Tavern on the Meta

@SmokeDetector it's your fault.

2

1:14 PM

@M.A.R. Is your question: "Why are drawings using characteristically similar colors to the real thing?" - I think the question answers itself.

Gotta go, see y'all later!

@Rob No, it's . . . uh, I kinda just forgot

Scratches head

No rush.

I was asking why they were depicted that way, I've seen enough illustrations, but I forgot why I was asking why

1:31 PM

!!/blame

SmokeDetector

@Ollie It's Mgetz's fault.

user707129

@M.A.R. ? I don’t get it. Please reread your message so it makes sense

user707129

I would approve correcting a typo

@Daniil "If an edit in a long answer corrects a simple typo, why is it "annoying" or worse, should be rolled back?"

Color of Blood in Veins

All blood in the body is red, although the shade of red varies. Blood in veins isn't blue, even though in illustrations of the circulatory system the veins are traditionally colored blue. When we look at the veins close to the surface of our body, such as those in our hands, they do appear to be blue in color. The blue appearance is caused the behavior of light as it enters and leaves the body through the skin and not by the the blood itself.

"White" light from the sun or an artificial light source is a mixture of all of the colors in the visible spectrum. The colo…

1:38 PM

I feel like you should really only roll back if the edits made are either damaging (they incorporate incorrect information or deface the existing information) or if they incorporate incorrect information and a rollback fixes that.

Source: owlcation.com/stem/…

An edit that improves the post, even if somewhat superfluous, is honestly fine. Now, if you're suggesting superfluous edits, you should better spend your time suggesting meaningful ones.

@Daniil Even if it's a single typo in a 10k character post?

John Dvorak

If there's nothing else to fix...

not worth the time, but no need to rollback either

user707129

@M.A.R. I don’t get your point, I don’t have time for this

1:42 PM

Can we stop poking each other over this already? It's not going to get constructive.

Rubiksmoose

^

My too-long message up there was that this issue shouldn't be contentious, answerable well within meta.SE guidelines.

Rubiksmoose

Also this is a debate that has raged since the early days of SE (what exactly counts as a constructive/minor/major edit), it's not going to be solved here.

I'm talking about any edit that you might consider in that category, doesn't have to be about this issue so doesn't have to be polarizing

Neither blood nor gas can prevent the regurgitation.

1:44 PM

The mittens of disapproval are on

user707129

@M.A.R. drop it

care all ye who tread there, lest you upset the flower

Sure, I'm done here.

And everywhere else, FTR.

theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/…

user707129

I was done an hour ago FTR

Rubiksmoose

@M.A.R. moving on to lighter topics I see lol

1:46 PM

Thou shalt not disturb thine blurred flower. If thine will is to be smote from this platform, you need only continue down this wayward path, unburdened by warnings from your surrounding peers.

@Rubiksmoose The best way to solve a presupposed imagined fight is to imagine it didn't happen

Bring out the truck.

@Rubiksmoose heh, I was looking at that horrific explostion in beruit

@Rob I was wondering if "has" was some weird jargon

"that dosen't look too... wait. those are cars. And that's not a wall.... <<cussing follows>>"

1:48 PM

@JourneymanGeek Apparently POTUS, like the blithering idiot that he is, has called it a bomb attack.

@M.A.R. one of the early rumours was someone dropped a small nuke...

tbh, coulda fooled me

At this point, I guess we should be surprised if he didn't muck up international relations

@JourneymanGeek That was some burrito

uh

@M.A.R. huh?

1:49 PM

@JourneymanGeek That was a big boom.

10x the amount of ammonium nitrate as the oklahoma blast. + fireworks + possibly a grain dust explostion

.... it was

I seem to be hearing that a fire at a fireworks warehouse ignited a whole lot of old ammonium nitrate that had been sitting confiscated for several years

Those walls are thick and heavily reinforced.

I live next to a port. One of those pictures has a key crane next to it

... those things about abot 10 stories tall.

@Mithical Fire at a fireworks warehouse sounds familiar...

1:50 PM

I have seen a grain storage silo...

People never learn ;)

those are...

its such a big explosion that the damage looks... small until you get a sense of scale.

although

Mad Scientist

Storing fireworks next to a few thousand tons of ammonium nitrate is one of the worst possible ideas you could have

@MadScientist and apparently a grain silo...

1:51 PM

Who stores 2700 tons (!!!) of a high explosive in the middle of a densely populated capital

Sadly, like seemingly every issue these days, it's gonna get politicized

its like... uh...

@M.A.R. alas :/

@Magisch I do. I like living life on the edge.

@Magisch And harbors aren't known to be quiet places

@Ollie "living" isn't happening

@M.A.R. I live next to one

can attest

1:52 PM

I too like to store my megatons of industrial fertilizer / industrial explosive in the middle of a densely populated area, with a nearby fireworks depot and a grain silo (because dust explosions are fun) for the added flavor of danger

That's a shocking amount of malfeasance and incompetence on display by officials here

It seems that at least local officials were aware the stuff was stored there though, and that it was higherup that didn't move it?

@Magisch we have it in Israel too.

Yeah iirc it had been there since 2013

@Magisch This seems like a horrible horrible idea after the explosion, but I'm almost sure these irresponsibilities are even now in more than one place. I'm drawing Iran as a comparison.

and remained there because the court didn't rule what to do with it yet

still, you could have stored it somewhere not near a fireworks factory, and/or not near a population cluster

Mad Scientist

1:55 PM

@Magisch they also don't have the excuse that they didn't know any better. Almost 100 years ago in Germany they regularly used dynamite to loosen up some ammonium nitrate mixture. Went well most of the time until it didn't. That was only 400 tons

Storage and handling regulations always seem like useless bureaucracy with very unlikely and distant occasions. It's easier to get lax with them

Some mistakes are bigger than others: Try ammonium nitrate, potassium nitrate, calcium carbide and cyanide (and a lot more):

pretty sure that particular brand of hell no happened dozens of times across the world

2015 Tianjin explosions

On August 12, 2015, a series of explosions killed 173 people, according to official reports, and injured hundreds of others at a container storage station at the Port of Tianjin. The first two explosions occurred within 30 seconds of each other at the facility, which is located in the Binhai New Area of Tianjin, China. The second explosion was far larger and involved the detonation of about 800 tonnes of ammonium nitrate (336 tons TNT equivalent). Fires caused by the initial explosions continued to burn uncontrolled throughout the weekend, resulting in eight additional explosions on 15 August....

I recall reading about that one time in the US

1:56 PM

Everytime it rains it heats up and creates poisonous gas.

Hindenburg, Halifax, courtesy of ELU chat

Apparently the cause of this was a welder trying to fix a hole in the depot where fireworks were stored, which ignited and then exploded, and that explosion eventually set off the nitrate

So, ignoring the precaution of "non sparking tools only"

As I said, this stuff is so commonly overlooked

idk man

It almost seems to stupid to believe that it wasn't intentional

So you have 2.7k tons of some high grade explosive compound

You seize it from a ship because you deem the ship unsafe to store it in

Well that's just speculation

1:59 PM

and then just ... dump it into a random hangar, next to a fireworks factory (!) for 7 years?

4 mins ago, by M.A.R.

Storage and handling regulations always seem like useless bureaucracy with very unlikely and distant occasions. It's easier to get lax with them

no it is known that it was seized from a ship in 2013

@Magisch No I was thinking your story was gonna end in some terrorist or whatever thinking they only need to light a match

Here, you can have a factory severely poisoning its workers and no one's any wiser.

Going now. Ta!

TTYL

2:03 PM

Conversation first started here:

19 hours ago, by Rob

Even with all the tools and some instructions, still couldn't do it correctly.

Yeah this is the sequel

Then the conversation will have a part 3, with a cool title, like COVERSATION III: THE RECKONING

@Mithical well it's still close, so it's fine to assume such a big explosion affected us as well. ;)

@Rob That's basically me though. Tacrolimus makes my hands shake when I'm excited (the side effects are much more severe for some individuals and higher doses) and seem to be too much of a perfectionist in the lab I always ruin things

@ShadowWizardWearingMask It's likely to affect, well, not you, but the officials, politically, if idiots like Trump call it a "bomb attack"

@M.A.R. If it was that, there's no evidence of it atm.

But it does seem to have been just a long chain of stupid and unfortunate coincidences

That ended with some guy being made to weld a hole shut in a fireworks factory located next to a storehouse containing 2700 tons of industrial explosive

@Magisch It seems to me people need to relax.

We all need to watch The Big Lebowski again or something.

Everyone (uh, that means a small number of people in the US and UK) panicked over these INVASIVE species of plants China was sending them as a means of plant WARFARE. Turns out it's just a brushing scam.

2:11 PM

I mean

If I got a random unsolicited seed packet from china I sure as hell wouldn't think "oh cool, free seeds!" and plant them

@Magisch Yeah, what if they turn into a giant beanstalk with a goose at the top that lays golden eggs?

@M.A.R. meh, they hate us anyway, this won't make a difference. But we have bigger idiots, who are happy for what happened, e.g. facebook.com/MFeiglin/posts/3225157277563365 (Hebrew, I'll try to translate)

@ShadowWizardWearingMask Eh, don't bother

@Tinkeringbell Then I would either have to climb the beanstalk or cut it down

Which would be a lot of work

Which was my point ;)

2:16 PM

also and nobody ever considers this I live in the middle of a town so a beanstalk with the proportions to reach the clouds while being structurally sound would be so big as to encroach on the farm nearby

@M.A.R. yeah, what he says is essentially "I'm happy that it happened, because it saved lots of damage in the future". Anyway, he's not stupid, just evil.

@ShadowWizardWearingMask Frankly, as an example, some people here get happy when something bad happens to Israelites. Some Israelites also get happy when something bad happens to Iranians. I've found it's a very empty sort of 'happiness' though. They say they're happy as a confirmation of their beliefs, or as a compensation for their hatred.

and when I cut it down not only would I need an axe, like 30 people and several days of work I would also squish whatever it would decide to fall on

@ShadowWizardWearingMask Hah, the Hiroshima argument?

the hiroshima argument isn't completely baseless

2:18 PM

@Magisch Well, climb it and come back until a CGI monster chases you, then cut it so they'll get squished

#Get_Smart

but lebanon has not been in a position to credibly wage war on anything for a while

a 20.000 foot tall beanstalk would have to be massive at the stem to not collapse

@Magisch well this would be a bleak argument to pursue so I won't but the US had already killed some 18 percent (more? That's the figure I remember) of the Japanese population and the war was almost gonna end itself soon so I find the Hiroshima argument hypocritical

Port officials under house arrest: theguardian.com/world/live/2020/aug/04/…

People come up with that argument as if when someone says nuking Hiroshima was a bad thing they're being implicated

@M.A.R. what is it exactly?

2:22 PM

@M.A.R. I said it's not completely baseless not that I support it.

Filtered news, passed along.

@ShadowWizardWearingMask Essentially, that nuking Japan was a good thing because it supposedly prevented the war from going on for a longer time and supposedly killing more people

imo the atom bomb attacks were crimes against humanity but then again the US has many of those on its conscience some of them as bad or worse

and they sanction the international criminal court whenever it tries to indict US soldiers so

@Magisch And so do so many nations and civilizations in history

@M.A.R. oh. Well, yes, kind of.

He says there that whatever exploded was meant to be put on missiles and launched on Israel at some point.

2:24 PM

@ShadowWizardWearingMask Eh, that's a level no one has to stoop down to.

But he's not saying we did it, he just thanks the "divine power" that let such a thing happen.

@M.A.R. true.

@ShadowWizardWearingMask Well, to get kinda deep, people need to have to uphold some principles in life. That makes them love some people, and hate some people. This hating is often useful, especially in close proximity: Most principles revolve around hating bad and immoral things. It's rather useless when it talks about distant things: People miles away that you will never meet, or crimes that were only possible a thousand years ago. You just have an emptiness in you that will never be satiated. That's how I

look at it.

Deep indeed. :)

But it's not about love or hate: justifying deaths of innocent people, including children, can never make sense for me.

Stack Exchange's official stance regarding "Blacklist"/"Whitelist" and "Master/Slave" terminology

2

The problem, as seen from the west, is that people have long standing dislike for neighbors and rekindle the problem before any wounds could ever heal.

2:34 PM

@Spevacus Pleased, main Yoda is.

@ShadowWizardWearingMask What foreign news lacks is exactly the proximity. You only hear what happened, not what sort of people it happened to, how the people around it feel about it, or how you would have felt if you were affected, because you're not. Add to all of that self-reassuring feedback loops from like-minded people, and you conjure a very distorted version of the event, especially the parts that you didn't feel.

So what I'm saying is, what they would be saying doesn't even matter, in the most objective form of the word. Clearing their blurred version of the reality is worthwhile.

Our news isn't government sponsored, or suppressed.

user400654

it is however painted

@Rob Sure. You can't change people from being picky about what they hear, however

@Spevacus Good enough

Flavoured by the political leanings of the owners, but there is more than one news agency; and journalist standards.

2:38 PM

That says nothing about getting the news right or wrong

Facts are boring. No news agency, absolutely no news agency, provides just the facts.

And you could argue they shouldn't

But biased is biased, whether you align with them most of the time or not

im actually in favor of block/allowlist

because it's easier to understand to someone unfamiliar with the terminology

These are the sort of facts that reach the western shores: cnbc.com/2020/01/10/…

@Magisch I like how it's easier to understand too, but I hate how the people pushing for changing it aren't using that as the main argument but some completely wrong understanding of the etymology of the world blacklist.

That's political correctness overdoing itself.

But such reports come from all but one direction.

@Rob Later they admitted it was a missile. What's more to say about it? Someone saw a blotch on the radar and decided it was hostiles.

Or was their admittance to their idiocy not covered? Doesn't matter much.

@Tinkeringbell Genau

I urge folks to read the parts of 1984 that deal with dumbing down the language.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

2:43 PM

I thought changing the "master" branch to "main" was a bit overkill but honestly blocklist/allowlist is fine to me.

@Spevacus Same for master to main... main is easier to understand. And that should've been the argument, not some word-scopecreep making the word mean something it was never associated with.

@Tinkeringbell Agreed to be honest. I think someone else mentioned "main" is a couple letters shorter than "master" anyway, so it's technically faster to type ;D

That too! :D

And while I generally don't like policing reasons when I can agree with the end result, I just feel this is indeed getting dangerously close to becoming too controlling and dysfunctional to remain silent.

2

I read long ago about the philosophy of humor, from a good comedian, I've never remember much but enough: That it needs to have an edge. Same goes for language. Sometimes correctness mistakes supporting a minority group with removing the inherent edge from some words in the language.

And that's when you're dumbing down things. Arguably no one's looking for edginess in "blacklist" but you're literally removing the color from the word by replacing it with a bland word. Now when sometimes that bland word is not even unambiguous the change becomes actively harmful.

That said there's something to be said about relatability and easiness for labels

@Spevacus It saves many gigabytes of data, in the years to come.

user400654

2:55 PM

🚽

3:11 PM

💩

🧻

Q: Does SO upvote answers when you apply to jobs?

3:34 PM

-17

I have a feeling my answers get upvoted when I apply to jobs presented to me by Stack Overflow. I imagine SO is incentivized to up-vote my answers so my profile looks more appealing to potential employers, which increases the probability of me getting hired - (I assume SO is compensated for plac...

Eh okay

4:07 PM

Woah. There's not enough tinfoil to block that.

4:20 PM

Congratulations to Martijn Pieters on 1 million, Monica Cellio on 400k, and Chad on (almost) 100k.

@MartijnPieters :)

@ShadowWizard I just used your trick to tag Martijn. Let's see what happens.

I wonder why it says PeterJ has only 67 gold badges. He has far more than 67 gold badges: stackexchange.com/users/1750581/peterj?tab=accounts

Who's Chad

He looks distressed

I think that's a ventriloquists doll.

I'm being silly

I'm being serious ;)

New avatar would be selfie with a distressed look

Maybe

@Usermanynumbers yeah, it works

How can you even doubt @Sha, with that hot smile

4:31 PM

Better yet, what do y'all think of a feature request to close this loophole?

It's probably for a reason that being ping-able requires being present (or recent presence) in a room, and if people aren't, they probably shouldn't be hunted down in a transcript and pinged?

@user1271772 Only sites with more than 200k rep are included in the badge counts. Meta sites are not included (except for meta.SE)

Especially now it's apparently getting to be a wider known loophole...

A: Does the global flair include the badges gained on a meta site?

7

Nope, meta stack exchange sites are not included, only this meta.stackoverflow.com is included, and only the site you have 200+ reps counted for badges This is a copy of your flair at the moment and you have 9 sites with 200+ reputations gold badges — 10 (2+3+1+1+1+1+1) silver badges — ...

Not sure about the better known part but I'd support what you propose

@Tinkeringbell As long as mods are still allowed to superping, I'm OK with it.

4:34 PM

There's no rational reason to oppose it, unless it takes a long time to implement. You also need to take into account that an inbox notification takes you to a transcript, and rightly so, and that's how you can reply to them

So removing the reply button on the transcript isn't a good idea, but rendering very old messages truly read only might be.

@M.A.R. It's probably a hard check to develop, but I would say that replies to old messages if the person isn't pingable shouldn't create an inbox notification either.

@DavidPostill 200k? did you mean 200?

It's different from superpinging, it's getting kinda close to harassment... Especially if it's get widely known and not just 'Sha's trick for pinging old friends'.

@DavidPostill I guess as Atwood said millions of years ago on rate limiting, restrictions are caused by random people doing something bad or stupid just because they can, so Tink is just being pre-emptive

Yeah, maybe I should wait until someone really makes it a problem...

4:38 PM

@Mithical The unit is Rials so you can ignore as many zeroes as you like

@Tinkeringbell Oops. Yes.

Perhaps @Sha could weigh in on pingability ;)

@user1271772 @user1271772 Only sites with more than 200+ rep are included in the badge counts. Meta sites are not included (except for meta.SE)

HAHA someone doesn't have a diamond here

{shrug}

4:41 PM

@M.A.R. cc @DavidP Hmmm :)

I don't have a diamond anywhere but I'm still rubbing it in your face

@Spevacus genau

@DavidPostill 200k is quite a lot. But I counted that he has more than 67 gold badges on the sites where he has 200+ rep.

@user1271772 21+4+15+5+1+8+3+3+3+2=65

@user1271772 It would be harassment if superpings were done for no good reason ...

@Tinkeringbell How is it harassment if a non-mod does it but not harassment if a mod superpings

Because there's a difference between stalking someone through a transcript for trivial matters and superpinging someone for matters of moderations.

4:55 PM

@user1271772 Moderators are usually superpinging for a reason (often moderation-related). That's different from any random user pinging somebody for any reason they choose.

woah, get out of my mind ;)

But mods can superping for any reason they choose, and if they have no reason, is it called harassment?

@user1271772 It's getting just as kinda close to it as I said.

Also, for someone that didn't want to argue with me, you're being quite argumentative today.

Did you change your mind?

I pinged someone because I congratulated him for reaching 1 million rep across the network. I was well within my rights, because if I wasn't, I would not be able to do that.

"I am technically able to do this" isn't the best argument for "I am allowed to do this"...

4:58 PM

It's not the best argument, and it's not the worst argument.

Better arguments could be made, you are right.

In any case, no, I'd say a single ping does not constitute harassment. If people were to consistently start pinging people by replying to old messages that'd be different. As long is it remains a rare occurrence, it should be fine. And if someone asks you not to ping them, then respect that.

@DavidPostill I might have made a mistake and kept counting the sites even if there was only 150 rep, because 65 is less than the 67 displayed in the flair.

@user1271772 How do you think he would feel if all 13m SE users pinged him to congratulate him?

@Mithical "if someone asks you not to ping them, then respect that" I totally appreciate that and agree with that. For what it's worth, this was the first time I've ever done this, in fact I didn't know how to do it. I first type "Martijn" in the search box and zero results came up. Then I searched "Martijn" in the "said by" box and it was still not obvious how to proceed, and whether it would actually work

@Mithical I shouldn't have to ask people not to ping me if I am not pingable in a room in a regular way in the first place I think... which is why I put up whether a feature request to close the loophole would be a good idea ;)

5:03 PM

@user1271772 Caching

@DavidPostill I don't know how he would feel. Maybe happy the first 25 times, then overwhelmed. But I doubt that he will get more than ONE ping in this circumstance, because I already pinged him once and if he doesn't respond, no one else will do it.

@DavidPostill How would caching cause 2 badges to be lost! haha

@user1271772 Pinging someone for no good reason is like spam ...

@DavidPostill That's your opinion, and you have the right to have that opinion.

I pinged him to congratulate him. If he doesn't like it then he can tell me never to do it again.

@MetaAndrewT. wouldn't be here right now if it weren't for @ShadowWizard giving him a superping :)

Ah yeah, the old Sonic argument. Not everyone should have to tell you they don't like something for it to be an iffy behavior to engage in to begin with.

@DavidPostill You're right. Corrected ;)

I'm sorry, I got distracted by a phishing attempt per SMS... that's never happened to me before O.o

o.o I've never had one of those.

Lot of spam calls recently, though.

5:12 PM

The argument that is never personally delivered shouldn't be tested at a distance.

@Spevacus We have a do not call list for that ...

@DavidPostill belmeniet?

Or does your current country have one too?

I keep forgetting, you lived here but no longer, right?

@Tinkeringbell Yeah, UK has something similar.

@DavidPostill Nice!

@DavidPostill Mhmm, I've got the Google Pixel 3a which I guess lets you report calls as spam as well as block their future attempts to call. If a number that's been reported by someone else as a spam call tries to call you, it's automatically blocked. It's pretty neat ;D

5:13 PM

I got hung up on on the last energy company advertisement call, when I asked for the person's name and company they worked for so I could properly report them.

:( That means I only got the company name they were advertising to report, which is too bad.

Ooh I should do that. I get a good few of those.

@Spevacus There's a few rules, you need to be registered at the do-not-call list, and you need to keep a list of companies you give your phone number to. If any telemarketeer outside of those companies calls you, you can report them.

@Tinkeringbell Yes. For about 10 years or so. My memory is not as good as it used to be. Came back to the UK in 2015?

@DavidPostill 10 years is a long time. Survival of the fittest, I guess :P

@Mithical I wonder why your name is in Italic font whereas everyone else's name is in roman font?

5:17 PM

@Tinkeringbell Yeah, I wasn't fit enough to get a new job after redundancy ... something something not fluent enough in Dutch ...

Oh you are a room owner probably

Room owner italics, yeah.

@DavidPostill Aww :(

But I guess that makes sense if you don't know goat-wool-socks ;)

lol

Yea I noticed that now.

5:19 PM

Meh.

it's a reasonable post. The name is something you're not made to judge ;)

@Tinkeringbell I spoke English where I worked (international company, common language English) so never got past basic Dutch. I could manage OK shopping for example, but for philosophical discussions no chance ...

@DavidPostill Yeah, that makes sense. Then again, a lot of people could never hold philosophical discussions even if their mothertongue is Dutch :P

Same goes for some Dutch people attempting to speak English ;)

"He's sweating carrots"

@Tinkeringbell Reminds me of a Belgian friend who once said "up yours" instead of "bottoms up" when toasting her boyfriends parents (potential future in-laws) who had just bought a round of drinks, and another time invited me outside for "a quick shag" (we both smoke hand rolled cigarettes). Much hilarity from the English on both occasions :)

Heh. I have a little book (I got one for me and my brother when he was studying for his exams) with all sorts of badly translated Dutch proverbs. At least I know which ones not to literally translate now!

Eh...

5:31 PM

My name is hare ;)

> ... invited me outside for "a quick shag" ...

Amusingly the correct expression says the same thing.

Interesting that it doesn't update the "Next badge" after the suggested badge is already received.

user707129

5:53 PM

@user1271772 shouldiblamecaching.com

Now, the knives come out: translate.googleusercontent.com/…

City Hall - Tel Aviv