Category: Uncategorized

A fair few.

• Iranian and Azeri culture: Pegah Esmaili
• Turkish culture: several posters, but Ayse Temmuz and Sam Snow stand out for me.
• Albanian culture: several posters again, but Kelvin Zifla, Alket Cecaj and Stiven Llupa…
• … who I’ve just realised has deleted his account. Bugger.
• Greek culture: Dimitra Triantafyllidou and Evangelos Lolos are only primi inter pares. Too many to mention.
• Music: Curtis Lindsay.
• History: Dimitris Almyrantis.
• Transgender issues: Jae Alexis Lee.
• Literature: Michael Masiello.
• Courtesy: Edward Conway.
• Judgement: Jennifer Edeburn.

The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium confirms John Bard’s answer:

As late as the 4th C., the Mediterranean continued to be an “inner sea,” totally surrounded by the territory of the Roman Empire. It was the only sea for Greeks, the esō thalassa [internal sea] (Aristotle) as opposed to the exō thalassa [external sea] or ocean; for the Latins the mare internum, intestinum, or nostrum. The term mare mediterraneum did not appear until the 3rd C.; Isidore of Seville used it in the early 7th C. (O. Maull. RE 15 [1932] 2222). The Byz. did not have a general term for the Mediterranean, although they used special names for its parts—the Aegean, Ionian, Tyrsenikon (or Tyrrhenian), Sikelikon, Kretikon pelagos [sea].

For the same reason my bio on Quora topics promotes Quora Base Camp.

The studious lack of onboarding on Quora has been a long-running problem, and there have been tens of attempts by its users over the years to remedy it with their own guides. The problem has been that none of those attempts have gathered critical mass of visibility: the wheel keeps getting reinvented, and noone much gets to go on a ride on it.

Jennifer Edeburn, whom I count as a friend, had a genius idea when she embarked on her own attempt to write a guide for readers: viral marketing. Using our bios as walking billboards, to guide new (and not so new) users to help about Quora.

I thought it a brilliant idea, and I went one better when it went live. Necrologue, for better or worse, has a readership; and its footer is now a walking billboard for Quora Base Camp too.

I agree with Dion Shaw’s answer: detecting irony is a subtle skill, which requires you to deduce, from real world knowledge, that the speaker intends the complete opposite of what they’re literally saying, and that they think it’s appropriate to do so because they regard the question as not worth answering literally (typically because they regard the answer as obvious).

Computers aren’t doing well at detecting irony in general, and the problem is AI-hard. (Real Artificial Intelligence, with a social and intentional factor, not just machine learning.) In fact, the one paper I read about it recently was as crude as it possibly could be—it only got so far as working out that the person was speaking an untruth, ergo, Irony! But of course lying, error, and irony are not the same thing at all, even if all of them reduce to the same truth-conditional purview of a statement not being true.

Quora’s algorithms, sadly, as not in the business of extracting truth from ironic answers, which is at least part of the reason why Joke Answers are frowned upon. I have to say, I find it difficult to see how Quora’s algorithms are extracting meaning from the wide range of answers given here at all. But they don’t have to; they merely have to understand upvotes, credentials, and social networks of users.

Ἰθάκηνδε, which occurs five times in the Odyssey (1.88, 1.163, 11.361, 15.157, 16.322).

This has been said plenty by others, and I’m just clearing my backlog with this, but:

All justice is reasonable when administered with equity. See Michael Masiello’s answer to What do you hate about Quora as of March 2017?

BNBR sure does not look like it is administered with equity. Moderation does not do context or extenuating circumstance, and it’s not supposed to.

But that’s the complaint about the implementation of BNBR.

I have plenty of concerns about BNBR as a policy itself: I think it is problematic.

BNBR licences bad knowledge and truthiness: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why has Quora become a magnet for flat Earth and Moon landing conspiracy questions that must be given BNBR respect, even though they’re undeserving? BNBR suppresses criticism of individuals, and has a chilling effect on criticism of a lot of things. BNBR gets fetishised as an end in itself, rather than a means to more civil discourse. And BNBR is blatantly culture-specific: there is no universal measure of niceness or respect. (So everyone gets measured by a Northern Californian norm. Or that of the subcontractors thereof, or that of the bots thereof.)

These are all controversial claims, and there’s plenty of arguments to be made for and against. But saying BNBR is reasonable as a given, before moving on to how it is misapplied in practice, is not how those arguments get had.

Ah, you know there is, OP.

Greeks do have a tradition of omen-names they give kids, once they’re run out of grandparents to name their kids after—although with the drop of children per mother, and of traditional superstitions, they are probably no longer issued.

Greeks did not like female births, because they cost them. Less hands to help around the family farm, when they moved away to join their husbands’ household; and a whole lot of expense in paying out dowry. So if you had a whole lot of daughters in succession, you would eventually give one a name, asking it to stop.

One of those names, in fact, is Stamato or Stamatina. Those names are the feminines of Stamatis, which is derived from stamaˈto ‘stop’. There is no St Stamatius, and the feast day for people called Stamatis, Stamato, or Stamatina is November 8, St Michael’s day. Apparently (Σταμάτιος – Σταματία), the Archangel Michael was supposed to have said “let us stand well, let us stand with fear of God”, a line from the Mass, to stop the fallen angels from falling.

(OK, I lied. There are neomartyrs called Stamatius. Neomartyrs are martyrs under Ottoman rule; that tells you that the name was already around before Ottoman rule, and it wasn’t around thanks to any of the original batch of saints. So those neomartyrs were just called “stop!”, even if it they were boys.)

Tina Fey is Greek from her mother’s side; Tina is short for Stamatina. She has one older brother, so her name is likely not an omen name; it could have been an ancestor’s though.

Another such omen name, used in Thessaly, is Agoro, a feminine derived from aɣori ‘boy’. Αγόρω.

Abigail, I go all Michaelis Maus whenever I see unanimity. I go all the more Michaelis Maus now that Michaelis has been banned.

It’s hard for me to, because the OP (who has since deleted their account) put in the proviso: “without hurting or offending others”.

But pay attention to that: they had to. Being yourself is not a paramount goal. You still have to be part of society. You still have to be not-yourself enough, in order not to make your life a constant battle. You need discretion in life, too, and discretion is about holding back on being yourself.

If you’ve found a way to do that, that’s great: that means you’ve worked out discretion. But it’s not a one-off deal. You need to recalibrate how much of yourself you need to suppress, to be more likeable, in given social circumstances; and those circumstances are going to change, and expand, as you move around. They’ll certainly get more constrained in the workplace, for example. It’s a balancing act, and you’re going to keep balancing. Middle age is about grubby compromises. We do what we can get away with.

No good saying this to OP, they’re not here. Good luck to the rest of you.

I’m suffering this right now.

If you’re overrun with A2As, as I am: don’t get around to answering them in a hurry. And if someone else has gotten around it before you do, and you’re happy with their answer, well, that’s a win, isn’t it? 🙂

I would not dilute my interests, but I would let some questions slide. I’m not good at that, but what’s the alternative.

A2A’d by Emlyn Shen.

All I know about Emlyn is that she’s Asian, trans, and a teenager. To me, she’ll always be her profile pic, as most of you are:

Yet somehow, I doubt that’s a photographic depiction.

I don’t get out much, so I don’t know many Asian trans young people. If the profile pic is not, as it turns out, a True Likeness of Emlyn, then I’m going to guess she looks a little like Natalie Chen:

Natalie Chen is creating TransGirl Cosplay | Patreon

Emlyn, am I close?