@Vikas You're right to be! I think we occasionally have some mosquitoes here that can cause dengue.

@Mitch OK I had no idea chimpanzees weren't monkeys. I shall have to look up the definition.

At least I do know they are apes.

Speaking about apes, Jovie's Home taught me a difference between America and elsewhere: in America, you will never see public urinals in the street where you can see the person standing there, no closet or covering.

She says, "you'd be arrested".

Is this true?

@Cerberus wait, um, do urinals in Europe not have a door?

Can you see the people inside relieving themselves?

@Mitch vague answer, because they evolved not to kill their main hosts. More concise answer, because, in malaria, for instance, the parasites undergo a different part of their reproductive cycle than humans; that is, the sexual part of the cycle, which takes place mostly in their digestive tract and is way less harmful. The host where the sexual cycle takes place is the final, or defintive, host. Humans are also the definitive hosts for a few parasites,

. . . whose infections tend to be milder in immunocompetent patients and often limited to GI problems (like self-limited diarrhea). (Immunocompromised patients are screwed either way without treatment) IIRC one example is cryptosporidiosis.

But the most concise answer of all is that that question probably has quite a few aspects that I don't know

Which brings us to the first answer

@M.A.R. cnn.com/2018/08/14/europe/paris-urinal-intl/index.html

See also Europe public urinals

@Xanne huh, okay. It does raise some questions though. Not that I care all that much about it. I mean, it's not horrifying or anything. It seems people like to think of open or closed urinals as a symbol for one thing or another, but I don't think it means much

@Mitch Good one 😅

@CowperKettle Cool

@CowperKettle I see: gdb.rferl.org/…

I will also share one photo in a few moments :D

Just copying from camera to laptop

@CowperKettle How do you upload big images?

Isn't there a limit on upload size?

Uhm of course

In past I would get error if uploaded big size images

Today's sunset

I want to take my tripod with me so I can click even better.

But taking it with my bike is not convenient as I'm a learner rider

I practiced 70 Kms today only :D

My bike is 110 cc only

@CowperKettle you thought bicycle? 🤣

@CowperKettle I think electric scooters are becoming popular now

As petrol prices are increasing rapidly here

There are a few electric motorcycles but you can say they are still rare

Most people use petrol motorcycles and scooters. Electric scooters are also common now.

Yeah I think in future electric vehicles become more and more popular

Yes

Foreign brands like Honda is also making electric scooters. But they are only entry level scooters mainly for city commute

Wait, Honda has yet to launch it

Other local companies have launched it

I would also buy electric scooter, but right now I want to learn those gear/clutch basics. So . . .

Main reason for electric scooters is petrol prices are increasing here

Yeah

@CowperKettle In Indian market, these tyre sizes are same as regular petrol scooters. So it wouldn't matter here.

For example this.

It's a very common scooter here.

Nobody complains about tyres

Front tyre is little bigger than rear though.

But rear tyre = Gogoro tyre size

@CowperKettle of course it's not easy to ride scooters on rainy days and typical Indian roads like this:

i0.wp.com/lawlex.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/…

Personally, I've noticed ride on scooter is not smooth. They are only good at smooth roads. Can't be good at rough/off roads

Entry level motorcycles are a little better in terms of smooth riding. Because they have large radius tyres

Tyres are still skinny but they have bigger diameter as compared to scooter

So they are little more smooth at rough roads

@CowperKettle Lol. Modern horses of modern era

bwahahah

It also looks scary. They might control the world in future

They just need brain

I saw these on Instagram

@Cerberus I think that's a classic misunderstanding in English. Informally all of those monkey like things (chimps, baboons, spider monkeys, lemurs) tend to be called 'monkey', but more formally, apes (which chimps and gorillas and orangutans are) are not called monkeys but are called apes (ie ape and monkey are separate categories). Chimps get really upset if you call them monkeys.

Cladistically (= very formally), the category primates is split into New World monkeys (like spider monkeys or tamarins), Old World monkeys (like baboons or rhesus monkeys), and apes (gorillas or chimps or humans). Slightly less formally New and Old World are monkeys, non-human apes are apes, and humans are themselves. least formally, everything primate that's not a human is a monkey... though I think it'd be hard to call a gorilla a monkey (at least to his face).

@M.A.R. Mine was sort of an observation on the order of "You know those indestructible black boxes they retrieve after a plane wreck that records the last moments? Why don't they build the whole airplane out of that?"

@Cerberus The pissoir is non-existent in the US.

I was tearing my hair out, but perhaps you guys will fare better: semantle.novalis.org

Yes, public urination is 1) frowned upon 2) finable 3) depends on exactly how you're doing it how bad it is considered. If you just stand there on a sidewalk and expose yourself and pee, then that's arrestable as public indecency.

If you go to the corner of a building facing away on the street, then that may be public indecency if there are people around or if it is in like an alley with no one around then that's just vandalism (finable, or possibly arrestable (not exactly damage like spray painting))

If you stop by the side of the road on a highway and go behind your door (towards the side not the road, are you crazy that would be dangerous) well, you just don't do that in the US (well, maybe but it would be frowned upon) you just go behind a tree.

I only remember ever seeing pissoirs in Paris and no other French (or even European city) and frankly I don't think I've seen any at all ever.

But then Paris is the one city that has in addition to the usual urban European exhaust smell, this slight after-odor of urine. Maybe they need more pissoirs?

@CowperKettle I gave up in the end. I got to 35.53%

@CowperKettle Probably caught urinating at a Dutch pissoir?

@MattE.Эллен color 30.69%

@CowperKettle 1) do they have public urinals in Russia?

@Mitch yeah. I got stuck there at guess 49

@Cerberus We're talking about women, right?

@MattE.Эллен I think we can crowd source this thing and crush it.

@Mitch 109 guesses later I tried colors, which is 31.28%

@Mitch oh, yeah, The Bridge has already got it

paint and tint are both 23% < color/colors

when I say I gave up, I mean I literally clicked on the I give up button, so I know the answer

There's no logical hill climbing method like you can do with wordle

@MattE.Эллен Oh

you have to try to feel out how the association is mapped

well yeah

the map happens to be infinite dimensional

that's fiiiiiiine

there's a human involved somewhere along the way, so it's somewhat predictable

but not as predictable as I had hoped. trying parts of speech gave me a big red herring

i've been trying to 'triangulate' pick a word that is intentionally further away (semantically different in a few different ways)

but that hasn't helped

graphic 34.43% (923/1000)

when I hit the word that is 950/1000 I got so stuck. the answer does not seem more related to that than it is to color

@Mitch I wish I had got that one, might have got me out of my false minimum

so many false paths to take

word2vec does nothing whatsoever about spelling or roots or anything structural. it's entirely co-occurences with other words.

oooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

that makes much more sense

so many good meta-hints you're giving... which do not help in the least.

:D

I will not give away the answer

as much as I would like to

no, I do not have the answer

I thought it had somehow been mapped with meanings.

but if it's just basically ngrams

@MattE.Эллен pretty much

maybe you could do it with COCA?

a little more complicated. for a given word it takes all ngrams and assigns a vector of roughly 300 coords (when you consider that semantics is infinite, 300 is reasonably small)

and you slowly get closer to a vector for each word.

so word2vec is more of a training algorithm rather than the final set of vectors. the final set depends on the training set of sentences.

but I think the word2vec that everyone uses is one particular opensource guthub thing

so yes you could use COCA as a corpus of sentences to train your own word2vec

and the whole point is that you can compute 'distances' between words by doing the dot product of two vectors (the vectors for the words).

but if you plug your best guess into COCA, would you likely see the target word in there somewhere?

Because the dot product a.b = cos(alpha)/(|a| |b|)

so the closer two vectors are in angle (cos alpha close to 1 -> angle almost 0), then they are considered very similar in semantic space (of 300 dimensions)

@MattE.Эллен oh... COCA just does a search on the word given... does it give synonyms too?

@Mitch it gives the co-locations

but I see that wouldn't be enough

@MattE.Эллен but it's close to the idea

words with similar co-locations are similar

and by collocation I mean plain boring bigram, not the usual 'words that usually go together like 'stormy petrel' or 'catch the ball' and not 'and the'

@MattE.Эллен I'm wondering if using a thesaurus would be cheating

mostly because I think most of the current online thesauri use word2vec (plus human oversight) to pick nearby words

@Mitch I tried, but I still didn't win :D

I think you'd need one of the top 20 matches to get to the word

nft = 3.82

a big red herring is that there is no special consideration for polysemy

eg one meaning of a string of letters may be super close, but the other meaning may be very far away and so dilute the nearness (and therefore a guess might have a low score but really would have been a good hint to get closer to the real answer)

Yay ! got it!

well done!

Yes, you need 1) a lot of guesses

@Mitch you're not into this blockchain stuff now, too?

2) luck

3) you said this, you need to have something close to be able to get close (??)

You practically need a synonym to get the final thing

otherwise it's a lot of flailing

@MattE.Эллен haha no it's a crock

@Mitch :D

so, what is nft in this context?

or rather when I try to be diplomatic, it may well have a good use case, but too many rent-seekers are jumping on it and using it for technically incongruous uses (or for Ponzi-scheming)

@MattE.Эллен non-fungible token... oh... in this context I think I've seen recently that associated with the word nft a lot of (pretty low-brow) drawings.

anyway, I'm surprised that nft was in their word list...probably for something else entirely

@Mitch oh! it was a guess

yeah I thought I might as well try

I thought it was some statistic related to word closeness

nearness feeling threshold

right... one of those mathy acronyms like svc or positive semidefinite

yes I know positive semidefinite is not an acronym

:D

but it was all I could come up with at the moment

@Mitch I uh, would not want to be made out of mosquito

16 guesses @Matt

Kisses biceps

@M.A.R. how about just the winds?

@Mitch I don't want my winds to be made out of mosquitos either

@M.A.R. cripes... wings. -wings-

@Mitch oh I thought it was a mal-aria pun

But I stand for what I said

Gives me certain ideas about referring to farts as malaria, just for the shock value

@CowperKettle I listened to those too. Very entertaining.

@CowperKettle Mostly unrelated second word of the day: cabotinage (overacting; hamming)

@M.A.R. The ones outside generally do not have doors, no.

They may have boards that prevent most of your body from being see, or not.

These are 'traditional' here.

These movable units are frequently used when there is a problem with people peeing against buildings in busy areas and it isn't possible to (quickly) build fixed urinals.

Grey plastic.

This picture looks as though it could be France or something.

Oh, I think it's Belgium.

@CowperKettle Do you find it shocking?

You cannot really see any penes, because of the sides.