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2:40 AM
hoot hoot!
I'm an owl!
3:02 AM
horses around instead
3:44 AM
anyone here good with the oddyssey?
that's not a thing.
The Odyssey exists even if you misspell its title
but how am I supposed to know what is being referred to if it is misspelled?
have you read The Ofgernebl2függl?
that's a thing, it's just misspelled.
@GeorgePompidou That's a good question. How did you know what it referred to despite the misspelling?
It's unlikely that you didn't.
I didn't. I just knew that the oddyssey isn't a thing.
3:54 AM
Color me skeptical.
that's not even a real color.
scuttles off, giggling stupidly
4:12 AM
The promotion of "Keeping up with the Joneses" sells the misconception... Is this the proper way to reference an idiom?
4 hours later…
7:58 AM
Is it correct to say "I and mister X published a paper"? Or "Me and mister X published a paper"?
"Mr X and I published a paper" is the correct form @Chris'ssis you would say "I published a paper" not "Me published a paper" and the name of Mr. X goes first as a matter of a polite convention.
@skullpatrol This is what I wanted to know. Thanks! :-)
Thanks for asking @Chris'ssis :-)
8:50 AM
I'm sure there are more technically/grammatically correct ways of explaining it, but that's the way I look at it.
3 hours later…
12:02 PM
@Player72 Hi! What do you need?
2 hours later…
:O 84%
@Reg is one point ahead of even Shog9. Who knew?
And Janus is a point ahead of Jatwood.
Meanwhile, @MattЭллен has clearly retired to bee-keeping and rose gardens.
why do they call 1% a "point"?
That’s a rather pointed question.
indeed :D
2:25 PM
But so it is.
basis point
a measure used for describing interest rates, equal to one hundredth of a percentage point (0.01%)
percentage point (pəˈsɛntɪdʒ pɔɪnt)

one hundredth of a percentage rate ⇒ interest rate changes of a quarter percentage point
2:57 PM
@skullpatrol Say 5% of the population are unemployed. A rise of unemployment by 10% would mean the new figure is 5.5%. A rise by 10 percentage points, however, means the new figure is 15%.
Or did you know that already?
I didn't know that
How not?
is that^ a rhetorical question pal?
% or ‰ or ‱ or ⁰⁄₀₀₀₀₀.
3:06 PM
an infinitesimal percentage point = %...
That was a wwwwweally long penta-u.
a ghost of departed quantities
the percentage point of a ghost of departed quantities
3:10 PM
@skullpatrol ⁰⁄∞∞∞∞∞∞⧜
that works :D
‭ ∞  221E       INFINITY
I was arguing about "infinity" most of yesterday
when will I learn :/
[ ¹⁄∞⁻, ¹⁄∞⁺ ]
3:16 PM
People have been arguing about infinity forever, and they always shall.
et nunc et semper
Does MathJax work in the more mathical SE chatrooms?
you need the plug in
3:19 PM
So it works otherwise than how it works in the regular postings?
the chatroom needs a special plug in
Don’t SE sites with MathJax enabled farm out the rendering?
And how does it tell you that it needs this? I’d rather not sully myself by going there myself.
I wonder if the plugin still going a-farming.
word of mouth
Or whether it instead does everything in situ.
3:24 PM
@snailboat So fine a thought though that may be, I doubt it rhymes for me nor thee.
Now why in the world is LᴬΤᴱΧ set in italic?
In your math.ucla link.
I bet I know why.
I bet it renders all roman letters in oblique.
Just as in formulae.
Bad E, alas.
Here, this one is all of one cloth woven: 𝔗𝔈𝔛 𝔖ℭℌ𝔐𝔈ℭℌ.
Oder nicht.
    macbook# echo 𝔗𝔈𝔛 𝔖ℭℌ𝔐𝔈ℭℌ | uniquote -x

    macbook# echo 𝔗𝔈𝔛 𝔖ℭℌ𝔐𝔈ℭℌ | uniquote -v
The stuff in the BMP doesn't look the stuff in the SMP.
my profile has a bit of that
3:39 PM
Unicode didn’t provide a MATHEMATICAL FRACTUR version in the SMP of the stuff they already had a BLACK-LETTER version of in the BMP. This is unfortunate.
But you can fix that by going bold: 𝕿𝕰𝖃 𝕾𝕮𝕳𝕸𝕰𝕮𝕳
And good luck reading black letter.
Wow, how felicitous yet unpalæographically fidelitous a letter spacing there on that 𝖒𝖎𝖓𝖎𝖒𝖚𝖒, eh?
Hm, x-heights don’t even vaguely match here.
i see now, thanks
The x-height of the main font looks nothing like the one used for the SMP math fraktur.
fontology :)
3:46 PM
This is something of a nightmare in typesetting, but some modern systems allow you to say "Pick whatever fractional point-size for font A such that the x-height of A exactly matches the true x-height of font B at some discrete point-size.”
You have to do that when mixing on a line, or it looks like shit.
That way if you have to pinch a glyph from a different font, it has the right size as the rest of the word or line.
Had to do this for my last book.
Because the font they ended up using was pre–Unicode-3.0, so there was a bunch we needed to grab from otherwhere.
The new U+1E9E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S was one of them.
U+00DF ‹ß› \N{LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S} is Age=1.1, but U+1E9E ‹ẞ› \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S} is Age=5.1, where by Age, I mean the Unicode character property Age which is used to indicate the first Unicode release in which that code point was an assigned code point.
Oh, and everything starts at Age=1.1; there is no Age=1.0 because it was not compatible.
The argument for a capital sharp s was interesting, and to me at least, unexpected.
go on...
Well, traditionally the lowercase ß was fully equivalent to uppercase SS digraph.
3:57 PM
What I mean is that the uppercase case-mapping is ß -> SS, so running uc("tschüß") is defined to return "TSCHÜSS".
That could have interesting results for some words.
@AndrewLeach Because the lengths change?
No, because uc("imbißstube") would end up with three Ss in the middle, whereas it's easier to read with ß.
It's intriguing that the two glyphs you have used are actually different on this PC. Capital is wider.
4:01 PM
You make a good argument for the creation of a capital version of it, for text set in all caps or small caps.
And that, apparently, is part of the argument that was made for it.
That's pretty.
Isn’t it? I love how they find places to hide the Umlaute so that they fit within the line proper.
4:14 PM
macbook# perl -CSA -le 'printf("lowercase of U+%v04X <%s> is U+%v04X <%s>, uppercase of U+%v04X <%s> is U+%v04X <%s>\n", ($_)x2, (lc)x2, ($_)x2, (uc)x2) for @ARGV' ß ẞ

lowercase of U+00DF <ß> is U+00DF <ß>, uppercase of U+00DF <ß> is U+0053.0053 <SS>
lowercase of U+1E9E <ẞ> is U+00DF <ß>, uppercase of U+1E9E <ẞ> is U+1E9E <ẞ>
Kinda annoying.
And uc(lc("ẞ")) is not ẞ but SS.
If only they had thought of all this for Unicode v1.1, we wouldn’t have a lot of the super-ugliness is casemapping that we have now, all because of the lowercase sharp s.
Then again, un-roundtrippability is normal. Think of the three sigmata. Or just in English: uc("weaſel") is "WEASEL".
There are, alas, “lots” of single code points whose casemapping results in multiple code points.
macbook# unichars 'length(lc) > 1' | wc -l
macbook# unichars 'length(uc) > 1' | wc -l
macbook# unichars 'length(ucfirst) > 1' | wc -l
macbook# unichars 'length(fc) > 1' | wc -l
Any guesses what that first one is, the only code point whose lowercase is more than a single code point?
It’s notorious.
Hint: It might even keep them out of the EU. :)
macbook#  perl -CSA -e 'printf("lc of U+%v04X <%s> is U+%v04X <%s>\n", ($_)x2, (lc)x2) for @ARGV' İ
lc of U+0130 <İ> is U+0069.0307 <i̇>
Really really annoying.
You can’t “correctly” capitalize “i” in the Turkic languages without special case-mapping rules.
        * Turkish and Azerbaijani use 0131 for lowercase
        x (latin capital letter i with dot above - 0130)
        x (cyrillic capital letter byelorussian-ukrainian i - 0406)
        x (cyrillic letter palochka - 04C0)
        x (script capital i - 2110)
        x (black-letter capital i - 2111)
        x (roman numeral one - 2160)
So in Turkish, lowercase of "I" is actually "ı" U+0131 LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I.
And in Azerbaijanaramadamadingdonghi.
If only the Romans were still here to teach people how to spell using the Latin alphabet. :)
4:44 PM
crushed under weight of complexity....stops using characters to communicate
4:55 PM
So my cat bit my arm yesterday. Now I'm on 10 days of antibiotics. Stupid cats.
biting the arm that feeds it! how foolish. no salmon for that cat this Christmas
And then he gives me the stink-eye when I refuse to let him back in the lap.
"Look who's sensitive all of a sudden."
the very nerve of it
5:05 PM
@Robusto - hey, I hope you saw my apology. I felt very rude.
@Mitch - that was an interesting link. I see that 4 mods were in the top 19. That seems to say I'm correct that downvoting is necessary for the site?
If you were inferring something else, I'm all ears.
Also, I don't know how to see the next page, or the next.
Would you be so kind as to tell me (where to get?) how to do that? Programming is Greek to me - no, actually it's much worse. Programming is like Klingon to me.
I think there is only one page. the query itself is limited to the first 100 entries. if you fork the query, you can remove that part and run it and it will return results for everyone with more than 20 downvotes
@Robusto sorry about your cat. One of my big mistakes (my first year out) was treating a girl who had been bitten with the wrong antibiotic (a stupid move and an invaluable lesson). So, good that you're on them.
so the query would look like:
    Id as [User Link],
    (DownVotes)*100/(DownVotes+UpVotes) as DownVotesPCT
FROM Users
WHERE  DownVotes > 20     -- Suppress lower vote counts;
 AND Id <> -1 -- these are habitual downvoters.
@Ma fork the query (Matt) = ?;<->??!8-O|:-(?? (me)
@medica Points out ambiguous statement and then thinks better of it.
5:14 PM
no probs :)
Do I replace the entire fielf with that or just add it into the field?
replace the entire field
thank you.
@AndrewLeach - do speak
I'd like to hear your thoughts
I didn't know you could be bitten with the wrong antibiotic.
(Was that worth it?!)
Haha Yes.
At least it's the first time I smile about it in the decades since I've made that mistake.
So am I just hairsplitting with my concern about downvoting? I think I do tend to split hair at times. Maybe more often.
5:21 PM
Downvoting is necessary for the site
I wouldn't have cast over 1000 if I didn't think so :D
So, earning the legendary badge isn't a sign of a good user (well, what with how strange rep is, that should go without saying, I guess) but a maybe unhelpful user...?
hmm... you know what I mean, though, don't you?
the legendary badge is a sign that you have rep capped 200 times
rep capping only implies you didn't down vote an answer in the rep cap period after you capped
so you could have down voted during the period before you capped
But if downvoting is important to the site, doing both decreases the number of legendaries.
5:26 PM
I'm not sure what you mean by "both"
No, see, that's not (I think) true, because if you downvoted any time during that 24° period, it gets pitted against your cap. I think
I've looked at those times, and I find sometimes it was on two downvotes I placed all day.
maybe. I don't cap often enough to know, but it would seem odd to do it that way, although SE does odd things from time to time.
I've tried reversing the downvotes, and that never works.
It sometimes brings me to 199, but never back to 200.
rep capping only implies you didn't down vote an answer in the rep cap period after you capped This states that only downvotes I've cast after hitting my cap count?
that's what I think. I don't know for sure
I'm not sure that's right. I don't know, though.
I hate to make a post on the big site.
Never have
5:33 PM
Ill ask around (brb)
@tchrist very pretty font.
@tchrist - interesting article.
no response yet.
on the other hand there's nothing to worry about posting to meta meta
5:48 PM
posted on December 12, 2014 by sgdi

There once was a man from Ohio Who constantly asked “why oh why oh?” There wasn’t a reason It was just the season For things to be making him cry “oh!”

the thought of it makes me cringe.
well, I'll give it a couple of days or weeks or months and see what happens.
Thanks, @MattЭллен. You're very helpful. I appreciate it.
If you hear back, ping me. :-)
@medica What I inferred was that contrary to expectations, many of our most prominent members are heavy downvoters. "necessary for the site" was never in my mind. I think downvoting is necessary, but I just happen to tend towards a higher proportion of upvotes.
Dang, you left.
@medica No problem. I just thought it was funny.
@medica So what was the wrong antibiotic? They gave me clindamycin.
@Mitch I'm not a heavy downvoter.
So how do I tell my cat that I love it but I'm just not into pain and antibiotics?
6:31 PM
@Robusto You are a "prominent member" but not in the 'many' part. From that table.
@Robusto Give it back the mouse it just laid on your doorstep.
We got the mouse problem settled.
Or denail it... shudders
How did you solve the mouse 'problem'?
Stopped storing food in the basement.
6:46 PM
@tchrist I have a character that won't display, and I'm not sure how to identify it. Can you help with that?
@KitFox Probably.
Shall we talk privately?
Just paste it here.
OK. A moment.
Naw, it's easy.
6:51 PM
I in turn paste it into a "what the hell is that?" script.
No, that’s the Unicode Replacement Character.
This is not a failure to display.
How do I give you the right thing?
I wonder whether this means something in the processing chain messed up and swapped in the URC.
I can believe it.
Do you have a source where it displays reasonably?
6:52 PM
Oh. Wait. I know where I can get it.
That. Prime? Maybe a single quote?
Are you trying to display CP1252 but saying it is actually UTF-8?
The db is 1252.
That’s trouble.
I don't know about the results page, but it's different than the content page, so it displays correctly in one place and not the other.
You cannot just display CP1252 in a UTF-8 page without upgrading/re-encoding.
6:55 PM
OK. Well, that's not going to be my problem. I'll pass it on to the dev to fix. I just needed to know what wasn't displaying.
We, thank god, upgraded all our tables to UTF-8.
cp1252       90  ⇒  U+FFFD  ＜ � ＞  \N{REPLACEMENT CHARACTER}
cp1252       91  ⇒  U+2018  ＜ ‘ ＞  \N{LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK}
cp1252       92  ⇒  U+2019  ＜ ’ ＞  \N{RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK}
cp1252       93  ⇒  U+201C  ＜ “ ＞  \N{LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK}
cp1252       94  ⇒  U+201D  ＜ ” ＞  \N{RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK}
cp1252       95  ⇒  U+2022  ＜ • ＞  \N{BULLET}
cp1252       96  ⇒  U+2013  ＜ – ＞  \N{EN DASH}
cp1252       97  ⇒  U+2014  ＜ — ＞  \N{EM DASH}
cp1252       98  ⇒  U+02DC  ＜ ˜ ＞  \N{SMALL TILDE}
So that’s the problem. The page encoding is fibbing.
I don't understand. It's not translating it correctly?
That looks like the codepage maps correctly.
@tchrist We have exactly that problem. Our databases were encoded in Latin-1:Swedish or some such nonsense. All the data has to be reimported. (I mean, where did they get "Swedish" from?)
7:02 PM
I can't find how the page is encoded.
@KitFox it might say in the head tag something like <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
or <meta charset="utf-8">
It's a stupid IE compatibility thing, but seems that means "utf-8".
It's this: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9; IE=8; IE=7; IE=EDGE" />
There's no other thing.
So whatever that means.
I don't get it either.
maybe it's embedded somewhere else.
yeah, that tag seems to indicate the IE modes that are supported
7:07 PM
I would think.
I'm going to let the dev figure it out.
yeah, that's their job!
7:29 PM
@Robusto - hi. Do you happen to still be here?
@Robusto - I gave a 12 year old girl who got a cat bite to her cheek erythromycin*. A day later, she was hospitalized for IV antibiotic treatment with the proper drug. Never made the mistake again (one of the few good things about mistakes is that one learns from them very quickly in medicine.)
@Robusto - ok, I don't want to go into too much detail here in chat, but if you're not allergic to penicillin, the drug of choice for cat bites is Augmentin (amoxicillin-clavulanate). Cat bites (the true puncture wounds) are always treated, because they almost always get infected.
The main pathogen is Pasturella *multocida*, so the drug has to cover *at least* that bug.
hi @medica. I've chatted to some other mods. What they say is that if you down vote after hitting 200 then you will be below 200 (regardless of how much you would have scored from up votes) until you receive more rep, but if you down voted before you reach 200, you will still reach 200.
Hi marge @medica it's Cyril
Clindamycin has virtually no effect on Pasteurella, so it's usually not used singly, but usually in combination with another abiot.
@crl Hi, Cyril! How are you?
abiots are placebos :p
@crl :D
7:36 PM
no joke, they probably have an effect
@MattЭллен OK, Thanks. I will pay more attention to my voting habits. Is there any reason to think that might be changed?
@crl Hmm, just wondering, Cyril, but are you off your meds?
posted on December 12, 2014 by sgdi

They said it would be over quick I’d not even feel a prick It just wasn’t true The pain grew and grew And made me quite violently sick

@medica not as far as I know.
@MattЭллен OK. I'll watch myself.
rightoh :D
7:38 PM
Thanks. Really.
no problem
@crl j/k
How are you, though. I haven't chatted with you in a long time!
@medica I have stopped the meds, they disabled my brain too much, but the psychiatrist does not agree, he is pessimistic..
Ah. Doctors. :(
@medica I tolerate smokers a bit more
7:40 PM
How are you doing, though? Oh, that's great news!
So you feel better overall?
I need to find a job I think, to fill my boredom
I'm just playing scrabble all day long, with a solver, it's fun to beat everyone
Yes, you do. You really do. It would be so good for you. Even if it's just a (smoke-free) coffee shop or something, till you go back to school.
I'm searching a developer job (Python maybe), I think I can be motivated to do that all day
@crl Hehehe! Yes, it is! I used to play chess online. 7 - 10 minute games. Loads of fun.
Better for your overall well-being than computer games, mon ami.
@medica Why do you care so badly? So you rep capped at 200 but then downvoted 15 items? You're not exactly hurting.
7:44 PM
@Mitch I don't care badly. I care enough to see if it's a bug. If it's not, I will adapt easily. Just fun to try to get another gold badge. The rep means little to me anymore.
@medica Wow, cats are like komodo dragons like that then. if the prey gets away, the cat can just follow them until they get slowed down by a fever.
@Mitch :D
Cats bites are much worse than dog bites for infection. Dog bits are more disfiguring.
@medica but he said that type of illness (schizophrenia) worsen with time, without medics your head becomes constantly jammed
@medica I know the feeling, trying to optimize this 'reputation' number. I'm just saying that in the bigger picture, you shouldn't mind since you think of the downvote as a positive contribution. Think of it like bonuses, you lose those points but for better quality.
I bought a snowmobile tonight.
Then went back to work.
7:46 PM
@crl Yes, Ceril, I'm afraid that's true, actually. It makes me very sad, but he's right.
ahh ok, I think I will discuss again with him, I need a treatment but just one less powerful
@Mitch Well, actually if I had to pick between the two, I would pick doing what I believe is the right thing, which is to downvote.
@JohanLarsson a real one? for fun or for practical use?
@crl Mine is a climber, longer and stronger.
7:48 PM
@crl There's not a lot of harm in trying to go without your meds for a while.
@Mitch Fun. A friend has been nagging for two years. Ran out of excuses.
@medica It's kind of a nice thing that a medication can 'unjam' things.
@crl But if you don't make the changes needed to put you in a better place, you will most likely (I'm sorry to say) go back to how you were a year or so ago (and before).
no matter what kind of sickness there is either a cold or cancer or a cat bite or mental things, you always feel like it is your own fault, like its your own personal failing, however irrational that maybe)
7:50 PM
@Mitch Medicines are one of God's gifts to this world.
Well, it is totally the cat's fault for the bite.
@Mitch absolutely!
@JohanLarsson Can drive it to where you want to go, or do you have trailer to take it up to the place to go?
Blame the cat, blame the cancer, don't blame yourself, unless you smoke like a chimney, drink like a fish, shoot up drugs (even then I feel bad for the user).
@medica ok I see
7:52 PM
@medica also germ theory.
and relevantly, washing your hands.
@crl Go out there and get a job, Ceril.
@Mitch another gift to man. Soap.
@medica thanks Susan (it's Cyril)
@medica Fishes seem to be able to handle it OK, why not me?
@crl arrch. I'm terrible at spelling. sorry!
@Mitch My friend has a stuga in the mountains. Gonna leave it there, not enough snow here. No snow at all in fact.
7:54 PM
@medica and waste treatment. how about concrete?
@Mitch try putting your fish into a bowl of Chevas regal. Or Mad Dog 20-20. Or Boone's Farm aple wine (I feel sick even naming the last one.)
@JohanLarsson Nice.
stuga = ??
@Mitch lol! Yes, maybe concrete, too.
7:56 PM
@medica I'm trying to think of the one single thing that made the difference.
Brushing teeth?
@Mitch clean water
single most important thing.
Well then concrete is good for that.
D'oh, you're kidding me.
Oh yeah, I heard that guinea worm is becoming rarer and rarer now because of water cleaning practices (concrete is involved!)
you can fight ebola with enough clean water and soap.
@Mitch lol! are you a shareholder in Concrete-o-matic or something?
7:58 PM
@medica concrete is good for building water treatment plants. I wouldn't know how to otherwise.
(I don't know how to anyway but in my imagination)
The romans used lead pipes to bring clean water. :(
It was ok if the water was soft, but bad if the water was hard.
Soft water would leave a scale deposit in the pipes, so reduced lead leaching into the water.
