English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

2:17 AM

@user726941 Why nude beaches rather than any other place?

2:43 AM

Word of the day: carnelian (gold and carnelian ring found on the finger of Scipio's skeleton, about 300 BC)

Scipio Barbatus (337 BC – 270 BC)

twitter.com/OptimoPrincipi/status/1558411686826188800

He was the grand-grand-father of Scipio Africanus

At the time of his death Barbatus was the patrician censor of 280 BC. His censorate is notable because it is the first one of which there is a reliable record, though the position was quite old by that time.

3:07 AM

@Cerberus I should of said "one of the many places" where the elderly go

@user4539917 The only time I was at a nude beach was when I was maybe 8 or 10.

Also the only time.

@CowperKettle Wow, they actually identified his skeleton?

Remarkable.

And the ring is intact! Or has it been heavily restored?

That stone is superb.

It's also interesting how little signet rings have changed in 2300 years, mine looks the same except the stone is green.

@Cerberus The skeleton was in a huge stone sarcophagus, it was hard not to identify

Is your stone jade?

@CowperKettle Sarcophagi are usually ransacked!

Tomb of the Scipios

The Tomb of the Scipios (Latin: sepulcrum Scipionum), also called the hypogaeum Scipionum, was the common tomb of the patrician Scipio family during the Roman Republic for interments between the early 3rd century BC and the early 1st century AD. Then it was abandoned and within a few hundred years its location was lost. The tomb was rediscovered twice, the last time in 1780 and stands under a hill by the side of the road behind a wall at numbers 9 and 12 Via di Porta San Sebastiano, Rome, where it can be visited by the public for a small admission fee. The location was privately owned on discovery...

3:12 AM

@user4539917 No, heliotrope. It is intransparent, but with tiny red specks.

Neat.

@CowperKettle Such luck!

For us.

I wouldn't expect people who have cold symptoms to go to a nude beach.

On a nude beach, nobody knows you have a cold.

In space, nobody can hear you scream.

3:18 AM

When we went to the nude beach with a friend, she said that guys standing around the fire to warm up have "such cute bums".

Now and then, a motor boat from a local vacation camp passed the beach. It was loaded with giggling women, they did it on purpose to look at the nude people. The guys on the beach waved gregariously.

But generally, it was no different from an ordinary beach.

@CowperKettle Pretty cool history.

I wonder whether any other Scipiones were found.

I wonder why the Roman Empire flourished so long. Probably because Italy is protected by mountains in the north, and has sea all around. There's a lot of fish, which is very nutricious.

Here in the Urals, every other person has poor thyroid function. No sea, no iodine.

And the mountains don't protect you much, they are glorified hills.

Hence, no Ural Empire.

Oh, I didn't know that.

It is a combination of factors.

About hypothyroidism?

Yes, about that being common away from the sea.

3:28 AM

@Cerberus My mother remembers being given iodine tablets in school. Teachers told kids that one should eat iodine, since the Urals is an iodine-depleted region.

I think it is normally added to table salt here.

Just as fluoride is added to toothpaste.

@CowperKettle One factor is probably the great organisational skills of the Romans.

Iodine deficiency in local produce in Russia.

Deficiency in produce?

3:30 AM

Yes, in locally-grown foods

I didn't know produce was even supposed to contain iodine.

Russia's Bakers Union discovers a lack of iodine in iodine-fortified salt brands sold in Russia 1prime.ru/business/20210415/833467008.html

Out of 12 brands sampled, 10 contained a low amount of iodine, and 2 did not contain iodine at all.

Hmm not good.

Are there any fluorine deficiencies?

4:01 AM

@user4539917 I think every place in the world is fluorine deficient, except perhaps wherever NASA is storing rocket fuel.

> "Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Program Better". This paper changed my thinking about what future langauge models will be good at, mostly in a really concerning way. twitter.com/davisblalock/status/1558347542101839873

Models are overrated. Your inner beauty matters.

> But if we can generate unlimited training data for coding in particular, this suggests that future language models will be far better at coding than anything else.

> This might be bad because coding ability is the main thing that could make deployed models hard to control—like, no amount of English proficiency lets you modify your own source code or break out of a Docker container. But if you can code at a superhuman level? Things could get interesting

@M.A.R. They made a big deal about this in the 70s

General Ripper: Precious Bodily Fluids

►

4:11 AM

Exactly^

> Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation. Fluoridation of water?
Mandrake: Uh? Yes, I-I have heard of that, Jack, yes. Yes.
Ripper: Well, do you know what it is?
Mandrake: No, no I don't know what it is, no.
Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?

A Communist plot.

Thanks @CowperKettle

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere developed a machine-learning model that can answer university-level mathematics problems in a few seconds at a human level. mitsha.re/4uwP50KbAiI

@user4539917 Glad to be of use!

4:57 AM

@user4539917 flouride, not fluorine.

2

Oops 🙊

To atone for your sins, go dump some iodine in the sea

Is that why they call it the red sea?

No that's because people keep dumping cheap lipstick in it

lol, I'm preparing for The Rage On The Red Sea happening one week today.

5:06 AM

Siberian Unicorn, 'Elasmotherium', which went extinct 29,000 years ago

@CowperKettle wow, those two guys are really strong.

A 2021 study challenges assumptions of Elasmotherium having had a horn by comparing its cranial dome and neck musculature to those of modern rhinos.

Yeah it looks like an overgrown sloth

@CowperKettle Cute.

Even though horns are hollow, that does seem rather heavy.

6:03 AM

A picture with zero red pixels in it.

So my brain is imaging that can of Coke is red?

Yes

Maybe because all the green tinge around? I did not read up

> On August 13, a local district attorney expounded on the nature of Rushdie's injuries, confirming four wounds to the stomach area of his abdomen, three wounds to the right side of the front part of his neck, one wound to his right eye, one wound to his chest and one wound to his right thigh.

10 wounds.

6:36 AM

Word of the day: Colorado brown stain

> The foundation of water fluoridation in the U.S. was the research of the dentist Frederick McKay (1874–1959). McKay spent thirty years investigating the cause of what was then known as the Colorado brown stain, which produced mottled but also cavity-free teeth

user21820

7:29 AM

@CowperKettle Picture with no blue or yellow in it

The general effect is known as:

Color constancy

Color constancy is an example of subjective constancy and a feature of the human color perception system which ensures that the perceived color of objects remains relatively constant under varying illumination conditions. A green apple for instance looks green to us at midday, when the main illumination is white sunlight, and also at sunset, when the main illumination is red. This helps us identify objects. == Color vision == Color vision is how we perceive the objective color, which people, animals and machines are able to distinguish objects based on the different wavelengths of light reflected...

Image is from there.

Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs

7:54 AM

Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs is a 2022 documentary film written and directed by Canadian YouTuber and video essayist Dan Olson on NFTs, cryptocurrencies, the metaverse, and Web3. The video was published to his YouTube channel Folding Ideas on January 21, 2022. == Contents == In the video, Olson traces the early history of Web3 through the 2008 Great Recession and the creation and early history of Bitcoin and Ethereum before going over the concepts, technologies, and economics of the space. Olson then goes over the history and technologies behind NFTs while arguing that they mainly exist...

long-winded; but, convincing

8:30 AM

air filter👀

►

Nice solution to polluted air, an individual air filter.

9:26 AM

@user4539917 if you zoom in, you only see black lines.

Very trippy

The real optical illusion is chat is filled with usernumbers and I can't tell them apart.

I hope that's not racist.

@CowperKettle isn't that called a nose

Just grab one of those fake ones and use it until you replace it

Juana Maria

Juana Maria (died October 19, 1853), better known to history as the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island (her Native American name is unknown), was a Native Californian woman who was the last surviving member of her tribe, the Nicoleño. She lived alone on San Nicolas Island off the coast of Alta California from 1835 until her removal from the island in 1853. Scott O'Dell's award-winning children's novel Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960) was inspired by her story. She was the last native speaker of the Nicoleño language. == Background == The Channel Islands have long been inhabited by humans, with...

Spent 18 years on an island alone.

9:52 AM

They say there's a spike of foreign visa applications in Russia after foreign politicians started calling for Russians to be banned from entering foreign countries.

10:02 AM

> "Donald duck studying for a mathematics test", oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci.

By the DALLE-2 engine

10:52 AM

@CowperKettle can't figure out what his right hand is doing.

Gluing the pencil to the top of the page?

11:05 AM

"photo of an elegant yellow woman's dress with leg visible wearing a high heel"

11:23 AM

@M.A.R. I see.

1:13 PM

In January-July 2022, a total of 4300 new elevators were bought for replacement purposes in Russia, which is just 33% compared with the same period in 2021.

In Moscow, only 35 elevators were purchased, compared with 2283 in the same period of 2021, marking a y/y decline of 98%.

2:16 PM

Peter the Great made a cup on a turning lathe in 1709, and gifted it to Matvey Gagarin, who had it inlaid with gold and stones

10 years later, Peter the Great hanged him.

Mitch

@CowperKettle this is why your aunts tell you to send personal thank you notes -promptly-

Handwritten preferably

Millennials these days with their texting and emojis. It will be the end of civilization.

Next they'll be eating peas with a knife

Execution is too good for them

We'll serve them tea from second use tea bags

No that's a bit harsh

3:01 PM

Send-off of the 37th Division to the Russo-Japanese War

Probably in the summer of 1904

3:23 PM

That war didn't go so well for Russia either.

3:35 PM

It deprived Russia of Port Arthur and half the Sakhalin, but gave Russia its first Parliament.

And 80 000 killed in action / died of wounds and diseases

> Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.

3:51 PM

From which war is that?

@CowperKettle About the same scale as Ukraine now, perhaps.

@Cerberus It's by Wilfred Owen, killed in action 7 days before the end of WWI

> When the subway jerks, it's the fixed stars that throw you down.

I don't understand this. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach%27s_principle

4:18 PM

@CowperKettle The trainloads sounded like WWI.

@CowperKettle What don't you understand about it?

I wonder whether it is 'true', though.

I've read the Wiki page, and its beyond my mental capacity

It is an interesting problem, at least to a layman: what is rotation? Is it movement? Is it nothing? If it is movement, is it relative to something? To what?

The Earth rotates around the sun, not the other way around. But how do we know this? Ask yourself that question.

And keep in mind a principle (possibly outdated since the Theory of Relativity) that all movement must be relative to something else: if the Earth is moving in some direction in space, and nothing exists except the Earth, can the planet be said to be moving? How could you ever tell it was moving, if there was no other object to relate the movement to?

When you look at the sun, it seems to be moving around the sky. But now we know it is the Earth that is moving, not the sun.

If there existed nothing besides Earth, and it moves.. there is still the space inside which it moves

When you look out a train window, the landscape seems to move, not you and the train.

@CowperKettle Think about that some more! Is it really true?

Is space anything?

What if there were no space, if the only thing that is were the Earth. Could it still be moving?

In this case, no, it cannot be moving.

4:28 PM

Why not?

There are no walls around it.

Define: "is"

Cowper began with the word "is"!

Indeed.

If you cannot measure the movement relative to anything, then it's not happening.

Right, that is the underlying premise.

Can you measure relative to empty, limitless space?

4:31 PM

Note, space does not "exist" without time.

Kant: "space and time not necessarily things that exist objectively outside the human mind: they are merely convenient methods by which our brains categorise and structure our sensory input, and the things we hypothesise cause the sensory input".

And vice versa.

Right.

I wish I could understand that.. but I Kant.

lol

Kan't

4:36 PM

Hah.

My friend has this thick book with "Kant" written in large letters on the back.

Every time I forget that kant also means "lace" in Dutch.

(Oh, and it also means "side".)

In Russian, kant is piping, as in piping on the jacket's pockets

> Before / after

Карман с кантом (piped pocket)

Yet, Plato believed numbers "exist" outside of space and time.

4:53 PM

@CowperKettle Sounds as though it could be related to Dutch kant.

@Cerberus Yes, it must be. It doesn't have the Russian feel to it, must be a borrowing

An etymology site says it's from L. canthus, rim of a wheel.

It's funny how we can feel these things, isn't it?

Perhaps Dutch kant is also from that Latin word.

The th suggests a Greek origin.

> The term for “rim of a wheel” is ultimately of Gaulish origin, from Proto-Celtic *kantos (“corner, rim”). Related to Breton kant (“circle”), Old Irish cétad (“round seat”), Welsh cant (“rim, edge”).

> The frequent spelling with -th- is due to the influence of unrelated (or possible Indo-European cognate) κανθός (kanthós, “corner of the eye”) (see Etymology 2), which after its borrowing became conflated with the Gaulish term for "rim" in Latin.

> Ontleend aan een Noord-Franse dialectvariant van Oudfrans chant ‘zijde, kant’ [1155; Rey] (in het Nieuwfrans verouderd), wrsch. uit Latijn cant(h)us ‘velg’.

Yup, it is the same word.

@CowperKettle That's interesting, because Dutch also has another word kant "side", which seems similar to this Celtic word.

> Teacher at arts and crafts: class, today we are learning how to turn the piping (**kant**) inside-out.
A girl: Maria Ivanovna, would that mean "the moral law above me and the starry heavens within me"?

(a Russian joke based on the similarity of piping in clothes and Kant in Russian)

5:01 PM

> In de westelijke Romaanse talen is het woord algemeen: middeleeuws Latijn cantus ‘hoek, zijde’, Italiaans/Spaans/Portugees canto ‘rand, hoek, zijde’, Oudprovençaals can ‘zijde’, wrsch. ook klassiek Latijn cant(h)us ‘velg’. In dat geval ook Grieks kanthós ‘velg’. Wrsch. is dan ook verwant Oudkerkslavisch kǫtŭ ‘hoek’ (Russisch dial. kut, Tsjechisch kout) en Litouws kampas ‘hoek’. De relatie met het Keltisch (Welsh cant ‘ijzeren rand of hoek’ en Bretons kant ‘landstreek’) is onduidelijk.

Hmm this seems slightly different from your quotation.

Oh, well.

What does it mean for a "word" to exist if not with in some language.

@user4539917 I can't parse your sentence.

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