English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

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alphabet

1:04 AM

@CowperKettle I heard about some poll that said that a majority of Russians have a positive opinion of Stalin.

1 hour later…

CowperKettle

2:18 AM

@alphabet Hm. I don't know

CowperKettle

2:34 AM

> T9 corrected your spelling.
T10 will correct your whole sentences.
T1000 will correct the futility of your existence.

CowperKettle

2:46 AM

I took a lot of Mg+B6 in the evening, and had a weird dream, a bit erotic.

1 hour later…

CowperKettle

4:00 AM

> "44 yo Pavel, who lives in a suburb of Yekaterinburg with 2 wives and regularly beats them up, has finally been put under arrest"

Local news.

e1.ru/text/incidents/2023/06/08/72376559

The two wives were in tears when the police was taking him away.

tchrist

@CowperKettle Because they didn't want him to be arrested? Bigamy is not a crime in the Russian world?

CowperKettle

4:30 AM

@tchrist Because they pity him.

He was detained several times after they were beaten up, and they appeared at the police station with statements that he did not do that.

His official wife did not want him to "be left on the streets" because she owns the flat.

No, bigamy is not a punishable crime. One can only officially have one wife, and falsely signing a second marital contract would be a crime.

But unofficially, you can have as many as you want.

Sorry for posting a graphic photo.

I should abstain from reading such trash news.

Mitch

4:53 AM

@M.A.R. I knew you were going to say that.

@M.A.R. I think Lot?

CowperKettle

2 hours later…

Vikas

6:31 AM

Jay Biden

1 hour later…

CowperKettle

7:55 AM

During his famous Salt March

Raghupati

►

CowperKettle

8:28 AM

Etymology of the day: poilu -- French private soldier, 1914, from French poilu, literally "hairy," from poil "hair," not of the head, but of beards, animal coats, etc., from Latin pilus (see pile (n.3)). In 19c. French the adjective had a secondary sense of "strong, brave, courageous" (Balzac).

Totally new word for me of the day: okra (абельмош съедобный)

2 hours later…

CowperKettle

10:08 AM

1 hour later…

CowperKettle

11:37 AM

> "The city was saved mainly through Grigori Yevdokimov, an old seafarer, vigorous and grey-haired, with a mujik's roughness. Loud of voice, fond of the bottle, he never seemed to admit that a situation was hopeless."

jlliagre

CowperKettle

We have a word for a rich head of (unruly, untrimmed) hair: шевелюра (shevelura)

Clearly from French.

> The Nuxalk word clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts’ (IPA: [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]), meaning "he had had [in his possession] a bunchberry plant" has thirteen obstruent consonants in a row with no phonetic or phonemic vowels.

jlliagre

CowperKettle

Word of the minute: main drag

main drag

Noun: main drag (plural main drags)

(informal) The main street of a town or suburb, or the principal highway passing through a rural area.
Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see main,‎ drag.

I think that drag may be cognate with Russian doroga (road)

Mitch

12:45 PM

> drag (v.)
late 14c., draggen, "to draw a grapnel along the bottom of a river, lake, etc., in search of something;" late 15c., "to draw away by force, pull haul," from Old Norse draga, or a dialectal variant of Old English dragan "to draw," both from Proto-Germanic *draganan "to draw, pull," perhaps from a PIE *dhregh- "to draw, drag on the ground" (source also of Sanskrit dhrajati "pulls, slides in," Russian drogi "wagon," doroga "way;" connection to Latin trahere "to draw" is possible but problematic).

The 'main drag' is somewhat informal

Robusto

#Worldle #503 2/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟨⬜⬆️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐⭐🏙️🪙
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

Two countries in the world that eerily resemble each other.

🌎 Jun 8, 2023 🌍
🔥 27 | Avg. Guesses: 4.5
🟥🟩 = 2

globle-game.com
#globle

Bingo!

Daily Quordle 500
8️⃣5️⃣
7️⃣3️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle/

Mediocre.

Robusto

1:22 PM

Wordle 719 4/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛🟨
⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Robusto

1:33 PM

Daily Octordle #500
7️⃣🔟
9️⃣8️⃣
4️⃣🕚
6️⃣🕐
Score: 68

When it's a choice between two letters for a one-space fill, why do I never choose the right one?

CowperKettle

> Google DeepMind has trained a reinforcement learning agent called AlphaDev to find better sorting routines. It has discovered small sorting algorithms from scratch that outperform previously known human benchmarks and have now been integrated into the LLVM standard C++ sort library.

deepmind.com/blog/alphadev-discovers-faster-sorting-algorithms

Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep reinforcement learning - in Nature, 7 June 2023

Bought this for Behemoth today. It claims to help dissolve some stones in the urinary bladder.

CowperKettle

1:58 PM

Word of the minute: perdurable

> Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced. nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06137-x

Mitch

@CowperKettle You're getting the same interesting articles in your feed as me

Improving a sorting algorithm by taking advantage of small combinatorial steps in the swaps is not particularly difficult for an AI method to do. Last year there was a big Todo about a better matrix multiplication algorithm with similar finding of better combinations. 'Better' means fewer integer mults and may be faster for only very very large matrices (or for sorting for only very large sets of elts to be sorted)

What stands out to me is that the sorting method is -already- integrated into a standard library

That's impressive

@CowperKettle I've heard more vinegar and lemon juice in a diet helps prevent or reduce uric stones.

How you get a cat to drink that I don't know

@CowperKettle kids these days are too soft

Also they use words wrong

2 hours later…

jlliagre

3:46 PM

#Worldle #503 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐⭐🏙️🪙
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

1 hour later…

tchrist

5:11 PM

> Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto dijo el cómico latino. Y yo diría más bien, nullum hominem a me alienum puto; soy hombre, a ningún otro hombre estimo extraño. Porque el adjetivo humanus me es tan sospechoso como su sustantivo abstracto humanitas, la humanidad. Ni lo humano ni la humanidad, ni el adjetivo simple ni el sustantivado, sino el sustantivo concreto: el hombre.

alphabet

5:30 PM

@CowperKettle Too bad they don't make feline roller coasters

alphabet

5:41 PM

Apparently Ukraine's main effort has likely begun, moving south from Zaporizhzhia, as expected. Will be slow going due to well-prepared Russian defenses. Igor Girkin is predictably reporting that Everything Is Totally Fine.

1 hour later…

jlliagre

6:41 PM

Daily Octordle #500
3️⃣4️⃣
5️⃣7️⃣
8️⃣🔟
6️⃣9️⃣
Score: 52

Not bad.

jlliagre

7:16 PM

I was literally lucky with my third seed word.

jlliagre

7:31 PM

Wordle 719 4/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
🟨🟩⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Robusto

7:48 PM

@jlliagre Whenever we do well on these games it has an element of luck attached.

And whenever we do poorly it's someone else's fault. ;-)

jlliagre

🌎 Jun 8, 2023 🌍
🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 6.28
🟥🟩 = 2

globle-game.com
#globle

@Robusto Bingo! I suspect we used the same starting country.

Cerberus

@Robusto What is the other one?

#Worldle #503 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐⭐⭐🏙️🪙
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

jlliagre

@Cerberus I was wondering too.

Cerberus

8:03 PM

🌎 Jun 8, 2023 🌍
🔥 1 | Avg. Guesses: 9.67
🟧🟨🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧🟧
🟥🟥🟩 = 11

globle-game.com
#globle

Globle just seems kind of random.

jlliagre

Daily Quordle 500
6️⃣5️⃣
8️⃣7️⃣
m-w.com/games/quordle/

Robusto

@jlliagre As always.

@Cerberus Rwanda.

The correct answer has more drippiness to it.

But I'm never sure how much detail is accurate in these silhouettes.

Cerberus

Ah, I would never have thought of Rwanda.

Robusto

I've been so steeped in African countries lately that I always tend to try to fit the Worldle shapes in there first unless it's obviously wrong.

@CowperKettle Back in PIE they might be.

Robusto

8:42 PM

> Drag racing (1947), is said to be from thieves' slang drag "automobile" (1935), perhaps ultimately from slang sense of "wagon, buggy" (1755), because a horse would drag it. By 1851 this was transferred to "street," as in the phrase main drag (which some propose as the source of the racing sense). —Etymonline

CowperKettle

9:31 PM

@Cerberus Nobody expects the Rwandan inquisition

CowperKettle

9:51 PM

> They then asked whether 14-month-old mice – in their middle age – would benefit from taurine supplements versus animals fed a placebo. The median lifespan extension in female mice was 12% and 10% in males. This was conducted in a gigantic animal cohort of nearly 250 mice. technologynetworks.com/tn/news/…

Taurine helps mice live longer

CowperKettle

10:05 PM

jlliagre

10:49 PM

@Robusto Almost. It happened once that my starting country was the one to find. Next day, I chose another one feeling the same country wasn't going to fall twice in a row.

CowperKettle

11:22 PM

#Worldle #504 1/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐⭐🏙️🪙
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

CowperKettle

11:39 PM