We have the following question as data, and we will assume that there is no intrinsic bias to people self-selecting in the survey:
How do Quorans score on the Political Compass Test?
Yes, the Political Compass test is deeply flawed. Whatevs.
As of this writing:
Left Libertarian: 91
Right Libertarian: 19
Left Authoritarian: 3
Right Authoritarian: 6
https://www.meta-chart.com/share…
… The answer based on the aforementioned question is: yes.
Such japes might cause much merriment at first,
or second even; but I warrant you,
that by the fifteenth time that poetaster
had made his verse response to some request,
the joke by then would be well past its prime,
and this ill habit taken by its readers
as evidence of mental feebleness—
as seen with Judge Roy Ashland on the West Wing.
I’m turning 45 in a month, actually; but this Cretan song I heard in my youth has been haunting me since I turned forty. I even had the first verse of it as my Skype mood message for a fair while.
Άχι και σαραντάρισα, δεν κάνω μπλιο γι’ αγάπες
και μου ’ρχεται να τροζαθώ και να γλακώ στσι στράτες.
Γιατροί μου απαγορεύουνε, μα λεν το κι οι γι-ανθρώποι:
ξέχασε κειανά που ’κανες και τη ζωή την πρώτη.
Μην παίζω μπλιο, μην τραγουδώ, μην ξενυχτώ τα βράδυα.
Να πάψω να τσιλιπουρδώ στσ’ αυλές και στα σκοτάδια.
Ρακί, κρασί μην ξαναπιώ, τσιγάρω μην καπνίσω,
Μηδέ το μήνα μια φορά να μην ξαναγλεντίσω,
και προπαντός τα όμορφα μην τα λοξοκοιτάζω.
Χώρες χωριά και γειτονιές απού ’κραζα μην κράζω.
Και λέω ίντα θα γενώ, και τρέμει η ψυχή μου.
Σαν του χοχλιού το κέρατο εζάρωσε η χολή* μου.
Μα συλλογούμαι ίντα θα πεις Σαββάτο γή Δευτέρα,
και συνταγές και γιατρικά θα τα πετάξω πέρα,
και από τσι χάρες τση ζωής τσι πλια όμορφες θα πάρω,
να αφήσω αποδιαλέουρα στον κερατά το Χάρο.
Alas I’m forty, fit no more for love.
I feel like running crazy down the streets.
The doctors ban me, people say so too:
forgot what you once did, and your past life.
Don’t play no more, don’t sing, don’t stay up late.
Don’t hang around in courtyards and dark corners.
No wine, no brandy, no more cigarettes,
don’t have a party even once a month,
and never steal a glance at pretty girls.
Stop haunting towns and neighbourhoods I’d haunted.
What’s to become of me? My soul, it shivers.
Like a snail feeler my gall bladder* shrivels.
I wonder what you’ll think come Saturday,
when I throw all my scripts and pills away.
I’ll sample all the best life has to give.
The leftovers—that bastard Death can have.
*Censored from ψωλή “dick”.
Patriarch Cyril Lucaris made overtures towards Calvinist theologians in the 1620s, and many though not all specialists believe he was pursuing a reform of the church along Calvinist lines. His contemporaries certainly thought so, and attributed the Calvinist Confession of Cyril Lucaris to him.
The Synod of Jerusalem (1672) repudiated both the Confession, and Cyril’s authorship of the Confession, three decades after Cyril’s execution.
There is one Quoran who upvotes just about everything I write (or at least, did the first few months I was here). He’s one of the few Quorans I knew online pre-Quora. I appreciate it: I regard him as my Quora sponsor.
There are Quorans I consider close Quora-friends, and I upvote most of their stuff I see in my feed, as a mark of group loyalty. Not all of it; if it was unspectacular, or trollish, or something I both disagree with and think was not well argued, I’ll decline to upvote. And hope they don’t notice. I don’t want to upvote automatically, but I will upvote by default.
In both cases, these are people I’ve gotten to know already. If some random starts upvoting me lots, well, I’ll make a point of getting to know them; but if we have that kind of overlapping interests, my experience until now has been that I already have gotten to know them.
As for comments: no, I cherish comments. If anything, I am the one creeping out other people with comments. Some people make it clear that they appreciate the banter, and reciprocate. Some people make it clear that they don’t; well, their loss.
What are your reasons for doing so?
What are not your reasons for doing so?
How long has this been a consideration?
What prevents you from doing so?
How long have you been active in Quora?
What Topics do you most frequent?
1–2 hours a day. More than I should be…
I still have a soft spot for GraphicConverter. Quite similar to Paint in its basic features.
There’s more to Judaism than the Tanach.
As discussed in Bosom of Abraham and Paradise, the notion of heaven as a place where the righteous dead go, rather than Sheol for everyone, is a notion that was kicking around in late Judaism, including Jewish papyri and apocrypha such as 4 Maccabees.
That understanding of heaven is mentioned a couple of times in the Gospels, and was developed further by early Christian writers; but it was not alien to the Judaism of Jesus’ time.
Ditto hell: Gehenna as an antecedent to Hell is not much in evidence in the apocrypha, but it’s there in the Targums and the Talmud.
(I gotta say, btw, this was the result of 5 minutes on Wikipedia, and I’m astonished that none of the answers given looked into Jewish antecedents to heaven and hell.)
See also:
What they said. For fieldwork, you get a flat-file database for organising your field notes and automatically generating glosses and dictionaries. (A relational database is overkill.) Toolbox (The Field Linguist’s Toolbox) and its predecessor The Linguist’s Shoebox from SIL International are the default tools.
Databases are less useful than you might think, though I found they were useful for typological work (if you’re doing wide surveys of languages).
For Computational Linguistics, you learn Perl (if you’re living 20 years ago like I still am) or Python, and you get hold of a good software library. The premier one seems to be Natural Language Toolkit. Treat it as a starting point, but it is a very good starting point. Enough that I’ve winced and taught myself enough Python to use it, though I still find Python distasteful.
If you’re doing phonetics, you will be doing a lot of IT, to get the data, and to get statistics about the data: phonetics is a lot closer to disciplines like psychology. Like Joonas Vakkilainen, you will get familiar with R. (Or Python, I guess.) Ditto sociolinguistics, as Joonas said. But for most other fields of linguistics, you won’t likely need more stats than you can get out of Excel.
Sorry for 4 month delay in A2A, Z-Kat.