The Reading Room

Tsundoku

12:33 AM

Ah, the hats are gone now. The leaderboard is still online. For now.

bobble

I'm back to just being a hat

Tsundoku

So it's always Winter Bash for you ;-)

According to this site's leaderboard, "720 users from this site have earned a total of 1,296 hats!"

Tsundoku

1:46 AM

This one interpreted one of the hats as diapers:

Rand al'Thor

7:04 AM

@bobble Congrats!

verbose

7:19 AM

@Tsundoku I got 9/10. I couldn't understand the last question ... nor the answers. (I have never learned German)

@GarethRees I thought the Shire was New Zealand?

Also, writing this answer some days ago reminded me of something I've always wondered about. Did Patrick Henry mean "gimme liberty xor gimme death", or was he relying on short-circuiting behavior of operands ("liberty || death")?

bool liberty, death;
death = 1;
liberty = countryFree? 1 : 0;
return liberty ? liberty : death;

This of course assumes (correctly) that countryFree is an ext variable

Wait that won't work, it would always return 1. Ah well. Politics is hard.

It would work with one small change: liberty = countryFree? 0 : 1; assuming the calling function treated a 1 return as death.

Bookworm

9:16 AM

0

Q: What does Silverweed's poem signify?

Richard Adams's novel Watership Down has a memorable episode in a warren full of big, healthy rabbits ("Cowslip's warren") who are kept in good shape by a man leaving food for them, have many strange un-rabbitty habits (carrying food in their mouths, storing it underground, making pictures, havin...

Rand al'Thor

@Gallifreyan What's the current status of the One Minute Reviews Tumblr page? You and Mith are the admins, right?

This meta is seriously out of date (pinging Hamlet to contribute?), and maybe we should close it as a duplicate of this newer meta from @Mithical, but I don't know if that one's out of date too.

Maybe we can close the older one as a dupe and tag the newer one as faq. But I also want to create a new meta with a list of existing posts in that Tumblr feed, and I'm not sure if that should be separate from "how to contribute" or if they should all be rolled into one.

verbose

Hey @Tsundoku when used in English, Künstlerroman the first letter isn't always capitalized? In White's monograph, for example, she uses it uncapitalized.

@Randal'Thor roll it all into one, yo. it's tedious (for example, with the topic challenges) to navigate multiple meta questions to gather info re: one single thing. (the topic challenge question is super long, so I can see a rationale for splitting it)

Rand al'Thor

9:31 AM

We could hijack Mith's meta to include a list of posts too. Or I can simply cannibalise my existing answer there: remove its current content, replace by a list of posts in the Tumblr feed, and make it community wiki so everyone can edit easily.

verbose

Both those are good options. I'd lean slightly in favor of the latter because an overlong answer can always be split if needed ("here are the posts from 2017–2022"; "here are the posts from 2022–present") while splitting a question would require more editing. But I'm just thinking out loud, not formulating a definite opinion

Rand al'Thor

Yep, you're right. We can take a lesson from SFF where there's a separate answer for each year's worth of blog posts. It might be optimistic to hope that Lit's list will get long enough to need splitting, but hey, let's be optimistic :-)

Mithical

9:56 AM

I'd say just post a new answer to the question.

And yes, AFAIK Gall and I have admin access.

Rand al'Thor

10:08 AM

@Mithical Too late, I already edited my answer :-P It's slightly dodgy since the votes weren't for that content, but I don't think anyone will complain that a list of the posts so far gets a few "free" upvotes.

Gallifreyan

10:51 AM

@Randal'Thor I checked now, me and Mith are the admins

I just realised I could prolly set up a proper Ghost blog instance for our blog as well

But that'll have to wait until I've got more reliable hosting

Domains seem available

verbose

@Randal'Thor Meta upvotes don't count toward rep, right? I thought they were all community owned. So I don't think anybody would accuse you of being dodgy

Rand al'Thor

Yeah, there's no rep on per-site metas.

(main meta does have rep, for some reason)

Tsundoku

11:50 AM

@verbose Of course I know that English nouns are not capitalised (as a rule). But when discussing the term's etymology, I think the terms "Künstler", "Roman" and "Künstlerroman" should be capitalised.

@verbose Shouldn't that be liberty == countryFree ? ... ? With a single equals sign, you get an assignment instead of a test.

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku For students, an assignment and a test might be the same thing ;-)

Tsundoku

Those students ...

@verbose That's also what I thought, until I wrote an answer on SO Meta that got 35 upvotes and and a 10-rep gain... (At least that what the trigger looked like at the time.)

verbose

12:09 PM

@Tsundoku But I am assigning. liberty is declared as a bool with no defined value in the function. It's being assigned the value of the ext variable countryFree.

I suppose one could do a test instead of assigning; it would have the same effect. That wasn't my thinking when I wrote the code, though

No, wait, one couldn't. Because it would crash. liberty is undefined, i.e., it has no value. So a comparison would fail. There's no defined value to compare countryFree to.

True enough, except ... I wasn't testing at all? I was assigning.

Oh you mean the ternary is a test.

Anyway, the code is ridiculous because either it always returns 1, or it assumes that countryFree would be a zero if the country is free, which is absurd, given that bool values are 0 == false, 1 == true.

The more important question I had, y'all are ignoring:

5 hours ago, by verbose

Also, writing this answer some days ago reminded me of something I've always wondered about. Did Patrick Henry mean "gimme liberty xor gimme death", or was he relying on short-circuiting behavior of operands ("liberty || death")?

Oh well, I'm off to bed. My answer to the question I'm currently working on will have to wait until tomorrow.

Happy Twelfth Night, everybody! Don't forget to put on your cross-gartered yellow stockings! And enjoy your twelve drummers drumming, your twenty-two pipers piping, your thirty-three lords a-leaping, etc.

3

verbose

12:33 PM

*thirty lords a-leaping. Too sleepy to get it right the first time

whom am I kidding, I'm not sleepy, 'tis the fact that I just polished off my first bottle of wine of the new year. (a very good Pinot Noir)

Tsundoku

@verbose A former colleague of mine liked Pinot Noir so much he named a piece of software after it.

Bookworm

4:39 PM

0

Q: 1955 in Otro poema de los dones by Jorge Luis Borges

In the poem, "Otro poema de los dones" by Jorge Luis Borges, there is a line in which reference to 1955. Borges being Argentine, refers to the military coup to unseat President Juan Perón of Argentina? Or what is the reference? Original version: Por ciertas vísperas y días de 1955, English versi...

spanish-literature jorge-luis-borges

Bookworm

5:04 PM

0

Q: What does Albert Camus mean with "they remembered pleasure"?

In his novel The Plague, Albert Camus wrote among others: So everyone comes down into the streets, they deafen each other with talk, argue or lust after one another - and the town, under the red July sky, filled with couples and noise, drifts towards breathless night. (...) In the beginning, whe...

french-literature albert-camus the-plague

Rand al'Thor

8:48 PM

Users with the most Necromancer and Revival badges combined, out of a total of 500 on Literature - unsurprisingly, @GarethRees is way out in front with 73, followed by me with 46, Tsundoku with 42, verbose with 26, Peter Shor with 13, and Matt Thrower with 9. (Data.SE is updated weekly, so numbers may be slightly out of date.)

Rand al'Thor

9:04 PM

@Tsundoku Congratulations, your avatar was featured on the Winter Bash wrap-up blog post.

bobble

I have 3! Haha! That's only 70 less than Gareth.

Rand al'Thor

9:37 PM

Congratulations @MattThrower on your first tag badge here :-)

Tsundoku

9:55 PM

@Randal'Thor Nice :-) I suppose it was the contrast between the placid stony face and the carnival mask that did it. (I also went on an editing spree and earned that hat on 33 sites.)

In the Winter Bash 2016-2017 wrap up, Language Learning SE got a special mention for unlocking "Just Here for the Hat" with just two users. Unfortunately, LLSE has gotten too quiet in recent year to pull off that sort of tricks.

In good news: we may get a yearly moderations statistics post later this month.

Bookworm

10:15 PM

0

Q: What inspired the “lava-lymph” in Elizabeth Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”?

In book V of Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the narrator asks herself what she expects to achieve in her poetry: Shall I hope To speak my poems in mysterious tune With man and nature,—with the lava-lymph That trickles from successive ...

poetry inspiration elizabeth-barrett-browning aurora-leigh

Tsundoku

10:35 PM

@Bookworm While browsing my copy of La Peste I found a newspaper cutting from October 2000 about a researcher, Matt Keeling from Cambridge University, who had created a mathematical model to explain the recurrence of epidemics. Based on that model, he said that hunting and killing rats during a plague epidemic probably speeds up the spread of the disease.

See Metapopulation dynamics of bubonic plague by Keeling & Gilligan (Nature, 2000).

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