Can you record yourself saying the word “covfefe”?

By: | Post date: June 1, 2017 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Personal, Quora

Vocaroo | Voice message

OK, OK, I yield to the inevitable. Word of the day is in fact, “covfefe” – ‘a summoning word of fearsome power, never to be used lightly.’ pic.twitter.com/PE4Oc4CPS5

— Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) May 31, 2017

Nick’s 2000 followers

By: | Post date: May 29, 2017 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Quora

Not on TWs, but on 2K by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile

Anyway. I’m not writing about the quill here, I’ve said too much already. But just as Jordan has just hit 20K followers with no quill, I have just hit 2K followers, with no quill.

https://opuculuk.quora.com/Not-o…

Uri Granta: How about a drawing of you speaking to the two-thousand in an amphitheatre (or wherever it was that the Greeks did their public speaking)? Suitably attired, of course.

Do Australians regularly eat kangaroo meat?

By: | Post date: May 28, 2017 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Australia

Another data point:

  • Routinely served to tourists, as an exotic offering. Like crocodile is.
  • Available in gourmet restaurants on occasion, as an exotic offering.
  • I’ve had it two or three times. The last time, in an Ethiopian tagine.
  • Available in supermarkets, but not plentiful in supermarkets.
  • Very plentiful as pet food.
  • Very lean meat, so very easy to overcook.
  • Has not captured the people’s imagination, it must be said. Australians have changed their staple meats (from rabbit to chicken), and Australians pride themselves on being foodies; but there has not been a groundswell of enthusiasm about roo meat.

Would you participate in Quora in Klingon if it existed?

By: | Post date: May 25, 2017 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Language, Quora

Translation to Federation Standard follows:

yItamchoH jay’ ’ej HuchwIj yItlhap! nuqDaq jIqI’?

mach tlhIngan Hol mu’ghom, ’ej tlhIngan Hol Quora tu’lu’chugh, pIj DIvI’ Hol mu’mey lo’lu’ net pIH. jIHvaD qay’be’.

cha’ Seng vIpIHlaH:

  • tlhIngan Hol Quora lo’laHwI’ law’ law’, wa’maH law’ puS; ’a wa’vatlh law’ law’. Quoravetlh leHmeH yapbe’.
  • meqna’mo’ tlhIngan Hol Wikipedia bot Jimbo Wales. vuDvetlh jeS D’Angelo ’e’ vIHar. Dogh Quora DIvI’ ’e’ luQub Huch nobwI’, ’e’ Hajba’.

Shut up and take my money! Where do I sign up?

The Klingon vocabulary is small, and if a Klingon Quora were used, people would often end up borrowing English vocabulary. That’s not a problem for me.

I anticipate two problems:

  • There’s more than 10 people that could use a Klingon Quora, but less than 100. Not enough to maintain such a Quora.
  • Jimbo Wales blocked Klingon Wikipedia for a clear reason. I’d think D’Angelo would be of the same mind. He’d clearly fear funders thinking Quora Inc is being silly.

How is telecommuting working for you?

By: | Post date: May 25, 2017 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Information Technology, Personal

Question answered: How is telecommuting working for you?

The plural of anecdote is Quora answers.

Herewith mine.

I worked for 3 years physically in a job that many of you will have already worked out by now, and 14 more telecommuting. The only way I could bear to keep working on that job was by telecommuting, and through the low level of supervision and engagement with management that entailed. And in fact, it’s astonishing I stayed with the job as long as I did.

Which is one way of dealing with difficult bosses, I guess.

Telecommuting can work, but you need a boss with clarity on their goals, a high degree of autonomy, a high degree of trust, a way of giving visibility to your work product, and an effective way of coordinating with colleagues. Particularly if you’ve got severe timezone clashes, these are challenges; I spent a lot of time on chat with my most excellent and generous and helpful programming colleagues; and weekly phone catchups with management were essential, all dysfunctions considered. I’m doing bits of work on Upwork now, and getting the attention of your British or US or even Indian client when you’re on UTC+10 is very hard; it’s getting me to stay up later than I should need to.

There’s high convenience and flexibility; but they come at a cost of lack of clarity and focus. I’m very happy to telecommute as a second job; I’d have misgivings about telecommuting for a primary job.

Vote #1 Dave Aronson’s answer to How is telecommuting working for you?, who’s gone into all of this in much better detail.

Are there lesbians because girls are so hot?

By: | Post date: May 25, 2017 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Culture

Actual lesbians have answered this question, and now, despite my better judgement, so will I. Using the insightful comment of one of their number as a springboard:

Molly Juul: https://www.quora.com/Are-there-…

The “aesthetically finding women more beautiful”-phenomenon is 100% social. Women are sexualized sooo much in the media, and men are constantly being told that “women are the only ones who should care about beauty, men can never be beautiful”. At least, this is my theory.

You know Ancient Greece? Men was seen as the aesthetically more beautiful and perfect gender.

This. And it’s salutary to spell it out:

  • Individuals find people of varied genders hot, through a nebulous interaction of their innateness, their socialisation, and social constructs.
  • The dominant narrative of hotness in Western society is heteronormative and male–centred. That doesn’t mean it’s bad; I don’t feel it’s horrid of me to find, I dunno, Sophia Loren attractive, because I don’t feel it’s horrid of me to be cis het male. It is a perspective, that happens to be the dominant one, but is as true as any other.
  • The notion that this dominant narrative is the universal narrative, though, is pernicious to anyone who isn’t its direct beneficiary. Gay men deserve their beefcake too (and they get it). Straight women deserve it too, and a lot of them are socialised not to seek it—because blokes are unlovely. If blokes are so unlovely, why boff us at all? That gets very unhealthy very quickly.
  • And I know noone should cry for the poor cis het male, but being told all your life that only chicks are attractive, and that you can only be a consumer of beauty and not a producer? That’s not healthy for blokes either. As you can see in the questions asked in the Relationships topic here.
  • As for lesbians… my reaction downstream from Molly, via Melinda Gwin, was to reject the question as implying “are there lesbians because girls are hot according to heteronormative contingent cultural norms of femininity that a lot of lesbians overtly reject?” The heels-wearing, unironically femme “lesbians” of straight porn doing endless kissy-face may match the criteria of “hot” underlying the question; but they do not correspond to the life experience and predilections of all actual lesbians.
    • Or so I am told.

So yes and no. Lesbians are lesbians because girls are hot. But the girls a straight man finds hot are not necessarily the girls a lesbian finds hot. Guys are hot too, despite the pernicious standard narrative. And lesbians aren’t lesbians because of a straight man’s notion of female beauty. Or because women are somehow intrinsically and objectively more attractive than men.

Now normally, there would be some banter in comments between me and Melinda about the objective facthood of feminine pulchritude, and how her current, atypically male partner violates her better judgment. But you know what? He too is lovable, including physically lovable.

Are there any Esperanto users on Quora? If so, can you write in Esperanto what you did yesterday?

By: | Post date: May 22, 2017 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Language, Quora

Hieraŭ? Nu, hieraŭ estis dimanĉo, do ripoztago. Kaj mi pli-malpli ripozis, laŭ mia kutimiĝinta maniero.

Mi iris kun la edzino por matenmanĝo ĉe franca dolĉejo, kie ni kutimas dum la semajnofino. Mi tie legis du el la tri gazetoj de la urbo, kaj plendis kiel kutime pri la faŝismo de tiu kiun posedas Rupert Murdoch. Mia dekstrema edzino, kiel kutime, min malatentis. Ni poste iris por taja masaĝo kune, ĉar ni maljuniĝas, kaj la ostoj de ni ambaŭ plendas. La mia pli plaĉis al mi ol la ŝia al ŝi. Ni iris por meztaga manĝo ĉe komerca centro (tre bona nigiri), kaj diskutis afable nian geedzecon.

Mi min retrovis hejme je ĉirkaŭ la tria ptm, kaj faris unu–du taskojn: mi promenigis la hundon, kaj poste prenis la aŭton por lavo. Dum mi atendis, mi verkis du respondojn ĉe Kvora. Mi revenis hejmen, manĝis kokon kun rizo, kaj poste okupiĝis pri du informadikaj taskoj de upwork.com. Estas surprize, kiel malfacile estas mezuri per programado la spezon de energio fare de grafika komputilblato, aparte se ĝi estas AMD-a kaj ne NVIDIA-a. La televido montradis la “realecan” kantkonkurson La Voĉo, kie Boy George kaj Seal vetkonkursas pri siaj egooj. Mi enlitiĝis frue, ĉar labortago morgaŭ.


I’ve been asked to translate, and so have others. So:

Yesterday? Well, yesterday was a Sunday, so it was a day of rest. And I rested more or less, in the custom that I have become accustomed to.

I went with my wife for breakfast to a French patisserie, where we usually go on weekends. I read there two of the three city newspapers, and complained as usual about the fascism of the one Rupert Murdoch owns. My right-wing wife, as usual, ignored me. We then went for a Thai massage together, because we’re getting old, and both our bones are complaining. I liked mine better than she liked hers. We went to have lunch at a shopping mall (excellent nigiri), and discussed our marriage affably.

I ended up at home around 3 pm, and did a couple of chores: I walked the dog, and then took the car to be washed. While I waited, I wrote two Quora answers. I went home, ate chicken and rice, and then worked on two programming tasks from Upwork. It’s surprising how hard it is to measure programmatically the energy expenditure of a graphics chip, especially if it’s AMD and not NVIDIA. The TV had the reality singing competition The Voice on, where Boy George and Seal were competing their egos. I went to bed early, because it’s a workday tomorrow.

Which party would the average American Democrat vote for if they moved to your country? And why do you think that?

By: | Post date: May 18, 2017 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: Australia

As all the other answers have said, there is just too broad a spectrum of views within the American Democrat party for us to speak of an average Democrat. Unless, of course, that is code for “moderate Democrat” or even “blue dog Democrat”.

Australia too has two big tent major parties.

  1. Labour has a left wing, but not much of a left-wing policy anymore, and the Labour Right has been dominant for a while. The Labour Right has a socially conservative constituency, which is part of the reason why Australia still has not legalised gay marriage.
  2. The Liberals have a moderate and a conservative wing. Formerly, the split was about economic policy. In the past decade, the split has mostly been about social conservatism, with the moderates more libertarian and the conservatives more authoritarian. That split is the current big story in Australian politics.
  3. The Nationals have been in lock-step Coalition with the Liberals for the past four generations, and their brand of agrarian populism does not appear to have had much impact on government policy when they have been in government.

As with much of the West, the two major parties’ fervour has hollowed out, and they have bled votes to populists:

  1. Left wing populists (formerly the Australian Democrats, nowadays the Greens, who have locked up the inner city intelligentsia),
  2. Right wing populists (of which One Nation is only the most notorious),
  3. And even Centrist populists (the original Australian Democrats, back when Labour was still a left wing party; nowadays the Nick Xenophon Team).

So the landscape is just as messy as America, and the two major parties are fractious coalitions just as in America. But third parties are slightly better established, and of course the social consensus is to the left of America, both socially and economically.

A social conservative Republican might make their home grudgingly in the Conservative wing of the Liberals, and the newly bellicose Conservative Liberals have certainly been borrowing rhetoric from America. But they would be bothered by the abundance of RINO equivalents, and may eventually flee to a more principled party. One Nation, possibly, if they’re anxious about culture and race; Family First or Rise Up Australia if they are Christianist.

A libertarian Republican might make their home grudgingly in the Moderate wing of the Liberals, and the newly supine Moderate Liberals have certainly been borrowing rhetoric from America. But they would be bothered by the abundance of big government statists even in the Moderate flank, and may eventually flee to a more principled party. The only real alternative is the Liberal Democrats—which by Australian standards is horridly right wing (Why Ridiculously Stupid White Man David Leyonhjelm Will Lose His 18c Racial Discrimination Case – New Matilda)—simply because Australians are really not used to libertarian rhetoric. (Yes, New Matilda is left wing.)

In terms of sentiment, a Sandersnista would gravitate to the Greens, who are the only somewhat mainstream voice against refugee demonisation and for gay marriage. (Labor has been riven on both, because of its big tent.) A Clintonista would gravitate to Labor, and Labor functionaries do apprenticeships in Democrat campaigns.

In terms of actual economic or social policy, a Sandersnista would probably find themselves somewhere in the Labor party (more to the left socially, more to the right economically). A Clintonista would find themselves freaking out at the overt power of Unions in the Labor party, and hopping between Labor Right and Moderate Liberals.

Just as outsiders can see American politics more clearly than those caught up in its culture wars, so too I trust that an American Clintonista can actually make out some sunlight between Labor Right and Moderate Liberals…

Where in Australia do most expats from South Africa live?

By: | Post date: May 18, 2017 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Australia

In my experience, Perth by far. Enough that the South African presence in Perth is very visible: it’s one of the largest ethnic subgroups there. (Perth has not had the same level of Mediterranean or Asian migration as Sydney or Melbourne.) South African restaurants are common there, and very uncommon in Melbourne (though I’ve still found a couple of places that had biltong.)

It helps that Perth is so much closer to South Africa, of course.

How many children did your grandparents have?

By: | Post date: May 18, 2017 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Personal

My maternal grandparents (Crete) had five (1940–1953). John, Helen, Maria, Georgia, George.

My paternal grandparents (Cyprus) had nine (1926–1947), of which one was still-born (Angelica) and one died of smallpox as a toddler (Kostas). George,† Helen, Chris, Stavros, Dora,† Andrew, Savvas. As Savvas once said to me, “the machine kept going, until it stopped.” The first child migrated when the last was six months old; I think they all were in the same room only once after that, when Dora was dying of cancer in ’81.

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