was here last weekend, and I've been kind of hooked ever since.

Looks almost like programming!

That's what makes it interesting.

11:56 PM

Better than a baba au rum.

It's different ways of applying logic to situations.

@Cerberus Now, now, I rather like baba au rhum as well.

I watched The Great British Bake-Off, and its Dutch aequivalent.

It struck me how much the English like their sponge cakes, especially soaked in something.

The Dutch version hardly had that at all!

Do not trifle with me, lad.

I just don't get the texture.

Reminds me of cheap children's birthday cakes.

You have to use low-protein flour. Something like that.

11:59 PM

Wet dough. Ugh.

Now you're making me want a baba au rhum.

It's for strawberry "shortcake".

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