Zompist Bboard Again

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Mar 28, 2025 2:37 pmThe original question was about popular culture.

More specifically, although it seems to have become lost, I believe the original poster was asking about preferences within popular culture which were used to poke fun at others.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Thu Mar 27, 2025 3:24 pmUnlike Hitler, he won't take his life when the hour comes. He will go down making bizarre, unpolitic comments until the last moment.

Potentially amusing diversion: what will his last words will be? "It's gonna be huuuuuge"???

malloc wrote: ↑Sun Mar 23, 2025 4:48 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Mar 23, 2025 2:32 pm

Raphael wrote: ↑Sun Mar 23, 2025 12:43 pm Does anyone know what the character limit for ZBB posts is?

60,000 characters, according to the admin pages.

Why that and not a nice even 65536?

Weird - I very nearly posted the exact same thing nearly 24 hours ago. Do you have the super-power of long-distance clairvoyance?

(some stuff) What about spoken traditions? I read the Ancient Greek "Argonautica" recently, and the protagonist Jason convinces many other men who are heroes in their own right with their own stories (such as Hercules and Theseus) to join his adventure to find the golden fleece. It's basi...

Wait, you got seats ? :D I used to work near one of the last stops on the RER B; it was okay but I can't say I miss it. The real annoyance is having to take it to get to the airport. But getting to Charles de Gaulle airport is an unnecessarily painful experience, no matter how you get there. I find...

Back in my days where I could legitimately call myself an "activist", I quickly learned that you had to work with people even if you deeply disagreed with their actual ideologies and like. I remember regularly coming to Peace Action meetings and dealing with a wide variety of people at th...

somebody who knows the words for "beer", and their complete entomologies Gosh, I had no idea there were many so many insects in beer. Well, it is just a running gag of alice which has long gone stale - confounding the words entomology and etymology . Hey, it made it into the Syntax Constr...

Thanks all! You'll be within fifty miles of me! I’m aware, actually… on which note, do you have any comments to make on Glasgow as a city, as someone who lives outside but close to it? I just don’t know what it’s like there at all, and that’s a big cause of my anxiety. I think you've less to worry ...

Yay! Congratulations, bradrn. You'll be within fifty miles of me!

Is it just me, or do other people get the impression that there is a very large number of people in the USA wha are shocked! SHOCKED! by what the Trump administration is doing, especially when it's clearly illegal or nonsensical, but seem utterly incapable of doing anything at all about it?

Someone (I forgot who) once said that jocks are just sports geeks ;) OK, "geeking out" about things one is interested in can sound very similar no matter whether the topic is rugby or Sindarin. Then again, arguably a sports geek is more like someone who knows a lot of baseball statistics,...

I've had an absolutely miserable start to the year. February I was sick more days than I was well. I'm not entirely out of the woods, but at least I'm doing better. Fingers crossed it holds. That's just like me! The first week back after the New Year is the only one I had no time off sick on any day.

...the universal constraint that plurals may not show a greater degree of morphemic contrast than the corresponding singulars... (p105, #3) Is this actually a thing, or does it not mean what I think it means, that morphology is always more complex in singulars than plurals? It's not hard to find co...

I just started George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series for the first time, and it's great so far! I tried it, but it did nothing for me. I really liked it when I read it years ago, but have gotten kind of disillusioned with Martin since then, thinking more about its flaws these days. Sa...

jcb wrote: ↑Thu Mar 06, 2025 5:30 pm Speaking of eggs, Trump's goon has just told us the solution to high egg prices: Just raise your own chickens!
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/brooke-r ... c440ed7fa7

What a great marketing slogan: "Raise chickens, not egg prices"!

Otto Kretschmer wrote: ↑Mon Mar 03, 2025 1:55 pm @Raphael

Note that in 20th century command economies the planning was done by hand while nowdays we have powerful computers with stuff like AI and Big Data

See also malloc's AI thread Don't forget that Mises and Hayek were ultimately about finding reasons for not paying taxes.

I have no idea what he does think he's getting with Russia; it's no substitute for Europe. Russia has taken the last year to advance like ten miles in Ukraine, what the hell is it going to do against China? I think, as Raphael says, he just likes dictators. And a lot of his base admire Putin for pu...

Neurons are interesting, because it’s been proven that a two-layer artificial neural network is enough to simulate any other non-linear function whatsoever. This is a qualitative difference from logic gates, which require considerably more complexity to do universal computation. The other big diffe...

See also: people who insist that "only a true working-class revolution can bring about lasting peace", or similar. I don't know how many of these you have where you are; here they're few but noisy.

zompist wrote: ↑Sat Mar 01, 2025 3:19 pm...you'll be unable to return home feeling food about this.

Is this a typo or a business idiom?