@MrShinyandNew安宇 I think that's like saying "all Chinamen look the same to me"

@MrShinyandNew安宇 I know, that's very sad. @RegDwight added those characters at the end of his name right after I did it. And I can't complain because he is a demigod and demigods are meant to be able to do anything

@MeysamѬſ道 do those characters have any special meaning to9 you?

@FumbleFingers Yes, they mean that I am different

@MeysamѬſ道 you already said that in your profile. are they valid characters in a language you use?

@FumbleFingers No they aren't

I am not japanes neither chinese neither korean neither north korean neither south korian etc

@MeysamѬſ道 I don't even know if any of those languages share any characters at all

@FumbleFingers It's hard to tell. but my guess is they share nothing

I just typed them into google - take heart! - you are on the first page of results (last of 10, where all the preceding 9 are RegDwight!)

@FumbleFingers The weird thing is that the name of @RegDwight is before my name. It somehow shows that Google is showing the search result in descending order

@MeysamѬſ道 I think it's just that Reg posts more, so he's more indexed

@FumbleFingers And that shows how easily we can fool Google's search engine by posting something everyday (no matter how meaningful or helpful it is)

@MeysamѬſ道 And when did you add those characters to your name?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Right before @RegDwight did it.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 He's being ironical, in case you haven't noticed .. You're supposed to laugh out loud.

I'm off for a walk. good night

LOL

better?

or was that too forced? hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha cough

Much better.

enjoy your promenade, Meysam

@Gigili Gigli and giggle start with the same three letters. Also gigantism and gigabyte.

Hello, my friends, hello.

good morning!

did you miss me?

Yes, terribly.

How was your holiday?

it was nice

i ate wonderfully

That makes me feel hungry.

So good. Spent a lot of time with family?

Hey @JSB, do you know anything about data cubes?

no, unfortunately

are they like data tables, only more three-dimensional?

:) Yes, I think.

All of the stuff I have found seems to indicate that these are old tools, like early 2000s.

I need to handle a lot of data, and I thought that data cubes were the thing to use.

But I need to access the data using a web interface.

i know nothing about this. i am useless to you today.

And I don't know MDX (yet).

@JSBᾶngs OK, thanks. But you are not useless to me. It's nice just to have you here.

I suppose I ought to see if I can build a cube in the first place. This seems like a dreadful undertaking.

@Robusto Well, there are many words starting with the same three letters as "Robusto", would you like me to list all of them once and for all?

@Robusto also, his name is Gigili, with an extra i in it.

Oh God, I wish I could flag that message.

@Gigili my message? what's wrong with it?

You called Gigili him?

what's wrong with Gigili? He's perfectly nice.

@FumbleFingers tell that to the people who keep asking about the phrase on ELU.

@RegDwight hi, have any time for that translation?

I knew you would ask. :P

You are getting predictable.

I'll see. No promises. Must download the file first.

thinks about coffee

Bah. Addict.

@RegDwight ok but you already had a version of it ;-)

Addict. Addict.

See @KitFox, You said "only dogs beg" but this jez thingy is a counterexample.

I wonder if there could be someone more annoying than this user.

@RegDwightѬſ道 I just searched. I only see 2 Q's on "all are belong", and you closed one as a dup of the other. Anyway, I like the quirkiness of it!

@Gigili have you met Carlo?

Is he back?

dunno

But Gigili was wondering if there could be someone more annoying.

Carlo asks some very odd Q's

Hey @MrShiny, do you know anything about data cubes?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Oh you mean they're the same person?

@Gigili No. I mean Carlo is more annoying.

@KitFox no, not really.

@KitFox I suppose you mean "multidimensional" cubes.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Mind to reconsider?

@FumbleFingers Don't get me started.

I am feeling very irked right now. I should know how to do this stuff, and I don't even know what sorts of questions to ask.

I feel like an amateur.

@KitFox well you asked. I'll just say it's all about judicious choices of indexes, so you can get the slice views you want with reasonable response times.

Oh, I meant about using "multidimensional" with a noun that is by definition three-dimensional.

I have a pretty good theoretical notion of how it ought to work. It's putting it together that I can't seem to do.

@Gigili I don't really want to start trying to order the list of users by "most annoying to least annoying". I have a feeling that that road only leads to tears.

cries

@MrShiny thinks I'm the most annoying user.

@KitFox you can't hold a candle to Carlo!

What did he mean exactly? Should I cry my eyes out?

@FumbleFingers Well, I could, but he's so green he wouldn't burn.

@KitFox There's always Ron M too, but whereas I think C specifically tries to pose "awkward" Q's, with R it's an accidental by-product of the fact that he's a bit weird himself.

(the other difference of course being that R is a perfectly competent native speaker)

@Gigili wait, have you actually already sorted the users in that list?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 What else could I do? But I didn't expect to see that name on top of the list ...

Hello.

Hi.

How're the workplaces of our American ELUers?

makes grumpy face

The sheets are still on the line.

Aww.

Oh, Physics time! Bye.

Well, at least this way my computer isn't overheating.

Bye!

I was going to close this as gen-ref with extreme prejudice but then I clicked on that Google link... WTF.

Lots of confusion going on in the comments already. We might need a linguist to have a look or even post an answer, lest this turns into a train wreck. @JSBngs @nohat

@RegDwightѬſ道 I'm already backpedalling - I can't think of any grammatical principle saying it's wrong to use "are". All I know is native speakers never do this.

Well that's the thing.

Surely that is worth something, no?

Google books claims 7000 instances of "what are wrong with", but that's just because the individual words are common. Forced to deliver, it comes up with about a dozen, mostly apparently by non-native writers.

I haven't checked COCA or BNC just yet. It's a bit of a nuisance on this machine.

It certainly makes my brain go "No, you mean what is"

@MattЭллен I don't think anyone is going to seriously defend "what are wrong" - the question is why isn't it acceptable, given that in other contexts, "what" can be singular or plural.

Well I do see a 1-rep user getting rep from defending "what are wrong", even if indirectly.

In fact he's even added into the equation yet another sentence I would call ungrammatical.

> What is first thing...

good night

@RegDwightѬſ道 I considered voting "general reference", but I got fired up by seeing an upvote for angrychimp's lamentable answer. That's why I downvoted him and answered myself. I couldn't easily find authoritative sources to back up my position that "what" here is a "noncount pronoun", but that does it for me.