The Reading Room

12:05 AM

Mathematics has a surprisingly low answered percentage.

@Alex oh?

I'd have thought they'd be near 100%.

Doesn't everything have an objective answer?

Or are the users there so advanced that they're asking all the world's greatest unsolved math problems?

getting an answer requires
- the question to *have* an answer
- someone to *know* that answer
- that someone to *see* the question
- that someone to *care* enough to post an answer

(and yes, I planned for no Markdown)

@Alex I guess it's our fault for keeping our resident mathemagicians @Randal'Thor and @b_jonas busy here instead of letting them focus on their real passion.

Dear goodness, look at the number of accounts this spammer has to promote their company! stackexchange.com/users/20806306/pdnconstruction?tab=accounts (profile-only spam, I think)

12:15 AM

@verbose The least you could do is provide Randal with a math question here like I did.

Which of course he answered without any math.

@Alex maybe if you'd asked one about differential topology instead of arithmetic

@Alex m lemme think on that

I actually have another math question I could ask here.

But the answer is almost certainly that the author was being imprecise, so probably not worth posting.

@Alex why not let the mathematicians be the judge of that?

I don’t think they could come up with an explanation for pi = 3.

h'm maybe the Indiana Pi Bill, which sought by legislative fiat to set the value of pi to 3.2, had something to do with it

12:32 AM

@verbose Nearly 30 years after the book I’m talking about.

@Alex maybe the bill was a reaction to the book?

@bobble same for j-k-rowling and robert-galbraith in that @Tsundoku answer

@verbose I guess it's easier to outlaw the math used in a book than to ban the book itself.

12:56 AM

Someone just upvoted my age discrepancy question, which I have to assume is from the conversation above. For the record, though, that wasn't the math question I was referring to.

1:22 AM

@Alex That was I. I had not read it before that I recall. I had read the medication dosage question, which I assume is the math question.

@verbose Yes, that's the one.

b_jonas

@verbose No, it's because mathematics SE is mostly boring homework questions so nobody likes to write answers there.

Q: What is the "a-" in "a-flying" and "a getting" in Robert Herrick's poem?

1:38 AM

@b_jonas ah

6 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

7:52 AM

@Alex No, the advanced users are on Math Overflow.

1 hour later…

Bookworm

8:54 AM

Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to day, To morrow will be dying. The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun, The higher he's a getting; The sooner will his Race be run, And neerer he's to Setting. What is with this a- in a...

poetry

9:33 AM

@verbose That has been fixed :-)

Cool

Whoa, I mean Tomasz Jedrowski actually stopping by to answer a question about SitD when we had so many from Pasta Lover ....

@verbose It might be the author or someone impersonating the author. How are we to know?

@Tsundoku yeah it's not like this is twitter and they have blue checks or anything

9:53 AM

but like the guy and his grandpa in that Christmas carol, I believe

2 hours later…

b_jonas

11:28 AM

@Randal'Thor We're on both. And all the smaller SEs too.

Rand al'Thor

12:01 PM

@verbose Wow!

I wonder if he's noticed that he's one of the most asked-about authors on this site ...

Maybe he noticed this site before due to all the questions about his book, and only bothered posting when he saw a question he found more interesting.

Not to detract from Skooba's nice evidence-based answer which I also upvoted.

4 hours later…

4:18 PM

Gargantua and Pantagruel translated by M. A. Screech, with Gustave Doré's illustrations, published by the Folio Society. At £545.00, it's real bargain :-P

4:32 PM

In May last year, Christie's sold a 1556 edition of some of Rabelais's works (Gargantua, Pantagruel, Prognostication Pantagrueline) for 22,500 €.

Rand al'Thor

4:44 PM

in Twitter Control Room, 16 mins ago, by Rand al'Thor

Why was Marie so sure that Meursault would be acquitted? To solve a question on a novel of #AlbertCamus, indigochild and Tsundoku go deeply into the legal history of colonised Algeria: https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14114/17?stw=2 #lEtranger #theStranger #AlgerianHistory

279 characters :-)

It's a good thing Twitter changed the 140-character limit.

5:15 PM

@Bookworm This question has been a-getting upvotes and is now HNQ.

2 hours later…

Q: Poem-parody about O'Hare airport, written as though it were the Odyssey

7:10 PM

I suggested an edit, then almost regretted it because it would mess up my nice round number. Oh well. Maybe leave it in the queue for a bit :P

Bookworm

I'm trying to find a poem that I'm relatively certainly was published in The New Yorker. I think I read it around 10 years ago, but definitely a margin of error of a couple of years on either side of that. It was paired with a cartoon illustration of a man with a suitcase that I think might have ...

poetry identification-request

1 hour later…

8:39 PM

@Randal'Thor oh I dunno, the question about why Beniek undergoes 1st communion prep is in some ways more interesting than the one TJ chose to answer

@Tsundoku so when does your copy arrive?

@verbose Haha. It's a translation of a French text, so I'm not buying it.

Q: Which of Rick Riordan's books is next?

Oh boy, interesting choice of question to highlight when all of the US is on tenterhooks about the Derek Chauvin verdict. Please reconsider?

Bookworm

I have a friend who wants to read the mythology books in order. I know that it's the Percy Jackson series, then Heroes of Olympus, then Trials of Apollo. Is the Kane chronicles next or Magnus Chase?

reading-order rick-riordan

@Bookworm This looks like another duplicate of an older reading order question.

3 hours later…

11:24 PM

character-analysis? literature.stackexchange.com/q/3384/11259

@Tsundoku chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/1037?m=57666006#57666006

@Randal'Thor I'd think some would spill over.

@bobble I don't think so? Because I guess I think of character analysis as having to do more with personality than age, though I agree that the latter influences the former. But I'll defer to what others think.

@bobble yes, I think it does

You already said yes to that second one :)

But I'm not sure what work tag the dear doku would want to use

though also having separate tags for anne-frank and diary-thereof seems redundant

NAA?

11:30 PM

@bobble yes, naa

@bobble ah

11:50 PM

@bobble I have added a work tag now.

if the mods would care, I'd be happy to round up the user ID numbers of profile spammers here :) nice mindless thing to do when I have a few minutes free

@bobble I wouldn't add character-analysis to a question about a character's age. (Unless that question also asks about the character's psychology.)

@bobble Well, Shakespeare was definitely a contemporary of Shakespeare ;-)

also, should not the tsundoku be asleep?

@bobble "If the mods would care"? I destroyed a number of spammers across the three sites I moderate today.

@bobble i was just wondering that meself