Notices by Bill Zaumen (bzdev@fosstodon.org)

@skinnylatte @irene I'm not Asian, but can manage a few words/prhases in Mandarin. I once got a phone call that sounded like Chinese, so I said in Mandarin that I spoke it very poorly, figuring that it was a wrong number. First no response. I though "oh, oh, did I get a tone wrong?" Then I heard "Why you talking Chinese?" It must have been some teenagers playing with the phone and my response left them completely flustered.

@skinnylatte I once read about McDonald's (the fast food chain) going after a small Scottish bakery named McDonald's Bakery even though it was (a) owned by a McDonald family and (b) was something like 100 years old. This did not go over very well in Scotland. It is not just colonialism.

@thomasfuchs Before deciding if this specific event, billed as a conference, is a "front for a cult" or "tax fraud", I'd really like to see the conference proceedings, if any. Do you or anyone else have a link?

@thomasfuchs To add a bit more - while in graduate school, I went to a colloquium about a search for magnetic monopoles, where they analyzed material from the ocean floor in case any might somehow be trapped there. When we heard the search was in the Caribbean Sea, everyone laughed. The speaker mentioned they had tagged along with oceanographers, who apparently liked to study the arctic in summer and the Caribbean in winter.

@thomasfuchs Epstein apparently wanted to hang around prominent scientists, which he found useful for marketing. So, it is conceivable that some events on his island were not out and out sex parties, if only due to the risk that someone who thought he was going to an actual conference, or at worst a junket, would report him.

@skinnylatte That reminds me of watching an old movie that was set in Shanghai. At one point, it showed a group of Chinese men, all scared and shouting. A
friend who knows Cantonese said, "Hey it is supposed to be in Shanghai and they are all speaking in Cantonese, which isn't used there." The director probably just told them to
say something and figured the audience would never know.

@vkc I can see why they would delete such comments: Fox "News" seems to use "woke" as a general insult devoid of meaning. Once they realize that (a) all they meant was "I don't like it", and (b) how much effort it would take to explain why they don't like it, they delete the comment rather than spending hours trying to critique some software that they couldn't figure out how to use.
Besides, maybe they don't want to admit to watching Fox News.

https://www.metafilter.com/199618/200-things-that-Fox-News-has-labeled-woke

@fu So what if the article is two years old? Fox news doesn't change its word usage with the phase of the moon.

@skinnylatte Were the fish hiding inside a jellyfish or did the jellyfish eat them? Jellyfish have a varied diet that includes small fishes.

@skinnylatte I would have thought the reason loan words are rare in Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) is that you can't just make up a new character, and if you tried, others wouldn't be able to read it.

@IveyJanette @skinnylatte He shouldn't send ICE/etc. into the Mission or the Castro: they'd probably be more comfortable in SOMA, assuming they can be pointed to a suitable venue. You know, something with whips and chains. Think dungeons.

They can probably charge it to an expense account as "training".

@briankrebs Since this person is a physics major, perhaps his 750 word essay should go into what he learned about doing experiments, including all the steps and record keeping so you can reproduce it and test hypotheses.

Curiously, once while doing some mundane operation - copying a file - I managed to get system privileges on a computer. I repeated the steps a few times to make sure that I
had recorded everything needed to reproduce that behavior, and then reported the problem.

@skinnylatte According to friends who are fluent or semi-fluent in Cantonese, the language has a lot of funny (i.e., humorous) idioms. For example:
"A chicken talking to a duck" (two people making a lot of noise but basically talking
past each other),
"fried squid" (someone who was fired - centuries ago, when day laborers moved between
jobs, they wrapped their belongings up in the mats they slept on, and when fried, squid
tends to roll up into a similar shape).

Must be a lot more 😃.

@skinnylatte I've been rock climbing for over 50 years and have never heard a climber use the term "rope event," so I think we can eliminate one possibility. 🙂

@Scienceisnotopinions @thomasfuchs There's a tiny risk of an adverse reaction to the vaccine and a much higher risk of dying from COVID-19 if you don't get vaccinated. To explain it, I've used a story a heard from a climber, Bruce Carlson, while giving him a ride home from Yosemite. He was in the Himalayas and a huge avalanche - going at about 200 mph - was about to hit him. So he jumped into a crevasse, not knowing if it was 10 feet deep or 100: risky but a lot less than just standing there.

@evan You might want to delete "tear up ... rail lines" because Elon Musk it seems doesn't like our train systems (at a minimum, one of them) anyway. Why spend the effort if these bozos may do it for you?

https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article264451076.html

@dgar Unfortunately, preferential voting will occasionally elect the wrong candidate. For an explanation of why, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem (don't feel bad if this is not obvious - the work resulted in Kenneth Arrow receiving a Nobel prize).

@hellomiakoda @georgetakei The problem with Canada taking over the west coast of the U.S. is that California's population alone is comparable to Canada's, so we'd dominate parliament.

Meanwhile Trump has a pronoun problem: instead of "they/them" he thinks his are "we/us" (as in the royal "we").

@murdoc @hellomiakoda @georgetakei Except that all the citizens of these new territories could simply move to proviinces before an election and then take over parliament, then making the new territories provinces. After the election they could move back.

So, you'd pretty much have the same problem, and given that we can't seem to govern ourselves these days ....

@Nentuaby @48kRAM You missed the point, which was basically, given all the ridiculous allegations going around these days - like meteorologists controlling hurricanes - when I see something where the "editors" are "anonymous", why would I bother reading it? How would they be threatened? It's not like Trump being able to ban someone from his country club (assuming anyone even cared).

It is not about Richard Stallman. It is about a simple filter to avoid wasting my time.