Holy hell. Here's hoping for a speedy, or at least thorough, recovery.
From the (gigantic) discussion over at metafilter:
We can wreck two trains right into each other by positing that her epic water-broke journey was to ensure that their are no questions about her son's Alaskan citizenship after the secession.
If I had to go all-in on an outlandish conspiracy theory, this is the one that'd get my chips.
It's a fascinating mess, this nomination.
I just searched through ten years of email on my desktop, and I couldn't find my Social Security number or any of my credit card numbers. I don't understand the context where one would send this kind of information via email.
Any passwords or other account-management info? Bank statements or receipts? Personal information that you'd rather not be published to the world? Etc.
There are plenty of folks who manifestly refrain from putting anything in email that they wouldn't shout on a street corner, and as far as that goes the access issue goes away, but I think there are probably a lot more folks who out of some mix of ignorance of the risk (likely your big majority, that) or laziness despite their awareness (hi!) will allow sensitive things into their mail.
So, from that, what Mike said, with a heaping helping of what Red said to make it even worse.
And even if you keep your mail pristine from a privacy perspective, having someone invade your account to, say, wipe out your entire inbox likely qualifies as ruining your week, if not exactly ruining your life.
Note that a £310,000 advance isn't required for this story to be true
The way I heard it, AuthorHouse just narrowly outbid Garamond Press. Belbo is mildly, jovially furious about the whole thing.
Isn't that kind of futile for someone to try that here, though? I thought all URLs here had the "nofollow" attribute set, which makes ML pretty stingy with its googlejuice.
One of the charming constants of the web is that no spamming tactic is sufficiently pointless and self-defeating as to prevent someone from trying it anyway.
Alice: "You say this wine comes from the South?"
Bob: "Well, er, yes. What makes you think it's not?"
Alice: "It's a bit too Okie."
Recycled from elsewhere in February, but so long as we're mixing constraints:
Lim'rick very brief;
Haiku lurks beneath.
"Bog,
Frog."
Basho begs relief.
Since then I've tended to think of them as every bit as traditional as, and no more fraught than, "foo" and "bar" and, again, not given them further thought.
For me, Alice and Bob have some value because of that tradition -- when someone trots them out, I'm likely to read it as a clear indicator (possibly mistakenly, granted) that they're not only presenting an example but presenting what they want to be understood as an example in the purest hypothetical sense.
Foo and Bar aren't just nonsense words in that same sense -- if someone were to tell me about Fum and Grak, I wouldn't have the same instant confidence that we were talking about placeholder variables; even X and Y communicate a little less specific common knowledge, being a little more plausibly lay terms.
Which isn't to say that Abram and Badra aren't a good thing to throw into the mix, but I guess there's a difference between saying "let's talk about communication theory" explicitly and being able to introduce that notion just by bringing Alice and Bob up.
musclebound poet
chews greens and defends his art
"iamb what iamb"
Terry, was some/all of that aimed at Jacob at #405?
I have no need of trochee;
Hairs are split in twain.
The metrical distinction I disdain.
Iamb a rock.
Iamb an island.
Yes, that's vague, and I'm sorry I can't explain it better; that is a cultural thing, and not completely explicable to someone on the inside.
And though I'm arguing hard this morning, I truly do understand and appreciate that. I'm arguing more for the sake of understanding the local understanding of the process and principles than to try and draw out some sufficient-or-not-explanation, so if I'm coming off as overly insistent on any of this I apologize.
I continue to have this feeling that deemving is a practice that is somewhat overloaded with cultural meaning here. Which is not necessarily a problem here, since if everyone is more or less comfortable with the various nuances and implications of it on ML the overloading isn't a problem. But it does in my mind undercut the practical utility of it as a general tool -- I think it may be significantly harder to responsibly expect the average BB commenter to be fully cognizant of and down with the implications and theory behind deemving. And given that looser, broader group of commenters, I think it's going to much harder to avoid the specter of public shaming as a component of the mod/user interaction. But that's BB, not ML.
Hosting somehing costs more than money. Otherwise your not a host
Again, I totally agree. The costs of playing host to a community are real and not strictly quantifiable let alone reducible to accounting, and I live with them every day. Right there with you.
I don't want to beat a horse-corpse, so I'll clarify just this last time that it's objections tied to the unambiguously financial notion of "hosting fees" that I find weird.
abi's point taken
yet line eight an iamb short
rebuttal haiku
But they pile up. And I don't want to pay (even fractions of a penny) to be annoyed.
But when what you object to is fractions of a penny, it is again the principle and not the actual cost in question.
A man says to me, "I would not pay you a single dollar for that". I understand that he is describing it to me as worthless, not that he is bargaining me down to fifty cents or a quarter.
The phrase "hosting fees" is hard to interpret as anything other than a monetary reference. I'm not saying I object to the principle, just that I find that -- the explicit invocation of anything like the monetary cost of maintaining a comment or even a thousand comments to be very silly and not helpful at all to the person's argument.
Josh: If a comment is deleted, do all comments that quote it get deleted?
Depends a lot on the context, actually. Sometimes yes, sometimes no; the more substantial (and less personally aggressive) the comment, the better the chance it has of surviving the cleanup; the viler the quoted portion of the deleted comment, the more inclination to remove a response to it if it's been itself deemed deletable.
Because, in this very thread, we have disemvowelled comment, and the full text of the comment in a response.
Which is something I'm curious about, actually. If the point of deemving is to throttle the response and protect folks form accidentally reading something they should have to read to evaluate (one of the stated objections to invisotext or, presumably, other functionally similar comment hide/reveal techniques), then leaving quotes in full seems to kind of undermine the value of the deemving in the first place.
Which may in part just be a game of admin catchup -- deemving is faster and easier than subsequent searches for quoted portions to also deemv, even if that's the intended practice -- and I've had that same sort of headache on mefi when I've missed some response while cleaning up a derail.
As to "thrust"... yes. I recall the thrust of comments/posts which have been eaten by the system, but that's not the same. I hate knowing I had some clever turn of phrase, (or cohesion of argument) which isn't the same, because the system stuttered and I had to reconstruct it.
Aye, and as I say, I can appreciate that. But I think there's a significant difference between complaining that one's clever turn of phrase is lost to the ether and complaining that one has been denied the possibility of presenting and discussing the substance of their argument or comment.
A limerick seems a good size fer
Citations to make a man wiser;
The sonnet's a bother,
And makes of the author
A lexicographical miser.
Thing is, if my vowels were cut from a comment I left, I could put them back in myself without much difficulty, using the posted text. Then I could wrap my re-envowelled comment in a précis of the topic-as-I-saw-it and post the whole on my on site.
The same holds true for a rewrite, if you were saying something of substance that you believed in. I don't want to mock the idea of draft-loss, especially for a longer comment, because I know it's frustrating to rewrite from scratch, but a comment worth keeping, rebuilding, blogging, and bringing back to the original discussion circuitously ought to be a comment worth remembering the thrust of, yes?
Deemving as a service to the deemved is a weird shell of a courtesy, as far as that goes. It is certainly not the thing making it possible to discuss a contentious comment. (I'm going to use a couple of mefi examples to make my point, but not because I see this as a MF vs. ML issue at all -- it's just What I Know, and a ready set of examples. So, for what it's worth, anybody on mefi who wants a copy of their deleted comment can get one as quick as it takes to drop us an email, or a mefimail, or a request in the contact form.)
And then I could, since I'm not banned or other wise rendered mute come right back here and post a comment with a link to my post.
Where does banning come into this, though? The alternatives aren't "deemv and don't ban" vs. "delete and ban"; banning is a separate, last resort part of the process in either case, as far as I can tell. (Mefi example: when it's a case of someone trying to answer in good faith but presenting their information so badly that it's fightstarter/derail material that bears deleting, we'll often drop them a line to explicitly note that it's FINE if they want to cut the antagonism/etc and restate their point more civilly. Again: bans don't come into it as a standard part of the interaction; a deletion is not in general a prohibition against the subject itself.)
For which I'm paying the hosting fees, which does not in the least bit apply to here, where I'm a guest and not paying a blessed thing.
I can get behind the Host vs. Guest argument as a fundamental point about your house vs. someone else's, but I do not understand why people would want to invoke the "cost of hosting" thing like they have here and at BB. The actual cost of hosting vs. not hosting a given comment is nil. It is the very tiniest of blips against the sunk costs of monthly bandwidth, equipment, maintenance, etc. The principle is fine, but the cost thing is a bizarre red herring.
Yeah, a good scrape for a local tuning corpus would probably be the best way to handle it. I've done similar things with Mefi -- direct access to the db makes it easy to do so more ambitiously, of course -- and it's interesting to see what stands out against a baseline frequency table of English usage.
If you click on the blue words
Ah! You! You're responsible for disemvowelment.com! You broke my heart and made my day when I found out that already existed; I've been fiddling around with my own proof of concept regardless, but have been too distracted to get it up on the web.
Have you fiddled at all with bi-gram or tri-gram models to improve the lexeme selection? That's the next thing on my TODO list, but while I'm optimistic about it in principle I have no idea how usefully it'll pan out.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2008 | 82 |
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