English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

00:05

> Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms
Pentagon Plans Swell Deficit
Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim
Toronto Law to Protect Squirrels Hit by Mayor
Teacher Strikes Idle Kids
Infant Pulled from Wrecked Car Involved in Short Police Pursuit
French Push Bottles up German Rear
Police Officer Jailed for Attacking Members of the Public Found Dead
Fossil Yields Surprise Kin of Crocodiles
Nathan Chen Wins Sixth Straight Men’s U.S. Figure Skating Championship

I should tell Arnold. He'd get a kick out of it.

Cerberus

00:18

@tchrist They certainly do.

Cerberus

00:42

@tchrist High quality.

CowperKettle

02:52

@tchrist Ah! I did not notice that the links to other languages are on the top right, and hidden behind a drop-down menu, not on the left and shown always

tchrist

@CowperKettle For me they were on left. You must be on a handy computer.

Well, a rather unhandy one. Some little palmtop that's even worse at phone calls than the ancient dialers were.

CowperKettle

No, I'm on my usual home computer with a 24" Dell monitor

tchrist

That's what I'm using and they were on my left. Sorry for the confusion.

CowperKettle

I have to shorten the width of each browser because of the enormity of the monitor ))

tchrist

Oh I let mine run wild. It was born to be free doncha know.

CowperKettle

02:54

And it irks me when windows are misaligned and there are portions of different windows sticking out behind each other in a concertina fashion

tchrist

Or maybe that should be let mine run wide. I don't know, I was always bad at footballs.

@CowperKettle Like so many loose pages scattered upon the floor.

CowperKettle

Word of the day: cline ( a measurable gradient in a single character (or biological trait) of a species across its geographical range)

> For example, it has been observed that in Australia, birds generally become smaller the further towards the north of the country they are found. In contrast, the intensity of their plumage colouration follows a different geographical trajectory, being most vibrant where humidity is highest and becoming less vibrant further into the arid centre of the country.

tchrist

Aye, that is is.

That happens with birds here, too, where those in the southwest are paler than normal and those in the northwest are darker than normal.

CowperKettle

> Beneath the tree’s umbrageous limb
A hungry fox sat smiling;
He saw the raven watching him,
And spoke in words beguiling:
"J’admire," said he, "ton beau plumage!"
(The which was simply persiflage.)

tchrist

It's not that way for all possible fully continental species, but it is remarkably frequent.

The southwest being full of deserts, the northwest full of rainforests.

@CowperKettle That's one of those weird French adjectives with five forms. Beau would become bel if plumage had begun with a vowel, and both those are masculine singulars still.

Sandhi stuff.

un beau garçon mais un bel ami

beaux arts pour Mozart :)

une belle amie

Evidence for a mouse origin of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant

> Collectively, our results suggest that the progenitor of Omicron jumped from humans to mice, rapidly accumulated mutations conducive to infecting that host, then jumped back into humans, indicating an inter-species evolutionary trajectory for the Omicron outbreak.

Now we know why cats get sick from it.

:) but :(

Cerberus

03:12

@M.A.R. www-nrc-nl.translate.goog/nieuws/2021/12/30/…

How do you feel about this recent article?

tchrist

@Cerberus Well, I'm starting not to trust the mice. haha not hahah

Running these analyses on murine models has always had its risks. This one I didn't see coming.

Cerberus

Do they think it jumped in a laboratory?

tchrist

I didn't read the full paper. I am betting otherwise though.

Cerberus

I forgot: did the plague spread via fleas on rats, or didn't it?

There was some controversy and/or new insights, perhaps?

tchrist

It did.

But Yersinia pestis is a bacterium not a virus. It's far less apt to snatch genetic material from a murine host.

Although that can happen easily enough between prokaryotes. I guess you could call the murine mitochondria organelles a bit like an entrapped prokaryote, but it still seems really different.

Usually you need viruses to patch genetic material from one eukaryote to the next, not bacteria since they don't participate in cellular protein transcription the way viruses do. At least not that I've heard about.

That is, bacteria can reproduce on their own. They don't need to co-opt the cell's machinery to make more of themselves the way viruses must.

Cerberus

03:23

@tchrist Oh, interesting.

tchrist

I suppose anything is possible. Every day we're shown things we could never have believed possible yesterday.

Cerberus

Such is life.

tchrist

Germ warfare is just insane.

> CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” Those repeats are found in bacteria’s DNA. They are actually copies of small pieces of viruses. Bacteria use them like collections of mug shots to identify bad viruses. Cas9 is an enzyme that can cut apart DNA.

Bacteria fight off viruses by sending the Cas9 enzyme to chop up viruses that have a mug shot in the collection. Scientists recently figured out how bacteria do this. Now, in the lab, researchers use a similar approach to turn the microbe’s virus-fighting system into the hottest new lab tool.

I am much too tired to read the full paper. But it's available on the preprint server.

Cerberus

I know there are all kinds of weird interactions between viruses, and also between viruses and higher organisms, borrowing each other's DNA.

Or possible being infected with it.

tchrist

If bacteria are engaged in germ warfare against viruses, that seems to tell me that viruses can also hijack a prokaryote's reproductive machinery to make more of itself, not just a eukaryote's.

Bacteriophage

A bacteriophage (), also known informally as a phage (), is a virus that infects and replicates within bacteria and archaea. The term was derived from "bacteria" and the Greek φαγεῖν (phagein), meaning "to devour". Bacteriophages are composed of proteins that encapsulate a DNA or RNA genome, and may have structures that are either simple or elaborate. Their genomes may encode as few as four genes (e.g. MS2) and as many as hundreds of genes. Phages replicate within the bacterium following the injection of their genome into its cytoplasm. Bacteriophages are among the most common and diverse entities...

So yes.

(remember that prokaryote = bacteria + archaea)

Is your infection's infection your friend? Is the infection infecting the infection infecting you your friend? :)

Cerberus

03:44

I think we also put some viral DNA to good use in our own DNA?

tchrist

> Phages have been used since the late 20th century as an alternative to antibiotics in the former Soviet Union and Central Europe, as well as in France.

So yes, sometimes the virus infecting the bacteria infecting you are friendly.

@Cerberus I don't know about good use, but yes, we have them. Lots of them.

> Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) are a family of viruses within our genome with similarities to present day exogenous retroviruses. HERVs have been inherited by successive generations and it is possible that some have conferred biological benefits.

They've taken up home in our genomes, some recently, some incredibly anciently.

From here.

Cerberus

04:00

Yeah.

Life is strange.

CowperKettle

"Which makes the proverb true abide,
That fools have Fortune on their side".

CowperKettle

04:28

Word of the day: to buss (to kiss someone in a friendly rather than sexual way)

> politicians bussing babies

buss (1500-1600) Probably from bass “to kiss” ((1500-1600)), from French baiser

Compare Persian بوس‎ (būs, “kiss”) and Latin basium (“kiss”).

CowperKettle

05:59

Canada has a vertical banknote.

I never thought vertical banknotes existed. Nice.

How about a kitty-corner banknote

CowperKettle

06:10

hot cockles

Noun: hot cockles

(dated) a children's game in which a blindfolded person had to guess who was hitting them.

I wonder what the etymology is. Why "cockles", and why "hot"?

CowperKettle

06:22

Most popular soap operas on the Russian TV in 2021. Position no. 1 is held by the 7th installment of "In-Laws", created a decade ago by the current Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, who was a well-known comedy actor in his youth.

2 hours ago, by Cerberus

Life is strange.

CowperKettle

09:10

-11°С

A lot of bicyclists, some are even on thin-wheeled bikes, like this one.

Matt E. Эллен

10:16

@CowperKettle not sure why cockles, but hot would come from the fact that you're getting hit. The French name is "main chaud", because in the game the hand is hit. nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.32684.html

I guess if you're hitting the hand, maybe it's some corruption of knuckles

@M.A.R. I'm well known for my chatetite

M.A.R.

@Cerberus although I know that it's not possible because of the readership and conventions and all that, I think the title, the first lines and the rest of the article don't match. I would have preferred something more neutral like "Recent Developments about Omicron Variant". The takeaway for most readers of that article is going to be "Omicron is less dangerous", because most readers are not cautious, and I consider that a problem to be fixed, no matter how professionally the journalists write.

Matt E. Эллен

10:39

@Cerberus I don't know, if someone writes "we're coming to audit your taxes" and sends it to someone else, it's as if a spell is cast over them

CowperKettle

I just hope that Paxlovid spreads by and by, maybe by summer it will trickle down to Russia, and one could just have a package of Paxlovid handy, in case of a covid infection.

CowperKettle