English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

CowperKettle

02:22

Looks bad

CowperKettle

03:06

T̸o̵d̵a̵y̶ ̴w̵i̸l̵l̷ ̸b̵e̷ ̴a̷ ̸s̴u̶n̶n̸y̷ ̶d̷a̷y̸.̴

> In the small town of Odintsovo in the Moscow region, an old lady contacted the police to make a complaint about her grandson's poor performance in Counter-Strike. She accused the server admin of somehow handicapping her grandson's play.

znak.com/2021-04-17/…

CowperKettle

06:15

CowperKettle

07:55

+10°С

CowperKettle

08:07

There are still mounds of snow here and there

CowperKettle

09:47

Железнодорожное купе в доме (оригинал видео)

►

A guy made a room in his house that looks like a train compartment

CowperKettle

09:58

I would love to ride in such a coach.

I bet the beds are much bigger there.

Since there is no need for a large corridor that would allow lugging all your luggage to your own compartment, the corridor could be made tiny - just enough for a single person to slid along.

And I would make all gages wider to allow for more space. The Indian gage is the widest in the world, I'm curious whether coaches are more luxurious there (I mean the hi-end ones).

CowperKettle

10:29

@M.A.R. This is good! I used to walk at least an hour a day, but I sadly lost that habit. It helped me memorize hundreds of poems. It's impossible to memorize them while jogging.

Something's wrong with my GI system. I feel heavy in the stomach and weak. Going to the doctor now to understand what's wrong. Will have another ultrasound scan on Tuesday.

The doc says it's 'chronic pancreatitis', but that's just a commonly used garbage-bin diagnosis in Russia. If you have just anything strange with your GI tract function, it's "chronic pancreatitis".

Maybe I'll try to find a better doctor. Maybe I should spend my own cash on a CT or MRI scan of the GI tract, or on some blood tests, but I know near to nothing about gastroenterology.

In Russia, doctors have a very bad habit of coming up with a diagnosis even when they don't know what's wrong with you. They use a set of "garbage-bin" diagnoses. If you have spells of dizziness, some neurological symptoms, then it's Vegetative-vascular dystonia (VVD). Which basically is not a diagnosis, just a mumbo-jumbo Soviet term for a concoction of symptoms varying in presentation.

A VVD may be a heart disease, a nerve disease, an infammatory disease, and very often it's depression or stress-related reaction or anxiety disorder.

But since it is too cumbersome to actually go forth and diagnose the exact cause, the doctor just writes VVD, and prescribes some vitamins and some drugs with unproven efficacy that are not used anywhere in the world besides the former USSR states.

And hopes that the patient will get better by himself, or at least will get lost.

CowperKettle

11:45

Ozhidaniye = expectation

Realnost' = reality

CowperKettle

12:17

M.A.R.

12:40

@CowperKettle yeesh

It's one of those things that hurts so bad you feel the heat

@CowperKettle Hmm, I think that's more or less common everywhere. It's easy to understand where they're coming from, but it's unscientific and hurts people's trust in them

CowperKettle

Wow, he was forced to leave the university. That's very bad.

That's hipocrisy. Any normal male has visited porn sites, besides a very rare saint.

They should just laughed a bit and leave him be.

CowperKettle

13:26

Citizens of Voronezh, a Russian town close to the Ukrainian border, complain of heavy howitzer training performed in the night by the troops that Putin accumulated near the city.

Robusto

13:49

@RegDwigнt: I had a funny dream last night. I was playing in an orchestra, in Pittsburgh of all places, and there was a guest conductor who looked kind of like Leonard Bernstein. And the orchestra started treating him like a substitute teacher in junior high. The oboist, sitting next to me, started playing "Shave and a Haircut" at the end of every movement. The conductor asked him why he was doing that, and he replied, "That's my signature tune, man." (snickers and laughs from the orchestra)

Then the trombone section started doing it, using slide gliesses and mutes for the wah-wah effect at the "two bits" finish. And soon all was laughter and merriment.

In case you aren't familiar:

Shave and a Haircut

"Shave and a Haircut" and the associated response "two bits" is a 7-note musical call-and-response couplet, riff or fanfare popularly used at the end of a musical performance, usually for comic effect. It is used both melodically and rhythmically, for example as a door knock. "Two bits" is an archaism in the United States for 25 cents; a quarter. "Six bits" is occasionally used. The final words may also be "get lost", "drop dead" (in Australia), or some other facetious expression. In the UK, it was often said as "five bob" (slang for five shillings), although words are now rarely used to accompany...

Maybe I'm going stir crazy.

btw, "gliesses" should be "glisses" above.

M.A.R.

@CowperKettle Yeah

Robusto

@M.A.R. Are you getting good virus distribution yet?

M.A.R.

@Robusto second dose in a few days

Robusto

Nice.

CowperKettle

Here, there is at last a lot of vaccine doses available.

Robusto

14:00

Good news.

M.A.R.

They haven't even contacted me about it, but they said they would, sooo

CowperKettle

100 thousand citizens of Yekaterinburg have had at least one shot thus far, out of 1.5 mn.

Robusto

I just got contacted for the Moderna vaccine but I've already had the Janssen, so ...

CowperKettle

I would have all possible vaccines, just to make sure.

Robusto

heh

I don't want to take someone else's chance.

CowperKettle

14:01

If some Western vaccine's are certified in Russia, I'll get a shot.

Robusto

Maybe later on, when everyone who's had a shot is satisfied.

M.A.R.

@CowperKettle That sounds pretty redundant and kinda inconsiderate

CowperKettle

If some Western vaccines are certified in Russia, I'll get a shot.

M.A.R.

I mean, vaccinated people profit way more from more vaccinated people than extra 5G bandwidth

CowperKettle

@M.A.R. I mean I would have a second vaccine by buying it, not via the free distribution.

I should force my parents to vaccinate first.

Single dose of Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID vaccine shown to be more immunogenic than natural infection

But it's a preliminary publication.

Robusto

14:08

They're all preliminary.

We're actually doing the testing in vivo.

CowperKettle

14:27

nods

Cerberus

15:48

@Robusto Hmm odd, how could that happen?

Robusto

@Cerberus Poor record-keeping? I don't know.

Cerberus

I suppose your country has vaccines aplenty, so they are trying to vaccinate everyone as fast as possible.

Robusto

That's certainly true.

Biden is a man on a mission.

Cerberus

16:09

This is only part of total exports.

washingtonpost.com/world/europe/covid-vaccines-eu-export/2021/…

> Overall, 77 million doses have been [exported] from the European Union since early December, 88 million will have been distributed internally by the end of the week, and 62 million shots have been administered within the bloc, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.

While Europe has exported more than 20 million doses to Britain — no longer an E.U member — the bloc has so far sent fewer than 16 million doses to Germany, which is more populous.

Britain has exported no vaccine doses back to the European Union, according to E.U. officials.

So we are not in that position of luxury here.

If we had acted like America and allowed no exports, or, better, like Britain, receiving massive imports without allowing any exports, we'd be in a much better position now. However, many of our vaccines exports have been to Covax, the programme to distribute vaccines amongst poor countries (I praesume for free).

> Still, some vaccine makers like Germany's CureVac say they are facing challenges in boosting production in Europe.

One of the company's founders, Florian von der Mülbe, told German newspaper Rheinische Post in an interview published on Wednesday that global supply chains for making COVID-19 vaccines have been disrupted by US restrictions, creating problems for companies seeking to build up production in Europe.

dw.com/en/covid-eu-pulls-out-all-stops-to-boost-vaccine-rollout/…

CowperKettle

How do you personally pronounce route? /ɹuːt/, /ɹaʊt/?

Cerberus

I spell it route.

Pronounced as in French.

> The chief executive of Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest maker of vaccines and a critical supplier of the U.N.-backed COVAX facility, asked President Joe Biden on Twitter to lift the U.S. embargo on exporting raw materials needed to make the jabs.

Vaccine makers and experts in India have been concerned that the use of the Defense Production Act by the U.S. to boost it own vaccine production was resulting in exports of critical raw materials being stopped. This was hobbling vaccine production in other parts of the world.

apnews.com/article/…

CowperKettle

16:26

I was just watching a video by VOX and noticed that the narrator pronounced it as /ɹaʊt/

At 2:12

Cerberus

Yes, that is unfortunately not uncommon.

But it should really be pronounced the French way.

RegDwigнt

@Robusto as long as it isn't The Lick, it's not an insane yume to have.

Tom Hughes

@CowperKettle I don't know if this is correct, but I always distinguish between route rhyming with 'root' (meaning, a path from one place to another') and route rhyming with 'trout' used as a verb, meaning to send something along a specific path, as in "I will route this package via Singapore."

RegDwigнt

For a while I experimented with ending all my pieces in the same signature turn. That I stole from Koji Kondo, of all people. It's quite fun.

Cerberus

@TomHughes Hmm odd!

Mitch

16:34

@CowperKettle The second way, /ɹaʊt/.

Some people in the US say /ɹuːt/ but that always sounds weird to me like maybe some kind of dialect of grew up in a weird part of the US.

@TomHughes Yes. For me some highways are naturally pronounced with /ɹuːt/, Like 'Route 66'. But also for me, the generic noun for a path is pronounced /ɹaʊt/

CowperKettle

I like "root" better, but I come across "raut" now and then. ("the breakout forces' supply raut)

Wiktionary says that Australians pronounce it as /ɹʉːt/

I've now idea how that is different.

Mitch

17:10

@CowperKettle Whenever I hear Australian, it sounds to me like they're triphthonging or tetraphthongizing vowels. 'mouse' -> /mieows/

or just 'no' -> 'nieow'

CowperKettle

17:38

Cross-hatched letter of 1837, Massachusetts, USA.

Cerberus

Why not.

CowperKettle

17:54

The brain uses the same trick to distinguish freshly-received signals from those encoded in memory: orthogonal coding

It rotates the representation by 90 degrees and stores it that way.

> Some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. New work shows how the brain rotates those representations to prevent interference.

CowperKettle

18:07

I can hardly imagine an infant approaching 40 kg.

So I changed it to "young children" in Russian.

The Okhrana in the Russian Czarist times used to do all kinds of dirty jobs. Proud to see that Putin's FSB and GRU are walking in the same steps.

But unlike Okhrana, they did not manage to compose The Protocols of the Elders of Zion yet.

Cerberus

18:37

It's not entirely clear to me, from the article, what they really mean by "orthogonal". I get the feeling it's an analogy.

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