many the languages i crossed

Non-Gricean Humor: The past, the present, and the future walk into a bar. It was tense.

Being a mathematician does irreparable damage to you vocabulary. I have on more than one occasion forgotten that certain words have normal every day meanings

Normal meanings as in, what, they're orthogonal?

You’re thinking of a normal vector! Normal meanings are meanings that are invariant under conjugation.

That's a normal subgroup! Normal meanings are those where any two disjoint closed subconcepts have disjoint open neighbourhoods.

You're thinking of a normal space! Normal meanings are those where if you take their infinite expansion in any base, any sequence of subconcepts appears equally frequently.

I actually really like the thing when you're starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn't natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me "every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week." And I understood.

I don't think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words "humidity" or "stress", I managed to string together: "This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me." And she understood.

And sometimes you just say things weird, but it's better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn't know the spanish word for "hurry", but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english "I have all the time in the world."

The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn't expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.

I did this with Spanish so much when I lived in Argentina.

Highlights:

some pdfs are dusty. this is a fact despite their lack of physicality. you understand

fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

goose

In the future after the model collapse people dig around for any pre-2020s text and images they can salvage, like raising pre-1945 battleship wrecks for low-background steel...

obviously not the most important part of the paper but i adore the prose style here... "the model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality..."

not to be pedantic but it annoys me so much when people talk abt how chatgpt is "lying" or "making things up". or esp when people say it "refuses to admit" to lying. like girl that is a toaster oven

"it REFUSED TO ADMIT that it LIED to me" it is a line of code generating letters in the most algorithmically probable order

the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck

this is what ancient greek philosophy is like

what if doorbells went dong ding instead of ding dong

don’t say something like that

so the nyc subway doors make a ding-dong sound when they close and a few years ago i was on a G train (which is, like, one of the saddest trains, people make fun of it all the time, and i say that even though i love it and i think it is objectively one of the most reliable trains, it just doesn’t go into manhattan) and it was like 1am and i was just trying to get home but this train car, instead of going “ding-dong” when the door closed it went “dong-ding” and everyone in the train just kinda froze and looked around at each other and made bewildered eye-contact and i’ve seen a lot of weird and fucked up things on the subway since i moved here but hearing the doors go “dong-ding” might be the weirdest thing i’ve ever experienced in the nyc subway system

It's still so strange to me how apparently taboo it is to like a post on someone's Instagram from a month ago when there are posts still circulating on Tumblr from 1550 BCE

If he didn't want it circulating in 2022 he should have sold better copper

Guys we gotta up our game the Georgians said fuck more than us

Having looked through historic googlebooks many a time and been frustrated by how difficult it is to search in this time period, this chart is most certainly due to the algorithm not properly picking up the "Long S" which was an f-like character used in place of an s especially in 17th and 18th century printing.

The rules of when the short and long s's are used are somewhat complicated to modern people, but they are almost always at the beginning of words, never at the end, and if there is a double s sometimes they are combined and sometimes not:

99% of the time the word actually being used is "suck" or "sucking." It actually shows up a lot as a word used to describe babies who were still nursing. In texts from this period the word "suck" will almost always read as "fuck." This makes some of these auto-transcriptions absolutely brilliant in hindsight:

If you search for the word "fuck" in googlebooks within this time frame, you get hundreds of pages of entries like this. For example, this Shakespeare anthology:

This is not to say that people in the 18th century didn't find this hilarious, I'm sure they did, but f-bombs were not being dropped in classic literature at the time. If they do show up, like in this 1785 slang dictionary: it is almost always bleeped out:

The other 1% of the fucks in 18th century books are, of course, not bleeped out because they are in Ye Olde Porn, of which there is a surprising amount on googlebooks.

#labor solidarity with the duck fucker

I should also note if it wasn't clear that the immense dropoff just after 1800 is when the long s stopped being used in print, and the reemergence was in the mid-late 20th century when people DID start dropping f-bombs in literature

Stability in language is synonymous with rigor mortis. —Ernest Weekley

petition to shorten "classic literature" to "clit"

A large part of housecat vocalisation toward humans isn’t goal-directed communication, but rather, affiliative signaling: a simple call-and-response protocol which establishes that the participants are part of the same social unit. Amongst themselves, most housecat affiliative signaling is non-vocal, but humans aren’t really physiologically equipped to respond to such signalling in a feline fashion, and cats, well, they’re adaptable.

Which is to say that when your cat yells, and you yell back, so the cat yells again, and so forth, what you’re really saying to each other is “hiiiiii~”.

This is why it is important to meow at loved ones.

A largish percentage of human vocalizations are this, too!  When your human co-worker says “Workin’ hard or hardly workin’?” or comments on atmospheric conditions or other readily-observable features of your surroundings, or generally statements that seemingly convey no useful or novel information whatsoever, the true purpose of these vocalizations is to develop and/or maintain the social unit of the workplace!   In effect, they are saying, “We are experiencing this situation together.  We often experience situations together.  Let’s be allies!”

Some humans will even make vocalizations of this kind to complete strangers, such as when waiting in a line or using public transportation.  This behavior is especially common in situation that may involve some form of inconvenience or frustration, such as waiting in a long line or experiencing a delay.  In these contexts, the vocalizations communicate, “We are both experiencing the same unpleasant situation; let’s not make it worse by being aggressive to one another.”  

thinking about the time a prof told us that in real research mathematics it's fine to be slow, speed itself is not essential, as long as you can find it within yourself to make consistent unyielding inexorable forward progress, like the time some guy stole an M60A3 tank and terrorized a suburban neighborhood with it, said guy wasn't going that fast but plowed through cars and telephone poles and shit no problem. i'm not kidding that's what he said, that's the metaphor he used, he told us that the act of mathematics is like the 1995 san diego tank rampage

i love words like “acquire” and “acquit” etc… it’s such a treat to see c and q together like that. they’re such an odd couple. it’s like if you were in high school¹ and one day you saw the blonde overachiever valedictorian² hanging out with the weird friendless goth girl with the siouxsie sioux³ hair and you realized they’d been childhood friends all along

¹ stage of education in the united states, commonly portrayed in a romanticized manner in films and tv shows. ² untranslatable; a type of warrior-priest. ³ english singer who was an important figure in the emergence of the gothic rock genre in the late 1970s.

there are 2 Ethans in my daughter's class. you'd think they'd go by Ethan L and Ethan M, but they decided together that they would like to be called Lethan and Methan and I think that's fantastic