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00:25
@Robusto "Hydrox came before Oreos" - interesting
Hydrox is a cream-filled chocolate sandwich cookie currently owned and manufactured by Leaf Brands. It debuted in the United States in 1908, and was manufactured by Sunshine Biscuits for over 90 years. Hydrox was largely discontinued in 1999, three years after Sunshine was acquired by Keebler, which was later acquired by Kellogg's. In September 2015, the product was reintroduced by Leaf Brands. Oreo was created in 1912 as an imitation of Hydrox. Oreo eventually exceeded Hydrox in popularity, which resulted in the Hydrox cookies being perceived as an Oreo off-brand. Compared to Oreos, Hydrox cookies...
@Robusto I love this old Russian mock advertisement of Skype, here with English subtitles:
Ukrainian kids singing carols in a subway station during an air raid alert
@CowperKettle Hmm what makes it stand out to you?
@CowperKettle Cute!
@Cerberus It was made by a student on a low budget, and it perfectly mocks the "enthused" style of some adverts
This girl student went on to became a famous satirical cartoons artist
00:56
@CowperKettle Oh, yes, that style is super annoying.
> Loud explosions reported at Russia's strategic military airfield at Engels, more than 600 km from the Ukrainian border. No independent confirmation as of yet.
01:17
Home Alone, shot in the Soviet Union - by MidJourney AI
@CowperKettle I think there were explosions there before?
@Cerberus Yes, in (the?) early December
OK.
(No "the".)
Days of the week and months normally do not take the definite article.
01:20
In Soviet Russia, days of the week take the definite article, the comma, the colon, and basically they take everyting.
How does a word take a comma?
I don't know
GPS jamming in Russia, approximate
Russian authorities are clearly afraid of Moscow being targeted
Wow, a semi-live map?
What are the green and transparent areas?
01:41
@Cerberus I guess the transparent are unknown, and green are with proper coverage
I popped out to the kitchen to make breakfast. I turned on the TV, and there was the Soloviev talk show. He was saying: "How about Warsaw and Helsinki? It this traditionally Russian land?" - The interviewed guest replied "To take Warsaw, we'd need to be very strong internally".
Soloviev said "But we're not hurrying anywhere".
"Yes, we're not in a hurry, so maybe later".
02:41
@CowperKettle Weird.
Conquering Ukraine, we can't do that.
But Poland and Finland? Sure.
03:52
Harriet Jacobs (1813 or 1815 – March 7, 1897) was an African-American writer whose autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is now considered an "American classic". Born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina, she was sexually harassed by her enslaver. When he threatened to sell her children if she did not submit to his desire, she hid in a tiny crawl space under the roof of her grandmother's house, so low she could not stand up in it. After staying there for seven years, she finally managed to escape to the free North, where she...
She hid in a garret, 3 by 2 meters and only 90 centimeters high, for seven years, in order to escape slavery.
From age 22 to age 29 years old.
A week from now, it will be +20°C in Edenton. I can imagine what hell it was to live through a summer in a garret there.
04:35
Where did you find that?
> Under ultraviolet light, females and males of all 3 species of Glaucomys fluoresce in varying intensities of pink on both dorsal and ventral surfaces.[4] The fluorescence is hypothesized to help the flying squirrels find each other in low light and mimic the plumage of owls to evade predation.[5]
This hypothesis has been challenged by Toussaint et al. (2022) [6] who instead suggest that the pink luminescence is a byproduct of the body's waste management. Moreover, these authors argue that it is far from evident that UV illuminating sources that occur naturally are sufficient to elicit lum
The three species of New World flying squirrels, genus Glaucomys, are the only species of flying squirrel found in North America. They are distributed from Alaska to Honduras. They are similar in many ways to the Eurasian flying squirrels in the genus Pteromys. Two species of New World flying squirrels can be easily distinguished on the basis of size and ventral pelage. Northern flying squirrels, Glaucomys sabrinus are larger and have belly hair that is dark at the base and white at the tip. Southern flying squirrels, Glaucomys volans, are smaller and have belly hairs that are completely white...
04:58
@CowperKettle Landing lights.
05:19
> Because one main advantage of transformers is that they do not need explicit annotations in the data they are trained with, they can also be used to build models to classify images without explicit supervision, as Pranav Rajpurkar and colleagues show for the detection of the presence of pathologies in unlabelled chest X-ray images. nature.com/articles/s41551-022-00997-w
06:01
@Cerberus Oh, on Twitter, there's a feed dedicated to odd and interesting facts in Wikipedia :)
@CowperKettle But it must be from a different article, or ancient.
06:18
@Cerberus Yes, it must be from some other article
 
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07:35
This is in NY Times, Putin Wants Fealty, and He’s Found It in Africa
 
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08:58
Wordle 555 5/6

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09:32
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad ns for domain in body, blacklisted username, blacklisted website in body, potentially bad ip for hostname in body, potentially bad ns for domain in body (286): How do I get a human at JetBlue?‭ by faresglob‭ on english.SE
10:15
@SmokeDetector Thank you for the heads up, Smokie! Merry Xmas to you.
Who in this chat knows how to run a slide rule?
William Oughtred ( AWT-ed; 5 March 1574 – 30 June 1660), also Owtred, Uhtred, etc., was an English mathematician and Anglican clergyman. After John Napier invented logarithms and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales (lines, or rules) upon which slide rules are based, Oughtred was the first to use two such scales sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and division. He is credited with inventing the slide rule in about 1622. He also introduced the "×" symbol for multiplication and the abbreviations "sin" and "cos" for the sine and cosine functions. == Clerical life... ==
Inventor of the slide rule
 
3 hours later…
13:52
@CowperKettle I don't think I've even seen a slide rule in person, nor would I know how to use it exactly. I learned to do advanced math on a TI 84. In addition to the math (heh), you could write programs on it (but only in some type of BASIC) and it also had games
14:34
@Laurel Interesting! This looks like a top-notch calculator!
The use of the slide rule probably ended in the 1970s.
I only saw it used in movies. :)
So I wondered whether there are actual people around who have used it.
Delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD), more often known as delayed sleep phase syndrome and also as delayed sleep–wake phase disorder, is a delaying of a person's circadian rhythm (biological clock) compared to those of societal norms. The disorder affects the timing of biological rhythms including sleep, peak period of alertness, core body temperature, and hormonal cycles. The diagnosis of this disorder is currently a point of contention among specialists of sleep disorders. Many insomnia-related disorders can present significantly differently between patients, and circadian rhythm disorders...
A curious disorder. Accounts for 10% of complaints about insomnia. I first stumbled upon a gene associated with bipolar disorder, and then discovered that the gene is also associated with this one. Never heard of it before.
That a gene implicated in sleep-wake cycling is associated with bipolar is no wonder.
Tinkering with the gene in mice causes them to have something akin to seasonal affective disorder.
If the gene is wrecked in humans, they may have a weird circadian rhythm and elevated depression scores ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4801303
@CowperKettle When I was a kid one of the coolest things I got as a present was an electric calculator (and then later a programmable calculator). Then at some point I heard of slid rules and got one as a present.
As to actually using it, sure, you slide the inner bar so that the value of 1 on the slider matches value a on the holder, then where b on the slider hits the holder is the value
of a*b.
(or something like that, maybe it's from 0?
@CowperKettle My parents both used slide rules briefly in school apparently
But since I didn't actually need to use it and all I could do with it was multiplication, I think I used it for 5 minutes, and then it immediately became nerd decoration.
Slide rules had poor precision. Two decimal places was about it.
Unless you're calculating the diameter of the visible universe, 2 decimal places is often enough.
14:50
As a senior in high school I had the idea (yes, it's true) of an electric slide rule that could have two very long tapes side by side in a spool housing. You would control it with buttons. But the precision, I realized, would yield only another one or two sig figs of precision.
Not four years later my college had a digital calculator (one) for the math department.
@Robusto Very scifi!
I'd get it.
But never use it
@Mitch I can sell you one. Wait a minute, I'll see if I can find it.
I like thinking about multiplication, but actually doing it is so... basic
These days, it's so ... JavaScript.
@Robusto Actual slide rules from the 70's are really expensive, like $200.
on amazon
14:53
My slide rule was from the '60s.
By the early '70s slide rules were on their way out.
I should know this but I feel like slide rules can really only do multiplication.
or maybe logs/exponentials?
You can do division as well.
or maybe if you got one of those weird circular ones you could also do trig functions.
I never really got comfortable with slide rules, because I always wanted more precision. I wound up doing most of my calculations longhand, with paper (usually graph) and pencil.
@Robusto In some sense, you can't do addition/subtraction
14:57
I don't remember.
hm... unless that's what all those other lines on the slider were for.
I did have a flight calculator, which was circular, and could calculate all kinds of information.
and now the calculator part on our phones is one of the lesser used apps.
@Robusto with a stud in the middle so you could turn one part to match with the outer ring?
@Laurel Were they engineering types?
14:58
Like that.
nice. now I feel like I have enough information to fly.
Those lasted way longer than slide rules.
How does James Bond or Jason Bourne or Jesus Brist do it when they're escaping the evil henchmen and they have to jump into a random plane on the airfield, flip the sun visor to get the keys, start it up and take off, all while shooting backwards over his shoulder out the window at the chase car.
Oh
right
That comes up pretty soon when he runs out of fuel over the Himalayas
Then gets out of the cockpit, finds that there are no parachutes
then finds an inflatable life raft pack
he jumps out of the plane with the pack half a second before the plane slams into the top of the mountain exploding in a fireball.
James Bond never worried about decimal-place precision.
while hurtling toward sharp mountain peaks 20,000 ft below he opens the life raft pack which self inflates and becomes its own parachute
@Robusto We don't know what he was really thinking.
maybe that was his primary concern
15:07
Funny, he never talked about it.
and he just translated that into immediate action
@Robusto He was a quiet guy
cards close to the vest
Kind of a raconteur for a quiet guy. He never shut up at the card table.
anyway, the liferaft/parachute lands softly on the upper slopes of the mountain.
and starts to slide downhill
a muffled roar indicates to our hero that the plane explosion started an avalanche behind where he landed.
the sliding raft is picking up speed but so is the avalanche
the sliding raft shoots over a chasm, barely making it to the other side
that doesn't stop the avalanche, it easily flies over the chasm.
#Worldle #339 1/6 (100%)
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https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

Almost got the flag. Another four guesses and I would have had it for sure. ;-)
@Robusto OMG that guy would suck the air out of the room
with his stories about being able to fly any kind of airplane without training
and without a flight fuel usage calculator
@Robusto flags are the worst.
three stripes, same colors as half the other flags.
nobody cares but people in that country
15:13
I almost didn't get the Netherlands flag yesterday, even though I knew what it looked like.
but the chicken... that's a cool flag.
@Robusto same. it ws binary decisions about which three colors and which direction.
Sorry @Cerberus for confusing you with Belgium
OK so the raft/sled slides all the way down the mountain to come at a rest right next to a school yard with a bunch of kids stopping their games to stare at the raft.
But the avalanche was still coming.
@Mitch Which results in a humorous encounter with a nun, and a patented Bond quip.
🌎 Dec 26, 2022 🌍
🔥 117 | Avg. Guesses: 5.21
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globle-game.com
#globle
tearing trees out of the ground, crushing cars, plowing through gas stations exploding them.
rushing towards the raft, and the school, and the kids, with sharp icecicles slicing through the air
but slowing
but getting closer
but slowing
a little closer
and then stopping an inch from the raft
Bond/Bourne/Jesus gets up, brushes some snow off his tuxedo, notices a little thing sticking out of the raft, bends over to pick it up.
he pulls it off the raft and the raft comically deflates with a farting noise.
No reaction from the kids.
Bond looks at the thing.
It's a paper fuel consumption calculator
Wordle 555 5/6

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> The earlier six paragraphs of main text were not written by the editors of Nature Biomedical Engineering. They were instantly generated by ChatGPT
15:23
@Mitch I think they only used slide rules early on in school, so only basic math
@CowperKettle "one main advantage of transformers is that they do not need explicit annotations in the data they are trained with" - That is wrong.
That sentence is not using the vocabulary correctly. Also, worded the way it is, it is assuming some context.
'explicit annotation' means labeled data, each instance is a whole bunch of input, and then one output (the thing to be predicted or generated). By explicit, that implies that a human (or some automated process that we're trying to predict) created the labels (annotations).
It is, after all, The King's English. So he can reflexivize himself all he wants. — John Lawler 18 hours ago
An encoder-decoder model for sentence generation (which GPT is) doesn't need explicit annotation because the thing being predicted/generated is creatable from the training corpus of text, just take a sentence and any word in that sentence is a potential thing to be predicted by the rest of the sentence.
Today I learned that people become more reflexive as they age.
Like aging silver that is well polished.
Transformers can be used for encoder-decoder, but also for labeled sequences.
So it is a misuse of the vocab to say that 'transformers don't need explicit annotation'
@tchrist I saw that. He seems to be at that stage of knowledge where he's like "Didn't I tell these students this already? Oh year, last year and the year before many times over. Fine whatever it doesn't matter."
15:42
Once we begin to question regal inerrancy all propriety is forever lost. Rome shall fall.
@CowperKettle I can't tell who wrote that editorial (the Nature/ChatGPT one). Who are the authors?
They'll take away his chair.
@Mitch When do you get to the part about the nun and the Bond witticism?
Is British English overrepresented in the Google Books corpus? Are there more citations than are represented by relative populations? @tchrist @Mitch
Daily Quordle 336
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Shite.
16:25
@Robusto I'm sure there's documentation on the Google Books site that says how big each corpus is. But also for English there's probably a lot of overlap, ie things that are labeled both US and UK (are in both corpora) -or- are unspecified UK or US.
I have noticed that on a google books search (ie after ngrams, a link to the actual hits where the numbers come from), that lots of the hits are somehow the same, ie repeats of the same text. Is that what you are seeing but with UK stuff specifically?
@Mitch I'm suspecting that BrE is overrepresented in the combined corpus, and that BrE simply has more citations than AmE, so that inferences drawn from the combined corpora will always favor BrE.
@CowperKettle That title is very misleading for the article that follows. The article presents a lot of useful explanation of a few concepts related to AI.
But it doesn't really argue that AI is stupid unless the explanation of the Chinese Room Argument is supposed to be sufficient for that (it's not, because it is not accepted by most in the community)
and though the author explains causal reasoning, he doesn't explain how it is not a fix for AI.
@Robusto The gBooks corpus is extremely messy. The British English corpus contains works published in GB, no matter if they're actually British English or if they're duplicates of another book or if they were actually written near that year
Causal reasoning is a recent trend in stats/ML as an addition that might improve things. It is not claimed to be a fix. It is claimed to be necessary, but is not claimed to be sufficient, to make substantial progress in quality.
@Laurel Interesting, thanks.
16:35
That said, the article is good at explaining (at a very high level) what the Chinese room argument is and what causal reasoning is.
@Mitch If reasoning is not causal it must be casual.
@Laurel Do you have any idea if that is the case for the US corpus? I'd expect there's nothing special to make such errors more common for things published in the UK vs those in the US
@Robusto That pun/error is so easy to make as a typo or spello.
Yet apt enough in this case.
casual is not necessarily acausal
don't hold to me to logic on that
@Mitch It's an extension of strict vs. casual.
Antonymy once removed.
16:43
Antinomy contradictorially.
Antinomy is the opposite of autonomy, except when it is antimony, or even anti-money (which is also called dark money) and is the primary form of money in the universe.
@Mitch Yeah it happens in both corpuses. Oh also, rereading my answer about this, there will be hits that aren't even in English at all
@Laurel I suppose the entire philosophy is false positives are better than false negatives
@Robusto Antimony is elemental but not tinny
@Mitch So their philosophy is of the dumping-out-the-entire-purse to find the one stick of gum you suspect might be there variety. ( got tired of typing hyphens )
@Robusto Always has been
The user can sift out the bad ones by glancing
16:52
If they can be determined to be bad.
Think of it as a screening process rather than diagnosis.
do a very sensitive tests, there'll be a lot of people who get raked in, but almost all of the definites will be caught up in the process.
So kind of like the KGB
Or is it FSB
@Mitch See, the thing is, only radiologists are entitled to interpret x-rays accurately, and they're not always right. So here we have a bunch of lay-radiologists (EL&U answerers) trying to diagnose from very blurry x-rays.
What's worse is when people try to use Google search for this
@Robusto It's very annoying
@Laurel Yeah, that's the bottom of the barrel.
17:01
I don't see reddit often but sometimes I'll see through google search a Reddit answer and an ELU answer and the Reddit answer is better.
@Laurel Wait...
using google to interpret an x-ray?
I wouldn't put it past some
@Mitch When it addresses your query at all, that is.
Daily Octordle #336
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Mediocre, but at least not a total whiff.
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@Robusto It's self-appointed judges who worry me the most. — Edwin Ashworth 3 mins ago
Wow. Total irony there.
2
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I got one more: Anonymity breeds autonomy metonymically.
Menominee
17:09
@Mitch You should take an anodyne.
Anemone
Cripes those Greek muses - Terp-sih-tchore
@Robusto that guy has no give.
But that's what all this UK/US/GBooks was about?
@Mitch Terpsichore rhymes with her hickory.
@Mitch I mean when people use "2,000,000 estimated results" as their evidence. It's very common and it's completely wrong. (Unfortunately I'm sure I have one or two really old answers like that.)
@Robusto yes, I'm funning along with the epitome of hyperbole
@Mitch You could be turning into a hyperbully.
17:20
@Laurel Yes. It's not the most reliable evidence.
I wouldn't say -completely- wrong though. maybe -some- positive correlation.
maybe
just like ngrams, you have to click around, look at later pages, click into the hits etc.
@Robusto I'd rather meet a ballet bully than a hyper hippo
@CowperKettle A règle à calcul was part of the standard toolkit when I attended the secondary school but we didn't use them a lot, only occasionally to approximate multiplication/division results. They were also used to as a practical application when introducing logarithms. Calculators were really expensive at the time and were initially forbidden at school, not every student could afford one and using them would have been cheating as we were expected to do all computations by hand.
@Mitch Er, billy bully belly Billy Bell from Bollywood. Something like that.
@EdwinAshworth: It's a comment not an answer, still less is it a peer-reviewed academic work. You're like the guy who, when hearing someone else say, "I went blue from the cold," who says , censoriously, "You weren't really blue." — Robusto 3 mins ago
So yeah, that comment chain should be moved to chat anyway. @Laurel? You're up, I think.
18:09
Done
@Robusto I just heard someone say /'kaw ʒəl/ for 'causal', halfway to 'casual'.
@Laurel Muchas gracias.
18:25
@Mitch Why? Why would they do that? It's the thin edge of the wedge, innit?
18:46
Wordle 555 X/6

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19:48
Do you watch horror movies?
 
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21:01
@Vikas Peter Jackson's gorror movie :-)
I saw it for the first time on a rental VHS, I have never laughed so much.
 
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23:05
So I think ELU chat is the best place to ask this
What's singular for sheep? Shoop right? Its for an essay
23:30
Adolescent suicides decreased when pupils were taught at home, not in-person (at schools)

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