Ah, Michael, Michael, Michael…

I see this has become a random word association task, and that it has spawned Be honest: what do you think of when you hear “white people”?

OK. Let’s see where this takes me.

• African-Americans.
• Not Africans. Not Jamaicans. Not Australian Aboriginals. If I see a Somali in town (our second-last refugee intake in Australia), I don’t think “black people”, I think “damn those Somalis are tall.”
• Negative media portrayals
• Being scared while in the hood in Memphis (correlated)
• Civil rights struggle
• All that awesome music. All of it.
• I know too few black people, offline or on
• The ones I have met were all awesome
• Including here
• Should really get around to reading more Langston Hughes one day
• Maya Angelou does not seem to be a good poet
• I keep thinking I’m going to be subconsciously racist around blacks
• Maybe I am, but I don’t think I’ve allowed anything to get out 🙂
• I need to know a LOT more about Frederick Douglass

Well, that was my stream of consciousness…

Habib, you’re on a roll here, aren’t you!

• Confucian virtues
• Industry
• Most people I hanged out with at high school. And undergrad.
• Spicy food
• East Asians, Not South Asians; I’m from Australia, not the UK
• East Asians, Not West Asians. Does anyone even say “West Asians”?
• East Asians, Not North Asians. People definitely don’t call Siberians North Asians.
• East Asians, Not Central Asians. Huh. It really is all about extended Sinosphere, isn’t it.
• South East Asians. Kinda sorta extended Sinosphere.
• My neighbours’ parents, who yell too loud in Chinese at their kid.
• My urbane Taiwanese psychologist friend, and his darling kids.
• Lots of cultures with venerable history, that I know too little about.

There is a mental barrier for me, as a longtime resident of Melbourne: Melbourne ends at Mt Eliza. The mental barrier is to do with continuous buildings: there is a break in construction just south of Frankston, and there is empty land between Mt Eliza and Mornington (even if it is roughly 5 km).

The break in coverage of the metropolitan railway is another such construct: there is empty land between Dandenong and Pakenham (though not for long), but I think of Pakenham as part of Melbourne, because the train ends there.

There are people that commute into Melbourne CBD from the Mornington Peninsula, and for that matter from Geelong; but I would stick with the continuous building criterion. You are right that Melbourne has uncommon urban sprawl; and Sydney’s is worse. But I would think of Melbourne still as having a 50 km radius, not 100 km.

Originally Answered:

How western is the republic of Greece and its locals?

Vote #1 Goru Yamato: Goru Yamato’s answer to Are Greeks truly “western”? How can they be western if they are orthodox? In that case, why aren’t the other orthodox countries considered western? Μπράβο σας, Γιαμάτο-σάμα!

I’ll just add that the struggle between the Hellenic and the Romaic, the Western and the Eastern orientation of Greece, was a defining cultural conflict within Greece. Greeks were not Westerners on the foundation of the Modern Greek State. Greeks had to be taught they are Westerners. A lot of Greek culture is still not Western. And Greeks throughout the 19th century, and well into the 20th, referred to Western Europeans as Franks. Which they wouldn’t do if they considered themselves Western Europeans.

The term Franks has fallen into disuse in the past generation or two. Not coincidentally, Greeks have embraced the project of the European Union: for all that they loathe Germany right now and are pushed against the wall, they really do want to stay in.

Greek culture has been in transition; but then, all cultures always are. More importantly though, Greeks themselves have come to embrace a Western identity. Which matters more.

… What are you doing here still? Vote #1 Goru Yamato: Goru Yamato’s answer to Are Greeks truly “western”? How can they be western if they are orthodox? In that case, why aren’t the other orthodox countries considered western?

For Scott Welch.

When I walked away from linguistics, I walked upstairs into department IT support for the Languages Department. It was an underpaid but cosy sinecure, where I got to write papers, work on the side as a research assistant, and practice bad Italian, French, and German on my peers.

That didn’t last, and it couldn’t of course. Just as IT was being centralised into faculty in 2006, and I would have to give up my cosy office, an old friend gave me a call. He was doing a PhD in physics while I was doing mine in linguistics, and we both worked in university tech support.

He had just taken a secondment with a consultancy, that was advising the Australian federal government on interoperability issues in the school sector and the university sector. They had a project going on persistent identifiers, which was kinda philosophical and might be right up my alley. Was I interested?

That started my current career; it’s been ten years now. I’ve been working for national infrastructure projects, of various flavours, in the school sector or the university research sector. I’ve been called a business analyst in all those projects, although that’s a title of convenience more than anything else, because I have done and do lots of different stuff.

• I have done the conventional BA tasks of gathering requirements and writing use cases and communicating between developers and management. I have even drawn the odd flowchart.
• However, I do on occasion cut code where needed, I know what developers get up to, and I can write it up. As a delighted colleague once said to me, when he discovered that I programmed: “Oh! So you’re not an idiot!”
• Staff befuddled at where I fit in the world have come up with Technical Business Analyst.
• A lot of my work has been in standards for data transfer online. That work is a lot of fun: it’s a bit of philosophy, and a bit of engineering, and a lot of ratiocinating. More often than not, in international collaboration.
• Increasingly, I’m moving into policy analysis, and I’m also becoming more aware of systems architectures, and planning strategic choices around them.
• Since 2013, the particular national infrastructure project I’ve been involved in has been the National Schools Interoperability Project, which works on improving access to information for stakeholders in the Australian school education sector (including schools and system vendors, as well as government agencies).

It’s kind of hard to describe what I do, because I do bit of everything. I hop from being a developer to a data analyst to a policy analyst to a business analyst, at a moment’s notice. But I like that.

---

I don’t post here much about my day job. The approaches we use are hardly unique to Australian education, but I haven’t gotten into the culture of talking about it much.

For a very long time, I didn’t identify myself with my new gig; the circumstances of me having to leave university were somewhat wrenching, I had a lot invested in my academic identity, and the new gig was not something I’ve trained for, or expected to end up in.

It took me some years, really, for me to take pride in what I do in my day job.

The real test of it would be for me to start pontificating about my day job on Quora, the way I do about linguistics—or the way I can, face to face, with Scott Welch, who turns out to be in the same line of work. But the gig is a little more politically sensitive than I’ve been accustomed to; and I haven’t sought out yet the network of people who would be interested (other than Scott).

But I do take pride in it now. It’s a job, true, and like any job it has its downsides. But as its best, I get paid to think. And that is to be cherished—particularly in a small country like Australia, which effectively has no R&D in the private sector. (That’s why you’re going to have to blast me out of government work.)

And the gig is flexible enough to allow me to pursue other things. Perhaps a little too flexible… 🙂

I’ve written a fair bit up about this at http://www.opoudjis.net/unicode/… . All secondary research, but it’s secondary research that seems to have been cited at Wikipedia.

Your timeline is right:

• There was a distinct heta letter for /h/, which looked like H, but it was not used in all locations.
• There was an innovation in antiquity (ca 400 BC), whereby Greeks in Southern Italy broke H in half, and used that for /h/: Ͱ
• From there, Greek papyri use one half of H as a diacritic to indicate an H is present, and the other half to indicate they are missing: x҅ x҆ . (I didn’t write down when, but my page says “by the time Greek starts showing up in papyri”, so it would have been around 300 BC—before /h/ stopped being pronounced.
• Those symbols survived long enough to be passed on to Early Cyrillic, and thus Unicode.
• In Greek manuscripts by the 12th century, the diacritics ended up being curved: ἀ ἀ
• Notice that the symbols were used long after the /h/ stopped being pronounced. In fact, accents and breathings started being notated as diacritics, precisely because they were starting to be lost in pronunciation. They were first used to teach proper speech, and after they had completely disappeared, they kept being used because the ancients had used them.

• Coffee:
• Turkish coffee (renamed Greek coffee) for the older generation
• Frappé coffee for the younger generation
• Instant coffee (“Nes”) as a lighter, more western option
• Variants such as Vienna Coffee for a night out
• Nursed for hours at a café
• First beverage at home in the morning
• Herbal teas
• Sage, Camomile, Nettle
• Drunk when you’re ill, as a restorative
• Stereotypically associated with old people; hence Zambetas’ great lyric, Οι νέοι θέλουν έρωτα, κι οι γέροι χαμομήλι, “The young need love; the old need camomile”
• Tea
• That thing that English people drink
• Traditionally treated as a counterpart of herbal teas: a health drink, rather than a social drink
• Wine
• The traditional drink of feasting and celebration; can be seen at the dining table
• Not watered since Byzantium
• But already resinated since Byzantium (see below)
• Traditionally, there’s some homebrew lurking around in the village; buying a decent commercial vintage is a nouveau things
• There are fine venerable distinctive grapes in Greece—Category:Grape varieties of Greece – Wikipedia is a long list. But traditionally, people drink whatever’s handy locally. In my experience, it’s on the sour and unsubtle side.
• Retsina
• Resinated as a preservative
• A tart taste that makes no sense outside Greece, but a lot of sense with lamb chops with oregano
• Default drink of the taverna
• Endearingly served in tin pitchers
• Beer
• Introduced with the Bavarians in the 1830s. The venerable and recently revived brand Fix was originally Fuchs.
• In my youth, there were just two brands: Amstel and Heineken (locally called “Green”), with an occasional showing of Löwenbräu. There’s a lot more now, including local brews (and the beginnings of microbrews).
• Traditionally the secondary, lighter alternative to wine; more common (I think) when going out than in feasts at home.
• Raki/Tsikoudia/Tsipouro
• Traditional hard drink
• Drunk straight in shot glasses
• If you’ve had grappa, you’ve had raki. It’s a Pomace brandy.
• Drunk with mezze (tapas)
• Much more a drink of manly men celebrating each other’s manliness than a feast drink
• Ouzo
• Variant of raki
• Drunk straight in shot glasses, or watered down in tumblers
• Actually corresponds to Turkish rakı, with the whole aniseed flavour and the turning white with water
• Drunk in ouzeries (tapas joints), and I assume by manly men celebrating each other’s manliness
• Whisky
• The urban and urbane counterpart to raki
• The choice of the Greek going to a Western-style bar
• The choice of the Greek showing off their affluence
• Coke
• Default soft drink, like it is eveywhere
• Sprite
• Second default soft drink, like it is eveywhere
• Gazoza
• Traditional equivalent to Sprite, though a bit more lemony
• Fell out of favour in the last few decades
• Visinada
• Sour cherry juice (or cordial, and sometimes carbonated)
• Byral
• A local imitation of Coke
• Big in the 60s, before Coke was launched locally

As a wise man (or failing that, me) said (Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which language is older, Persian or Arabic?):

There’s no such thing as an older language.

Markus Zeeb brought up all the right caveats about Basque in his answer:

so Basque might be the oldest (or rather longest continuously spoken) language in Europe (whatever that means, to be honest).

And Aquitanian, the actual ancestor of Basque, prominently figures in my answer above.

So no, Wendish (Sorbian languages) may have been spoken in Eastern Germany before German was. But Wendish is not meaningfully older than German, and is no older than Slovakian, or Greek, or Spanish, or Aquitanian. Even if Wendish were extraordinarily conservative as an Indo-European language, which is not a claim I’ve heard.

Ah, Mez.

There’s symptoms of what needs to be fixed in Quora, and then there’s the underlying issue.

Almost all answers are targeting the symptoms. Which is cool, the symptoms are what they’re experience and being frustrated by.

But look deeper. If I’m running Quora, I have to deal with the underlying issues. Not just the symptoms.

Scott Welch got closer than everyone to the issues—the lack of a continuous improvement culture, and the debacle of corporate culture reported on at Glassdoor.

But dig deeper yet, if you step into the shoes of Adam DiCaprio. Scott and I have done so face to face, and I know he’s said it here too.

But he’s had his shot at an answer, Mez. And here’s mine.

Why do I loathe Quora Inc. by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency

I decided that if I’m going to be a Welchite about Quora, and complain about it, I owe Quora the courtesy of articulating why constructively.

And I split the post into “At the surface”, and “At the core”.

At the surface is the stuff everyone complains about. Moderation, UI, User Relations.

At the core… well, I’ll quote my blog post.

Lack of leadership

Who’s running the show? Is there a CTO? Is there a CFO? Why are all the high profile managers jumping ship? Does D’Angelo even exist, or is he a scripted bot? If he’s a scripted bot, can we at least improve the frequency of his posts?

Lack of vision

What problem is Quora solving? Is it an expert forum? Is it a social forum? Is it a knowledge repository, crowdsourcing Doug Lenat’s Cyc? Is it a training bed for AI bots? For intranet knowledge bases? Where do we writers fit in? Why are we here and not on StackExchange?

Lack of sustainability

It’s been six years of burning through venture capital; even by Silly-Con Valley standards, that’s been a while. Is there a plan for profitability? Is there a not-for-profit exit strategy? Is there a strategy at all? And will there be a Quora in five years’ time?

These issues are not getting visibly fixed. And these, in the end, will unhouse us all.

You want to make Quora better? Don’t just fix the symptoms. Fix the core. A Quora in five years that’s exactly the same, with the same random number generator UI and unaccountable moderation and adversarial user relations—is still better than a defunct Quora.

There are 22 states in Brazil. I know this, because of the Brazilian flag. Ordem e Progresso!

Of those states, I can name…

…

Um…

…

Is Rio a state as well as a city?

Please don’t unfollow me, Alfredo. Your point is very well taken.