English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Dannyu NDos

01:38

Travel prohibition to the Nord-Kivu province of DR Congo.

Cerberus

Not a fun time for people there.

Robusto

01:53

@DannyuNDos Shit, I was going to take the family for a vacation ...

CowperKettle

02:13

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look! Aw shucks, there's Trump.

Vikas

03:35

SW-51 Mustang in Utah // High Speed FPV

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Michael Rybkin

09:51

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

1. Turns out it wasn't the pipes. The water was just off.
2. Do you have evidence that it was him who did it?
3. Seems like India is having a breakthrough in massage technology.
4. Upon visitng Spain, I bought myself anti-tanning cream because the sun was scorching.
5. Tradition has it that when you visit Russia, you get yourself an ushanka hat.
6. This is the place where real work gets done!

tchrist

12:48

@MichaelRybkin I don't think I've ever heard of "anti-tanning cream". We normally just call it sunscreen these days, and don't usually mention cream or lotion after it, either.

It used to be called "suntan lotion", but that didn't necessarily protect you at all.

Sometimes it's called "sunblock".

Xanne

13:58

Strands #347
“It's in the cards”
🔵🔵🟡🔵
🔵💡🔵🔵

Connections
Puzzle #613
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟪🟪🟪🟪

GratefulDisciple

14:26

Cool archaeological find: Londinium's first Roman basilica dating from 70-80 AD! in a good state of preservation (Dailymail article can be trusted with pictures) buried under 85 Gracechurch street in Cheapside (the section of London derided by Jane Austen snob character Caroline Bingley, see article about it).

@Cerberus Yeah, unfortunately the target audience seems to be those who watch popular American movies, TV series, and songs. I wouldn't have guess it until the reveal reminds me of it, and purple never heard of it either. But today's Connections is very easy:

Connections
Puzzle #613
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪

@alphabet I'm glad that Claudia Sheinbaum handles TCG very well by not playing the courting game like other leaders and keeping a cool head by not pushing him into a corner (we know invariably what's gonna happen). And on the Gulf name issue, she countered with "América Mexicana", a defensible name in a Mexico founding document from 1814, rather than out of someone's whim.

Robusto

15:12

#travle #792 +0 (Perfect)
✅✅✅✅✅
https://travle.earth

#WhenTaken #352 (13.02.2025)

I scored 539/1000🎗️

1️⃣📍2.1K km - 🗓️10 yrs - 🥈134/200
2️⃣📍9.4K km - 🗓️23 yrs - 🥉45/200
3️⃣📍256 km - 🗓️2 yrs - 🥇189/200
4️⃣📍8.9K km - 🗓️26 yrs - 🥉35/200
5️⃣📍2.3K km - 🗓️8 yrs - 🥈136/200

https://whentaken.com

Wordle 1,335 4/6

🟨⬛⬛⬛🟨
⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛
🟩🟩⬛🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Mitch

@MichaelRybkin "Do you have evidence that it was he who did it?"

'he' is more natural (and also follows the grammatical rules for nominative case). I might use 'him' because it matches my informal way of speaking, but most English speakers would use 'he'.

Robusto

@Mitch Most? Really?

CowperKettle

Hyphenated, non-hyphenated. Oh the irony.

Robusto

Connections
Puzzle #613
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟪

Strands #347
“It's in the cards”
🔵🔵🔵🟡
🔵🔵🔵

Robusto

15:36

Daily Octordle #1116
🕚🔟
9️⃣4️⃣
6️⃣5️⃣
8️⃣7️⃣
Score: 60

Daily Sequence Octordle #1116
4️⃣7️⃣
8️⃣9️⃣
🔟🕚
🕛🕐
Score: 74

Daily Extreme Octordle #1116
9️⃣🔟
🕚🕛
3️⃣5️⃣
6️⃣8️⃣
Score: 64

MetaEd

Wordle 1,335 4/6

🟨🟨⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟨⬛🟨⬛
🟩🟩⬛🟨⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

@Cerberus yeah this was tricky for me

MetaEd

15:49

Strands #347
“It's in the cards”
🟡🔵🔵🔵
🔵🔵🔵

Connections
Puzzle #613
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨

perfect game!

Mitch

16:16

@Robusto That's my impression. But your questioning it makes me doubt. What do you think?

MetaEd

@Mitch It's a matter of register. Informally many people will say "him".

Mitch

16:49

@MetaEd Yes, I pointed that out exactly that in my first reply.

Robusto

@MetaEd And a lot of people never speak formally at all. Perhaps most. Not in our circles, perhaps, but somebody elected Trump.

Mitch

@Robusto apropos of that...

Osti de crisse de tabarnak avec paroles

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MetaEd

@Robusto reddit.com/r/self/comments/1gouvit/…

Mitch

@jlliagre Does that sound bad to you? It sounds so... nice to me.

Robusto

@MetaEd Are you saying we should view social networks a lot less? How is this a rebuttal to my point?

@Mitch OK, now you're just gaslighting me.

Mitch

16:58

@MetaEd books.google.com/ngrams/…

(which of course is only writing, but still)

@Robusto Dude, there's nothing wrong with the lights. Maybe you should lie down.

But then there's also that movie with Bette Davis where she really -is- sick and she thinks the lights are going down but they're not and her friend starts crying.

MetaEd

@Robusto It's not a rebuttal

@Mitch might also be interesting to compare AME and BRE charts of the same thing

Robusto

@MetaEd OK, then I don't get the relevance.

MetaEd

@Robusto this person suggests that Trump was elected, in part, through this kind of election interference

Mitch

@MetaEd American English:

British English:

MetaEd

wow, I would have imagined the opposite

Mitch

17:04

I don't know what to imagine anymore.

I let ChatGPT do all that for me now.

MetaEd

wtf happened to the queen's english. oh that's right, the queen is dead, long live crappy english

Robusto

@MetaEd I still don't understand why you think it applies to me. But whatever.

@MetaEd Which is "correct"? "Let him/he who is without sin cast the first stone"?

Mitch

Some things I just can't reconcile:

1) Holy crap, it's already February?

2) It's been ten years since a week ago

3) it's only been 5 years since 1994

4) 1995 feels like it's 5 years in the future to me

Robusto

@Mitch I meant my second comment for you, not Ed.

MetaEd

@Robusto you seem to be seeing attempts to argue a point, where I'm making conversation. Not sure why

Mitch

17:33

@Robusto Sure.

Robusto

> Two things I hate: 1. The status quo 2. Change

GratefulDisciple

Correction to my message above. It came out wrong. I meant to say "Dailymail article can be trusted to provide pictures". I didn't mean to endorse a tabloid to be trustworthy.

Mitch

@GratefulDisciple I'll just say what I think you're thinking (and what I think)... the Daily Mail is trash.

Robusto

@Mitch My daily mail is mostly ads, solicitations, and bills. I never get love letters anymore, and I suppose that's a good thing.

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch It's a tabloid just like The Sun; no way I trust the implicit editorial narrative, but when it comes to reporting on accidents, terrorism, acts of God, you cannot beat them. And celebrity news, I just ignore. It just happens sometimes they bring science / archeological discovery news to the top (headlines), but like that famous James ossuary we also need to source what the experts say themselves.

@Robusto Ever consider an AI agent to be your secretary for emails? I wonder whether there is a service like this, upgraded with GPT-like model.

At work, a consulting team is using app.read.ai, which automatically seems to provide not only transcript, but also a meeting report consisting of Summary, Chapters & Topics, Action Items for attendees, Highlights, Key Questions, Participation Score (engagement, sentiment, charisma, bias), keywords, percentages of how much someone speaks, video snippets from the meeting, etc. Quite scary if people rely on AI to unthinkingly accept the "narrative" of the meeting.

Robusto

18:00

@GratefulDisciple I wouldn't trust it. Would you?

MetaEd

Daily Mail is one of the news sources I always try to filter out of any news feed.

GratefulDisciple

@Robusto My fear is for executives to trust it. As for me, I have my independent judgement, similar to accepting its work for translation and transcript (which is known to mess up when the terms require subject matter expert). I have a feeling that humans will need to compete with AI agents like that, that the survivors would be humans (like us here in the chatroom) that are used to think for ourselves.

@MetaEd I only go there when I am baited by a headline from a news aggregator, based on the topics I'm interested in which I visit "on demand". I don't use news feed since I want to steward my stream of consciousness in a healthy way.

Robusto

@GratefulDisciple Look, if I accidentally deleted an important email that I later needed (+30 days later), I'd blame myself. If some AI deleted an important email that I later needed ... I'd blame myself.

GratefulDisciple

@Robusto In a sense, wouldn't Gmail's automatic "Spam", "Forum" and "Promotional" filters already doing that? In Office 365, Outlook also provide a UI for separating "Focused" from "Other" emails that we can influence from our feedback to individual emails. So I think as long as the AI agent don't delete them permanently and has a good feedback feature to complement its model, I would be okay with this, just need to remind myself to check the emails set aside by the AI agent periodically.

Robusto

@GratefulDisciple There are worse things AI can do with my emails than delete them. I already know Google is spying on me, but that's kind of a given in this day and age. But I see AI "help" as a whole new level of spying on me.

GratefulDisciple

18:13

@Robusto Yeah... that's a critical point to be sure, that Google (under orders from a political dictator) can weaponize AI analysis of a citizen's emails to serve "actionable items" like FBI investigation! Orwellian in the works (shudder). Maybe I need to go back to possessing my own email server.

Robusto

@GratefulDisciple Or you could use something like Proton mail for privacy on important matters.

GratefulDisciple

One way to STILL use an AI agent whose provenance I control from its very inception (such as the generation of its model, fully hosted in my own server, etc.). So this AI agent fully works FOR ME and no-one else. Unfortunately, given the cloud service IT model, it's becoming harder and harder to not use services. Even using Google speech recognition can potentially generate unwanted log similar to Google tracking my search history.

@Robusto I can disclose that I have nothing to hide from a legally sanctioned spy; NSA can listen in my phone calls or scour my emails and files for all I care. But this presumed the authority of a competent human who respects natural law freedoms sanctioned by the Christian view of man. A Christian conscience should not fear an understanding of God who (if Ps 139 to be trusted) "spies" on everything we think and do.

CowperKettle

18:41

> By using AI to interpret MEG signals while participants typed sentences, researchers were able to pinpoint the precise moments when thoughts are converted into words, syllables, and individual letters. techspot.com/news/…

Mitch

@GratefulDisciple 1) there's no fully autonomous AI agent yet to 'handle' your email box for you

GratefulDisciple

@CowperKettle That's a cool finding that actually also bolster my trust in Thomistic analysis of human nature, in this case about how the active intellect (however it is implemented) abstracts from the phantasms recorded by passive intellect (from bodily senses) into some kind of non-verbal understanding which then becomes the true location of someone's perception of a truth before being encoded into words.

Mitch

2) there are many companies working on making that for you right now, small ones and big ones (eg Google)

3) you could probably cobble together one with existing tools right now.

4) They will suck terribly at first, and for a lot of the sucking, you won't notice because you won't see the effects it has on people who are emailing you.

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch Maybe by using GPT service as an API in your own programs that also use an API of an email program.

@Mitch I wouldn't worry about this, because I don't let AI agent to write my email (yet). At most I let it generate a draft. The use case I'm imagining is secretarial, i.e. prioritizing, summarizing, grouping. Or being a more intelligent dictation agent that suggests things to you throughout the writing process.

Mitch

5) an spam detector works perfectly great for getting rid of unwanted emails (Google's works pretty good for me... I don't think I've ever seen spam in my inbox, and only rarely do I have to check the spam filter for false negatives (or is it positives?) the one's I actually do want to see.

@CowperKettle 1) nice paper 2) it really shows how -little- we know about the brain (and here specifically language processing)

Interesting that it is using writing as the object of study, rather than speech.

@GratefulDisciple Rarely do I find the lookahead suggestion useful. And that's just the next word or so.

I find it hard to imagine letting it do an entire email.

But I'm old.

MetaEd

18:58

I'm old enough to remember Clippy

GratefulDisciple

@MetaEd You may be older than me, but I experienced Clippy too. Didn't help me at all, just appear cute and smiley.

Mitch

@Robusto It's like former East Germany with their arcane and massive filing system of notes on individuals and their proclivities and distastes and random things overheard, 1/6 of the population being 'information gatherers (ie snitches) and in the spring of 1990 after the fall of the wall and the communist government and they opened up the files so that anybody could see what had been gathered on them...

... and you take a day off of work to access what had been gathered and you go to one bureau and get sent to the next and then to the attic for the index and then to the basement for the file itself, and after row after row of shelves and finding a step ladder or two to reach...

... and you finally pull down your own file and you get a flimsy manila folder with only your driver's license picture (of all things, not a bad one considering) and an obituary notice of a distant relative, and stamped on the outside in big red ink is 'Mostly Harmless'

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch I felt that the next generation AI agent will combine the best of both AI techniques: expert system forming a better level of understanding of your email history and your "bibliography" (citations that you are most likely use), and generative AI model trained on the literary style of your writing as well as incorporating what other people usually write given the same situation you are in.

Mitch

@GratefulDisciple You shouldn't be scared that you've committed a crime and they'll find out, it's that you should be scared that you -haven't- committed a crime and you're accused of one via this online information, and you have no recourse or proof otherwise.

@GratefulDisciple 'best' doesn't mean 'good'

Yes, companies will create things that attempt to do these tasks marginally acceptably well, but they will be crappy.

GratefulDisciple

19:15

@Mitch Yes, that's exactly what I'm scared about. That either a clueless AI-agent powered human misunderstands me, or under-orders to misrepresent me and forming less-than-whole depiction of me that (to a judge) can make me appear to be guilty. As opposed to God-like knowledge of the whole me as Ps 139:1-12 seems to claim.

BTW, v.4 is totally consistent with the paper: "Before a word is on my tongue, you know all about it, LORD".

tchrist

@MetaEd And Pong. And CP/M.

MetaEd

@GratefulDisciple If I believed in God, that would be, I don't even have a word for it. Not just terrifying. Whatever you would feel if you were kidnapped and chained to a bed for years with a camera on you constantly, never knowing if your tormentor was watching.

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch Completely agree with you there. There is something irreducibly human that no AI agent can ever do, even someone who has Stasi-level dossier on me.

@MetaEd Of course, but the Psalmist assume that his God is a good God who wants the best for you, not a tormentor. And a Christian philosopher turns this into a "feature": God who mind reads you to sympathize and in solidarity with your innermost being.

MetaEd

@tchrist Epoch for the Apple II. Or should I write Apple ][

GratefulDisciple

@MetaEd First time I used Apple it was already a Macintosh, and I need to learn how to do assembly programming and debugging on it.

MetaEd

19:21

@GratefulDisciple if I was terrified of my captor, I would probably pay a million compliments to try to stay on his good side ;)

GratefulDisciple

@MetaEd That's unfortunately the bane of bad religions making people to do child sacrifice and stuff.

@MetaEd I think this is the debugger I used in class. They even have a marketable name for it: MacsBug!

MetaEd

@GratefulDisciple I grew up with the story of Abraham and Isaac. Even "child-friendly" treatments of that story were icky. As an adult I am terrified with Abraham.

@GratefulDisciple I never got to use that.

CowperKettle

19:37

Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus

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Michael Rybkin

@tchrist Thank you very much.

@Mitch Thank you very much.

Robusto

@Mitch Yeah, but up until then everyone had to fear what was in that folder.

GratefulDisciple

@MetaEd Yeah, maybe since when Kierkegaard made a big deal of it, the Binding of Isaac has become one of the biggest issues in Christian apologetics. Of course my dad immediately brought this issue up when I was trying to update him on newer readings of Genesis from psychological and literary point of views:

1) Psychological. Abraham was playing a "game of chicken" with God trusting, that God will not follow through since earlier (Gen 17) He promised that Isaac WILL be the one through whom his descendants came, so Abraham played along knowing that this is just a test. 2) Literary. This story was the basis of a law against child sacrifice since in OT writings stories also serves as the narrative and etiological context of a law.

But yes, I can relate that it has some icky-ness. I heard jokes about how Isaac became traumatized that he wouldn't leave his locality, even his dad's servant needs to find a wife for him.

Although when we read the story itself (Gen 22) there are a LOT that is not told. Maybe Abraham told Isaac to play along. And there is nothing like the dramatic moment that paintings sometimes show, v. 10 simply says "Then Abraham reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son."

MetaEd

19:58

@GratefulDisciple Reminds me of that bon mot attributed to Steven Weinberg. "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion."

GratefulDisciple

@MetaEd I agree with him to some extent, but I don't want to overgeneralize: there are good and bad religions. Bad religion makes people do horrible things but good religion makes people to be saint, with most good people are in the middle. I disagree with Luther than non-believers cannot be good. And yes, Christianity itself has a checkered history, but when one evaluates the teaching in its best representation, there is value in it to help people to flourish.

Mitch

20:13

@Robusto Frankly, a lot of mostly harmless people had thick folders because people are jerks.

Mostly jealousy by informers.

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch I wonder whether the informers were named. If so, they have more to fear!

Mitch

@GratefulDisciple Good point. In some sense, you don't want to have unnecessary retributive backlash against informers.

Robusto

Also, "mostly" harmless suggests worth keeping an eye on.

Mitch

Except I'm sure if I had found that my life had been changed for the worse by an informer (a neighbor, a disgruntled relative) that I'd have unhappy thoughts about them.

@Robusto I was going for litotes.

damning with faint praise.

they're totally harmless but maybe just maybe they'll show some spirit that we'll have to cut down.

frankly most people who are not in the 'mostly harmless' category are mostly harmless.

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch I wonder whether they redacted the informers' names before giving the dossier back to the subject being spied on.

Mitch

20:19

sure there are guys manufacturing ammo in their basement late at night and supplying cells with them, but that is mostly rare.

@GratefulDisciple I can't remember from what I've read about it if that is the case.

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch Is manufacturing ammo for personal use common? Like people making their own beer? I wouldn't manufacture my own bullets. It can literally backfire on me when I use it unless I'm a trained ammo maker.

Mitch

It's been thirty years. I can't imagine anybody thinking now "Hey, I wonder if anybody said anything bad about me when I was 8 years old! I should try and find out who that is.'

@GratefulDisciple I have no idea. It's a thing I saw in a movie once. Presumably the author of the screenplay wasn't making it up out of whole cloth, but then also, I don't think it's a common thing.

It's easier to buy from a manufacturer.

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch I would be upset if I know the informer is spreading libelous rumors on me, but if Stasi didn't injure me, I suppose I can forgive them although I would be very watchful for future libels that ex-informer may do to me.

Mitch

@GratefulDisciple ONce the apocalypse happens, we'll only have ourselves to do such things... which is the doomsdayer way. If you think things will fall apart, maybe you'll plan ahead for that kind of nefarious behavior.

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch I see. So they can be tagged as a prepper.

Robusto

20:47

@Mitch My point is, if they were seeing "mostly harmless" in their file it would not exactly be a clean bill of ... what, health? Loyalty?

Mitch

@GratefulDisciple 'anti-tanning lotion' -i don't know what tagged means here but making your own ammo does hint at being a pepper.

Robusto

Republicans LIE for the Camera and Crockett Sets Them Straight | “Dems Walk It Like They Talk It"

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Mitch

@Robusto I was going for the Douglas Adams hit to the ego that no you're not that important.

Robusto

I'm just waiting ...

till ...

Mitch

Oh?

Robusto

20:50

the concrete sets ...

or cures ...

or whatever ...

to list this interesting retort.

Mitch

that...?

Robusto

Dr. Pepper - "I'm a Pepper" TV Commercial 70's

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Mitch

@Robusto yes I can't edit

But thank you for noticing

Robusto

snarf

Mitch

cringes

Robusto

20:52

What, you didn't know Dr. Pepper was hoarding ammo and food and all?

@Mitch I think that secretly you're a pepper too.

GratefulDisciple

21:06

@Mitch I do love your free-association mind (tagging -> tanning), but yes, I meant "hint" (bad choice of word on my part).

MetaEd

@GratefulDisciple I think more importantly there are dangerous specific religious beliefs. For example the belief that doubt = unending hell fire. People who believe this do terrible things to protect their children from doubt. Terrible things to their children, and terrible things to other people who might put doubt in the minds of their children.

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch And maybe you hinted that Preppers love to drink Dr. Pepper? Maybe they manufacture their own Dr. Pepper :-) ?

Mitch

@Robusto not a real doctor

MetaEd

Because who wouldn't do anything to keep their children from unending hell fire.

Mitch

@GratefulDisciple sometimes I free associate, sometimes I have to pay for it.

Usually it's just a mistake. I blame auto correct -and- my lack of attention and poor eyesight in a small screen.

@MetaEd the whole 'hellfire' stuff is just parents trying to get their kids to stop doing stupid things.

Also rush people trying to get poor people in line.

GratefulDisciple

21:14

@MetaEd Yes, fear is the worst motivator to subscribe a religion. Love for God properly understood as The Ultimate Lover should be the primary motivator. The association of Christianity with "unending hell fire" is well deserved but I personally (along with many Christians) understand "hell" in this sense.

To your second point, I acknowledge that this is a problem with Christians who don't trust scholarship and reason to have enough ammo for their children to construct their own Christian worldview, by unproductively insulating them in a protective echo chamber. This is sad.

Robusto

@Mitch What? But it says he is right there on the can!

Mitch

@Robusto oh. My bad. Credentials right there for all to view.

Robusto

Right?

Mitch

@GratefulDisciple so you're saying that Christianity hints at being soul-preppers.

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch Yes :-) Without qualification. But what I pointed out in my second point is the bad way a lot of Christians do it.

Mitch

21:16

@Robusto accredited by the Coca-Cola company

Robusto

@Mitch You can't acknowledge a higher authority than that.

Mitch

Soul Prepper will be the name of my Christian punk-jazz band

A trio of bass, theremin and castanets

GratefulDisciple

@Mitch Nice combination: you got a bass line, a melody with an ethereal sounding instrument, and rhythm with castanets (maybe coupled with human voice mimicking drum sound).

Mitch

@Robusto if it doesn't also clean your car engine than what else can you trust?

@GratefulDisciple sure, if that's how you really want to play them

Robusto

@Mitch The theremin melody would sound something like this:

Forbidden Planet (1956) | MAIN TITLES

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GratefulDisciple

21:23

@Robusto The good 'ol days before electric instruments ruin music. Seeing "Cinemascope" and "Photographed in Eastman Color" would have hinted at "advanced technology".

Robusto

Hehe.

MetaEd

@Robusto omg Leslie Nielsen? THAT Leslie Nielsen?

Robusto

@MetaEd Yup.

MetaEd

@Robusto I've never seen Forbidden Planet -- now I have a good reason to :D

I mean I know it from RHPS

Robusto

@MetaEd It scared the shit out of me when my dad took us to see it.

GratefulDisciple

21:29

@MetaEd Didn't know he was born in Canada. In Regina no less, what Canadians nicknamed "the armpit of Canada" (don't know why).

Robusto

@GratefulDisciple Because they were too polite to call it "Vagina" ...

MetaEd

uh

Robusto

Apropos of that:
A. Name three streets in Chicago that rhyme with "vagina" ...
B. Uh, let's see ... Regina ... Paulina ... and Lunt!

GratefulDisciple

@Robusto I thought it was red-neck association, your word reminds me of The Vagina Monologues...

Robusto

@GratefulDisciple Hey, it's not my word. In fact, it was in the dictionary long before I was born.

MetaEd

21:34

calling a place the vagina of Canada should be a nice compliment

Robusto

@MetaEd Depends on your point of view.

GratefulDisciple

@Robusto You made me look up the history of the naming. You could made Princess Louise upset; it's meant as the latin for "queen" (see here).

Robusto

@GratefulDisciple Oh, I know where it comes from.

GratefulDisciple

@Robusto I thought you would.

Robusto

Specifically, Queen Victoria.

GratefulDisciple

21:37

@Robusto No comment :-)

Robusto

Probably because "Victoria" was already taken by the city in British Columbia.

GratefulDisciple

@Robusto It tells you that "G" rating means nothing. Anyway Nielsen said of the movie:

> Supposedly a science-fiction version of Shakespeare's The Tempest, it was all about the id, or something like that. Who knows? The Trekkies today regard it as the forerunner of Star Trek. I just had to wear a tight uniform and make eyes at Anne Francis. I was pretty thin back then."

MetaEd

@Robusto True. People do repurpose words as slurs against women, homosexuals, brown people, and other outgroups, by making them synonyms for "bad", "evil", "less than", "gross", "stupid".

Laurel

@MetaEd Canada is the land of beavers :p

Robusto

21:53

@MetaEd Well, "vagina" is hardly a slur, and I was not suggesting that it was.

jlliagre

22:08

@Mitch It sounds fine to my ears. Most if not all Québec swear words are just unexceptional French vocabulary, not at all rude.

Mitch

22:19

@jlliagre very churchy I suspect? like overhearing a priest.

Supposedly in Québec that would all be unutterable excpet in maybe gangsta rap (if that is indeed a thing in Montréal)

@Robusto nice

tchrist

@Robusto heolster

Mitch

@GratefulDisciple I don't think that that reminding is special to the word 'vagina'.

wait...I'm not 17 where all words remind me of 'vagina'

what I'm saying is...

dang

jlliagre

@Mitch Yes, church vocabulary.

Mitch

what I'm saying is that all words remind you of that word.

it makes sense in math.

for all x such that x is a word, it is the case that x reminds you of x

in other words, the 'remind' relation is reflexive.

tchrist

@Mitch Or 7 of Butt.

Mitch

22:25

There, I've squeezed out all the fun out of vaginas..

Xanne

We had four earthquakes here,

Mitch

clears throat

I mean the word.

tchrist

Which always beats 4 of Poop.

Mitch

cripes

Xanne

I felt the last one, half an hour ago

Mitch

22:26

@Robusto As queens go, she seemed all right.

tchrist

@Xanne Temblor?

Mitch

@MetaEd I remember when I was 6 years old and my older brother must have been mean to me and I went out to woods out back and started listing off all the swear words I could about him (Mom had said swearing was bad so I had to hide my temper) and the list went 'stupid,...

and that was it.

Xanne

Si, temblor

Mitch

That's what maturity really is, being able to express ones emotions with a larger vocabulary.

Xanne

just one back and forth, not sustained; a mere 3.0

Mitch

22:30

@tchrist exactly

@Xanne You can feel a 3.0? do the dishes rattle? or is like a truck going by but takes forever to do it? or is it like a funny queasy feeling?

MetaEd

@Robusto Right you are. Calling Regina, Saskatchewan "Vagina" on the grounds that Regina is the stinky armpit of Canada would be a slur though.

Robusto

@MetaEd Ya know, it was just me being silly. Sorry if I offended you.

MetaEd

We could call it Tabarnak.

Mitch

Calling someone a 'slur' though would just be weird.

Xanne

Southern California is in mudslide season (earthquake, fire, mudslide riot = four seasons)

Mitch

22:33

@MetaEd That has a very reverent ring to it.

Robusto

What about construction? In Chicago, there are two seasons: winter and road construction.

Mitch

@Xanne do you count yourself there? or just adjacent?

MetaEd

Musical Symbols (Unicode block)

Musical Symbols is a Unicode block containing characters for representing modern musical notation. Fonts that support it include Bravura, Euterpe, FreeSerif, Musica and Symbola. The Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL), which is supported by the MusicXML format, expands on the Musical Symbols Unicode Block's 220 glyphs by using the Private Use Area in the Basic Multilingual Plane, permitting close to 2600 glyphs. == Block == == History == The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Musical Symbols block: == See also == An...

@Mitch inorite?

Xanne

@Mitch I’m in Northern California.

MetaEd

time to get on the freeway

Xanne

22:36

The mudslides are on the news.

Mitch

@MetaEd please educate me... for a given font, like say Arial, do they have to design an Arial character for -every- unicode code point? how does that work?

Also @tchrist

@Xanne At least you don't have hurricanes or tornadoes?

Robusto

@Mitch There is only one basic set of musical symbols. I mean, you can't do Copperplate or Bodoni Bold or whatever. If you start getting hinky with the standard notation, suddenly sight-reading is just that much harder.

Mitch

@Robusto It would seem like an inordinate amount of work to create a new font and then have the font police tell you you're not finished you also have to make your font work with Thai and Cherokee.

Xanne

@Mitch No hutticanes or tornadoes here.

Mitch

In music's defense, there is only one 'font' for music anyway, right?

Xanne

22:41

hurricanes that is. But my cell’s bars are very poor.

Mitch

@Xanne Also it hardly ever rains? which I suppose is sort of a problem with respect to the fire thing.

Robusto

@Mitch They have different styles of Japanese text, but many fewer than exist in English or other Western languages.

Mitch

@Robusto That's what I was wondering. Like I've heard that there are fonts for Hebrew, but they are entirely orthogonal to the Latin alphabet ones.

and having to do a new one for kanji would be daunting.

again hard enough for ~26 characters.

Xanne

@Mitch We are having rain now; so is SoCal, thus mudslides. We have also had frost alerts here, near San Francisco. And “atmospheric rivers”, I think they call them.

Actually our reservoirs are all okay now. No drought.

Robusto

@Mitch There are variations, but I don't remember the names. There's a basic one that looks like standard printing, then a sans-serif, then a sharpish-looking serif, then one that's rounded and tubular-looking, kinda "Comic Sans" for Japanese, but that's about it.

I always use the basic meat-and-potatoes one, because for me that's the easiest to read.

Mitch

22:50

@Xanne oh...yeah... atmospheric rivers coming to California was in the national news last weekend that it was coming.

national as in the undifferentiated commercial weather news supplied by the Weather Channel

Robusto

Plus you can't go wrong with meat and potatoes. Unless everyone's a vegan who's going to read your work, maybe then you use Kale or what were you doing trying to write Japanese to a bunch of vegans anyway?

Mitch

@Robusto from a cursory google search, a font -can- design for any subset of the full unicode code points, but they don't have to. I found a lot of free fonts that have Hebrew and Cyrillic and Greek in addition to Latin.

but no confirmation that something like Arial or Helvetica do that. Google doesn't tell you the immediate obvious thing I want to know.

@Robusto do it in soy?

jlliagre

#WhenTaken #352 (13.02.2025)

I scored 688/1000🎗️

1️⃣📍493 km - 🗓️13 yrs - 🥈161/200
2️⃣📍1.5K km - 🗓️1 yrs - 🥈159/200
3️⃣📍193 km - 🗓️8 yrs - 🥇182/200
4️⃣📍6.6K km - 🗓️26 yrs - 🥉44/200
5️⃣📍2.4K km - 🗓️4 yrs - 🥈142/200

https://whentaken.com

Robusto

@Mitch What about wagyu [和牛]?

Xanne

@Mitch A small quake just feels like the building goes back and forth once. Not enough to rattle dishes. Usually there’s no damage.

Robusto

23:00

@jlliagre This one was terrible for me.

jlliagre

@Robusto And has a date mismatch. Spoiler

Robusto

@jlliagre That's what I thought! Glad I'm not alone.

jlliagre

We guessed the same year.

Robusto

Ha.

Cerberus

@jlliagre OK playing now.

I'm surprised you got the first one wrong.

I have picked a place yet.

So that must mean...

I am playing yesterday's, like you, the 13th.

jlliagre

23:06

@Cerberus Make sure your clock is set to Thursday.

Cerberus

No, I just used the archive function.

jlliagre

Ah, okay.

Cerberus

OK I knew it had to be wrong based on your numbers, but I tried it anyway.

@jlliagre By the way, do you use the hints system?

jlliagre

I don't.

Cerberus

OK.

jlliagre

23:17

> The “cost” of the hint is twofold: 1. with the exception of the first hint, you must watch a rewarded ad 2. in your share text, we will show a light bulb💡 for each hint you use. This lets other know you had help and allows purists to delight in their light-bulb free score sharing.

I'm a purist :-)

Cerberus

Ahh OK.

@jlliagre How did you get this one?

Robusto

@jlliagre What kind of hints? I don't think I've seen that in WhenTaken. I know there are hints in the Strands that do the lightbulb thing, but not in WT.

Cerberus

~~SPOILER~~

jlliagre

@Cerberus I didn't get it. I was actually 1500 km from it but I hesitated between the right place and the one I wrongly picked.

Cerberus

Ohh those stupid Ks mislead me, sorry.

jlliagre

23:27

I could have been right though.

Cerberus

Why on Earth would he use "K km" there.

Anyway.

How could you possibly have picked the right place?

Or do you mean, the right country?

jlliagre

@Cerberus Spoiler

Cerberus

@jlliagre ~~SPOILER~~

jlliagre

I did.

Cerberus

Cool.

Meanwhile, I think I have found number 3 exactly.

Well, the city.

Not yet the church.

jlliagre

23:40

@Cerberus Spoiler

Cerberus

@jlliagre The exact right spot or the right country?

I think the latter.

jlliagre

Yes.

Cerberus

Right.

I still can't find the church.

Even though I have the tram line.

But tram lines are poorly indicated in Apple's maps.

Found it!

Hmm I could have been more praecise.

jlliagre

Ha ha

Mitch

@Robusto Isn't that beef?

jlliagre

23:49

@Cerberus How did you get the city?

Cerberus

@jlliagre How I normally get them?

jlliagre

#3 one.

Cerberus

I consider what cities are likely candidates, and try to find e.g. tram line destinations, specific churches, streets and such.

In this case, I first looked in two other cities, but it didn't look as though those could be it.

In the third city, I found the destination of the tram line.

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