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00:07
@Cerberus Would you say the way he says is fine too?
@MichaelRybkin Have you read what I said? I'm a native speaker of English, and an American, and so is the man in the video.
@Cerberus Oh, I see. Just say you answered that. Thank you all for your help.
just saw
@Robusto I'm so sorry.
@Cerberus Normally I just dismiss "false flag attack" theories out of hand, but this whole incident seems so bonkers that I'm willing to believe it was staged.
@alphabet I'm inclined to agree.
Putin is known to be paranoid about security.
The best protected place after his current location should be the Kremlin.
A drone makes a lot of noise, especially at night.
Surely Russian security would have intercepted a drone long before it got anywhere near the Kremlin? Or, if not, they would not have been able to intercept it right above Putin's office either.
00:21
By the way, it is a well known fact that Putin very rarely visits the Kremlin. He mostly works from his office which is located in the Moscow region. There is nothing to do for him in the Kremlin.
OK makes sense.
We have a mythological archer called Aarash who shot an arrow from Mt. Damavand (near Tehran) and it landed near Turkmenistan's border with Uzbekistan, thus deciding the border between Iranians and Mongol descendants after a long war.
Maybe Ukraine should hire someone like that
I watched a bunch of experts talking about this issue today on the Rain TV channel.
Are most Turkmens Mongoloid?
I dunno
There's a couple of centuries you could call a dark age of which I know very little history that could have confused everything
00:24
@alphabet Their summary is exactly how I feel about it too.
Mostly before Safavids and after Genghis.
The Timurid Empire (Persian: تیموریان), self-designated as Gurkani (Persian: گورکانیان Gūrkāniyān), was a late medieval, culturally Persianate Turco-Mongol empire that dominated Greater Iran in the early 15th century, comprising modern-day Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, much of Central Asia, the South Caucasus, as well as parts of contemporary Pakistan, North India and Turkey. The empire was culturally hybrid, combining Turko-Mongolian and Persianate influences, with the last members of the dynasty being "regarded as ideal Perso-Islamic rulers".The empire was founded by Timur (also known as Tamerlane...
Yeah I just know that there was this guy, but besides him blinding 40000 people in one city and killing 80000 in another, I dunno anything else
Quiet conventional.
Before him there was Genghis's grandson of course
I dunno how his name is Romanized
@Cerberus they were fascinated with bone anatomy back then
"Oh look, this mountain of skulls holds"
@Robusto lol "concentration"
I shouldn't laugh but I'm disinhibited
00:41
@M.A.R. Kublai?
@Robusto Hulagu, his brother (?)
The Farsi version is "Holaku"
The gunpowder empires, or Islamic gunpowder empires, is a collective term coined by Marshall G. S. Hodgson and William H. McNeill at the University of Chicago, referring to three Muslim empires: the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Empire and the Mughal Empire, in the period they lasted from mid -16th to the early 18th century. These three empires were among the most stable empires of the early modern period, leading to commercial expansion, and patronage of culture, while their political and legal institutions were consolidated with an increasing degree of centralization. They stretched from Central...
 
1 hour later…
02:12
First comment: It's not a drone attack. It's a "special aerial operation."
Hah.
02:29
> Cassette tapes have side A and side B…
… so it’s only logical their successor would be the CD.
Some linguists suspect that there were two words for angle in Old Russian/Slavic: kut for an acute angle and ugol for an obtuse one.
Kut now means an angle in Ukrainian, and ugol means an angle in Russian.
But there's still a word with kut in Russian, zakutok, meaning a cubby-hole, a small shack.
> For the first 2 years off our life we are taught to walk and talk. And for the next 16 years we are told to sit down and shut up.
> CEBRA is a machine-learning method that can be used to compress time series in a way that reveals otherwise hidden structures in the variability of the data. It excels at processing behavioural and neural data recorded simultaneously, and it can decode activity from the visual cortex of the mouse brain to reconstruct a viewed video.
Three Identical Strangers is a 2018 documentary film directed by Tim Wardle, about the lives of Edward Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran, a set of identical triplet brothers adopted as infants by separate families. Combining archival footage, re-enacted scenes, and present-day interviews, it recounts how the triplet brothers discovered one another by chance in New York in 1980 at age 19, their public and private lives in the years that followed, and their eventual discovery that their adoption had been part of an undisclosed scientific "nature versus nurture" study of the development of...
In 1980 New York, three young men who were all adopted meet each other and find out they're triplets who were separated at birth. But their quest to find out why turns into a bizarre and sinister mystery.
03:10
No responsibility is assumed by publisher and co-publishers, nor by the editors for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a result of any actual or alleged libellous statements, infringement of intellectual property or privacy rights, or products liability, whether resulting from negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any ideas, instructions, procedures, products or methods contained in the material therein.

How would you explain the fact that there is no definite article in front of "publisher"? It's at the very beginning of this quote: "No responsibility i
03:37
@MichaelRybkin It's an example of bare coördination:
15
A: Omission of the indefinite article to eliminate ambiguity

Araucaria - Not here any more.Bare Coordination This phenomenon is one that is not at all well understood, and also one which is currently the subject of much academic research. It is an example of Bare Coordination. This is when coordinated noun phrases (NPs) which we would otherwise expect to take a determiner of some des...

Word of the morn: enhancer hijacking
> By combining comparative genomics with models of 3D genome folding, a new Science study reveals enhancer hijacking as an explanation for the rapid evolution of human accelerated regions.
@tchrist This person doesn't seem to have a realistic world view.
He thinks people in his Twitter bubble are The People.
@Cerberus People who spend too much time in cyberspace come to believe it's real.
Electrons are real, radiowaves are real, CPUs and video adaptors are real :)
Word of the minute: positive pitch (nose-up movement/position of a plane)
In Russian: kabrirovaniye, from French cabrer, to rear up (a horse)
05:25
@tchrist Exactly.
 
2 hours later…
07:06
Wordle 684 4/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
🟨⬜🟨⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Actually a hard one. I was lucky.
07:42
@CowperKettle electrons are real? That's probably stretching the definition a bit
I suppose they're at least as real as any abstract concept
Like truth or justice or pineapple-on-pizza
 
1 hour later…
09:06
@tchrist I see Reddit has infiltrated The Guardian
 
2 hours later…
11:13
Wordle 684 X/6

🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
:-(
Noun: ससुराल • (sasurāl) f
  1. father-in-law's household
Hindi of the day: sasural
The fourth wasn't with me.
 
2 hours later…
13:23
@tchrist Thank you.
> Systematic review of 10 esketamine RCTs for depression finds that ~40% of adverse events are omitted from publications — nearly all of those events (94%) happened to participants in the esketamine (not placebo) arm. Overall reporting quality: 'poor'. twitter.com/EikoFried/status/1654017670650494976
Somebody wants esketamine to be on the market.
They had better researched its mechanisms deeper, to find a more precise medication.
#Worldle #468 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐⭐⭐🪙
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr
A no-brainer.
🌎 May 4, 2023 🌍
🔥 4 | Avg. Guesses: 4.63
🟧🟥🟩 = 3

globle-game.com
#globle
Back in form.
Wordle 684 4/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛🟨
⬛⬛⬛⬛🟩
⬛🟨⬛🟩⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
13:43
#Worldle #468 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐⭐⭐🪙
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr
Population... grrr
Same.
Daily Quordle 465
7️⃣5️⃣
9️⃣3️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle
@CowperKettle IIRC, it works for mother-in-law too. My Indian friend uses it in both contexts
@冥王Hades Ah!
I came across it on Twitter, in a comment left by my Indian Twitter-friend
I don't know how he became my friend, but somewhy he is quite friendly to me.
Maybe we had met on StackExchange.
Why, do you usually not get along with Eastern Athabaskans?
The Alaskan Athabascans, Alaskan Athabascans, Alaskan Athapascans or Dena (Russian: атабаски Аляски, атапаски Аляски) are Alaska Native peoples of the Athabaskan-speaking ethnolinguistic group. They are the original inhabitants of the interior of Alaska. In Alaska, where they are the oldest, there are eleven groups identified by the languages they speak. These are the Dena’ina or Tanaina (Ht’ana), Ahtna or Copper River Athabascan (Hwt’aene), Deg Hit’an or Ingalik (Hitʼan), Holikachuk (Hitʼan), Koyukon (Hut’aane), Upper Kuskokwim or Kolchan (Hwt’ana), Tanana or Lower Tanana (Kokht’ana), Tanacross...
Never heard of them before
13:59
Most people have not. But I figure they're from Russia. :)
Daily Quordle 465
5️⃣7️⃣
8️⃣6️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle
It's funny. There are so very few of them left. But they gave rise to the entire Navajo Nation.
There their language descendents are.
I wonder why they didn't stop till they reached New Mexico. I suppose they'd had enou8gh of the cold weather.
Athabaskan (also spelled Athabascan, Athapaskan or Athapascan, and also known as Dene) is a large family of indigenous languages of North America, located in western North America in three areal language groups: Northern, Pacific Coast and Southern (or Apachean). Kari and Potter (2010:10) place the total territory of the 53 Athabaskan languages at 4,022,000 square kilometres (1,553,000 sq mi). Chipewyan is spoken over the largest area of any North American native language, while Navajo is spoken by the largest number of people of any native language north of Mexico. The word Athabaskan is a...
14:09
> Researchers gave #GPT an anxiety questionnaire, and learned three things:
1) GPT is more anxious than the average person
2) You can make GPT more anxious by getting it to talk about anxious topics
3) When it's anxious, it makes more mistakes
Navajo has all these consonant phonemes that English has no idea how to reproduce. When you hear them talk, you realize this.
@CowperKettle Seems rather human in that regard.
I think it must be some nonsense.
It just looked like a funny nonsense post on Twitter.
Thus far, I believe it does not have the structures for anxiety (amygdala, etc.)
Is it blue czeched?
> In terms of basic word order, Navajo has been classified as a subject–object–verb language.[58][59] However, some speakers order the subject and object based on "noun ranking". In this system, nouns are ranked in three categories—humans, animals, and inanimate objects—and within these categories, nouns are ranked by strength, size, and intelligence. Whichever of the subject and object has a higher rank comes first.
> As a result, the agent of an action may be syntactically ambiguous.[60] The highest rank position is held by humans and lightning.
It's like French ordering of clitic pronouns where you always promote the 1st and 2nd person ones no matter whether they're accusative or dative. :)
But not lightning.
14:23
@Cerberus Lenin's office and apartment was famously in that palace inside the Kremlin. A modest apartment and a run-of-the-mill office. There's a museum now.
Green lamps were popular, they were thought to be gentle on the eye, sparing vision
Way too small for a Putin-sized ego.
@CowperKettle Was that green-tinted glass that they shone through?
@tchrist Yes, a lamp with a green shade
I remember it from my school books.
One does still see them from time to time.
They were described with due reverence in school books, as probably US founding fathers are described in US school books.
There were homiletic stories and verses about Dedushka Lenin (old man Lenin), how he was on good terms with simple people (like a stove master, etc)
Lenin i pechnik (Lenin and the stove master)
In the prologue, Lenin is walking in a field, and the stove master does not recognize him and tells him to scoot away.
After some months, the stove master is invited to fix some antique stoves in the Kremlin, and voila - the man he told to get away is Lenin.
But good Lenin does not tell to shoot the master, neither to throw him into the Gulag. No, they just chat about this and that.
That's our kind Dedushka Lenin
14:34
@CowperKettle Interesting that those things might be expected possibilities, though.
@Robusto They are not mentioned in the poem, but the stove master is feeling a bit scared at first :)
The posthumous deïfication of Dear Leader and his incorporation into the national mythology is as old Caesar, as old as Gilgamesh.
@Robusto Lenin was riding a car from the Kremlin, and the car was stopped by a band of robbers, headed by some famous young robber. Lenin said aloud: "I'm Vladimir Lenin!" - he replied: "I don't ****** care, just fork out the money and the watches!"
It did not start with Lenin or Marx, nor Washington nor William the Bastard.
This story about the robber somehow did not get into school books
14:38
Also, you guys should combine their tw feast-days and just worship a merged Lenix during some expanded Saturnalia.
Lenin only refused to give away a bottle of milk he carried to his ill wife. Milk was a rarity.
THe stove master looks like Lee Marvin with a beard.
Maybe Pixar should shoot a remake of the Lenin and the Stove Master
With some magical powers and secondary heroes etc., etc.
And several songs in the style of a musical.
BTW, what is a stove master?
A stove repair man?
14:41
One that's gotten himself staved in.
@Robusto Yes, "repair man" might be closer.
Pechnik means a man who can make a stove, and can also fix it, if it does not work properly
The stove in question was not a cooking-stove but a Holland-style heating stove.
Голландская печь, голландка — изразцовая печь для отопления помещений. == История == Появилась в России в первой половине XVIII века. В крестьянских избах её начали устанавливать с середины XIX-го. Была широко распространена до XX века. == Название == Название «голландка» использовалось в европейской части России (Север, средняя полоса) и в Сибири. В южных регионах России и в Белоруссии печь называется «груба» или «грубка». == Описание == Высокая прямоугольная печь. Топливная камера большая. Под камеры сплошной (глухой), без колосниковой решётки. Воздух в топливник поступает через при...
Gollandskaya pech - "Holland stove"
Peter the Great brought them over to Russia.
Changing the subject, I wonder what the vowel is that Brits use to say shone. Americans rhyme that word with shown, but Brits say something more like shun, only a bit rounder.
@tchrist ^
14:56
@CowperKettle it's probably incompetence, not malice. I'm saying that as a future incompetent side effect observer
No, sorry, potential future incompetent side effect observer
Besides, releasing a drug and then withdrawing it from the market is not a great way to make quick cash. You'd have better luck robbing a bank.
15:38
@Robusto Sean Shawn.
Rhymes with lawn.
@tchrist A bit, I think. But it's more like the vowel in German voll.
Maybe they're the same.
[ʃɔn]
Yeah, that's the vowel in voll. But why do I feel it's a bit more rounded in shone?
Well, because there's extreme variation in the roundedness of the low back open vowels.
And you and I do not have phonemic /ʃɒn/ like they do.
For us, CLOTH and THOUGHT have the same /ɔ/.
They have a version in CLOTH that's a little lower than ours.
This is also why it feels weird for us to try to reproduce how many Brits pronounce scone.
I did once notice that I really do have at least one word where I really do have to say [ɒ] and never [ɔ] or it sounds like some wrong word that it is not, but for the life of me I can't remember which word I noticed this in.
The strangeness is that for us those two should be allophones.
15:57
@tchrist True.
16:10
@Cerberus I thought it was funny
> Christianity has been reduced to a scandal management system with costumes
> a 74-year-old British gentleman will ride a fancy carriage to an old church where a few other elderly British gentlemen in gilded dresses will declare him emperor, patriarch and head of state because God says so.
I'm guessing the 'no Greek ablative' comment was directed at Johnson?
16:22
@Mitch "The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth, for kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself, they are called gods."
The Basilikon Doron is a treatise on government written by King James VI of Scotland (who would later also become James I of England), in 1599. == Background == Basilikon Doron (Βασιλικὸν Δῶρον) means "royal gift" in Ancient Greek and was written in the form of a private letter to James's eldest son, Henry, Duke of Rothesay (1594-1612). After Henry's death, James gave it to his second son, Charles, born 1600, later King Charles I. Seven copies were printed in Edinburgh in 1599, and it was republished in London in 1603, when it sold in the thousands. == Content == This document is separated into...
I want a good audiobook on the history of China.
16:43
@CowperKettle I want consistent 20C temp to come in April
@CowperKettle but that's similar to what it looks like outside my window right now
@CowperKettle I wonder how hard it would be to 'speechify' a sequence of Wikipedia pages.
Wikipedia ain't great, but it's sitting right there.
It's more reliable than ChatGPT (which is hardly saying anything at all)
I spent 3 hours undergoing a small bowel barium follow-through, and overheard two X-ray specialists talking. One said: "yesterday, that woman from Central Asia came to be X-rayed, with four male relatives, barely speaking Russian. When she undressed, gosh, she was covered with bruises. Are they beating her up constantly, I wonder"
@CowperKettle Doctors know stuff that we don't see.
The other replied something along the lines of "Let those Central Asians decide among themselves what to do with their women"
O_O
17:02
Makes me recall all those cases when gays were made to "disappear" in Chechnya, or grabbed by Chechen cops at an airport in Moscow when trying to leave abroad, and hauled back to Chechnya.
The Middle Ages are just a step away.
When I rode the bus back home, a 60-yo man with a paunch was dosing off, holding his big smartphone in horizontal mode on his lap, not looking, eyes closed. He had the headphones in his ears. The phone's screen showed the main pro-war propaganda TV show with Solovyov. Unbelievable that this TV reincarnation of Der Stürmer is actually watched by anybody.
Thus far, it has always been some 60-yo or older lonely man. On a bus, or in the park.
Maybe men become more tribal with age.
The prefrontal cortex thins out.
@Mitch Better move your ass south, bunky.
Noun: bunky (plural bunkies)
  1. Alternative form of bunkie (“bunkmate”)
  2. bunky f
  3. inflection of bunka:
  4. genitive singular
  5. nominative/accusative plural
I should add bunky to Anki
> Bunkie is the birthplace of jazz drummer Zutty Singleton.
My Bunkie is a late 19th-century painting by American artist Charles Schreyvogel. Done in oil on canvas, My Bunkie depicts a martial scene in which the US cavalry battle an unseen Native American enemy in the American West. Schreyvogel's work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. == Description == Schreyvogel's work depicts a scene in which a group of US cavalrymen fight against a force of Native Americans, who are left unseen. One of the cavalrymen has been dismounted in the skirmish, prompting his comrade to rescue him by pulling him onto his own mount. The scene is based on...
17:53
> Why did London win the men’s but not the women’s handball championship?
Because she didn’t throw.
I don't get it.
@Robusto I've heard the south is moving northwards.
@CowperKettle Me neither. Some weird non-rhotic pun?
@Mitch Perhaps in geologic time. Can you afford to wait that long?
> Police were investigating the murder of Juan Gonzalez.
"It looks like he was killed with a golf gun," observed one detective.
"What in the world is a golf gun?" asked his partner.
"I don't know," said the first detective. "But it sure made a hole in Juan."
This one I understand.
18:42
> Het is niet de eerste keer dat Zelensky om westerse gevechtsvliegtuigen vraagt. Het kabinet heeft niet uitgesloten F-16-vliegtuigen te leveren, maar een definitief besluit daarover is nog niet gevallen. Nederland is nog in gesprek met België en Denemarken. Rutte beloofde wel zich in te zetten om „het debat tot een conclusie te brengen”. „Er zijn geen taboes”, aldus Rutte. „Het kost tijd, dat was ook zo bij de Leopard-tanks. Maar die kwamen er ook.”
Dutch PM seems to suggest that the F-16s will eventually be sent to Ukraine.
19:26
@Robusto Realistically speaking... probably <~40 years?
You'll be what, 100 by that time? Again, can you afford to wait that long?
So, no, even if I am able to wait I probably won't be able to enjoy it for long.
Jinx.
haha
Carpe that old diem, bucko.
19:28
I guess it'd be like the old curse, 'Be careful what you wish for'
Should be changed to: "Be careful what you wait for."
Florida doesn't seem like the best place to retire to
Far from it.
I wouldn't live in Florida if you paid me.
Well... depends on how much
and then maybe Miami
To paraphrase Gen. Phil Sheridan, "If I owned hell and Florida, I'd live in hell and rent out Florida."
19:30
and not have to worry about kids
cripes... living in the US you gotta worry about kids
Other countries have kids too.
I mean more than you would than for other supposedly developed places.
England has the weather problem -and- it seems it is accelerating towards falling apart (but nervous laughter not as fast as the US?)
Italy? Awful street sign problem. If they fix that, maybe I'd consider.
Oklahoma? Conveniently flat
Inconveniently extremely far from anywhere, even itself.
Bahamas? Currently an overdeveloped sandbar, avg height above sea level is negative.
Central African Republic? I'm pretty sure they got rid of the guinea worm.
(the worm that eats through your body randomly in an excruciatingly painful way and maybe comes out through your eyeball or maybe from under one of your toenails.)
Arthur C Clarke lived in Sri Lanka most of his life. Maybe he knew something.
 
1 hour later…
20:57
@Mitch Every place you think is paradise has an unpleasant host of issues that make it less livable than you expected.
21:09
My purple robe locust is blooming. Soon there will be swarms of hummingbirds partaking of its nectar.
21:25
Wow.
And hummingbirds, too.
I didn't know there were trees by that name.
I didn't either.
21:41
In the shape of a cluster of locust flowers?
22:17
Forest fires very early this year.
Hot weather.
23:08
Robinia hispida, known as the bristly locust, rose-acacia, or moss locust, is a shrub in the subfamily Faboideae of the pea family Fabaceae. It is native to the southeastern United States, and it is present in other areas, including other regions of North America, as an introduced species. It is grown as an ornamental and can escape cultivation and grow in the wild. == Description == This deciduous shrub grows to 3 meters tall, often with glandular, bristly (hispid) stems. The leaves are pinnate with up to 13 leaflets. The pink or purplish pealike flowers are borne in hanging racemes of up to 5...
> Purple Robe Locust: botanical name is Robinia pseudoacacia, an improvement of the native Black Locust tree.
Robinia pseudoacacia, commonly known in its native territory as black locust, is a medium-sized hardwood deciduous tree, belonging to the tribe Robinieae of the legume family Fabaceae. It is endemic to a few small areas of the United States, but it has been widely planted and naturalized elsewhere in temperate North America, Europe, Southern Africa and Asia and is considered an invasive species in some areas. Another common name is false acacia, a literal translation of the specific name (pseudo [Greek ψευδο-] meaning fake or false and acacia referring to the genus of plants with the same name...
> In botany, a root sprout or sucker is a severable plant that grows not from a seed but from the meristem of a root at the base of or a certain distance from the original tree or shrub.
I would have thought that a "sucker" burrows into the ground. I should add this to Anki.
I suppose it sucks at the ground?
Yes, that's why people don't like to die.
Oh, is that it.
It's a grave mistake to die.
23:24
Mistakes can pile up on you or burn you.
@Cerberus Interesting idea, but I don't know.
Ah, I thought perhaps that was why you posted the poem.
@Cerberus No. I posted it because it references spring.
Ah, spring.
There is spring in my step today.
In botany and dendrology, a rhizome (; from Ancient Greek ῥίζωμα (rhízōma) 'mass of roots', from ῥιζόω (rhizóō) 'cause to strike root') is a modified subterranean plant stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. Rhizomes are also called creeping rootstalks or just rootstalks. Rhizomes develop from axillary buds and grow horizontally. The rhizome also retains the ability to allow new shoots to grow upwards.A rhizome is the main stem of the plant that runs underground horizontally. A stolon is similar to a rhizome, but a stolon sprouts from an existing stem, has long internodes, a...
23:28
> What do boring commercials and wood nymphs have in common?
They're both dry ads.
The root cap is a type of tissue at the tip of a plant root. It is also called calyptra. Root caps contain statocytes which are involved in gravity perception in plants. If the cap is carefully removed the root will grow randomly. The root cap protects the growing tip in plants. It secretes mucilage to ease the movement of the root through soil, and may also be involved in communication with the soil microbiota.The purpose of the root cap is to enable downward growth of the root, with the root cap covering the sensitive tissue in the root. Also, the root cap enables geoperception or gravitropism...
I remember finding and adding that image in 2009.
> Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself. — e. e. cummings
> "I woke up today feeling like a god. I don't believe in myself." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
I saw a picture of Mount Rushmore before it was carved and its beauty was unpresidented.

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