Nick on Quora

You mean, other than yours, Habibi le toubibi?

And mine? (Nick Nicholas: loved him so much, they named him twice.)

Zeibura S. Kathau ranks highly. Quora Search, so I can’t find where he explained how he came up with it; but the Zeibura is his invention, and it’s arresting. I’m normally culturally reactionary enough to sneer at such things, but his moniker makes a lot of sense to me. It’s got Zzzing, and Burrrrrragadocio, and Mitteleuropa goodness all over it.

Admittedly, it makes more sense to me with him living in Czechia, than if he’d stayed in Britain. 🙂

This actually isn’t my own dislike, but it’s a dislike that really struck me.

My father left Cyprus in 1966. He was in tears the day that Archbishop Makarios III died. I’ve only been back to Cyprus twice, in 1979 and 1989, and briefly and superficially at that.

So I don’t have a clear notion of how Cyprus has evolved and changed, from a colonial backwater of popular revolt, to… well, to what it is now.

I was friends a decade ago with a Serbian postdoc. Before coming to Melbourne, he’d spent time at the University of Cyprus, in Nicosia.

Now, to my eyes, this statue of Makarios at the Archbishopric of Cyprus:

is a reasonable and respectful depiction of the Father of the Nation:

But my friend Vlado did not alight in the Cyprus of 1961. He alighted in the Cyprus of 2005, and he alighted from Serbia, a place where people are skeptical of religious leadership. (In fact they’re skeptical of religious leadership now in Cyprus, too.) And a place where people are even more skeptical about monumental depictions of national leaders.

So he made merciless fun to me of Mecha-Makarios, trampling the streets of Nicosia and crushing all underneath.

That really was a shock to me. But you know, his eyes are probably clearer in this than mine would be.

The edit logs gives you access to something their feed doesn’t: their comments.

If I like what someone has to say in their answers, I’ll follow them: I won’t go to check their comments, I’ll be seeing them live soon enough.

There are three circumstances in which I’ll check someone’s edit log.

• I haven’t heard from someone in a while, and I’m checking if they’re back yet. I’m doing that with someone now. Do come back, Person Whose Identity I’m Not Divulging.
• I’m bored, and I want an extra dose of someone’s Quora goodness.
• I suspect someone is being a troll or malcontent, and I want to make sure. Especially important if someone never answers and only comments. Also handy if the rest of what they say is sensible, so you don’t necessarily dismiss them completely.

Should we get rid of <c>? In what language? Azeri? But then, Mehrdad, how will I call Pegah Esmaili canım? I’d have to call her djanım. And that doesn’t look anywhere as nice. It looks almost as bad as τζάνουμ.

Philip Newton’s answer to Should we get rid of the letter C? has the right answer. And you know, the English spelling system truly is one of the most stupid orthographies in existence (but don’t get me started on Kanji), but… I like that it’s got so much historical detritus in it. It’s like doing an archaeological dig, every time you write a shopping list.

Sucks if you’re not a native reader, of course.

Hello all the good people, Clarissa and Audrey and Brian. I was going to join in to your discussion under Brian’s answer, but it didn’t head in the direction I was hoping.

Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller, who are the deaf–blind people Brian alludes to, communicated through finger spelling, read Braille, and wrote. Must have been hideously slow. But still, that was all the language they had; and I don’t see how we would usefully say they are language-deprived. They had a language faculty, and their language production was entirely in order. (It certainly helped that they acquired fingerspelling as children.)

If deaf kids can acquire language through a signed modality, and we call them native speakers of a sign language, I don’t see why we can’t say Bridgman and Keller didn’t acquire language through a tactile modality, and the language they acquired was pretty much written English. (This was after all the 19th century.)

Audrey, you’re not agreeing with the premiss I see, but neither of us know enough about deaf–blind language acquisition to have a debate on this. But I did not have the impression that Bridgman and Keller were one-offs; the impression I have is that deaf–blind kids acquire language all the time. What I don’t know is whether there too the primary language acquired, through tactile means, is abbreviated compared to written English—leaving out determiners, for example.

I don’t think it’s quite what Z-Kat was after. But I do think it establishes his scenario as feasible.

A2A Pegah Esmaili

Pegah, canım, you don’t expect an ordinary answer from me, do you? Like Cleopatra (meh, inbred Greek), or Catherine the Great (she’d fricking squash me) or Joan of Arc (back away from the crazy)?

Good. Because you’re not going to get one.

In the modern cornucopia of female objectification, do straight men need to go back centuries to fantasise about getting it on with someone? As Lyonel Perabo’s answer well illustrates, no we do not. (Although Lyonel, I must correct you. Ariella Ferrera being 37 years old does not make her a “historical person”. The word you’re looking for there is MILF.)

Now look what you made me do, Pegah. How am I going to save face after that?

Maybe with this answer. Let’s see.

It is a naive fantasy to have, to my mind, and I’ve only allowed myself that fantasy once, in my teens.

Helen Waddell

– Daily Muse – Inspiring Hellen Waddell Conference…

If you’re interested to learn about amazing, strong, intelligent women from the past then this conference at Queen’s University is sure to inspire you!

Great, so my adolescent fantasy is going to annoy several departmentfuls of Women’s Studies students.

Grace Henry-PORTRAIT OF HELEN WADDELL

Whaddaya mean, “The auction is over for this item. The auctioneer wasn’t accepting online bids for this item.” I call shenanigans!

Animals in the Desert

I don’t care if that blog is about desert monks. Yes, she’s a geek. And she’s fricking glorious!

OK. I’ll settle down now.

Helen Jane Waddell (31 May 1889 – 5 March 1965) was an Irish poet, translator and playwright. […] She is best known for bringing to light the history of the medieval goliards in her 1927 book The Wandering Scholars, and translating their Latin poetry in the companion volume Medieval Latin Lyrics. […] A prize-winning biography of her by the Benedictine nun Dame Felicitas Corrigan was published in 1986.

In 1986, I was 15. I read the Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, and I read the Wandering Scholars. And then I read the biography.

And as an unenlightened callow youth in the dim dark ages of the patriarchal 80s, I thought it a terrible thing that someone with such fearsome erudition, with such delicate poetic sensibility, with such a clear sense of what was beautiful and lovely about life and romance and scholarship and redemption, and everything that the mediaeval Latin poets wrote about, should live out her days alone. And I wished I could have been with her to share all that with her.

And you know. Get it on like Donkey Kong too, if the chance came up.

I’m a little better informed now, I trust. She may have been devout and she may have chosen to be alone, but that does not mean her cheeks were never flushed; she wrote too knowingly for that. As Wikipedia writes, she had longterm relationships, including being the “other woman” with Siegfried Sassoon. (I wonder how I missed that at 15: did the nun leave it out?) She was a PhD back when being a female PhD was positively dangerous. She hardly needed me to go back in time and rescue her, and she hardly lacked for people to share her verses with.

But yeah. If I had to pick, I’d pick someone with poetry in their blood, an awkward smile, and gentle donnish erudition. Someone like Helen Waddell.

• Two or three lectures spent on understanding the axes of the IPA charts: place of articulation, manner of articulation; vowel height, frontness, and rounding.
• A round of the class all calling out the cardinal vowels in unison. /iiiii eeeee ɛɛɛɛɛ æææææ, uuuuu ooooo ɔɔɔɔɔ ɑɑɑɑɑ/. I got to make my first year students do that, when my turn came. Good times, good times.
• Learning the values that fill the slots in the charts then comes remarkably easily, once you’ve grokked the axes. Most are reasonably mnemonic.

Because it was already created elsewhere, as U+210E PLANCK CONSTANT ℎ. Unicode will not differentiate between the symbol for the Planck Constant, and a mathematical italicised lowercase h (which is what the Planck Constant is).

Every character has a story #20: U+210e (PLANCK CONSTANT)

I’m generalising this to: what is the purpose of the phatic function of language—of which hello and goodbye are canonical examples.

Phatic expression

In linguistics, a phatic expression /ˈfætᵻk/ is communication which serves a social function such as small talk and social pleasantries that don’t seek or offer any information of value. For example, greetings such as “hello” and “how are you?” are phatic expressions.

…

The utterance of a phatic expression is a kind of speech act. According to Malinowski, even such apparently “purposeless” communication as polite small talk, like “how are you?” or “have a nice day,” even though its content may be trivial or irrelevant to the situation, performs the important function of establishing, maintaining, and managing bonds of sociality between participants.

Oh, and btw:

Besides speech, in the digital world, phatic expression can also cover digital interactions. For example, liking someone’s social media post can communicate social approval and as a consequence build rapport.

You say hello, for the same underlying reason you Like (or Upvote).

We use phatic expressions, because we don’t speak just to convey information. We speak to be sociable. In fact, without being sociable to others, we may not get to the point to conveying information to them at all.

Ah, OP.

The core lesson of life, which I rebelled against at 20 and acquiesced to at 40, is that all that we do, and all that we are, and all that we love shall one day be dust.

The core lesson of Silicon Valley is that, without a clear plan to profitability or even not-for-profit sustainability, all the online services that you do and are and love shall be dust, a hell of a lot sooner than you think.

My profile says I love Quorans, and I hate Quora Inc. My main reason for the latter is the ongoing bumbling of UI and knowledge management and moderation.

The subsidiary reason is what my One True Quora Master Scott Welch and I mutter darkly to each other, in our monthly meetings of the Insurgency. With no discernible leadership or roadmap, I’d be rather pleasantly surprised if Quora is around in five years’ time.

Quora is not made to last forever. It is not a government agency, it is a private company. And as private companies go, it is not made to last 100 years.

Is there anything Quora can do to prevent this fate? Yes, have a completely different structure and a real business plan. And the time to do that, from my uninformed external perspective, was several years ago, when they last went cap in hand to the venture capitalists who are paying for our daily salon.

You can thank me for my cold shower of Silicon Valley Venture Economics 101 later.

What shall we do in the fact of this prospect, OP?

• Bookmark Brian Bi’s answer to When, and how, will I be able to download all of the Quora content I have produced, like the Facebook and Twitter feed export options? If you can’t run Python on your computer, get in touch with someone who can. Archive your answers, and archive them periodically (and incrementally, lest the ScrapingBot be roused into rampage). You will lose the comments, but then again, Quora’s notion of copyright is that you have no right to archive others’ comments anyway.
• If there are people whose company you cherish, get their contact details now, through more sustainable avenues. Facebook is one. Email is another. And find ways to stay in touch with them.
• I’m anticipating Quora In Exile groups on Facebook. I’m anticipating lots of small Quora In Exile groups; not all 80 million of us (or whatever the inflated user count is) actually want to hang out in the one place.
• If you have been writing, find other venues to write. Blogs still exist, even if they aren’t as cool and now as they used to be. (I’ll most likely be reviving Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος and opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr, my two defunct blogs.) Other Q&A sites exist, though they don’t have the balance of seriousness and sociability that Quora has; your choices are Reddit and StackExchange.
• As Jordan Yates drolly put it, Grindr is a more plausible alternative to Quora than Yahoo Answers is.
• If you have been learning, find other venues to learn. They won’t be as wide-ranging and sociable, so you will truly need to hone in on core topics you’re interested in. If Wikipedia’s around (and that’s likelier), reacquaint yourself with it. Even if you can’t stand to write on the very snippy StackExchange, you can probably get a lot out of reading it.
• We’ll all get our lives back. Let’s just make sure we don’t lose our thirst for knowledge in the process.