Nick on Quora

My thanks to Ellie Kesselman for provoking this investigation, and to Heather Jedrus for fulfilling the investigation.

If your submission to a Quora blog is rejected, we have recently seen here (You may provide an optional explanation; but we won’t let you), you can’t notify the author why (bug), and possibly they never get to see your notification anyway (bug?)

Something else happens:

When a blog owner rejects a submission on Quora, does the author still have access to what they wrote?

The submission disappears. You don’t have a record of it. You can’t resubmit it elsewhere. It just *poof* vanishes.

Heather says in her answer:

So, my advice for anyone who’s submitting posts to blogs owned by other people, is to copy that content and save it somewhere, in case the post doesn’t get accepted to the blog.

My advice for blog owners is to PM the author their post before rejecting it, so they can reuse it as they see fit.

Bug (and by “bug” I mean “Wholesale Incompetence”, because I have no more reserves of patience for the Quora “Design” team), or feature?

Well, to quote from my previous post on blog submissions.

A feature to illustrate the futility of all things in this Vale of Tears, perhaps, including blog submissions.

Or, maybe, I’m being trapped in Story Thinking, of how I just want to reject a blog submission politely, and Quora Design is trying to nudge me into System Thinking (i.e. seeing the big picture), that blogs are a deprecated part of the Quora Experience, and everyone should just stick to Q&A.

And then again, maybe regression testing is just another thing that gets in the way of Quora Design DEPLOYING EVERYTHING ON THEIR DRIVE TO PRODUCTION IN 8 MINUTES!!!!!111!!11!!!!!eleven!!!

Or, maybe, since they don’t have “Reject” on the button but “Ignore”, it may be that the only alternatives they had in mind when they “designed” the blog submission workflow were

• Accept: I am happy to include this submission in my blog.
• Ignore: This is trollery which I want gone from the face of the earth.

But not:

• Reject: I don’t think this submission is appropriate for my blog, but it might well be useful elsewhere, or the basis of an answer, and I have no intention of it being deleted from Quora servers forever.

No.

That would require… oh, what’s the word…

USER Thinking.

If the question is inspired by this:

Women Struggling to Drink Water

The answer is clearly in photo #15 of the sequence:

It’s a proxy fetish for the Wet T-shirt fetish.

I’ll give Stelios Kazantzidis – Wikipedia’s take, but I’m very interested in hearing from Israelis why Greek Levantine-flavoured music, and his in particular, appear to have had such resonance in Israel.

In Israel, he was a musical icon. Many of his songs were translated into Hebrew and performed by the country’s leading singers. Yaron Enosh, an Israel Radio broadcaster who often plays Greek music on his programs, described the singer’s ability to combine joy with sorrow: “This is the task of music: to touch the entire range of feelings… Kazantzidis could do this; he played on all the strings.” To the Greek Jews who immigrated to Israel, Kazantzidis was “the voice of the world they left behind, for good or for bad.” According to the operator of Radio Agapi, a station that plays Greek music 24 hours a day, “Kazantzidis was the voice of the people, of the weary, the exploited, the betrayed. And the voice of the refugee and the emigre, too.”

I don’t know that Hebrew Wikipedia (סטליוס קזנג’ידיס – ויקיפדיה) has much of an answer…

As it happens, I’ve already answered this question in the context of another question, a year ago:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why do some languages assign a gender to each noun (e.g., table is feminine in French)?

The pioneering work on the kinds of cognitive categories underlying noun classes is George Lakoff’s. His acknowledged classic takes its title from the membership of one of the noun classes of Dyirbal language, an Australian Aboriginal language.

The noun classes of Dyirbal are:

• I – most animate objects, men
• II – women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals
• III – edible fruit and vegetables
• IV – miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three

Lakoff’s classic was thus titled: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

Mind blown, Dimitra (who A2A’d)?

Greeks’ minds will be blown be the fact that πῦρ, γυνή, καὶ θάλασσα, “fire, woman, and the sea”, have been lumped together in an Ancient Greek maxim. (It has been attributed to Aesop: Πῦρ γυνὴ καὶ θάλασσα, δυνατὰ τρία, “Fire woman and the sea, these are the three strong things.” And Menander: Θάλασσα καὶ πῦρ καὶ γυνὴ τρίτον κακόν “Sea and fire, and woman is the third evil.”)

My mind is blown (though it shouldn’t be) by the fact that Lakoff had no idea about the Greek maxim when he wrote the book.

I’ll add that the only misogynistic thing about the saying is that it is hetero-andro-centric. Intimate partners, male, or female, are a source of emotional risk, just as fire and water are a source of physical risk, which can turn to good or evil. (Hence Aesop’s wording: not ‘evils’, but ‘strong things’.)

Catrina M. Padilla’s answer is only narrowly correct. A celebrity who has been invited in by Quora to answer 10 questions as clickbait in a session, and never shows up on Quora again, does not count to me as being on Quora in any meaningful sense. Whatever Quora might want you to think (or, more importantly, might want advertisers to think.)

And all Mark Zuckerberg did, 8 years ago, is ask a handful of questions.

Adam Goldberg in her list has at least had some moderate activity, although minimal past 2012.

Dushka Zapata has no Wikipedia entry, although her mum might: Carol Miller (author) – Wikipedia. Quora-famous does not count as famous; by that metric, I’m on Quora too.

I have a soft spot for Pat Cash as a famous person on Quora, simply because he’s an Aussie that has come back to Quora on occasion, outside of being invited through a session.

I’m going through the Answer Wiki, and removing people with 15 answers or less (8–13 answers being what you get on a celebrity session), or people who only wrote answers on only one to three dates (e.g. Uzo Aduba, Scott Aukerman, which points to repeat celebrity sessions, or them getting bored very quickly), and people with no English Wikipedia entry. (An entry for his company, or other mentions on Wikipedia, do not count: Oliver Emberton. Robert Frost, Noam Kaiser, Gayle Laakmann McDowell, Denis Oakley, Mark Rogowsky, Siri, Balaji Viswanathan are out too.) I am putting a very deliberate asterisk against people who are Silicon Valley-famous (or in the case of Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the Indian counterpart).

Honourable mention to Andy Weir. He only spent one day on Quora, but he churned out 100 answers. At least he took his session seriously. And he didn’t have to be interviewed to do it.

I’m also putting up how many answers they have put up, and when their last answer was. Active Quora users, they are not.

• Clayton C. Anderson (247; Aug 2017)
• Marc Andreessen* (83; 2014)
• Michael Arrington* (20; 2013)
• Glenn Beck (52; 2016)
• Tim Bergling (52; 2015—and it’s lovely to see Avicii subjected to the Real Name Rule)
• Stewart Butterfield* (17; 2015)
• Steve Case* (16; 2011)
• Pat Cash (39; May 2017)
• Vint Cerf* (34; June 2017; his latest answer, ironically, is to “Why isn’t Vint Cerf famous”)
• Charlie Cheever* (1495; 2012)
• Leroy Chiao (110; Apr 2017)
• Thomas Cormen (382; Aug 2017)
• Mark Cuban (32; Jun 2017)
• Adam D’Angelo* (973; Aug 2017)
• Daniel Ek* (46; 2016)
• Sid Espinosa (36; 2012)
• Stephen Fry (42; 2015)
• Kevin Greutert (18; Jan 2017)
• Aubrey de Grey (310; Jul 2017)
• Jeff Hammerbacher* (1240; Aug 2017)
• Auren Hoffman* (401; Aug 2017)
• Sean Hood (228; May 2017)
• Drew Houston* (22; Feb 2017)
• Tim Kaine (34; Oct 2016)
• Ashton Kutcher (41; 2015)
• Adrián Lamo* (507; Jun 2017)
• Max Levchin* (37; 2016)
• Om Malik* (16; 2014)
• Daryl Morey (28; Mar 2017)
• Dustin Moskovitz* (74; Apr 2017)
• Justine Musk (33; Mar 2017)
• Adam Nash* (68; 2015)
• Craig Newmark* (164; Mar 2017)
• Peter Norvig* (39; Aug 2017)
• Jeff Perry (22; 2014)
• Michelle Rodriguez (30; 2014)
• David S. Rose* (6364; Aug 2017)
• Kevin Rose* (16; 2012)
• Sheryl Sandberg* (26; 2016)
• Vijay Shekhar Sharma* (93; Jul 2017)
• Mark Suster* (71; 2016)
• Kevin Systrom* (58; 2012)
• Werner Vogels* (16; 2013)
• Jimmy Wales* (947; Jul 2017)
• Yishan Wong* (1593; Aug 2017)

You will notice that it is a much smaller list. 128 goes down to 45. If you take out Silicon Valley types, it’s down to 18. If instead you reduce it to people who’ve written 100 answers or more: 14. People who have written an answer this month: 7.

And it’d be an interesting exercise to go through *this* list, and see how many you’ve heard of.

I get 17, but 4 of them only via being on Quora.

(And I did know who Vint Cerf is beforehand.)

In antiquity, every city had its own variant of the Greek alphabet; they varied not only on shape of letter, but also on which letters they used.

Athens undertook a spelling reform in 403 BC, under the archonship of Eucleides, which adopted the Milesian variant of the Ionian alphabet, including the letters eta and omega. (That alphabet was already widely used in Athens, but it was not the original local variant.)

The Modern Greek alphabet is the Euclidean Athenian alphabet, because the orthography of Modern Greek is historical. There are letters in the Euclidean Athenian alphabet that are redundant in Modern Greek (η υ ω); but it’s only in the USSR of the 30s that any serious attempt was made to write Modern Greek phonetically.

Of the archaic letters, pre 403 BC, only one truly matters: Digamma, ϝ. It was the Ancient Greek /w/. The sound does show up in papyri of Sappho and Alcman. We can also reconstruct it in Homer, though it is missing in our text of Homer. The text we have of Homer was established in 6th century BC Athens; and the sound (and thence the letter) was long extinct in Athens by then.

Of the others: San (letter), ϻ, and Koppa (letter), ϙ, were adopted because Samekh and Qoph are letters of the Phoenician alphabet.

Greeks originally wrote <q> before back vowels and <k> before other vowels; so they wrote Ϙόρινθος <Qorinthos> for Corinth, and in fact the koppa became a symbol of Corinth. Eventually, they worked out that those were just allophones, and they dropped the koppa entirely except for counting (it’s the number 90).

Shin (letter) and Samekh were differentiated in Phoenician, because Phoenician had both /ʃ/ and /s/; Ancient Greek did not, and once people stopped robotically copying the Phoenician alphabet, each town picked one or the other of sigma or san to write /s/ with; no town kept both.

Modern publications of any literary texts that survived via the papyrus tradition went via Athens and its 403 BC spelling reform. Digamma is rare; san and koppa are non-existent, even though Aristophanes refers to san-branded horses. (Just as Qorinth used the koppa as its emblem, Sicyon used the san.) You’ll only ever see them in publication of inscriptions that did use them; and even then you won’t see them often.

In the process of establishing the Unicode repertoire for Greek, I came across a few more archaic letters. In fact, I came up with the name of one: Tsan, the Arcadian variant of San, which apparently was used for /ts/. The variant letters that were phonetically distinct, and which will show up in publication of inscriptions, were Heta, the eta-equivalent used to mean /h/ and not /ɛː/; the Sampi, an Ionic innovation which might have been pronounced /ʃ/ or /sː/; and the Pamphylian digamma, which looked identical to tsan but was likely pronounced /v/, as opposed to the normal digamma’s /w/.

One variant that didn’t make it in the repertoire was the Corinthian single letter for <ei> /eː/. It didn’t make it into Unicode, because the letter for it was in fact <E> (Corinth had a different letterform for epsilon.) No epigraphist has published it as anything but ει or, if they’re being extra careful, <Ε> in a different font. (Google Dweinias for the most important inscription.) Ditto the corresponding Boeotian letter, which looks identical to the tack-shaped heta, <Ͱ>. (http://www.opoudjis.net/unicode/…)

I have been responsible for conflating Pamphylian sampi and normal sampi in Unicode, even though they in fact look different, and I have posted my apology for that in Nick Nicholas’ answer to If you were allowed to add a symbol to unicode, what symbol would it be, and what would it mean?

Oh. Sho (letter) is Bactrian for /ʃ/; Bactrian used the Greek alphabet, but I don’t think sho counts here.

A far from straightforward question for those of us in the Greek diaspora.

My dad does not speak a word of Pontic Greek. But this Pontic revival song, sung by Stelios Kazantzidis towards the end of his life, shook him:

stixoi.info: Πατρίδα μ΄ αραεύω σε

Five houses have I built; unhoused from all.
A refugee from my cradle; God, I’ll go mad.

My motherland, I seek you, like a man accursed.
In exile, I am Greek. In Greece, an exile.

I left houses built between forests and riverbanks.
Wells built of marble, water flowing like tears.

And here now I thirst, and have no water to drink.
I am ashamed to ask for any, to moisten my lip.

And can I say, it’s nice to see Wikipedia Pontic orthography on Youtube. ja > æ in Pontic; the scholarly transliteration is α̈, and the lay translation was ια, assuming you knew this was Pontic and not Standard Greek already. Pontic Wikipedia has decided to use εα instead. Πέντε οσπίτεα έχτισα, Κι ας ολεα ξεσπιτούμαι. But do use ’κ’ for ‘not’. ’κ’ /kʰ/ ‘not’ ~ κʼ /k/ ‘and’ is a pernicious minimal pair.

It’s also nice to see not just Russian Pontians (who arrived from Russia in the 90s) on YouTube echoing the sentiment, but also the Albanians who’d arrived in Greece at the same time. Sometimes, there is value in YouTube comments after all.

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And yes, it’s even more complicated for the second generation of that diaspora. (By the fourth generation, of course, it’s ancient history, a splash of colour up the family tree.)

I am in some regards Greek. In some regards, I am nothing of the sort.

And parochialism lives and thrives in Greece, as it does in Italy (Campanilismo). “Where are you from” is still the first question you get asked. I identify as Cretan, though my father is Cypriot. Town of Sitia.

Vitsentzos Kornaros closed off his romance Erotokritos, the pinnacle of Cretan Renaissance literature, with the verses:

I would not hide, and be unrecognised.
I will reveal myself, so all may know.
The poet’s Vincent, and by clan Cornaro;
may he be found unblemished, when Death takes him.
In S’tia was he born, in S’tia bred.
There did he write and labour what you’ve read.
As nature bids, in Candia was he married.
His end will be wherever God decides.

I was only bred in S’tia for four years, age of 8 to 12. Those are pretty critical years though.

Nick Nicholas

I have had a lot of bile build up in me around this site and its ways, for one who has had his gall bladder removed. I am already daydreaming of how to exit this place with as big a splash as possible.

But when I deactivate Saturday my time, it will be for IRL reasons. I have had some health issues which are making it opportune for me to take a week off everything and unplug. I will replug back in the following Saturday.

If you’re going to ask “Are you OK?”, no, I’m not, which is why I’m taking a week off.

If you’re going to ask “Is it serious?”, I’m taking time off so it doesn’t become serious.

If you’re going to ask “What can I do to help?”, thank you for your concern, and the best you can do is not send me too many A2A to just sit there over the next week.

If you’re going to ask “Will you be back?”, the answer is “For now.”

Be excellent to each other.

Dylan MacIntyre

Update on Quora’s Gaylord by Matt Zhang on Connecting to Bi-Fi

I think you’re asking about the initial aspiration? That ‘hour’ in Ancient Greek is ὥρα hɔ́ːraː, but its plural nominative is ὦραι ɔ̂ːrai, not ὧραι hɔ̂ːrai?

… It’s not true. The plural of hɔ́ːraː is indeed hɔ̂ːrai. The breathing marks are tiny, and extremely vulnerable to typos; that’s the only explanation I can think of.

Particularly when combined with circumflex.