Nick on Quora

Well, not as spectacular a story as some. Just answers.

7 days:

5k is on the low end, so maybe less traffic than usual. I have been busy with freelance work this past couple of weeks, so I have been writing somewhat less than my usual deluge of stuff. Spike yesterday is from the inexplicably popular Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some cultural faux pas in Australia?

30 days:

That’s more like it: it varies between 5k and 10k these days. Some spikes, but actually no one overwhelming answer.

3 months:

The gaps at the start are of course the days the stats died (The Statistics Black Hole by Nick Nicholas on The Memes of Production). The peaks are my most viral answer to date, and not an answer I take any warm fuzzies in: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Which Indian states are well known in other countries?

• The world has moved on since 1970 (C: Kernighan and Ritchie). But the world still needs a low level language.
• Pretty printing and statement termination are solved problems. The programmer does not need to be forced to deal with them.
• You can have a low level language and still have associative arrays, extensible arrays and garbage collection as primitives.
• The world needs strict typing. But we can hide that from the programer pretty well.
• Encapsulation is a good thing, but you can skip inheritance and most of the other object oriented stuff.
• It’s about time parallelism was enshrined as a programming primitive.

Use of swearing to affirm solidarity. There’s a lot of that. In fact, what the contextual cues are to differentiate between swearing used to affirm solidarity, and swearing used to express hostility. Cultural factors associated with the use of swearing to affirm solidarity: what are the demographics? Working class? Youth? Gender? Other correlates? Are particular kinds of swear word used more for solidarity, or more for hostility?

This question has been asked and answered recently by someone else, but: Quora is agnostic about a banned user’s questions (or answers for that matter). Even if a user is banned for troll content, it is not assumed that all their answers are trollish, and those answers need to be reported, to be evaluated for collapse or deletion, separately.

That goes even more for questions, which once written belong to the community (to be reworded at will).

Yes it’s more work. I’d rather that work than the alternative over indiscriminately removing anything ever asked by a user, and making all the answers anyone has ever given inaccessible.

Well, OP, at least you’re not calling them Monophysites. 🙂

The Greek Wikipedia, and as far as I can tell the Greek Orthodox Church, refers to Oriental Orthodoxy as Pre-Chalcedonian Orthodoxy (Προχαλκηδόνιες Εκκλησίες – Βικιπαίδεια). Of course, a church who thought Chalcedon got it wrong is not going to call itself that.

Orthodoxy – Wikipedia points out the following:

The Homoousian doctrine, which defined Jesus as both God and man with the hypostatic union of the 451 Council of Chalcedon, won out in the Church and was referred to as orthodoxy in most Christian contexts, since this was the viewpoint of the majority. (The minority nontrinitarian Christians object to this terminology).

…

Following the 1054 Great Schism, both the Western and Eastern Churches continued to consider themselves uniquely orthodox and catholic. Over time, the Western Church gradually identified with the “Catholic” label, and people of Western Europe gradually associated the “Orthodox” label with the Eastern Church (in some languages the “Catholic” label is not necessarily identified with the Western Church). This was in note of the fact that both Catholic and Orthodox were in use as ecclesiastical adjectives as early as the 2nd and 4th centuries respectively.

Note also the title of the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria:

Pope and Lord Archbishop of the Great City of Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa on the Holy Orthodox and Apostolic Throne of Saint Mark the Evangelist and Holy Apostle that is, in Egypt, Pentapolis, Libya, Nubia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and all Africa.

Orthodox also shows up in the title of Ignatius Aphrem II of Antioch; in Syriac it’s presumably calqued:

English: His Holiness Moran Mor Ignatius Aphrem II, Patriarch of Antioch and All the East and Supreme Head of the Universal Syriac Orthodox Church

Syriac: Qaddišuṯeh ḏ-Moran Mor[y] Iḡnaṭius Afrem Trayono Paṭriarḵo ḏ-Anṭiuḵia waḏ-Kuloh Maḏĕnḥo w-Rišo Gawonoyo ḏ-ʿItto Suryoyto Triṣaṯ Šuḇḥo ḇ-Kuloh Tiḇel

Arabic: Qadāsa Mār ʾIġnāṭīūs ʾAfrām al-Ṯānī Baṭriyark li-ʾAnṭākya wa-Sāʾir al-Mašriq wa-Raʾīs ʾAʿlā lil-Kanīsa al-Suryāniyya al-ʾUrṯūḏaksiyya fī al-ʿĀlam

What this tells me is:

• Orthodox was the name Christians who felt they were not heretics called themselves from the 4th century.
• The Chalcedonian churches called themselves Orthodox. The Miaphysite churches, I’m assuming, would have retorted that they were Orthodox. If the Syriac for Orthodox is a calque, that certainly tells me that Syriac Miaphysites were well aware of the term, and happy to use it for themselves.
• To go by the title of the Coptic Pope and the Syriac Patriarch, they certainly regard their see as Orthodox, and likely have done so for a very long time.
• After the Great Schism, Western Christianity moved away from the term Orthodox, and went with Catholic instead. There was no move away from the term Orthodox in the Miaphysite churches; and Roman Catholic activity in the Middle East would have discouraged them from retaining Catholic.

Greek:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do Greeks use Roman letters for serving the same purpose as the way we use Greek letters for different values of constants?

The very most you’ll see is High School algebra pretending x y are the Greek letters χ ψ through strategic use of Greek cursive.

On Greek cursive, see Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does an equivalent of cursive exist in other alphabets?

I actually don’t know if that extends in Greek high school to the third algebraic variable being omega. I doubt it.

To Tasos Anesiadis’ answer (Tasos Anesiadis’ answer to What are the most difficult things to learn in the Modern Greek language?), I’ll add for Modern Greek:

• The chaos introduced by the clash of spelling pronunciations from Ancient Greek (via Puristic), and vernacular pronunciations. [nd] vs [nð]; clusters like [fθr]; [i] vs [j] before a vowel (άδεια, two syllables as “empty”, three syllables as “day off”).
• The subtler points of when to use the subjunctive (e.g. θέλω αυτοκίνητο που [να] κοστίζει 100 χιλ ευρώ I want a car which costs €100k vs I want a car which should cost €100k—the former implies you have a specific car in mind, the latter is a generic reference).

You know, the songs that are candidates for this question, I’ve already posted as my favourite songs. But with David Caune and Kat Rectenwald both asking me, sure, I’ll answer again:

• The regrets of my life, my falls from grace, my sadness at leaving things behind:

Gustav Mahler: Der Tamboursg’sell

O Galgen, du hohes Haus,
Du siehst so furchtbar aus,
Ich schau dich nicht mehr an,
Weil i weiß, daß i gehör dran.

Wenn Soldaten vorbeimarschieren,
Bei mir nicht einquartieren.
Wenn sie fragen, wer i g’wesen bin:
Tambour von der Leibkompanie.

Gallows, you high house,
you look so terrifying,
I’ll look no more upon you,
for I know that I belong there.

When soldiers march by me,
they won’t set up camp next to me.
When they ask me who I used to be:
A drummer in the imperial bodyguard!

• Seeking a friend to unburden my pains to:

Manos Eleftherious/Stavros Kouyoumtzis: Όποιος τραγουδάει τον πόνο

Μου ’πες μια καλή κουβέντα
και γονάτισα στη γη
κι έβγαλε νερό η πέτρα
η ψυχή μου για να πιει.

Όποιος τραγουδάει τον πόνο
στη ζωή δε θα χαθεί
κι ένας φίλος μες στον κόσμο
θα του συμπαρασταθεί.

You spoke a kind word
and I kneeled to the ground
and the rock gave forth water
for my soul to drink.

Whoever sings of pain
will not perish in this life
and one friend in the world
will stand by him.

• The abandon of exuberance, and letting sorrows go by for another day:

James Brown: Sex Machine

Get up
Get up
Get on the scene
Like a sex machine (uh)

The way I like it
is the way it is
I got mine
Don’t worry about his.

The Ethnologue: Languages of the World guesses 850. On the one hand, the Ethnologue is best placed to know, since it is published by SIL International, and the SIL has the missionary linguists on the ground, who far outnumber academic linguists. On the other hand, the Ethnologue is consistently a splitter not a lumper. 850 is the best estimate that we have, but it is still an estimate on the high side.

Any literacy in PNG has been introduced by missionaries or linguists speaking a Western European language, and I am not aware of any PNG languages with a script other than Roman.

The languages of PNG belong in two groups: Austronesian, which are recognisably related to the other Austronesian languages of Indonesia and the Pacific; and the Papuan languages, which were spoken before the Austronesian languages arrived. We do not have sufficient evidence that the Papuan languages are even related to each other as the same family; we just lump them together as pre-Austronesian.

There is abandonment of tokples (indigenous languages) for Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu, and English; but I don’t have information on how rapid it is.

Interesting question, and the way I’d want to tackle it is by defining what it is that unpaid work means. See also Could writing on Quora be considered voluntary work?

Work is undertaking an obligation to do tasks, that in themselves benefit another more than yourself. The compensation for work may take the form of payment, or barter, or incurring an obligation, or not being beaten to death as a slave; but the work itself is not meant to be its own reward. That tends to rule most of us out.

The closest to an acknowledgement of Quora contributions as work is by Stephanie Vardavas, in her answer. Community moderation tasks are less for fun, and more out of a sense of obligation to the community. But still, it’s community work; Quora Inc may benefit out of that work, but I trust Stephanie isn’t motivated to collapse trolls out of admiration for D’Angelo’s blue eyes. So it’s not the same as Work For Quora; and indeed, the community work Stephanie does benefits Stephanie as a member of the community.

I think it’ll be hard to find anyone considering Quora contributions as work to benefit another; possibly academics counting this as part of their Community Outreach?