English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2021-07-31

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12:08 AM

@Cerberus 達 (tachi) is a pluralizing suffix used for people and animals, so the term for we would add that to the singular for I (watashi ->*watashitachi*), and so on

@Robusto Funny.

That is a long word for I, by the way.

But Japanese, being no real fans of pronouns, may also use something like kochira (此方) to say this side instead of us, and it can mean I, me, we, us, and so on.

@Cerberus They would say I is a short word for watashi. Or boku. Or ore. Or any of a number of first-person pronouns.

And as I may have mentioned before in this chat, the Japanese can express who/whose is being referenced by means of whether verbs and nouns are "polite" (丁寧, teinei) or not.

謙譲語 (kenjougo, humble speech) vs 丁寧語 (teineigo, polite or respectful speech).

@Robusto Ah, there are others.

Yep.

Many others.

Pronouns are more likely to be used among same-group people, hardly ever to out-group folks.

Pronouncing "Caesar" wrong...?!

@Cerberus ^

12:35 AM

@Robusto I think that is correct.

Not 100% sure about the exact pronunciation of ae.

Interesting to hear his echt pronunciations, though.

By echt you mean resembling classical pronunciation?

I think his pronunciation is proper.

@Cerberus Yes.

Seine echte Aussprachen.

1:39 AM

@Robusto Very interesting! I'll add this explanation to my Anki record

@FaheemMitha In the UK

@Cerberus An enemy hit by such bomb was referred to as "stoned". They even composed a war chant "Everybody Must Get Stoned"

@CowperKettle Oh, really?

@Cerberus Yes

Do you mean the bomb actually fell on an enemy's body?

Or the enemy was hit by the explosion?

Yes

> Well, they'll stone you when you're trying to be so good
They'll stone you just like they said they would
They'll stone you when you're trying to go home
And they'll stone you when you're there all alone
But I would not feel so all alone
Everybody must get stoned

Bob Dylan - Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 (Audio)

I think this is some kind of joke...

1:51 AM

No, Bob Dylan translated this ancient war chant.

And added some lyrics of his own

When was this chant created?

And where?

2:08 AM

@Cerberus I just invented it ))

Can Liberals Survive the Apocalypse?: The Daily Show

2:21 AM

@CowperKettle I'm very surprised.

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2:40 AM

Word of the day: nepenthes (Ancient Greek νηπενθές (nēpenthés), neuter of νηπενθής (nēpenthḗs, “sorrow-banishing”), from νη- (nē-, “not”) + πένθος (pénthos, “grief”))

2:55 AM

Bizarre Natural "Toilet" Plant | Attenborough 60 Years in the Wild | BBC Earth

@Cerberus The Nature is wonderful

Quite!

It's Nature's counterpart of shitposting. You shitpost on Twitter, you get likes, and Twitter gets fertilized by your shitposts.

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This little crab steals prey from pitcher plants.

I've got to run. See ya!

3:09 AM

Adios, same here.

3:48 AM

@CowperKettle Are you aware that a "rainy day woman" was actually another term for a joint, i.e., a marijuana cigarette? The idea being that if you couldn't have a woman—that "rainy day" you save up against—you could at least get high another way.

And "everybody must get stoned" was a reference to getting high on marijuana.

The play is between "they'll stone you" meaning they'll throw rocks at you, i.e., give you hardships, and getting stoned as a relief from all that.

4:17 AM

@Robusto 100,000 new cases in America today. We've been here before. I didn't think we'd be here again, let alone during high summer when no one remembers that winter is coming. This is so fucked up.

Colorado +1175, Wisconsin +1198

> For many, illiteracy is also part of the trouble. Less than half of Americans are proficient readers, and only 12% are considered by the country’s health department to be “health-literate”. Over one-third struggle with basic health tasks, such as following prescription-drug directions.

More than half cannot read well. How can this be!?

5:00 AM

@Robusto No, I did not know that. I first heard the song in the early 2000s and I thought is was just Bob Dylan being quaint.

@Cerberus I'm back! See ya!

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Today was my fastest ParkRun run this year.

Элитная недвижимость гадкой парочки пропагандистов

Oh, they added English subtitles to the video that has been in Russia's most viewed 10 for several days thus far.

A good video about a couple of Putin's propagandists

1 hour later…

6:30 AM

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7:07 AM

@CowperKettle "Insult" is not well defined. If you mean overtly racist behavior, no. Though in my experience the British are, by and large, unpleasant people. They have elevated rudeness to an art form. But this isn't surprising, considering their history.

@FaheemMitha Could be so. I have never been in the UK, so I can't tell. I only met a British person several times, an English teacher who befriended my sister.

The racism part is really more of a vibe, I guess. I shouldn't compare my experience to people who have experienced racist attacks, like being abused and/or physically assaulted. Nothing like that ever happened to me.

I listened to the BBC radio, and a former WWII serviceman said that the British had conflicts with the US troops over the treatment of blacks. The US troops, he said, considered the Blacks inferior, while the Brits did not mind mingling.

I listened in the late 1990s to early 2000s

@CowperKettle Yes, that's well known. Two different racist perceptions colliding.

The US tries to whitewash its horrific history, but it's not far under the surface.

Maybe it's very hard to shake off nationalism. I get abused by Ukrainians for being Russian, because I frequent Ukrainian twitter feeds

7:17 AM

Different groups are racist towards their specific groups, as I said earlier. Usually their ex-victims. Sometimes, not so very ex.

Maybe a large portion of any population will always be nationalistic. Just because they are not very well-read and intelligent.

@CowperKettle Well, humans will be humans. Remember, we're all just monkeys with pretensions.

Thinking the laws of nature don't apply to us, for example.

And evolving our own lunatic methods of dealing with the world.

@CowperKettle By nationalistic do you mean ignorant and racist?

@FaheemMitha Yes. I generally consider nationalism bad.

@CowperKettle Depending on what you mean by nationalism. It's not a well-defined term, like most political words.

Yes, it's a hazy term.

I'm not against nationalism in the sense of collecting local lore and investigating the history of one's culture.

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Jordan is quite intolerant. I don't even know anything about Jordan.

7:28 AM

There's a viewpoint that nationalism is "useful" when it encourages people to combine against a common enemy. In this case, the definition used is roughly speaking, thinking of oneself as part of a common national "unit". Not very different from tribalism, I suppose. And this probably derives from the European nation-state concept. At least, the examples I'm aware of seem to derive from that. Nation states are not historically a thing. They appear to be mostly a European invention.

Socialists believed that once workers are persuaded to feel themselves united across borders, they would prevent the next big war by simply refusing to serve and vote for war. Sadly, in 1914 socialists in each country voted for war. It would have been great to just not go to war.

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> Termitomyces titanicus is the world’s largest edible mushroom, with the cap capable of measuring a little more than 1 meter across

"I only picked two mushrooms today, so call neihbors, we'll have a party"

8:14 AM

Cream Soda & Алёна Свиридова - Розовый фламинго (премьера клипа)

A random new musical video in Russian

A remake of a popular early 1990s song "Pink Flamingo" (Rozovyi Flamingo)

A new all-time high for Sverdlovsk Oblast: 23 covid deaths yesterday e1.ru/text/health/2021/07/31/70054253

That's quite high. The ambulances have been boosted with new personnel, yet they barely manage to cover all calls.

The number of patients on lung support is already quite a bit higher than in the previous wave.

8:34 AM

@CowperKettle I stumbled upon the news yesterday. It started by saying Covid cases are surging, then it right away proceeded to give us the wonderful news of a dozen different public events, with footage from the cramped spaces in the events for the next half hour

Charity events, book shows etc.

@M.A.R. " So runs the round of life from hour to hour" (Tennyson)

@CowperKettle It seems to me that, at least our government is sorta depraved, because all acts of charity and public work are attributed to religion and the government likes to think religious tradition is upheld because of them, they're always super-excited about these public events

So much that locking down entire cities doesn't prevent them from allowing these public events to happen

In Yekaterinburg, a big procession was held to commemorate the killing of the last Tsar's family. THe authorities said that it would be banned, but in the end just pretended that nothing happened.

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8:49 AM

Well, it might just be my impression anyway. But it might explain why they're not doing anything, maybe not out of maliciousness, just hesitance

9:01 AM

@CowperKettle I wasn't aware that such a thing as socialism actually existed. It's always seemed largely aspirational.

@M.A.R. We had/have similiar issues here.

@CowperKettle Over a hundred years ago?

9:20 AM

@FaheemMitha Yes, Nicholas II and his family. The tradition of a commemorative procession lasting trhough the night arose about a decade ago, and these processions have become really huge in the recent years. A river of people carrying icons and burning candles.

I think it's good to commemorate such a cavalierly done murder.

In 1959, an artist from USSR traveled to India, and upon returning he fell ill.

The doctors diagnosed him with flu, but he died several days later, and on autopsy they discovered that he was infected with smallpox.

Over the next 20 days, almost 10 million Soviet citizens were vaccinated against smallpox. The most urgent and large-scale vaccination campaign. It really nipped smallpox in the bud.

One benefit of a totalitarian state is that an order from the very top is sometimes carried out very ruthlessly. In this case, it saved lives.

Кокорекин, Алексей Алексеевич

Алексей Алексеевич Кокоре́кин (1906—1959) — советский график. Заслуженный деятель искусств РСФСР (1956). Лауреат двух Сталинских премий (1946, 1949). Умер от чёрной оспы, начав вспышку оспы в Москве. == Биография == А. А. Кокорекин родился 17 (30) марта 1906 год в Сарыкамыше (ныне в Турции). В 1927—1929 годах учился в Кубанском художественно-педагогическом техникуме. С 1929 года в Москве. Выполнял тематические картины, иллюстрации, пейзажи. Известен главным образом как плакатист. В своих политических плакатах воплощал мужественные, волевые характеры советских людей, обращался к крупномасштабным...

Here's the painter who died.

In all, 45 people were diagnosed, and 3 died.

Admirably prompt reaction.

Вспышка оспы в Москве (1959—1960)

Вспы́шка о́спы в Москве́ в 1959—1960 года́х — инцидент и связанная с ним беспрецедентная операция по оперативной локализации опасного инфекционного заболевания, завезённого в СССР одним человеком, в результате которой удалось предотвратить эпидемию в стране и её распространение за пределы СССР, а также провести массовую вакцинацию москвичей и жителей Подмосковья. == Эпидемиологическая ситуация по оспе в России и СССР == === В Российской империи === Первые прививки (вариоляции) в России начал делать специально приглашённый императрицей Екатериной II из Англии врач Томас Димсдейл. Екатери...

A woman who was a close friend of this painter was reading a lecture in a university. The Soviet special services came and put all attendees under quarantine.

26 thousand doctors and nurses were mobilized, and 3000+ vaccination stations set up.

9:52 AM

@CowperKettle You know a lot of history.

@FaheemMitha Don't encourage him!

10:09 AM

@CowperKettle I remember watching "Nicholas and Alexandra" many years ago and thinking it was really sad. Though I detest monarchies of all kinds, of course. I don't know how accurate the film was, though.

@M.A.R. History is interesting.

I see I said basically the same thing in January.

10:54 AM

About "Nicholas and Alexandra".

I find history interesting because it has a way of repeating itself.

11:46 AM

Price Commission

The Price Commission was set up in the UK under the Counter-Inflation Act 1973, alongside the Pay Board, in an attempt to control inflation. The Conservative government of Edward Heath, elected at the 1970 general election, had previously abolished the Prices and Incomes Board in November 1970, shortly after taking power, relying on competition to keep prices down. At the same time, the Industrial Relations Act 1971 was intended to rein in the trades unions. The Conservatives' economic policy was not successful, and the government took a U-turn. A 90-day freeze of pay and prices (as well as...

It turns out the UK tried to control prices in the 1970s. Distantly reminiscent of Soviet practices, but only very distantly. Still, an odd decision.

A Mars A Day Helps You Work Rest and Play

"Now with more glucose, more sugar". A Mars a day blows your pancreas away.

12:04 PM

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Yoghurt full of Brezhnevs.

12:16 PM

Vaccination Alone Won't Counter Rise of Resistant Variants: Study

12:26 PM

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> Dutch police photo
"Confiscated pornographic matter which was in the possession of a sick person."
1934

Makes me sick that such persons even exist. Just imagine, pictures of totally naked women.

I'm not looking.

I'm sure that wasn't my grandfather.

12:59 PM

@CowperKettle That soma is referring to A Brave New World?

1:16 PM

@tchrist Yes, it is severely fucked up.

It hasn't been this bad since Lincoln's Birthday.

@tchrist It's mind-boggling, but unsurprising. Add to that the severely cramped reasoning skills, the natural belligerence of ignorance, and the tendency of the news organs of capitalist profiteers to tell them shameless lies, and you have ... Republicans.

@tchrist Yeah. It's harder still because we thought we were through it. Now we are headed back there, and with a vengeance.

And yet that yelllowist of journalists, Hearst, was a Democrat.

@M.A.R. I'm not sure! But why not?

@tchrist He was an extremely wealthy capitalist. Nobody who owns a home that you have to take four 90-minute tours just to see the extent of can be called a "man of the people."

Why does every word have to have an antonym? — Robusto 13 secs ago

1:29 PM

True, some have postonyms instead.

My pet peeve about ELU, along with SWRs.

Oct 5 '15 at 16:04, by Robusto

Just because you can thinking up a description doesn't mean there will be a single word it applies to. What's a single word for a left-handed nun who eats pickled herring before chanting vespers at a Lithuanian convent? — Robusto 1 min ago

You could make one in German. :)

You can make any accretion in German.

SWRs in German Language & Usage must be powerfully simple.

Oh wait, there isn't one! No Deutsch SE site? That is weird.

No deutsch.stackexchange.com either. I'm frankly a bit surprised.

There's no CM whose native language is German.

1:57 PM

CM?

@Robusto Community Manager.

Ah.

So there can't be a German Stack Overflow.

That's because Germans already know everything.

Just ask them.

"Forever nineteens"

2:05 PM

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Yekaterinburg in 1910, about 15 minutes' walk from my home

I can spot the roof of a house that still remains standing, in the Modern style.

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This white house still stands, and it's near this house where we start the ParkRun

2:46 PM

@CowperKettle Looks nice!

@CowperKettle What happened to all the other buildings?

3:16 PM

@Cerberus The first and the third church (from the left) were demolished, the fourth was demolished and rebuilt 10 year ago. The majority of houses were demolished and bigger buildings built

I like how Prokudin-Gorsky told in advance to the locals that he would be taking pictures, so several women lined up in front of their house.

In the place of Church no. 1 there is now a big square with a big Lenin statue

And the Town Hall facing the square, in the Stalin Ampire style, with figures of industrial workers and peasants standing tall all along its facade on the roof. Like Medieval gargoyles

@CowperKettle Why demolished??

When you have a town you love, why would you demolish it?

Why destroy such a huge amount of useful capital?

@Cerberus Because religion is the opium of the people, as Carl Marx said, and so numerous churches were blown up or taken apart.

There were several waves of church demolition. The last big wave was after Stalin died, because Khruschev for some reason launched another anti-church campaign.

Opium of the people

The opium of the people (or opium of the masses) is a dictum used in reference to religion, derived from the most frequently paraphrased statements of German sociologist and economic theorist Karl Marx: "Religion is the opium of the people." In context, the statement is part of Marx's structural-functionalist argument that religion was constructed by people to calm uncertainty over their role in the universe and in society.This statement was translated from the German original, "Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes" and is often rendered as "religion…is the opiate of the masses." The full...

@CowperKettle Such a pity. They could have just converted those churches into musaea, as I remember they did in Petersburg.

And why demolish the rest of the town?

3:33 PM

@Cerberus To build bigger houses. They did leave a number of beautiful houses standing. But I would have left the entire center portion of the city standing, for the sake of history.

@Cerberus There were officials who were charged with deciding whether this or that monastery or church merits salvation in the sake of historical heritage.

Thus the tallest belltower in Moscow was saved. And so on, and so forth.

@CowperKettle Why would those bigger houses need to be where the existing town is? Just build a new neighbourhood in the outskirts?

It's such a waste to destroy perfectly good, even beautiful, houses.

@CowperKettle At least they were not total barbarians.

@Cerberus Because the Soviet architectural school called for very wide roads between buildings, to permit future traffic, expected to grow, and to limit fires.

It's the same as with Mussolini, who demolished a lot of Rome to build wide roads

@Cerberus THere were very cultured people in the Soviet government in the early 1920s

Many perished in the 1929-1937 during the Stalinist purges.

Yes, but demolishing some houses for wide roads, while regrettable, is still not as bad as destroying the entire historic town.

@CowperKettle I believe it.

Let's be glad that those times are past.

They also wanted to destroy large parts of historic towns here, in the sixties, I think.

@Cerberus Yes, I read online that some rivers, for instance, were turned into roads, and then back into rivers in the early 2000s

City planners came to believe that the solution to traffic is more trams and buses, not more roads. At least that's what Russian people enamored with Western "urbanism" say

New Urbanism is an urban design movement which promotes environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighborhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually influenced many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use strategies. New urbanism attempts to address the ills associated with urban sprawl and post-Second World War suburban development.New Urbanism is strongly influenced by urban design practices that were prominent until the rise of the automobile prior to World War II; it...

@CowperKettle Here, we did that with certain canals.

@CowperKettle Yes, and bikes.

4:16 PM

> His boots supple, his horse in great estate, now certainly he was a fair prelate; he was not pale as a forpined ghost.

4:34 PM

Of the 164 million vaccinated Americans, less than 0.1% have been infected with the coronavirus, and 0.001% have died, according to data from the CDC. axios.com/…

To the room: I was tested today at 16.00, and I got the result at 18.16: negative.

How can it be that fast??

I'm not a lab specialist, but I don't think it's overly fast. I go to the local lab for a total blood count, and they email me the result by midday.

Equipment has gotten very advanced.

OK, thanks, good to know.

It's just that they tell you you will usually receive the result within 24 to 48 hours.

Once a lab technician even led me to the lab room and showed the French-made apparatus they used to take the glycated hemoglobin test. He said "it's so great, we just put the samples in, and it makes everything and provides a log of actions". And that was in 2010.

Good.

4:45 PM

This year, a pieve of equipment went into production that is the size of a book, and it does DNA sequencing. 10 years ago you needed several PC-case-size units for DNA sequencing.

Hah.

And does it need any expensive materials?

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I don't know, I did not read in depth

MinION - The only portable real-time device for DNA and RNA sequencing

€1000 is less than I expected!

This year, an invention was made in which archeologists just take samples of soil in ancient caves, and they sequence the DNA of ancient people out of that. It's mindboggling. You need to sift through an ocean of DNA of other species in order to find the pieces of human DNA that have been lying there for 10 000 years.

Of course not complete DNA, but pieces. But it's amazing.

Quite impressive.

4:50 PM

I listened to an audiobook about the research of ancient human DNA, and the author repeated several times that the pace of technology has gotten so fast, that as soon as he finishes writing the book, parts of the book might be obsolete, superceded by new data.

Hah.

Progress can be confusing ans frustrating.

But we need it.

> De duur van de PCR-test kan variëren van 45 minuten tot 4 uur, afhankelijk van de gebruikte apparatuur. Er is ook een snelle versie van de PCR ontwikkeld, de LAMP-methode. Deze duurt enkele tientallen minuten, maar wordt nog getest op betrouwbaarheid.

@Cerberus they actually knew your status before the blood draw. They just go in the back, throw away the sample, and then wait around for a few minutes before pressing send on the email

5:07 PM

@Mitch Makes sense.

Except that it was no blood test.

5:42 PM

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Did anyone do the XKCD?

@Cerberus I've said too much

1 hour later…

7:03 PM

@CowperKettle I dunno, just wondering whether there are more aspects to that word that I haven't picked up

@CowperKettle Can confirm. I'm constantly prediabetic thanks to the medication

7:18 PM

I just heard a single lonely cicada. By itself it sounds really lame, especially when it peters out at the end, like novice bagpipe player.

@Mitch that's deep bruh

@Mitch Never!

1 hour later…

8:48 PM

@Cerberus wait...you can play it?

@M.A.R. dude, when there are a bunch (you have no idea because they're hidden up in the trees) it sounds like a thousand chain saws, Somme starting up some going for a long while some trailing off so it sounds like ... Well... A thousand novice bagpipe players but you can't tell when any particular one stops or starts.

9:41 PM

@Mitch What does the battle of the Somme have to do with all this?

@Mitch No, except by just painting on a screenshot, as I did.

Araucaria - Not here any more.

10:03 PM

@M.A.R. Hi there. Has Snailplane left SE?

10:22 PM

@Araucaria-Nothereanymore. Lamentably.

> The state of Florida on Friday recorded its highest ever single-day increase in COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic, with 21,683 new infections, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Friday’s infection surge comes as the Sunshine State is emerging as the new epicenter for the virus. The new tally outpaces the state’s previous peak measured in early January, when daily new cases reached a total of 19,334.

Florida on Thursday recorded 17,093 new cases, according to the CDC, even as the state's vaccination rate has recently increased.

10:44 PM

More than 100 people died of covid in Florida yesterday.

11:14 PM

That is a high number.

What is their rate of vaccination?

11:49 PM

@M.A.R. You are taking corticosteroids constantly?

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