English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

00:06

Oh that's right. The Greeks named all the winds.

M.A.R.

@Mitch ALVIN!

@tchrist one must sometimes make sacrifices for their health and well-being

@CowperKettle those pantless future alien kids

@CowperKettle is that Bill Cosby or?

tchrist

@M.A.R. I'm surprised yon theocrats don't make boys and men wear traditional robes and such instead of trousers.

M.A.R.

00:21

We're more traditional about women. It's all part of equality.

tchrist

M.A.R.

How did they walk?

tchrist

On their feet.

M.A.R.

Nah, probably grabbed all the baggy parts and rolled on the ground

tchrist

More Persian garb.

Whoa, I didn't know you had renfairs!

They all look like morris dancers to me.

@M.A.R. That's certainly one way to protect your sole.

M.A.R.

00:30

Everybody had everything.

Except gunpowder.

And they eventually got that too

Cerberus

@jlliagre OK, interesting nonetheless.

CowperKettle

02:16

> 200 operative workers and 500+ policemen are charged with looking for 26-yo Darya, who gifted Vladlen Tatarsky with an explosive statue

Turns out she managed to escape (thus far)

Even more amazingly, she had been previously arrested for 10 days -- for protesting against the Special Operation on the first day of the war.

This is an article in the (oppositional-leaning) media Fontanka about Darya: fontanka.ru/2023/04/03/72186191

She tried to enter the caffee, but the guards did not allow to carry the statuete through. She said to Vladlen, "I'm not being allowed in! The guards saying I'm carrying a bomb in there!" -- He replied "Haha, let her in, and we'll check her for a bomb, while we're at it".

alphabet

You know how the Wagner guy also owns a bunch of bars? Guess what happens if you're a milblogger and you visit one: iswresearch.org/2023/04/…

CowperKettle

The statuette exploded second after he took it. She was sitting just 2 or 3 meters from him.

She calmly stood up and just went out, and gone she was. Amazing. Amazing.

The famed Wagner Group did not even have a proper guard system for cordoning off and detaining people.

I guess the police will get to her soon.

alphabet

Wagner will enlist convicts to hold all statues from now on

CowperKettle

She wanted to take a seat at her place farther from the scene, but Vladlen asked her to take a seat near him. She said she felt shy, but complied.

Darya Trepova (Дарья Трепова)

alphabet

02:33

ISW seems incredibly uncertain about who was behind this and what their motives were

CowperKettle

Her husband Dmitry also got a term, 9 days, for being with her during her protest in the first day of the war.

He is a member of the Libertarian Party of Russia.

alphabet

> Some Russian political analysts also speculated that Prigozhin was supposed to attend Fomin’s event, although there is no confirmation of that speculation.

CowperKettle

Now he is reportedly abroad.

@alphabet Prigozhin seems extremely risky. He recorded videos just hundred meters from Ukrainian positions at the frontline.

But thus far he has been extremely lucky, in terms of surviving.

Darya's account in a social network has no political posts. Her account is maintained under the alias Ophelia, and has the usual stuff, jokes and such.

alphabet

> Fomin attended Russian President Vladimir Putin’s event announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian regions on September 30 where he stated: “We will defeat everyone, we will kill everyone, we will rob everyone we need; Everything will be as we like.”

Cerberus

@CowperKettle She stood up after it had exploded?

CowperKettle

02:39

@Cerberus Yes, according to a witness

Cerberus

And she was not injured?

CowperKettle

A witness said that he felt like it was a specialized explosive, designed to only affect a specific spot, not an explosive that just randomly spreads shrapnel.

@Cerberus Probably not

Cerberus

Good.

I hope she hasn't been arrested.

CowperKettle

@Cerberus Here's all that is known about her: fontanka.ru/2023/04/03/72186191

Cerberus

So ISW says the Russian government says she has been arrested.

CowperKettle

02:41

Ah.

20 minutes ago, BBC wrote that she was not apprehended yet bbc.com/russian/live/news-64970998

Cerberus

> Russian state media published unconfirmed information that Russian police detained St. Peterburg resident Daria Trepova, who had previously been arrested for anti-war protests in February 2022.[7]

7:

meduza.io/news/2023/04/02/…

CowperKettle

Oh. Yes. According to the Interfax agency, she has been apprehended, which means it's most likely true.

Interfax is a reputable governmental agency.

Cerberus

Hmm too bad.

CowperKettle

02:59

> A linguistic bias in the English language that leads us to 'improve' things by adding to them, rather than taking away, is so common that it is even ingrained in AI chatbots, a new study reveals. techxplore.com/news/…

Cerberus

Sounds somewhat silly.

This is not some subconscious magic.

Nor is it English.

CowperKettle

HippoSawrUs

04:40

I never remember any of my answers, not a single one. If I ever answer one twice, it'll be by accident.

Michael Rybkin

Howdy, guys. Could you please tell me if this sentence sounds fine to you as native speakers (something that a native speaker could say):

And the characteristic that most defines an equity security—differentiating it from most other types of securities—is ownership.

HippoSawrUs

I would say "would say" (not *could say).

Michael Rybkin

got that, but what about the sentence in question? What can you say about that?

HippoSawrUs

I know, right? Hahaha. It seems wordy, but I know squat about securities.

Vikas

@HippoSawrUs I remember mine. For most answers I had to put lot of effort to make them decent enough.

On GDSE.

But I asked far more questions than writing answers.

CowperKettle

05:08

CowperKettle

06:48

AI art by Lee Does AI twitter.com/putitintheAI/status/1593004656669896704

Xanne

07:11

Wordle 653 3/6

🟨🟩🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

CowperKettle

> Research finds that frequent commenters on social media are more likely to have more polarized opinions and use toxic language. And exposure to toxic language in comments increases the toxicity of subsequent comments. twitter.com/jayvanbavel/status/1642519319702654979

He provides a source. Would be interesting to read later.

I do feel like attending political threads makes me more radicalized, but that could be a false impression. How does one self-assess this?

Wingled Tiger

07:33

Anyone here?

Xanne

07:43

More likely than what?

Daily Octordle #434
4️⃣5️⃣
6️⃣🔟
🕚🕛
7️⃣9️⃣
Score: 64

That was nice.

That commentators and political elites are more polarized than the general public has been known for some time—apparent from many polls.

M.A.R.

10:08

@WingledTiger this place is more like a personal blog for two dozen people than what 'chatrooms' you may be used to. We usually just barge in, say a bunch of stuff, or initiate a conversation, and then leave

@CowperKettle well you enter a thread, someone is saying "X, what an idiot. Minor overview of X's policies". Half a dozen replies say "oh yeah, f*ck X". Whether or not you like X, you're gonna react.

CowperKettle

@M.A.R. I've just returned from a visit to a doctor. While in the queue, I struck up a conversation with an old lady. She said that her 44 yo son received a mobilisation callup notice in the fall, and "we all were crying our eyes out", but the comissar said that he was not needed yet - because younger men were available.

I asked her "but what if he is called up again?" - She said "There's nothing else to do but go"

I said "my friend is determined on hiding from mobilisation".

She smiled and said "you cannot run and hide forever. Besides, if nobody enrolls in the army, what would happen to all of us?"

I asked her "what would happen to all of us?"

She said "America will come here!"

I asked "So what will it do?"

She said "America will come and send us to the Solovki islands" (the location of the first GULAG camps in the 1920s)

I said "Are you sure?"

She said "Yes, of course".

O_O

Solovetsky Islands

The Solovetsky Islands (Russian: Солове́цкие острова́), or Solovki (Соловки́), are an archipelago located in the Onega Bay of the White Sea, Russia. As an administrative division, the islands are incorporated as Solovetsky District of Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia. Within the framework of municipal divisions, they are incorporated as Solovetskoye Rural Settlement within Primorsky Municipal District. The administrative center of both divisions is the settlement of Solovetsky, located on Bolshoy Solovetsky Island. Almost all of the population of the islands lives in Solovetsky. As of the 2010 Census...

M.A.R.

Oh don't worry it's just a metaphor for working at McDonald's

CowperKettle

LOL

These conversations with older people are so surreal, I want to pinch myself every time.

Because she had this huge smartphone, and was wielding it like a pro.

And the next minute, it's "America will come and send us to the GULAG".

M.A.R.

One keeps going back to those "loose" vs. "closed" minds. I can't talk with them either. They readily admit China and Russia are no better than America to cling onto, but Khomeini decided America is the big Satan so we have to roll with it

Now if we back off and, say, don't send drones to Russia, America will come and . . . And . . . Yeah I dunno

CowperKettle

10:23

Do you have some historical location where they used to send political prisoners, like the Solovki?

M.A.R.

Nah we have never had that many prisoners

Matt E. Эллен

just got some weird line noise and part of it is "ñüðë!". how would you pronounce that? (also, bit of a weird conincidence)

M.A.R.

It's a cat with allergies

Matt E. Эллен

lol

CowperKettle

11:53

line noise

Noun: line noise (uncountable)

(computing) Spurious characters due to signal noise in a communications link.
(programming) Data that looks random, as when outputting a binary file as text.
(computing, derogatory) Incomprehensible source code or other textual material (often due to terseness or overuse of operators).
2000, Simon Cozens, Ten Perl Myths, perl.com,
In short, Perl doesn't write illegible Perl, people do. If you can stop yourself being one of them, we can agree that Perl's reputation for looking like line noise is no more than a myth.

Ah. Line noise means not a sound, but some textual stream in a piece of software.

Live and learn.

Eth

Eth (, uppercase: Ð, lowercase: ð; also spelled edh or eð), known as ðæt in Old English, is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), Khmer and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh, and later d. It is often transliterated as d. The lowercase version has been adopted to represent a voiced dental fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet. == Old English == In Old English, ð (called ðæt) was used interchangeably with þ to represent the Old English dental fricative phoneme...

It's so warm and sunny here.

+16°C

This spring is extremely warm.

> Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year
(Millay)

CowperKettle

13:27

Lambie

13:37

@MichaelRybkin And the most salient, differentiating feature of an equity security is ownership. That said, I don't think that is a true statement, since all types of securities (debt, equity, derivative and hybrid) all entail ownership...

CowperKettle

Etymology of the day: sambuca -- Borrowed from Italian sambuca, from Latin sambūcus (“elder tree”), considered to be from the instrument name sambūca for its being made of elderwood.

Mitch

@M.A.R. Since forever in the US press they always mention 'such and such political prisoner is being held in Evin prison'

@CowperKettle I once visited a 'memory' ward (a section of an old people's home where people with advanced dementia are kept a closer eye on), and resident's would say outrageous conspiratorial things (eg which ethnicity is running the government and banks)...

CowperKettle

Evin Prison

Evin Prison (Persian: زندان اوین, romanized: Zendân-e-Evin) is a prison located in the Evin neighborhood of Tehran, Iran. The prison has been the primary site for the housing of Iran's political prisoners since 1972, before and after the Islamic Revolution, in a purpose-built wing nicknamed "Evin University" due to the number of students and intellectuals housed there. Evin Prison has been accused of committing "serious human rights abuses" against its political dissidents and critics of the government. == History == Evin Prison was constructed in 1972 under the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi....

Mitch

oh shit... I've heard similar from people who are not medically diagnosed with dementia nor old.

But anyway the lesson I learned is that people are thinking awful things all the time, it's just that circumstances (like dementia, or not having to care what other people think like writing on the internet) allow them to say what is floating through their mind.

But I guess that is open to hallucinatory thinking also being spoken out loud.

Or possibly for that woman in the line, reasonable inferences from what everybody is repeating in the news?

CowperKettle

@Mitch Oh, that woman did not have any signs of any dementia

Mitch

13:51

@CowperKettle What I mean is that old age unblocks any social restrictions on saying what she actually thought.

Or to put it another way, we're all demented but no one notices because we know to cover it up.

CowperKettle

Yes, this could be so.

Mitch

@M.A.R. I came here to say this.

@CowperKettle I have other theories, but I still feel a social compunction not to tell you all.

CowperKettle

Dostoyevsky's novels were masterpieces, but when he started a political blog (in printed form), he turned out to be quite orthodox in his opinions.

@Mitch "I have principles, and if you don't like them.. I have others"

Mitch

@M.A.R. 😬

tchrist

@Mitch How do you get medically diagnosed with old?

Mitch

13:55

@CowperKettle “The key to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.”

@tchrist counting down

CowperKettle

en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean_Giraudoux

Jean Giraudoux is author of the quote.

Mitch

"In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better"

@CowperKettle Dickens is a similar great observer and commenter on personality. But in real life supposedly somewhat of a jerk.

CowperKettle

@Mitch He was a poor friend?

Andrew Leach

@Mitch And you end up talking baby-talk and being fed milk. Oh, hang on... Which end of "old" are we talking about?

CowperKettle

> "Out of each 5 men, only 2 are happy"

> "Who do you want to die as when you grow up?"

M.A.R.

14:09

@Mitch it's a prison near the most populous city in Iran. It's also been the subject of a few recent mistreatment scandals. So yes it's infamous as far as Iranian prisons can go but it's no Gulag

At least, not that I know.

Mitch

@CowperKettle there is probably a lot of overlap between 'jerk' and 'poor friend' but they are not the same.

CowperKettle

> - But you told me you were on the pill
- Yeah, on the flea control pill

Mitch

@M.A.R. I think we can all agree that there's nothing else like the Soviet Gulag

Except maybe the Pre-revolutionary Russian Gulag

And maybe post-Soviet Russian Gulag? I don't really know about the latter.

CowperKettle

> Other people: "I hate my life". Me: "I hate my life"

Mitch

The US has ... cripes ... the prison industrial complex plus Guantanamo. China has ... Uigur work camps. The British Raj had the Black Hole of Calcutta.

And Sweden has ... the Ritz/Four Seasons/Waldorf Astoria.

@AndrewLeach I suppose that's the logical conclusion.

CowperKettle

14:21

Purple cauliflower

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2971621

"All things counter, original, spare, strange" (GM Hopkins)

alphabet

16:02

It seems that every time I answer an ELL question about whether to use the simple past or present perfect, I end up getting "corrected" by a BrE speaker. I need to start asking "Which dialect are you talking about?" before answering those.

(Sometimes intuitions even differ between AmE speakers; I lean towards using the simple past wherever AmE allows it.)

M.A.R.

18:46

@CowperKettle also a purple human

@Mitch yeah honestly, I think we've neglected to create a legendary horrible prison to dissuade anyone

Mitch

21:04

@M.A.R. wondering if that means @M.A.R. is planning something

If I were duly incentivized, by internal or external compunction, I would consider changing my avatar to:

Changing ones appearance means little to me except for what it means to me, but I know that when -others- do it, it confuses the hell out of me, so that is a bit of disincentive.

I am not totally blind to others state of mind. But sometimes it just doesn't even cross you mind that other people have feelings.

No names.

But they know what they did.

@alphabet It's the internet man. Here no one can see that you're British.

In the very early times (2011?) there was a meta question about having people state what their accent is. I can't remember what the outcome of the debate was, but the reality is that people seem not to do it. I always want to append to all my answers/comments "I speak GenAmE with very few Southernisms".

Also "I'm so sorry".

Mitch

21:34

@Robusto BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance

Just published (in concert with your expectations). The bibliography has a few instances of older history of using LLMs for financial prediction. It doesn't mention anything about numerical time series predictive analysis which vastly outweighs (in size and age) this in the literature.

No, I don't know how something could outweigh another in age. Just roll with it man.

Mitch

21:49

People are hyperventilating about sentient AIs and shit.

What about:

Ape With AK-47

►

What about:

Gombe Chimpanzee War

The Gombe Chimpanzee War, also known as the Four-Year War, was a violent conflict between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in the Kigoma region of Tanzania between 1974 and 1978. The two groups were once unified in the Kasakela community. By 1974, researcher Jane Goodall noticed the community splintering. Over a span of eight months, a large party of chimpanzees separated themselves into the southern area of Kasakela and were renamed the Kahama community. The separatists consisted of six adult males, three adult females and their young. The Kasakela was left with eight...

Did someone already post the sentient bees article?

The Mind of a Bee | Lars Chittka

►

Sentient Bees

With machine guns

Hippos kill more people per year than car accidents.

Hippos Devour Whole Watermelons in One Bite Compilation - Baby Hoppo Eat Watermelon

►

Don't get me going on the squirrocalypse.

CowperKettle

22:52

Yesterday the temperature reached +17.6°C in Yekaterinburg. The all-time high for 3 April had been +15.8°C, recorded in 1995. The new value is a whole 2 degrees higher. e1.ru/text/spring/2023/04/04/72189116

HippoSawrUs

23:05

@Vikas It seems like early onset dementia, or 7 out of 11 signs, or oldness in general.

CowperKettle

HippoSawrUs

@CowperKettle Nice. Today was cloudy with a high of 80° F here. But snowing in SD.

CowperKettle

+26C, wow, a full blown summer

Videos of the actual explosion in the St Pete caffee appeared online. Sounded like a small explosion.

Amazing how it managed to wreck the whole caffee.

CowperKettle

23:32

> If we are to meet the climate targets set by scientists, we have to leave 90 percent of the fossil fuels we have discovered underground. And at current prices that means stranding about $100 trillion worth of assets in the soil. rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/…

I used the 12 ft ladder to read it 12ft.io

alphabet

23:44

@Mitch I would list "GenAm mostly, but also I only pretend to understand linguistics, so maybe don't take my word for it."

Of course, I'm pretty sure "General American" is code for "the accent in the three cities where all the cool linguistics professors live."

If we really want to include all dialects, we should append "*Except in AAVE" to pretty much every answer about tense/aspect

CowperKettle