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00:02
Wordle 1,084 5/6

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Daily Octordle #865
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Score: 65
Daily Sequence Octordle #865
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Not my day.
00:49
#WhenTaken #101 (07.06.2024)

I scored 847/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 3076 km - 🗓️ 2 yrs - ⚡ 137 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 271.7 metres - 🗓️ 7 yrs - ⚡ 191 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 2 km - 🗓️ 1 yrs - ⚡ 199 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 7 km - 🗓️ 18 yrs - ⚡ 161 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 554 km - 🗓️ 13 yrs - ⚡ 159 / 200

https://whentaken.com
01:19
@Mitch I can’t find a record of my chat with Copilot.
02:12
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] One-character link in answer (88): What does e"e mean?‭ by najlasi‭ on english.SE
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Linked punctuation in answer (77): Boomer meme anti-rizz or boomer anti meme rizz?‭ by najlasi‭ on english.SE
 
4 hours later…
06:30
@alphabet I'm looking forward to kalashnikov-wielding racoons in Planet of the Raccoons
I found case reports of kids having mild lesions of their esophagus from L-arginine capsules accidentally lodged there, as when a person drinks too little water to chase a capsule down, and lays down to sleep immediately after taking it.
So L-arginine does cause mucosal burns
Turns out they give it to kids in an attempt to stimulate their growth, because L-arginine induces growth hormone production.
Curious.
@CowperKettle no it's the gelatin of the capsule absorbing water and irritating the dry mucosa
It can happen with any hard gel capsule. It's a common enough anecdote with amoxicillin capsules here.
In your case, as I said, a water absorbing ingredient (e.g. a filler) can irritate dry mucosa anywhere in your body. Theoretically that can happen, what really happens I don't know.
There are many hygroscopic excipients among common excipients in tablet and capsule formulation
Esophagitis caused by L-arginine capsule retention: Presentation of four cases (Blanco-Rodriguez et al., 2018)

L-arginine-induced esophagitis, report of six cases (Pedro Rivero-Borrell de la Parra et al., 2021)
> After taking the drug with very little water, she presented with retrosternal pain, nausea, vomiting, dysphagia for solids, and odynophagia for liquids. Endoscopy revealed a 2-cm ulcer with irregular edges covered in fibrin and another smaller mirror-image, or “kissing”, ulcer in the middle third of the esophagus. She was managed with fasting, omeprazole, and steroids.
I'm extremely afraid of opening private messages.
@CowperKettle one other possible factor here is L-Arg is a supplement with drastically fewer controls than therapeutic drugs. The gelatin and the plasticizer used on the shell of the capsule may be affected, as a result. But I'm just spitballing here
@CowperKettle this woman was causing a ruckus in the pharmacy the other day because a valacyclovir tablet had caused her extreme abdominal pain somehow. I assumed it was because she didn't have enough water with it. She had taken a selfie of herself being administered IV fluids in a local clinic (which was probably totally superfluous and unnecessary)
@CowperKettle wait, steroids? Misoprostol, do they mean? Because every other steroid causes peptic ulcers
 
5 hours later…
11:43
Has anybody tried the new AI feature on X (Twitter) called Grok?
 
2 hours later…
13:22
Wordle 1,085 4/6

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@user85795 I don't believe in AI. Or in X, for that matter.
13:50
#WhenTaken #102 (08.06.2024)

I scored 857/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 357 km - 🗓️ 1 yrs - ⚡ 188 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 2 km - 🗓️ 1 yrs - ⚡ 199 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 119.0 metres - 🗓️ 4 yrs - ⚡ 196 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 4634 km - 🗓️ 21 yrs - ⚡ 75 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 29 km - 🗓️ 0 yrs - ⚡ 199 / 200

https://whentaken.com
Wordle 1 085 4/6

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#WhenTaken #102 (08.06.2024)

I scored 949/1000 🎉

1️⃣ 📍 408 km - 🗓️ 3 yrs - ⚡ 184 / 200
2️⃣ 📍 6 km - 🗓️ 4 yrs - ⚡ 196 / 200
3️⃣ 📍 169.9 metres - 🗓️ 4 yrs - ⚡ 196 / 200
4️⃣ 📍 236 km - 🗓️ 5 yrs - ⚡ 187 / 200
5️⃣ 📍 386 km - 🗓️ 2 yrs - ⚡ 186 / 200
https://whentaken.com/
14:31
@jlliagre How did you get #4? I totally hated that one.
14:41
@Robusto Spoiler
@Mitch @Lambie Cowards! :)
0
A: What are common words in which "i" is pronounced as "ai"?

tchristI’m afraid you aren’t going to be able to do what you’re hoping to do with this—for several concrete reasons. So this answer should be read as a frame challenge. You’ve asked a question that cannot be reasonably answered in the positive, only in the negative. So that’s what I will do here. A fund...

14:53
1
A: Death in the saddle

James KIt's a bit of a cliché, so for that reason alone I'd avoid it (except as the title of a TV show, for example). It is also used as a euphemism for "death during sex". You might provoke some sniggers. More generally, it is nearly always used figuratively, to mean "died doing something, (rather th...

taboo word alert
@Robusto How to confuse hackers ;-)
15:16
@jlliagre I think I read about this in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.
@jlliagre Huh? You just linked to the main site.
15:38
@Robusto Just hover over the link.
@jlliagre All that shows is https://whentaken.com
OH, NM.
I was looking at the bottom of the browser.
I didn't realized you had added a title. Nice!
And yeah, I didn't see those.
And when I was in the country proper during the late unpleasantness I never visited that part.
15:58
Looking at it now, though, those are very dim and blurred. I didn't even recognize them as such.
@Robusto it's a mobius building
16:36
@M.A.R. The statement on the other side of the slash is true / The statement on the other side of the slash is false
17:13
Just the guy I needed. Please help a sistah out here. What is the code instruction for increasing font size in the HTML on this site?
@Lambie You mean in chat?
In CSS: .messages {font-size: larger} works for me.
Or you could do #container {font-size: larger !important} for the whole thing.
Wait, that still just works on the messages.
Font sizes in chat here are done as 12px, which is terribly antiquated. Modern practice indicates a percentage for different areas, so that one base style override changes everything proportionally.
 
1 hour later…
18:38
NO, I mean on/in the site windows in answers.
18:52
Yeah, that's not so simple. The CSS in the main site is so dense and convoluted it would be a job to figure out. I tried dynamically changing the answer cells using jQuery and nothing worked.
19:34
Well, a lot of people who answer put in HUGE font in their answers and I wonder how they do that.
19:52
@Lambie They use an <h1> header specified with # at the beginning of the line and followed by a space, or an <h2> header specified with ##, or an <h3> header specified with ###.
Not recommended. I almost always edit those out for shoutiness.
 
2 hours later…
22:03
Oh, that's what you were on about. I thought you just wanted more legibility.
Never thought I'd see women in niqabs in a Pride parade, but today was that day. Apparently our new protest chant is "No pride in genocide."
Hilarious.
@alphabet It isn't even comprehensible English.
22:20
@Cerberus I support them, of course. Their main point seems to be criticizing how Israel tries to use LGBT rights to claim moral superiority while they commit various atrocities.
@alphabet So I was surprised to learn that Massachusetts is way down on the list of per capita gays.
Sounds like people who have been on the Internet too much...
The surprise was Utah. Whoa!
California wasn't even in the top 15.
@Robusto Gallup says we're 7th in the nation, though that counts all LGBT people
Perhaps the lower the population the more stats like that, er, stick out?
@alphabet I thought it would make the top 3 at least.
22:22
@Cerberus Good. They're unlearning the propaganda you get in most American media.
@Robusto That poll puts California in 9th place. Where was your source?
@alphabet I can't remember, sorry. It had Utah at 6.7%, iirc.
Who knows. None of this stuff is, uh, rigorous. When you poll 500 people out of millions, it must be hard to be at all accurate.
The thing is, birds of a feather tend to, uh, you know the rest. So if you're polling in, say, Somerville or Northampton you'll think Massachusetts is at least 30% gay. But you go out to Worcester or Springfield, maybe 5%? I don't know.
Also: if you're looking for an area with a lot of nearby gays, the main factor is population density; in the middle of Manhattan, I'm sure you can find a lot more guys on Grindr than you can in Somerville, because there are more total people nearby.
@alphabet Yes. Even in San Francisco, things are a lot gayer in the Castro, I'm pretty sure.
@Robusto I've thought about moving away from Boston, probably to NYC or SF. I'm not sure if I actually like Boston or if I'm just used to it from growing up in the area.
Both are much more expensive than Boston.
And Boston is pretty damned expensive.
22:33
Granted, the problem with all of these surveys is that the actual borders of the City of Boston don't correspond that well to the area we (or at least I) think of as "the city."
Wow, things have certainly changed. But my niece was paying $3400, roughly, for a studio in SF before she moved back home during Covid and telecommuted to her job.
Anyway mostly I'm just annoyed at being perpetually single and would like to blame Boston for this somehow.
Boston can handle it.
> 1.a. 1794– Characterized by or relating to avoidance (of something).

1.b. 1942– With preceding word: characterized by avoidance of the thing specified.

2. 1931– Biology and Psychology. Designating behaviour which tends to remove a person or animal from situations or stimuli which are perceived as harmful or unpleasant, esp. social ones; relating to or exhibiting such behaviour. Cf. avoidance behaviour n., aversive adj. Additions 2a. Contrast adient adj.
> 2002 Someone with an avoidant personality, and who doesn't like dealing with others, is quite likely to end up with a resistant clinger. — Guardian 9 February (Weekend Supplement) 61/1
The funny thing is that even though they've dated its first use to 1794, they only added it to the OED in 2009.
I would not have thought to have chosen "has been avoidant of" over "has been avoiding".
I don't think avoidant usually takes an of PP as a complement.
22:41
> 1994 The typical defensive statement is self-protective and avoidant of blame and responsibility. J. M. Gottman, What predicts Divorce? i. 27
Not that tchrist can see my messages.
> 1794 There are three avoidant injunctions on the Bard: to avoid sloth..; to avoid contention..; and to avoid folly. E. Williams, Poems vol. II. 232
> 1817 Cathmor, in the wood, Avoidant of the voice of praise, abode. —J. Shackleton, Poems of Ossian attempted in English Verse vol. II. 83
So abode and wood once rhymed?!
Ew emergency alert on radio. Haven't heard that buzz for a while.
Line of very severe thunderstorms moving through the area.
Expect damage to rooves and automobiles. Hide.
Giant hail.
Did you know the feds will fine you for using that tone on anything whatsoever?
Meaning the FCC.
They've been doing so a fair bit lately. Apparently the children think it's a joke.
> The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can fine broadcasters
who misuse Emergency Alert System (EAS) tones, which are used to
send important emergency information to communities over radio and
television. The base fine for EAS violations is $8,000, but the FCC
may increase the amount based on several factors, including the
number of transmissions and the network's audience reach. For
example, in February 2023, the FCC proposed a $504,000 fine against
Fox Corporation for broadcasting a three-second excerpt of EAS tones
The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is a national warning system in the United States designed to allow authorized officials to broadcast emergency alerts and warning messages to the public via cable, satellite and broadcast television and both AM, FM and satellite radio. Informally, Emergency Alert System is sometimes conflated with its mobile phone counterpart Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), a different but related system. However, both the EAS and WEA, among other systems, are coordinated under the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS). The EAS, and more broadly IPAWS, allows federal...
Wow, that isn't even their largest fine lately.
@alphabet To be frank, it rather sounds like bickering over unimportant details and language instead of substance.
> Tones from the EAS were used in the trailer for the 2013 film Olympus Has Fallen; cable providers were fined $1.9 million by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on March 3, 2014 for misuse of EAS tones
22:57
@Robusto Do you know how large the studio was?
@alphabet Also because gays flock to big cities. So the proportion of gays in a big city will be higher than in a middling city, in addition to the absolute number.
@alphabet I'm single again and I think it is pretty nice, far fewer worries and problems.
@Cerberus There's always a part of me that wants to fall in wuv and have one of em Xanax weddings.
@Cerberus In the US it depends quite a lot on how progressive that city (and the surrounding state) is; Boston and Nashville have about the same population, but this chart shows Boston has 37% more LGBT people.
@alphabet Sure, it also depends on which city.
But you mentioned Manhattan.
@alphabet I will look up Xanax.
Americans always use brand names for regular things, I don't get why...
@Cerberus It's because we get advertisements for prescription drugs.
Hmm is that it?
But Americans also use brand names for many things that aren't drugs?
23:12
Indeed. People often end up referring to a product by the brand name under which it was first produced and/or popularized.
But why?
Or is it because advertising is more pervasive in society as a whole?
I suspect it's because people often don't really know what non-brand-name word to use.
Or because the culture is more susceptible to it?
@alphabet But I am wondering about the deeper causes.
E.g. what term are you supposed to use to describe "Band-Aids" other than the brand name? There is such a term--"adhesive bandages"--but it's much less recognizable and isn't really a complete description of what the product is.
Much easier to use the brand name, which is what you see all the time in stores and such.
(Of course, the less popular other brands can't use the term "Band-Aid" since it's trademarked, but still: people wouldn't know what exactly you were asking for if you said you wanted an "adhesive bandage," since that isn't a very complete description of the nature of the product.)
0
Q: Why do some people pronounce "familiar" with an /ɚ/ in the first syllable?

alphabetIn American English, the word familiar is normally pronounced as /fəˈmɪl.jɚ/. Recently, though, I've noticed more people pronouncing it as /fɚˈmɪl.jɚ/ ("fermiliar"), an alternate pronunciation listed on Wiktionary. Looking through YouGlish, this seems to be uncommon, but certainly well-attested; ...

Anyway, I posted a question that's been bothering me.
@alphabet I don't really know what they are.
Are those plasters?
23:21
@Cerberus I think that that's the term they use in the UK. Also not very recognizable, since of course "plaster" usually refers to a material that has nothing to do with medicine.
They're this thing:
Right, plasters!
So that is exactly my question: why do Americans use brand names and people in other countries don't?
I'm not entirely sure. I suspect it's related to the fact that Band-Aids were first invented in the US, and thus likely popularized under only that brand name.
But I'm not sure about why that broader pattern exists.
There are 100,000 different things we use in daily life.
Very few are normally referred to by brand names here.
@alphabet I don't see why it should matter whether something was first invented somewhere? Then different countries will have different brands for it.
And different articles were 'invented' in different countries.
@Cerberus Indeed. Here it's quite common.
Maybe someone would say Nutella.
But that could be because it tastes differently from other brands, I kind of want that specific brand.
23:27
The brand names are also often easier to pronounce and/or remember. Compare "Pepto-Bismol" with "bismuth subsalicylate."
I haven't heard of either.
But you would not use a chemical name, but just some name that describes it.
It's an over-the-counter medication used for various digestive issues. Usually sold as a bright pink liquid, though it also comes in tablet form.
Like a pen, a smartphone, crackers, chocolate.
I'm not sure what name you'd choose to describe it unambiguously.
Medicines have internally established names, not being brands.
Nor chemical terms.
23:32
Huh. Who establishes those names? Here we just have the brand names (like "Tylenol") and the chemical names ("acetaminophen," or "paracetamol" in the UK).
Paracetamol is not a chemical name, I think?
It is established by some international organisation.
Drug nomenclature is the systematic naming of drugs, especially pharmaceutical drugs. In the majority of circumstances, drugs have 3 types of names: chemical names, the most important of which is the IUPAC name; generic or nonproprietary names, the most important of which are international nonproprietary names (INNs); and trade names, which are brand names. Under the INN system, generic names for drugs are constructed out of affixes and stems that classify the drugs into useful categories while keeping related names distinguishable. A marketed drug might also have a company code or compound code...
> The INN system has been coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO) since 1953.
@Cerberus To my knowledge, it's also the name used for the chemical itself, though that name is also often coined by whoever first synthesized it.
Certainly it has the same status as "bismuth subsalicylate," which (like "acetaminophen") is the name used by store brands to avoid violating trademarks.
> Pronunciation Paracetamol: /ˌpærəˈsiːtəmɒl/
Acetaminophen: /əˌsiːtəˈmɪnəfɪn/ ⓘ
Trade names Tylenol, Panadol, others[1]
Other names N-acetyl-para-aminophenol (APAP), acetaminophen (USAN US)
I think paracetamol must be the name approved by the WHO, like an INN.
The chemical name is N-acetyl-para-aminophenol.
And acetaminophen, which is not used here, is probably some American relict from before the formal INN system?
> Early drug nomenclature was based on the chemical structure. As newer drugs became chemically more complex and numerous, nonproprietary names based on chemistry became long and difficult to spell, pronounce, or remember. Additionally, chemically derived names provided little useful information to non-chemist health practitioners.
4 mins ago, by Cerberus
> The INN system has been coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO) since 1953.
23:39
> A United States Adopted Name (USAN) is a unique nonproprietary name assigned to a medication marketed in the United States.
> The USAN Program states that its goal is to select simple, informative, and unique nonproprietary names (also called generic names) for drugs by establishing logical nomenclature classifications based on pharmacological or chemical relationships.
@Cerberus As usual, America has one system, and the entire rest of the world has another.
@alphabet Probably something outdated from before the INNs.
@alphabet Probably just because it's a very old medicine.
Maybe we had an alternative name for it here as well, long ago.
@Cerberus You'd think so, but: "The USAN Council began in June 1961 after the AMA and the USP jointly formed the AMA-USP Nomenclature Committee."
OK that is just silly haha.
Indeed. I assume it's some combination of American exceptionalism and distrust of international institutions.
Like how people jokingly refer to feet and pounds as "freedom units."
@Cerberus That's because its tongue is dysfunctional. :)
23:43
> acetaminophen is the United States Adopted Name[169] and Japanese Accepted Name and also the name generally used in Canada,[169] Venezuela, Colombia, and Iran.
Of course the likely suspects sit together once more.
America, Venezuela, and Iran.
@Cerberus Nobody wants to be on a list with Canada. /s
Too late.
So, yeah, I don't why why Americans use brand names so much.
Drop some acetylsalicylic acid and call me in the morning.
> paracetamol [koortswerend middel] {na 1950} gevormd uit par(a)acet(yl)am(inophen)ol.
@Cerberus Because that's the only name people know, of course.
They don't have common-noun ways of describing many of these products.
Contrast this with something like soy sauce. Nobody says they need to go pick up some Kikkoman or some La Choy or some San-J or some Kimlan. Well, maybe the first but only because I grew up next to a Kikkoman plant. But I've never heard it said.
23:54
I was trying to find out more about the deeper cause behind that.
It depends on the product line. Good lucking trying to get to the Brits to vacuum things instead of hoovering them up.
I am trying to find out why American use more brand names than other people.
I still think they simply lack any generic name for the thing.
The question is why.
Same reason the Brits have biros instead of ballpoints.
Biro is a proper noun, not a common one. Originally.
The following three lists of generic and genericized trademarks are: marks which were originally legally protected trademarks, but have been genericized and have lost their legal status due to becoming generic terms, marks which have been abandoned and are now generic terms marks which are still legally protected as trademarks, at least in some jurisdictions == List of former trademarks that have been genericized == The following partial list contains marks which were originally legally protected trademarks, but which have subsequently lost legal protection as trademarks by becoming the common...
And those are the ones they gave up on, no less.
23:58
I will keep asking why until we get to a deeper level.
Did you know that Adrenalin isn't a thing? That it's really Epinephrine?

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