English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room - 2019-01-01

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12:11 AM

@SJ A typo, perhaps?

For "differ"?

@Cerberus I have not made the typo but perhaps the source material did

That would be my guess.

@Cerberus maybe if I provide more context that would be helpful?

0

Q: Pluralization bug in reported badges on Spanish and Portuguese Stack Overflow sites

It looks like you have a localization bug on the Badges pages on the fully localized versions of Stack Overflow. You’ve matched the gender but not the number, so your concord is wrong: you aren’t accounting for singular versus plural badge counts. Portuguese badges error: Too f...

bug badges localization plurals

Context always helps.

2

12:12 AM

I swear, if computers cannot count, what good are they?

2

@Cerberus The text is listing in bullet point form the key concepts of design defects. The fist bullet point says "The defect did not occur in the manufacturing process, but rather in the design process". The second bullet point is "Product does not defer from its design". The third bullet point is "Rather than just a few examples of the product being defective; the whole product line is defective". The last bullet point is "The design is usually readily available".

@tchrist They can be used as stools?

@Cerberus I think a computer would make a very uncomfortable stool.

@SJ Well, that list is rather vague. It doesn't seem very structured. So I'd say anything goes. And I can't think of anything other than "differ".

Although I'd say "deviate" would have been better.

Happy New Year @Cerberus!

12:19 AM

You, too!

12:57 AM

> Where do you want this shot?

1. Right over here where the light is better.
2. Straight through the attic windowpane.
3. In my right arm since I’m left-handed.
4. Right in front of me next to the chaser.

1:15 AM

Looks like the Luddites are back.

Quelle surprise.

That's how you say "Get off my lawn" in Arizona, where there are no lawns.

Haven't read the Times yet today.

Tempus fugit like an arrow but bunnies fugit like there’s no tomorrow.

Funny, I can't remember the Latin for "Fear lent wings to his feet" from the Aeneid.

@Cerberus: Surely you know ^^^

It’s in Book Eight.

1:30 AM

Was looking for a side-by-side translation, but none appeared.

I used to know this, though. Sucks that I can't recall it now.

Meanwhile, we're getting more snow here this week than we've gotten in the past three years combined.

"This week" including last Thursday/Friday.

Timor addidit alas pedibus.

I'm going to go to Tucson in two weeks and spend a week riding the Pima County Loop and environs. Maybe do some hiking.

@tchrist Thanks.

The start of the line runs Illicit fugit ocior Euro, que petit speluncam;

Notice how alas remains the same word in Spanish.

Sí

El ala blanca, though, the way those things work.

The Aeneid also uses penna to mean wing. You’d have to ask @Cerberus whether ala and penna are completely synonymous, though. I don't know.

1:38 AM

Just out of curiosity, what are the waffles for?

I don't know.

I didn't get waffles. I should have gotten waffles because I like them.

Are you in our polar vortex backwash?

Dunno, but we're in someone's backwash.

Heavy snow, around 0 degrees and up to 25 mph winds, so like 20 below wind chill in old money.

1:43 AM

Yours is colder. We have 3-5" predicted for tomorrow, but that's a lot for here. Plus we got about the same last Friday.

user image

They were calling for 1 to 7 inches.

I had to put my kids up at a hotel by the airport Thursday night, just so they'd be right there and we wouldn't get stuck taking them on Friday.

@Robusto and @tchrist I wish you both happy new year! =)

Not new to you, though, is it?

Well, it's way past midnight here.

1:48 AM

user image

It really never snows like this here. Except now.

I have never seen real snow.

But other than getting rain on my head, I did get bird droppings too.

So I think the weather forecast should include whether there will be birds too.

Now I know why people carry umbrellas when there is no rain.

I think we only got 3 or 4 inches, but it isn't equally distributed.

We had a hailstorm in July 2017 that put down more frozen precipitation than the surrounding winters did in total.

Now this ...

God, I am so freaking bored with ELU questions of late.

And that "responsive" design they just fobbed off on us? It's not at all responsive on my new iPad I got for Christmas. In fact, it's a joke.

I can't imagine anybody really believes that was a professional job.

I mean, don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining.

2:16 AM

@Robusto What do you mean, specifically?

Some pages’ containers resize a little, that’s all it does.

@tchrist It doesn't accommodate the page widths either in portrait or landscape orientation.

Or at least in some cases it doesn't. Like working the review queue.

2:35 AM

@Robusto latin.packhum.org/loc/690/3/7/10264-10276@1#7

Gracias.

Or should I say Gratias.

@tchrist A penna is also or perhaps originally a feather, whence pen.

I don't think an ala can be a single feather.

@Robusto Indeed!

2:52 AM

@Robusto Right, queue stuff isn't responsive.

@Cerberus Oh duh right, I knew that. penna is feather not wing.

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas (ft. Tori Kelly) - Jacob Collier

fears

Do you guys keep getting grammarly.com and wix.com ads on youtube vids?

@Robusto Sounds brilliant.

@tchrist Tell me if it is possible that the following person is singing all these various voices. I flat don't believe it.

"One Man Disney Movie" Nick Pitera - Disney Medley

I mean, I'd buy the tenor, but the mezzo?

Maybe it's possible. I dunno.

@Jasper Jacob Collier is an amazing talent.

@Robusto It is possible for a man to sing that in falsetto, I would say it is definitely possible.

3:06 AM

@Jasper Doesn't sound like falsetto, though. Sounds like chest voice.

OK, but listening to that video it doesn't sound unbelievable.

I also had male friends who sing like actual female sopranos.

You know, maybe I should make a video of me singing in female voice, lol.

Here's another:

Wicked Medley - Peter Hollens & Nick Pitera

But a woman just can't sing in male voice, though some women have extremely low voices that make them sound like extremely high pitched men.

So there will be some voices where you don't know if it is a man or a woman singing.

I recently read that Mariah Carey, my favourite pop singer, can sing 7 octaves because she has something in her throat she was born with.

Anyway, I don't know how true this is, but in one choir I was in, I noticed that most of the soprano boys becamse tenors when they broke their voices, while most of the altos became basses. Not all, but most.

3:55 AM

> How many men were ruined by context?
None! For context is aye a helping hand,
A shelf to lead them out of quickest sand,
An ax that one must grip with certain hand
And through the thickest thorn proceed unvexed.

4:23 AM

Any idea on how to word this phase better? Grammar?

"The global ripple of a translation towards another Gregorian New Year is moving through us and upon the following world! Welcome to the future, Welcome into 2019!"

?

4:40 AM

@Robusto Yes, certainly it’s possible. I confess I wasn’t all that terribly impressed with that singer’s technique. He doesn’t manage to switch into head voice with the sort of seamless control you get in professional singers like Casey Breves or Jody McBrayer. And I don’t know that I buy his lower register.

Gravity - Casey Breves live studio cover

4:56 AM

This is kinda nice: Casey is often singing the bottom harmony here. Performed November 16th, 2016; make of that what you will.

Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen Tribute) - Sam Tsui, Alex G, and Casey Breves | Sam Tsui

6 hours later…

11:11 AM

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in answer, offensive answer detected, potentially bad keyword in answer, toxic answer detected (247): Please check this topic for me by user330122 on english.SE

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in answer, offensive answer detected, potentially bad keyword in answer, toxic answer detected, blacklisted user (316): Please check this topic for me by user330122 on english.SE

1 hour later…

12:30 PM

@Mitch You're the second person I'm hearing that from. Apparently there's a myth that the winter solstice being the shortest day is a myth.

Either that or you are referring to some calendar complexities I'm unaware of. It could shift maybe one day (say, on Dec 20) but that's all.

user image

Look at this, times of sunset.

That's half of the story.

For where?

Holland, I presume.

Look, dawn and dusk are out of synch!

That explains it, then.

@Cerberus Yeap. I'm too familiar with that, having observed the opportune times of morning and evening prayers for a long time.

Ah, of course.

The ancient religions are centred around the celestial bodies and their periods.

12:40 PM

And to each their own celestial bodies.

Happy thingie urbi et orbi.

@Cerberus you don't say. Next up you'll tell us that's why September is not called November.

Pentium FDIV bug

The Pentium FDIV bug is a computer bug affecting the floating point unit (FPU) of the early Intel Pentium processors. Because of the bug, the processor might return incorrect binary floating point results when dividing a number. Discovered in 1994 by Professor Thomas R. Nicely at Lynchburg College, Intel attributed the error to missing entries in the lookup table used by the floating-point division circuitry.The severity of the FDIV bug is debated. Though rarely encountered by most users (Byte magazine estimated that 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce...

@tchrist What a beautiful rendition.

God damn. Makes me cry every time. Does that song ever lose its charm.

Hallelujah - How to Cover it Badly

That song loses its charm pretty much every single time someone sings it.

I refuse to click on that link.

@RegDwigнt There was a fair chance you knew all the details.

12:51 PM

@Færd it's a musical analysis.

I do not shitpost.

I'm too caught up in it right now to watch it dissected.

It does not dissect the song.

It dissects the people who don't understand it.

Okay fair enough then

People who think just because they like a tune, they can sing it.

Do you have a fave rendition of this song?

12:53 PM

Rufus Wainwright, obviously.

Or however you spell him.

Thanks. It was nice.

For me it is (or was) this:

Brandi Carlile Hallelujah

I have a fondness for the female voice. Generally.

Oh my. She sings "the fourth, the fifth" and then does not actually play the fifth.

It's a brilliant song. But that precisely is the issue. You can't just go ahead and sing it without so much as listening to your own words.

Right.

You have to know that Cohen was a poet. He wrote poems. This here was the only poem that he wrote that is actually a song.

Most people who sing it don't even know the name Cohen.

They just repeat after someone else, who repeated after someone else, who had already butchered the song.

They don't know who David is they are singing about. They do not understand what "the fifth" means. Or "major lift".

Hence my link to that video. It explains it all for people who don't even have 10 minutes to spare.

Then again there are those who understand all this but don't really tell you the story.

Accurate, but bland.

I enjoyed tchrist's version more than any other today. Whatever they understood or missed, I'm in no position to opine upon.

1:11 PM

Well it's not even so much that it's a loss to the listener. The point is really that it's a loss for the singer already. They are missing out. On something crucial about a thing that they like. Which would make them like it even more if only they knew.

Simple things can be deceptive like that. Their simplicity is obvious, but their complexity is not.

Paul Simon is a master of that.

In my suggested-videos sidebar right now there's one that says "DonMcLean, American Pie (good quality)". And the thumbnail shows Bob Dylan.

That's people's attention to detail right there.

2 hours later…

2:59 PM

@tchrist His high register sounds like head voice to me. Which is to be expected.

@RegDwigнt You could say the same thing about Dylan.

I actually think his Hallelujah is best when he does it, but it's pretty hard to mess up.

Now, let them try to play one of his other songs. Like this one:

Leonard Cohen The Stranger Song

But I will say Pentatonix can fuck up just about anything. Because they're about hair and posturing. Which is a bad start.

Tantacrul is right about the rise and fall, the line, but I really think it almost sings itself. What he's railing at is posturing, having to decorate where simplicity is called for.

"If you're subordinating the music to your technical skill, then you suck." Truer words were never spoken.

4:10 PM

Daniel Barenboim plays Beethoven Sonata No. 8 Op. 13 (Pathetique)

There's an example of a master making something new out of something old.

I'd never considered the notion of not letting the countermelody sing out its response in the B section of the first movement, but clearly that works. Its halting nature actually propels the music forward, contrary to what logic might dictate.

Did I say master? Absolute master is more like it.

His rubato seems so unexpectedly right where he uses it in the 2nd movement, too.

Sometimes you listen to an interpretation of a piece of music and you think, wow, that feels so idiosyncratic. And then you notice that the logic of it is inescapable. And that is mastery.

@Robusto I see what you mean.

This seems to be Music SE chat.

I have only heard Hallelujah on American Idol before today.

And sometimes Simon Cowell will say brilliant, sometimes he will say terrible.

But most of the time, I have no idea why he says that.

4:27 PM

@Jasper Really? It’s in all the better shopping malls.

Christmas Food Court Flash Mob, Hallelujah Chorus - Must See!

4:40 PM

Thoughty2, Bad Music & The Decline of the Pop Song - My Response

5:33 PM

@Færd Hm... yes, looking things up, it must be a myth that it is a myth. Or rather the shortest say must be the day before, of, or after the day that the solstice (a point event) occurs on.

Maybe I was thinking of the latest sunrise/earliest sunset, which is, from @Cerberus's chart obviously not tightly linked to the solstice and is probably an artifact of clock correspondence with astronomical events ('shortest' is not dependent on the clock numbers).

@Mitch There is a regression in the day around solstice times (well, all the time, but most noticeable at the solstices). If the earth travels approx. one degree in its orbit (actual value: 360/365.25) then each day it has to rotate about one additional degree to "catch up" with the current position of the sun relative to the orbit. Hilarity ensues. Also questions about why the times move the way they do.

1 hour later…

6:48 PM

@tchrist If you want someone who knows how to count, find an orchestral percussionist. All they ever seem to do is count measures.

7:33 PM

@Robusto What I’ve never understood is the professional percussionist’s almost freakish ability to have each of their two hands evenly beat out two different and “relatively prime” numbers of notes per beat/bar against each other. And I don’t mean 2 against 3 or even 3 against 4 either; those two ratios are easy compared to the actual demonstrations of this ability that I’ve been present to witness for myself.

7:43 PM

The only explanation I’ve thought of is that they’ve somehow rewritten their own wetware through long years of highly specialized training in a discipline that can require and produce a Rain Man type of superpower that to the rest of us seems like it must actually be some sneaky sort of sleight-of-hand or -mind illusion from a sly prestigitator’s bag of parlor tricks.

1 hour later…

8:51 PM

@tchrist It really is amazing. I don't understand it myself. Btw, good ones can do different voices in each limb, which is also astounding.

9:08 PM

tchrist has stopped a feed from being posted into this room

3 hours later…

11:41 PM

@Mitch Yes, exactly my thinking.

That is, until recently, I hadn't really thought about it and assumed that length of day correlated with time of sunset, but now I know better.

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Jan '191

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