Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 9

When you're younger, nothing seems unusual about adults devoting their careers to children's entertainment.

When you're older, you begin to understand that these people aren't ordinary.

Caring deeply for cartoons, puppetry or clowning when you're 42 would usually get you labeled as a bit of a man-child, but we let it pass if, and only if, it turns into a successful career.

@Fergant Fordi jeg trengte et alias som ikke stod så nært mitt virkelige navn, og jeg syns italiensk er smooth.

French isn't a particularly beautiful language. It's nasal, raspy and percussive.

Spanish? Not much better. You lisp and vibrate your tongue loudly half the time.

Italian? Yes. Italian is beautiful language, actually.

What of my mother tongue of Norwegian? Not beautiful. If you want to speak a Scandinavian language that sounds suave, try Swedish.

English? It depends. The northern British Isles? Not so much. Southern England, or California? Better.

EU legislators love writing "harmonise" in place of "unify" or "standardise".

Sometimes, you wonder if archaeologists take artefacts a bit too seriously.

What if your "ceremonial idol" is just something a dude carved because he thought it looked cool?

While it's nice to be able to repair stuff, I think I'll gladly trade my money to save my time on this one...

It's hard to get a fish that has never been on land to acknowledge that it is surrounded by vast quantities of water.

Scandinavia is like that when it comes to leftism.

With the advent of the Internet, we have become aware of what America thinks.

It's off the scale, basically.

The general consensus is that American politics is insane and stupid, and that no one in their right mind would run a country that way. Saying things to this effect is explicitly *not* controversial in Scandinavia.

@dirtycommo @ChrisWilson Such strong opinions on food courts...

@FiXato "gård" is a better word for an enclosed or fenced area and can mean yard. "spisegård" would suggest a yard where you eat. Drawback: gård also means farm, where you make food, so that could get confusing.

@FiXato spisesal is pretty close, but suggests an enclosed space, and just generally doesn't quite describe what a food court is.

@FiXato A "hall" is defined as a large space, tall under the ceiling, typically for special events.

There is a better word, "sal", for rooms that are large but not tall, typically for regular use.

"spisesal" is a word we do use, for large lunch rooms and such. "sal" still suggests that there is a ceiling, though, whereas food court simply suggests an *area* where food is served.

"spisebane" would be a silly translation, an eating field, but closer to what "food court" suggests.

The concept of food courts is slowly seeping into Norway, but I'm not aware that we have a word for "food court" in our language.

Having instantly turned your math expressions into compiled JavaScript functions and typeset mathematical notation using math.js and KaTeX, what more could you possibly do?

My plan? I'm going to see if I can find or implement a library for Observable, so I can make notebooks that perform interactive computations with live equations.

Maybe I can even make something that automatically breaks down any mathematical expression into its computation steps.

If you love math, TeX and code, here's a treasure trove for you:

1. There is a JS library called math.js.

2. It has a very advanced mathematical expression compiler which can transform an expression into a computed value, AST (node tree) or optimised JavaScript function.

3. Every node has a method toTex() that will convert that sub-expression into TeX.

Now:

1. Implement your math code in math.js.

2. Add KaTeX.

3. Instantly render your code in sexy typeset math notation.

The political statements you see people make on the oppressive nature of gender norms can get a bit far-fetched at times.

I just saw a comic strip try to suggest that society is absurd / oppressive for expecting you to hide your genitals, yet insisting that clothes should reflect which genitals you have.

It's not. Gendered garments serve as a *proxy* for your genitals.

Fashion is a language, and if your statements are false or nonsensical, they may obviously cause some confusion.

@philcolbourn Still missing the point...

@philcolbourn Research paper from other scientists who assess how reliable the test actually is: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5487751/

@philcolbourn Some more background on the test: https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aqtest/

@philcolbourn Presumably, if other normal people are like you, they will have answered those questions in a similar manner to you, and the scoring equation will notice that you answered them like a normal person, and pull your score down.