@Robusto Spoiler

Ah.

@Robusto Spoiler/Correction

You're not getting enough sleep!

Shit

Happens to me too.

I'm jet lagged with all the DST changes ;-)

It happens.

Where did you go?

Oh, it's DST where you are.

Ours is this coming Sunday.

@Robusto I stayed at home.

So I gathered.

@Robusto 'twas yesterday.

This is what happens when someone is talking to me while I am trying to do the quiz.

@tchrist I expect it's a misprint for Mickle Delving.

"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim." ---George Santayana

@Vikas To be honest, I didn't get the meme picture. But I do get the explanation, that many people around the world 'care' and know much more about the US election than ...

@Mitch Russia?

I was about to say "... than their own election" because that's what the meme implies

@Mitch Yup that's also right.

@Mitch I thought this meme template is familiar to everyone.

I think the more correct thing to say (not in the meme) is that non-americans know more about the US election than most Americans do.

@Vikas No, I had never seen it before.

I saw it when GTA 6 (game) trailer was released.

I kinda don't know what to make of the image, just 'casual vs formal' and that's it.

Maybe this explains better.

that's funny

"Me at the wedding" instead of "my wedding" makes it less confusing.

but I wouldn't actually agree with the template's use you gave above, because most people around the world probably do know more about their own politicians than they know of American ones.

They surely know quite a lot about American politicians, to a degree that would shock Americans.

In the US, a foreign election of very great importance -might- get mention in a feed on the NYT or WaPo but not some headline or top billing.

But the US election is top headline news in -every- country around the world right now.

First article in every newspaper, first story in every news cast.

The Times of Montenegro Headlines: Kamala and Donald trade insults, Man on Motorcycle Runs Stop Sign

@Vikas That helps

@Mitch That's why I posted it.

There certainly is the issue that everybody in the world is affected by the outcome of the US election (no matter who's running).

And this time that one guy seems to be vocal about and ready to screw everything up.

But also it's the best soap opera ever because that one guy just might 'say something' (and we can expect he will).

@Vikas Are you kinda saying that you don't know much abot Indian politics, but you are following the US election (or can't get away from it!) in the news?

@Mitch Nope, I know, but I'm more interested in US election right now. Because Indian elections have become boring.

One sided you know.

@Mitch I don't think we are going to get affected much.

Core policies will remain same.

Countries that will get affected the most are the ones at active conflicts.

I enjoyed 2020 election BTW 🤣

@Vikas Good point

but one of the candidates is a chaos monkey.

but to India's (possible) benefit, Modi has a personal good connection with him.

@Mitch Modi is a brother to all leaders. They got lost in childhood when Modi was selling tea in a crowded train.

@Mitch I guess there can be riots.

@Vikas the interesting part is that the only people expected to riot will be if the chaos monkey loses.

So the popcorn eating drama will continue eighter way.

@Mitch That's what I mean.

@Vikas That's very poetic but not sure what it means. Are you saying that Modi is a friend (in reality -and- politically) to -all- countries' leaders, or just to those who are sowtrodden and show up at his door step (I don't know enough of what people think of Modi to understand the metaphor).

@Mitch All countries who are 'friendly' with Modi XD

Exceptions exist like China and Pakistan.

@Vikas ie so in particular not Xi?

got it.

Yes.

You didn't know Modi used to sell tea?

@Vikas I know that story but it's not the first thing in my mind when I think of him. The metaphor didn't evoke that for me.

The problem with the chaos monkey for India is that he is very transactional, and if the other person (Modi) doesn't reciprocate, the relationship could change quickly.

CM (for chaos monkey) also is, childishly, very enamored of other leaders who act like 'strong men' (potential autocrats), like Putin and Orban, and (to the outside world) Modi share some of those characteristics.

The Truth About Polling We don’t know what we think we know about how Americans will vote.

Yes all this polls and stockmarket stuff is not reliable.

Yeah.

I read also that some people may manipulate the betting odds.

@jlliagre Presumably part of the reason is that /ɪ/ never occurs word-finally in English (ones without happy-tensing excepted), so at least in café it has to be replaced with a tense vowel when imported into English.

By spending a lot of money on bets just in order to influence the polls.

@Mitch I've heard it said that the president is "mayor of the US and dictator of the world," given that they have more or less unchecked influence over foreign policy but (in theory) not over domestic policy.

@Vikas The last Indian election did get a decent amount of news coverage here, given the concerns about India slowly becoming a dictatorship.

@alphabet People have been heavily brainwashed that Modi is the only wise leader in India and has a vision.

@alphabet I think China, Russia, India, Iran, Brazil, and most of the world don't see it quite that way.

@alphabet Yep and the Brits place the tonic accent on the ca of café, AmE speakers don't. And no /ɪ/ in French, Spanish or Portuguese at all...and therefore, bitch often comes out beach/beech.

@Vikas Pardon my ignorance of recent Indian history, but back in the 1950s (Nehru's years), wasn't India a key supporter of the "non-aligned movement" (see Bandung Conference)? How is Modi's foreign policy different from Nehru?

I think not much?

Yesterday night's dream, I played blackjack but with UNO cards.

@alphabet I've heard that the US president doesn't have much control over the state of the US economy much less the world's. They spend most of their time trying to maintain domestic and foreign situations.

@Lambie I've known some French people, who are aware of the bitch/beach difference, replace the short I with the short e instead, that is, 'betch'

Oh I think I may have heard this too.

Researchers could predict with 91% accuracy which study participants faced discrimination by only analyzing their gut microbiome

@Cerberus At school, we are taught that -itch and -each share the same vowel, 'ee' /i/ and that the only difference relates to their length. That's unfortunate. Telling us that the former uses /ɪ/ which is extremely close if not identical to the chez vowel - as Gideon demonstrated - would be an eye-opener. An ear-opener even ;-)

@jlliagre That is most odd!

As to chez: maybe that would result in better recognition. But I wouldn't say it is identical at all?

@jlliagre I think the chez vowel is what I hear French people say sometimes.

@Robusto I haven't been reading Newton for the last 300 years, let alone in Latin

So I'm not guilty of misreading him.

And it should go "We, except CowperKettle, have been misreading.."

Philosophical graffiti on Pedagogicheskaya St., Yekaterinburg

> "Dasein" (German pronunciation: [ˈdaːzaɪn]) is a technical term in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Adopted from the ordinary German word Dasein meaning "existence", Heidegger used it to refer to the mode of being that is particular to human beings.

@Cerberus The reference, theoretical vowels differ but the actual realizations would overlap, or at least be undiscernible to many ears.

Not Gideon by the way but Dr Geoff Lindsey. Rendons à César...

> Confidence estimates are often "detection-like" - driven by positive evidence in favour of a decision. This empirical observation has been interpreted as showing human metacognition is limited by biases or heuristics. Here we show that Bayesian confidence estimates also exhibit heightened sensitivity to decision-congruent evidence in higher-dimensional signal detection theoretic spaces, leading to detection-like confidence criteria. arxiv.org/abs/2410.18933

I wonder what " higher-dimensional signal detection theoretic spaces" even means.

@jlliagre That is...incredibly strange, particularly because if you make the vowel in leaf too long, native speakers will mishear it as leave (in certain contexts).

@alphabet English vowels are incredibly strange in general.

@Lambie There's a general pattern where, in loanwords from French, AmE usually places stress on the final syllable (which is somewhat closer to French) whereas BrE places stress on the first syllable (following the more common pattern with English nouns)--massage, etc.

@jlliagre We have too many.

@jlliagre I don't understand what you mean to tell me by saying "the reference".

@Cerberus The idealized vowel represented in the vowel space area.

> The idealized vowel represented in the vowel space area, theoretical vowels differ but the actual realizations would overlap, or at least be undiscernible to many ears.

I don't really get this sentence as a whole.

Is it apposition?

At any rate, perhaps it doesn't matter.

It may also depend on one's accent in French?

@Cerberus I think that often preserving the contrasts between vowels and getting their relative positions more-or-less accurate is probably more important for comprehension than trying to get the quality right for each individual vowel.

Yes, that is what I meant by "maybe that would result in better recognition".

It still seemed a bold statement, though.

@Cerberus People do not pronounce theoretical vowels, do they?

You misunderstand my question.

There is something about the sentence which I couldn't parse or understand.

But it's probably not important.

NO, it's important!

;-)

Ah, maybe I got it.

Somewhere in the world, I am hungry.

- What do you mean by "somewhere in the world?".

I mean any place on the planet.

- But why do you say that, how is it connected to your point?

The world is a big place, so it could be anywhere on there, even underground.

(Do you see what I mean by this example?)

@Cerberus The punctuation is off. Should've been a period after area.

@alphabet OK there is now a period of two minutes after area.

@Cerberus A full stop, if you're one of those people.

Ugh, not those.

@Cerberus I mean the chez vowel is standardized as [e] and the 'kit' vowel is standardized as [ɪ] but the surface on the vowel space area that includes actual realizations of [e] by native French speakers and the surface including actual realizations of [ɪ] by native English speakers are likely to overlap, at least that's my impression.

OK I'm not entirely sure what you mean by surface.

Area?

But I imagine there may be speakers of French whose é can be like English /ɪ/ depending on context?

But I would say a difference can generally be heard in most cases?

At any rate, your point was that it would be better to teach Frenchmen to pronounce English short i as é, rather than short French i.

Which may be a good idea.

@Cerberus That's Lindsey's point actually, but an eye-opener to me.

I never thought about how French schoolchildren are taught.

@jlliagre Certainly I hear all the clipped versions of chez toi Geoff Lindsey cites as the word shit; the vowel quality difference is noticeable if you're paying close attention but I think native speakers of most dialects would hear it that way.

@alphabet You can hear varying pronunciations of the french vowel if you go on Forvo.

@Cerberus You mean pronunciations of chez toi or of the vowel in isolation?

Basically all the sound files containing chez.

@Cerberus Certainly all these sound more like /ɪ/, but without context you'd certainly be more likely to hear them as /ʃi/ (which is a word) than as /ʃɪ/ (which couldn't be).

On the other hand: the pronunciations of those phrases from Canada sound more like /eɪ/ than /ɪ/ to me.

@alphabet Obviously, we are much more sensitive to subtle variations of words belonging to our native language than to other. When for example /y/ is missing from your own language, you might have a hard time to distinguish it from /i/ and often pronounce it /u/ or /ou/ because that's what your eyes see.

But it seems to be only the Canadian ones. This one certainly sounds like it starts with Shane rather than shin.

> Vowels can be tricky to describe phonetically because they are points, or rather areas, within a continuous space. Any language will have a certain finite number of contrasting vowels, each of which may be represented with a discrete alphabetic symbol; but phonetically each will correspond to a range of typical values, and between any two actual vowel sounds there is a gradient continuum.

englishspeechservices.com/blog/the-vowel-space

@jlliagre Indeed. And I think that phonetically similar vowels won't sound any less distinct to native speakers than phonetically dissimilar ones.

E.g. I think all native English speakers hear /æ/ and /ɛ/ as completely distinct from each other, even though (particularly in AmE) they're acoustically much closer than most other pairs of vowels.

(At least I think they are, maybe that's a fact I made up.)

@alphabet Umm what?

Of course they sound nothing like /i/.

Nobody ever suggested so.

It is about /ɪ/ versus /e/.

@alphabet I believe using [e] instead of [i] is anyway for a French person a step in the right direction, i.e. /ɪ/, if only to discover that native English speakers pronounce that vowel a specific way.

@jlliagre I would say this applies to when a sound is perceived to flip from one vowel to another. At the same time, it is possible that standard speakers pronounce u close to a specific point inside the space of u. Even though a sound would still be recognised as u a little farther away from that point.

@alphabet My brain hurts from the triple negatives + than.

@Cerberus The flipping zones are a little blurry indeed. Someone might hear some vowel in isolation while another person might hear a different one. While listening to full words/phrases, the brain filter out "impossible" words so we are able to understand each other. You'll probably answer that I'm confusing phones and phonemes and I won't disagree. What we do though is to map vowels that do not belong to our native language to what we perceive as their closest acceptable equivalent.

Yes.

But I still wouldn't say a typical English /ɪ/ and French é are identical sounds.

@Cerberus They sound even less like /eɪ/ (with the exception of the Canadian ones).

@Cerberus Pronunciations of /ɪ/ aren't even identical between different speakers of the same dialect, even just considering the vowel qualities.

@CowperKettle The point is, you read him in a language other than Latin. Hence the mistranslation. You're welcome.