Zompist Bboard Again

If you like pretty fractals, I've just created three videos of zooms in the Mandelbrot set. I made a Youtube channel for them. This took incredibly long to render, I had to use cloud computing (which wasn't free)... Hope you enjoy them!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw_uOA ... JOg_uRcHwQ

Well, this sort of suburb also exists, of course: entire blocks of high-rise council houses, largely populated by immigrants (mostly from the Maghreb), and notorious for being poverty traps. The French word "banlieue" covers both.

Random question that just occurred to me: What are your relations to city, suburban, and rural environments? I grew up in a suburb: to be precise, one of the "New Towns" planned by the French government in the 1960s. So, the typical cookie-cutter suburb without any local identity. And whe...

Meanwhile, I've only learned that China is once again trying to sever other countries' relations with Taiwan, and planning a military takeover. Indeed, between the general COVID mess and an uneasy election in the US, now would be the perfect time.

I guess vaccines are a victim of their own success. Some diseases used to be inevitable, but thanks to vaccines, they have nearly disappeared... so people forget about them, or no longer see them as a threat, and no longer see the points of vaccines. I think France was more aggressive than most coun...

Archives as */'ɑːrtʃɪvz/ instead of /'ɑːrkaɪvz/. I think I learned the correct pronunciation in Batman Begins.

According to this: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1324085761449304067 , there's not much risk. The mutations may make the virus more contagious for minks , but not for humans. Given the number of cases in humans, if a simple mutation could make the virus more contagious to humans, it wou...

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Wed Oct 28, 2020 5:31 amOn the other hand, we should also add the West Germanic (Frankish) superstratum in French.

Yeah. For instance, there is a regular correspondence between French words in g- and Germanic words in w-: gage/wage, garde/ward, guerre/war, gaufre/waffle, Guillaume/William, Galles/Wales

Ares Land wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 6:26 pm
Another cool bit is seeing the Romans as the evil empire. (Those centurions sure give off a great Darth Vader vibe).

Nul ne peut bafouer l'Empire romain.

(*) Unpopular opinion: About the one good thing that could be said about it is that it helped spread democratic ideas. Other than that, it took a century before we got a stable democracy, and pretty much everything that actually got done during the Revolution was a step backwards. It also gave us t...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 7:08 pm I personally do use X-SAMPA, but as input to an X-SAMPA to IPA converter.

I do something similar, but with the code used for a LaTeX package called TIPA (it's similar to SAMPA but not compatible).

IANANS, so I just use the pronunciation implied by the spelling in my target accent, [ˈhɐndɹəd]. Maybe the first vowel can be a schwa if I'm speaking quickly. There may be some affrication on the first /d/.

I've heard some Americans say something like [ˈhɜnɚd] (hunnerd).

I knew about the card/cord merger, but not that it applied before intervocalic /r/.

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Wed Oct 21, 2020 1:53 pm EDIT3: Okay, how about calling it the sparring-sorry merger? This should be good.

Even better: we could call it the sari / sorry merger, for a perfect minimal pair.

I've noticed that Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr both use /ɔː/ in sorry . I guess their native NY accent has /ɑː/ in horrible, orange etc, they switched to /ɔː/ instead to sound more GenAm, and ended up hypercorrecting. So Americans' sorry /ˈsɑɹi/, tomorrow /-ˈmɑɹoʊ/, borrow /ˈbɑɹoʊ/, horri...

What Ares Land said. Keep in mind that in the majority of trials, the facts are not under dispute, only the penalty . Yes, you bothered an aardvark, and everybody knows it (you may want to deny it at first, but your lawyer tells you there's no point, as the evidence is airtight). The question is how...

From the New York Times via Twitter:
Most Patients' Covid-19 Care Bears Little Resemblance to Trump's

Wait, what do the Care Bears have to do with the pandemic??

The other thing is that my novel is coming along very well, but I'm not sure that the working title I have for it, which I REALLY like ( The Runaway God ), is the best fit anymore. I have another decent title option ( The Discarded Worlds ) but it's not as evocative as the original title. Mark Rose...

I did mention its use as a verb.

Now that you mention it, I may have heard "Bernie stan" before, but didn't make the connection.

Word of the day for me: a stan, meaning an obsessive fan of something (particularly a music genre or artist). Related: to stan, to obsessively follow something. It comes from the song "Stan" by Eminem. Considering how the song ends, this is pretty terrifying.