Random Thread

[Raphael]

Yes, that's very much like what I have in mind!

[Linguoboy]

Is that any odder than Cliff Richard being born in Lucknow?

No, but I knew that about Cliff Richard.

[Torco]

Netflix, that show about a kid with an ASD. Turns out the way in which he behaves is RPG-like. he wasn't a videogame nerd, more of a tv nerd. an epiphany:

all protagonists
are either necessarily or incidentally
kinda asperger

May the harsh light of day be kind to this idea

[Raphael]

Someone on Twitter named Annie or @nontanne , about whom I couldn't find out anything, said that apparently, their favorite poem is the Beaufort wind scale. They posted the following version of it:

Smoke rises vertically

Smoke drifts with air, weather vanes inactive

Weather vanes active, wind felt on face, leaves rustle

Leaves & small twigs move, light flags extend

Small branches sway, dust & loose paper blows about

Small trees sway, waves break on inland waters

Large branches sway, umbrellas difficult to use

Whole trees sway, difficult to walk against wind

Twigs broken off trees, walking against wind very difficult

Slight damage to buildings, shingles blown off roof

Trees uprooted, considerable damage to buildings

Widespread damage, very rare occurrence

Violent destruction

[Pabappa]

i like it.

minor nitpick, though, ... you left off the first line.

i remember seeing the wind chart when i was very young and believing that smoke would arise out of nothing whenever the wind was absolutely calm. it didnt make sense, but at that age, not a lot did.

i love cold weather and winter storms. Once about five years ago I went out for a walk during a winter storm where it wasnt particularly cold, but the wind was so strong that snow was swirling all around me and new falling snow was mixed with what had already been on the ground. and yes, even bundled up like i was, the high point of the walk for me was getting trapped against a fence for a minute because i just wasnt strong enough to power my way through the wind.

[Raphael]

minor nitpick, though, ... you left off the first line.

Fixed.

[Neon Fox]

I would have loved to post this over in the "What are you reading, watching, and listening to"-thread, but unfortunately, I couldn't find a recording available online that really illustrates my point well.

There's a version with English lyrics that my local radio station plays that sounds...very ominous. You're very much being warned about the ringing of the bells...

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I would have loved to post this over in the "What are you reading, watching, and listening to"-thread, but unfortunately, I couldn't find a recording available online that really illustrates my point well.

There's a version with English lyrics that my local radio station plays that sounds...very ominous. You're very much being warned about the ringing of the bells...

I don't suppose you would be able to link to the specific arrangement?

[Qwynegold]

Is there a way to identify the grammars of a subset of natural languages as the greatest statistical outliers? Has this been done?

You mean like what's the weirdest language? CALS has a feature that shows the averageness of your conlang. One could do the same for WALS I guess, but no one's done that AFAIK.

[Kuchigakatai]

New York Times, 1920.

[rotting bones]

You mean like what's the weirdest language? CALS has a feature that shows the averageness of your conlang. One could do the same for WALS I guess, but no one's done that AFAIK.

Yes. Thank you.

[Neon Fox]

I would have loved to post this over in the "What are you reading, watching, and listening to"-thread, but unfortunately, I couldn't find a recording available online that really illustrates my point well.

There's a version with English lyrics that my local radio station plays that sounds...very ominous. You're very much being warned about the ringing of the bells...

I don't suppose you would be able to link to the specific arrangement?

Sadly, no, I couldn't find it - I spent about fifteen minutes trying before I posted.

That said, there are a bunch of deliberately creepy Christmas song arrangements on YouTube, which I hadn't known before.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I feared as much.

[Raphael]

I've got a question about life in the USA. It touches a little bit on politics, but it's not mainly about politics, so I'm asking it here rather than in one of the political threads. Ok, here goes:

Political and media commentators from the USA sometimes talk about the 24 hours news cycle, and how much the world has changed because of it. They describe this 24 hours news cycle as a result of cable news and the internet. When they talk about the past, about the time before cable news and the internet in its modern form existed, they usually seem to assume that back then, the news cycle was dominated by newspaper headlines in the morning and broadcast tv news in the evening, or perhaps even just by the newspapers.

What confuses me about this is that when I was growing up in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, I hardly ever watched any cable news, but I got a lot of my news from radio stations that would broadcast a few minutes of news every top of the hour. So to me, it seems that there's been a 24 hours news cycle for at least as long as there's been radio.

So, which subtle nuance of cultural differences am I getting wrong here?

[mèþru]

From most media I've seen, in the 90s and early 2000s most people got news from either papers and TV. I think NPR might have actually had less listeners per capita back then.

There even used to be a big rivalry between print and TV journalists.

Note that I was born in 2001, and thus either very young or not alive for all that period

[Pabappa]

radio was always primarily for local news. so yes, people would tune in and they would learn a LITTLE about what was going on nationwide, but only if a national story was important enough to have local repercussions. I think it basically comes down to the technology ... even the most powerful radio station would have a reach of only maybe a hundred miles or so, meaning the entire audience lives in the same area, so it makes sense to focus on local issues. a few stations like NPR were popular enough to have local repeaters, but i think even those stations may have aired local news during parts of the day since presumably NPR was never 24/7. radio never surmounted the barrier of physical distance until the advent of satellite radio, but by then the Internet was very well established and satellite radio was mostly for people on long car trips.

[Ryusenshi]

A friend of mine is a flat Earth denialist. That is, they refuse to believe that anyone can seriously think the Earth is flat, and their theory is that all flat-Earthers are just trolls.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

That is, at least, more reasonable than believing the Earth is literally flat.

[Pabappa]

I wouldnt say all, but I consider flat-earthism to be primarily a meme, since nobody really was talking about them a few years ago. so, no .... i dont believe the Flat Earth Society (which has been around for a very long time) just suddenly started winning arguments, .... people are just joining a fad. it'll pass.

[Travis B.]

There were believers in a Flat Earth historically, e.g. pre-Pythagorean Greeks and the Chinese before Jesuits came to China, but both in Medieval Europe and in the Islamic World, the predominant belief was in a spherical Earth.