English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Robusto

00:01

@GratefulDisciple We had a better class of prisoners in those days.

@CowperKettle Ah, yeah. I don't think we got to genitive case in Russian I. And because it was a gender-separated Catholic school, and I was only in it because there were girls in there, for me it was probably more about genital case.

tchrist

00:24

@Robusto It wasn't gender separated just because you had only same sex classes. :)

jlliagre

Joe Dassin-Un garçon nommé Suzy-paroles

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tchrist

@jlliagre That's HILARIOUS!

Gaston.

jlliagre

@tchrist Another version:

"A boy named Sue", Sanseverino reprend Johnny Cash en VF

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tchrist

@Robusto It's the same as with Mozilla. When attempts were made to try to get them to support regex search, they said it would cost too much in support calls and tickets to expose that to the nontechnical people, who would never get it right and so complain.

Robusto

@tchrist Yeah, I get that, but shouldn't there be a "geeks only" section that is "try this at your own risk"?

tchrist

00:41

I tried that argument. Jamie still said no.

@Robusto Can you tell what sort of accent this guy has in English? ...

The Old Names Of European Countries (& Why They Changed)

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It mostly bleeds through only when he's pronouncing non-English words, when he always falls back to his native language's phonology system.

Robusto

@tchrist Interesting accent. It's fluttering just beyond my ken after 60 seconds of video, but let me finish and I'll let you know my thoughts.

tchrist

It will eventually hit you.

Xanne

He doesn’t have a reliable “th”.

tchrist

Correct.

His native language has it only intervocalically, but not in initial position.

Robusto

The way he pronounces "Herodotus" makes me lean toward Spanish.

tchrist

00:52

Yeah.

He's from Portugal.

Robusto

That's funny, I was going to say Portugal because I heard French and Spanish bits at different times.

tchrist

Exactly.

Robusto

But all in all, quite a fluent speaker of English.

jlliagre

Yes, he has a much better English accent than mine :-)

Robusto

@jlliagre Next time you come the US we'll have to check that out.

tchrist

00:55

I recognized it because he sounds very much like this guy:

How we are creating a forest in this barren patch of Iceland

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For whatever reason, native speakers of Portuguese from Portugal are much more likely to have good English than native speakers of Spanish from Spain are.

But they often have those two guys' accent when they do. It's very hard to place.

Same guy here. For some reason it sneaks through more here.

The Return of the Bison: Europe’s Largest Wild Animal

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The dental T's when pronouncing non-English words like Herodotus do jump out at you.

But many others would also do that natively.

I still think the European Bison look much more like they've cross-bred with cattle, perhaps aurochs, than do American Bison.

I think latest estimates based on sequencing comes out to only about 3% though, not 10% or larger some off-the-cuff estimates used to guess. That's really no more than you and I probably have of Neanderthal genes in us. But our bison are more gigantic even. Ours are a couple feet longer and maybe 25% heavier.

The wisents can be almost 10 feet long and weigh a ton: 2,000 pounds. Add 20 to 25% to those figures for ours at the outside.

But this is thought to be a diminution effect of some sort, that the common ancester and the earlier wisents were also bigger like that.

> While bison species have been traditionally classified in their own genus, modern genetics indicates that they are nested within the genus Bos, which includes, among others, cattle, yaks and gaur, being most closely related to yaks.

That's why it's so easy to cross-breed them cattle, alas.

When I was a kid I used to think that yaks and muskoxen were synonyms for the same creature. This is what happens when you do not grow up amongst them.

CowperKettle

02:40

My running this year.

Chomsky is considered to be one of the best minds, but he has an extremely weak argument for free will, and seems to repeat it over and over again reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/4sodpt/…

jlliagre

03:03

@CowperKettle So you ran a little bit more than one kilometer with an elevation of four meters and 66 centimeters. Congratulations ;-) I hate applications that still use a a dot or a comma as thousands separator. Using a space here has been an international recommendation for more than 20 years now.

Mitch

03:55

In case this wasn't posted before @Robusto @jlliagre @Cerberus:

How NYT 'Connections' is made

Cerberus

@Mitch It was! But thank you.

Mitch

Also probably behind a paywall.

Now I'm acting like your mom, sending you the same internet link about a funny cat video, or a job application.

Cerberus

I still appreciate it, mum.

OK I'm doing the one of the 31st now.

Green and yellow are easy enough.

OK blue is doable but requires some trying. It is also perhaps not the most cohesive one. But it works.

So I have only purple left. Staring at the four remaining words, thinking about what the conexion could be.

Connections
Puzzle #569
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪

CowperKettle

05:02

@jlliagre It confuses me too

CowperKettle

05:19

CowperKettle

05:50

> Early next year, Loyal, a US biotech start-up, is confident that it will bring LOY-002, a daily, beef-flavoured pill, to market that could give dogs a minimum of one extra year of healthy life. theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/26/…

Cerberus

Interesting...will read.

Michael Rybkin

Hi, guys. Can I check with you these sentences? Do they sound natural enough to say?

1. I must take action or it'll be late.
2. This news is great!
3. This is great news!
4. She was fired without warning.
5. Italy is on my list of places to visit.

CowperKettle

> SpaceX launches by day
2014: 6
2015: 7
2016: 9
2017: 18
2018: 21
2019: 13
2020: 27
2021: 33
2022: 61
2023: 98
2024: 134

@MichaelRybkin Happy New Year! I wish you all the best!

MetaEd

06:15

Wordle 1,291 3/6

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MetaEd

06:35

Strands #303
“Resolutions”
🔵🔵🔵🔵
🟡🔵🔵

Connections
Puzzle #569
🟨🟨🟨🟨
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Cerberus

07:16

You got purple before blue!

1: a bit odd, maybe "too late".
2: fine, but number 3 is a common expression.
4: good.
5: good.

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Potentially bad asn for hostname in body, potentially bad keyword in body (2): What question would you like to ask on Stack Exchange?‭ by Alfa Alfa‭ on english.SE

Michael Rybkin

07:54

@CowperKettle Thank you very much. I will say the same to you, my friend.

@Cerberus Thank you, my friend.

M.A.R.

12:55

@CowperKettle how is that weak? To me that exchange sounds like the guy rehashed the standard arguments against free will and Chomsky rehashed ones for.

As far as I've seen people prefer one explanation or other, but to me neither explanation is convincing.

It's just never been a subject where I'd see and understand arguments that would give me the conviction I feel accepting persuasive arguments on other topics

tchrist

> The number of people who identify as “influencers” continued to grow exponentially, which means that, unless we find a cure, within 10 years everybody on the planet will be trying to make a living by influencing everybody else.

GratefulDisciple

13:18

@Robusto Yes, it should be assigned to that section. It doesn't make sense because Google Chrome have chrome://flags that leads you to the Experiments section with blaring red all caps "WARNING: EXPERIMENTAL FEATURES AHEAD!" Granted, this is a web app and they don't currently have experimental area in mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/advanced .

As for the GUI for the search bar, once the flag turns on, there can be a drop down to choose between default search and regex search like in Agent Ransack app, for example. I think the real reason is that they don't want their servers to spend too much time executing regex searches.

GratefulDisciple

13:31

@tchrist In other words, the Sophists have won, with not enough Plato / Socrates supporters willing to mount a costly and arduous campaign to expose the hollow core of their captivating window dressings (i.e. the cure) because the people would rather be entertained and given false assurances.

GratefulDisciple

13:48

I strongly believe that the root of this problem is that most people don't love the Truth anymore, and by extension, scholarship, and the influencers capitalize on this condition. Mottos of some Ivy League and prestigious universities: Veritas (Harvard), Lux et veritas (Yale), In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen (Columbia), Veritas et Humanitas (Grinnell), etc.

tchrist

14:15

@GratefulDisciple That's easy to mitigate. First, Google's server code is written in Go, and they use Russ Cox’s re2 library. They do not have to support backreferences like \1, and even if they do, it is still using a Thompson NFA which is not subject to the same sort of exponential race to the heat death of the universe that regex engines based on Henry Spencer's approach are. Plus they could run it under a finite thread timeout.

But the other reason is that all the existing Google searches are full text searches, which works very, very differently from a regex search. You build a token index, and you only tokenize "words".

So it instead works more like Elastic Search or Sphinx or a mysql fulltext index works.

They'd have to instead crawl forward character by character, which is how a regex works.

At which point ugly matters like Unicode normalization forms raise their crazy heads.

They'd likely choose to have it match against against some NFKC transform, but even still you'd want to support "accent"-insensitive searches.

When you search for things within a loaded webpage using Chrome, it does indeed do this.

CowperKettle

15:00

Germany has just warned its population of an upcoming sausage and cheese shortage. They are calling it the wurst käse scenario.

Word of the day: outwith (outside). "In October 1880, the first ever statue of Robert Burns outwith Scotland was unveiled in Central Park in New York."

Robusto

#travle #748 +0 (Perfect)
✅✅✅✅✅✅
https://travle.earth

@CowperKettle I've never even heard of that term. Perhaps it is a variation of "without"?

CowperKettle

@Robusto Today it's mainly used in Scots

I was listening to the autobiography of Carnegie and googled on his love of Burns and came upon this word

> In fact, according to his autobiography the first penny he ever earned was one from his school teacher, Mr. Martin, for repeating in front of the class the Burns’ poem, ‘Man was Made to Mourn’.

Man Was Made to Mourn

"Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge" is a dirge of eleven stanzas by the Scots poet Robert Burns, first published in 1784 and included in the first edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786. The poem is one of Burns's many early works that criticize class inequalities. It is known for its line protesting "Man's inhumanity to man", which has been widely quoted since its publication. == Composition == The origin of this poem is alluded to by Burns in one of his letters to Frances Dunlop: "I had an old grand-uncle with whom my mother lived in her girlish years: the good old man was long...

Robusto

15:16

Wordle 1,291 4/6

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⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
🟩⬛🟩⬛⬛
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@CowperKettle Perhaps archaic as well.

tchrist

Why in the world do they keep saying that the former president is to lie in state at the Capitol? Haven't all presidents who've lain in state at the Capitol been former ones? Or are they contrasting those ones with all the ones who will lie in statements at the Capitol during their annual State of the Union speeches?

Robusto

@tchrist Maybe they don't say that if the president dies in office?

Oh wait, I just got it.

Connections
Puzzle #569
🟪🟦🟨🟦
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪

What I get for trying to do purple first.

Daily Octordle #1072
3️⃣6️⃣
7️⃣8️⃣
🕚4️⃣
9️⃣🔟
Score: 58

Daily Sequence Octordle #1072
5️⃣7️⃣
8️⃣9️⃣
🔟🕚
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Score: 75

CowperKettle

15:40

> For 800,000 years, brain size increased by about 7 cc every 10,000 years, but in the past 10,000 years, it has decreased by 150 cc — equivalent to over 200,000 years of brain growth lost

Robusto

Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Dec. 31, 2024

T I G H T R O P E
✅ 💔 ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ 🎉

My Score: 2000

tchrist

@CowperKettle That's from domestication syndrome. Notice by their cranial capacities how our Neanderthal kissing-cousins were not half so domesticated as we have become.

I wonder if they had pointy ears.

> The more docile animals have been found to have less testosterone than their more aggressive counterparts, and testosterone controls aggression and brain size.

Our "neolithic" agricultural revolution may have contributed to shrinking our frames compared with earlier gatherer-hunters.

We've always been mostly gatherers, not hunters. Isotopic analysis shows that 80% of the diet of pre-agricultural peoples was vegetable not animal in origin.

It's far easier to catch prey who do not flee before you. Like turnips.

M.A.R.

@tchrist hey don't give the Eugenics freaks any ideas

@tchrist This just means you haven't seen a cornered turnip fight

CowperKettle

16:00

Last Word of 2024: on the turn ("This orange juice is on the turn: better finish it quickly.")

jlliagre

@CowperKettle Launches by day? I guess that's by year.

M.A.R.

Last last word of 2024: collateralization (in medicine, it means when the blood flow of some vessels increase due to occlusion in other neighboring vessels)

CowperKettle

@jlliagre Yes

I earned 2900 rubles today, delivering food for 5 hours on a bicycle. This translates to the highest per-hour earning that I've ever had, almost 600 rubles/hour. The previous record-high rate was 500 rubles per hour, but usually it's just 350 rubles per hour.

Yesterday I spent the whole day trying to force myself to open private messages sent to me on different social networks by friends and people I know, and to make a phonecall to a woman I know to congratulate her with the New Year. This was the hardest, I spent hours just trying to concentrate on it. She did not pick up the phone; probably was not near the phone.

I should make a call today. Or at least an attempt.

I feel like I'm having a locked-in syndrome due to my fear of personal messages/emails/phonecalls.

CowperKettle

16:25

@M.A.R. Yep, I read about this

In the contest of heart disease, probably

CowperKettle

17:45

alphabet

@CowperKettle This whole exchange assumes that determinism and free will are incompatible, which most analytic philosophers are not inclined to accept.

CowperKettle

18:02

@alphabet Compatibilism is something too complicated for my mind..

Lambie

@CowperKettle Is that delivery of groceries or cooked food? Also, do you have a basket in front or behind?

CowperKettle

@Lambie Both, and no, I have no basket, I have a 100-liter bicycle trunk bag for putting stuff that doesn't fit into my courier thermal box

Lambie

Ah, SORRY, motorbike. Brrr. Except for pizza, it must be hard putting cooked food in a side basket. Do ou have that leg covering blanket-thingy to cover you legs in front?

Well, I feel bad because I do deliveries in a nice warm car, which I'd lend you if you lived near me. :)

That Blessica thing makes me think of vesícula, gall bladder in Sp. and Port.

CowperKettle

19:03

@Lambie No, it's just a bicycle with pedals :)

I have a lot of warm clothes

GratefulDisciple

19:25

Usually I'm struggling a lot, but strangely not today. Got the first three connections right away

Connections
Puzzle #569
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tchrist

19:40

1

A: Is there a similar expression to "pearl clutching" without the gender implications

Gender implications?! Why boy, anyone could wear pearls these days! How dare you show your misogynistic side by assuming pearls are for girls!! Anyway. I like pearl clutcher. I also use bed-wetter, handwringer, hysterical, drama queen, melodramatic, and hyperventilating. I use "panic porn" as the...

Robusto

20:48

#WhenTaken #308 (31.12.2024)

I scored 727/1000🎗️

1️⃣📍447 km - 🗓️0 yrs - 🥇186/200
2️⃣📍109 km - 🗓️6 yrs - 🥇188/200
3️⃣📍5.5K km - 🗓️3 yrs - 🥉115/200
4️⃣📍4.7K km - 🗓️12 yrs - 🥉102/200
5️⃣📍3.2K km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥈136/200

https://whentaken.com

Dannyu NDos

The best haiku amongst mine:
シャワーズは／犬か魚か／決めません
(A vaporeon / Is it a dog or a fish? / I cannot decide)

Note how the numbers of syllables in the English translation match the numbers of morae in the original Japanese text.

Robusto

21:05

@DannyuNDos I've never heard of a "vaporeon" but the subject of that sentence is shawaazu. Shawaazu wa / inu ka sakana ka / kimemasen is how it goes.

Dannyu NDos

Yeah, 5/7/5, they both are.

Robusto

So what is a "vaporeon"?

Dannyu NDos

A Pokémon, the Water-typed eeveelution.

Robusto

So why do they call it shawaazu in katakana, indicating that that is the foreign word they're relating?

Dannyu NDos

It's Japanization of the English word "showers".

Robusto

21:13

Haha, I'd never have guessed that.

Whenever I see katakana I shudder inside. Their Japanization of English words is the hardest thing about Japanese for me.

jlliagre

#WhenTaken #308 (31.12.2024)

I scored 915/1000👑

1️⃣📍302 m - 🗓️0 yrs - 🥇200/200
2️⃣📍9.0 km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥇198/200
3️⃣📍2.4 km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥇198/200
4️⃣📍600 km - 🗓️5 yrs - 🥇177/200
5️⃣📍2.5K km - 🗓️3 yrs - 🥈142/200

https://whentaken.com
Striking start but I couldn't keep up.

HippoSawrUs

21:43

Happy New Year's Eve

How about 'clutching their pearl clutch and storming out'

That happened in every old movie…ever

Only insane people clutch their pearl necklace they're wearing

'Oh, the indignity!'

You know what's really insulting

Pretending a virus is a conspiracy to keep Social Security solvent

And I'm out

Wishing all a Happy New Year!

Robusto

22:00

@jlliagre Oh right. I was 200 points behind you. They had to have TWO African refugee shots, didn't they? ;-)

@tchrist The point of that insult is emasculation. So it doesn't have quite the same resonance if it's bowdlerized to something else that doesn't attack the target's manhood. Cf. the US Marines' use of "ladies" to put recruits in their place, etc.

jlliagre

Connections
Puzzle #569
🟪🟨🟩🟨
🟨🟨🟩🟨
🟦🟪🟦🟦
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟨🟩🟨

Robusto

Good effort.

jlliagre

22:17

@Robusto Yes, even with the solution, I'm not convinced. Two "greens" could have been in the yellow category imho. Vivement l'année prochaine !

Tightrope, a daily trivia game | Britannica

Dec. 31, 2024

T I G H T R O P E
✅ 💔 ✅ ✅ ✅ 💔 ✅ ✅ 💔 🤕

My Score: 1170

Robusto

@jlliagre Whoa, there, cowboy. I'm worried that 2025 is going to be way worse than 2024. I could be wrong, though; a fucking miracle could happen and Trump and Musk could suddenly just ... I don't know, disappear? ... but I doubt it.

jlliagre

Wordle 1,291 4/6

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@Robusto We can't slow down time anyway (well OK, we kind of can do it with gravity/speed but that won't help). At least 2025 isn't expected to be a boring, eventless year.

Robusto

@jlliagre Politically speaking, what's wrong with boredom?

jlliagre

22:35

@Robusto It prevents people from being motivated to follow it?

Wordle 1,291 4/6

⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟨🟨⬛⬛
🟩🟨⬛⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Daily Sequence Octordle #1072
4️⃣5️⃣
7️⃣8️⃣
9️⃣🔟
🕚🕛
Score: 66
Daily Sequence Octordle #1072
4️⃣5️⃣
7️⃣8️⃣
9️⃣🔟
🕚🕛
Score: 66

Mitch

22:52

@HippoSawrUs I'm pretty sure cutching them is the thing to do if you're concerned the thread might snap and pearls fly all over the lawn.

Xanne

Connections
Puzzle #569
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟨🟩🟨
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟪

Mitch

True story, I spent a good 1/2 hour looking for pearls or whatever on a necklace that had 'slipped'. Who knows how many were lost in the grass? But that was only the start of the evening which changed all our lives for ever. No champagne was involved, well at least that I was aware of, but there was at least one visit the emergency room and one call to the police, who ended up not coming until everybody had run off.

@jlliagre Uh, actually, all the people on board the ISS are a couple seconds beyond behind us month on board due to relativistic speeds.

@HippoSawrUs spits tea all over keyboard

CowperKettle

23:19

In laughter, the letter 'L' comes first, and other letters come aughter it.

Transcript for

English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…