K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@lapingvino

> Why is the general feeling that something has to be not created to be real, while creation is the only thing anything we see is real?

At a guess: because the word "artificial" has picked up connotations of "fake"? It's not just a neutral word cognate to artifact, i.e. something manmade. For example, artificial flowers are distinguished from "real" flowers, not just having come to be through man's effort instead of natural processes, but in fact completely different articles - cunningly shaped bits of plastic made to deceive the viewer. So a term that in principle just tells you how something was created is also taken to carry information about whether it's real, and our understanding of what is real has become linked to our knowledge of its creation - even when that term itself isn't used.

@mitch @benjamin I'm perfectly happy with that spelling if your audience isn't unusually familiar with Arabic. The Q represents a sound that doesn't exist in English, and K is a much closer approximation than KW (the naive rendering of QU).

Equally, I think many older romanisations of Chinese are better for general use than pinyin - rendering "that sound like CH but different" as CY, CH', TJ, etc. gives an English speaker a much better chance at approximating it than Q.

In both cases, as you move to an audience that's more familiar with the language in general and your transcription system in particular, the mental effort of using a glyph to represent a sound different from its role in English decreases, and the benefit of being able to distinguish between the allophones increases. So, "Qur'an" would be more appropriate for a scholarly discussion, but I'd prefer "Koran" in a mass-market newspaper.

@nomi the point is that in negotiation, the union's incentives no longer line up with its members'. E.g. "sure, we could play hardball and wring a better offer out of the company, but it'd cut the company's profit (and thus our dividend) down so we've decided to just accept management's proposal."

@nomi is that lawful? I know there are rules against a company sponsoring a union, because it creates a potential conflict of interest. If a union is getting a dividend, they could conceivably find themselves in a similar place where winning a concession for their members hurts their finances.

@shayman why the cannon, actually? It fits the Blue Jackets' theming perfectly, but I don't see the connection to Jason and the Argonauts.

@peterdrake diagnostically, it might be useful to try 'sudo shutdown -h now' to see where the problem lies. If that works, it suggests the desktop environment's power button isn't triggering the OS to shutdown. If it doesn't, it implies that your OS can't talk to the hardware, so you're maybe missing some firmware or compatibility layer.

@mitch @benjaminhollon it's one of our nonstandard features at QOTO. It's not as useful as you'd think, because replies don't inherit the scope, so threads end up mostly-public with orphaned replies, and if an observer can deduce what you said based on my reply, it defeats the purpose.

@mitch I can certainly see them - I would guess this text was composed to illustrate the feature deliberately, since there's some mid-line hyphenation that doesn't seem to serve any other purpose.

I'm curious now as to what other typist "best practices" I learned that would be badly received in the design world:
- Interleaved replies, rather than top-posting?
- Aligning columns of numeric data to the decimal point, not left- or right-justified?
- Wrapping text to 72 columns to allow space for a few levels of reply quoting?

@mitch I gather from context that a word gutter means something like a vertical block of words that all end or begin at the same horizontal column? When I searched, I got a lot of stuff about setting gutter margins in Microsoft Word.

The closest I get to "design" is adjusting my LaTeX documents to eliminate overfull hboxes, so I think your assessment of different uses for different scenarios is probably on the money.

@mitch pretty much. You might as well ask what's the utility of starting a new sentence with a capital letter - it's not strictly necessary for comprehension's sake because it doesn't add any information; it's just one of those rules of the language that makes it easier to parse. Raw text is commonly composed and edited in fixed-width fonts, too, so many of the same considerations apply.

@mitch I spend far more time typing raw text than word-processed documents. It's not just old muscle memory; I'm actively reinforcing it every day. About the only context in which I don't put a second space is when using a phone keyboard.

@winnipegguy :(

@mitch Then the bit upthread about Catholics and Protestants isn't really accurate. Catholics are definitely amillenial - in their theology the millennial kingdom already started at the time of the resurrection of Christ. Protestants differ by denomination.

Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, one could identify the millennial kingdom as the Roman Empire beginning with Constantine making Christianity the state religion and ending with the fall of the remnant Papal States in the 1860s-70s, contemporaneously with the coming of a new Manifestation. Obviously that interpretation would pose some problems for Christians though!

@mitch this makes me think that the Báb's message was, at some level, "Erm, God's coming here later today; you might want to start cleaning the place up so you don't look like complete slobs when He gets here."

@emarktaylor@thecanadian.social @cfl more to the point, when the call is "Unnecessary Roughness - Horse Collar Tackle", how does the coach challenge the call of Roughing the Passer? I'm not sure UR is even eligible subject matter for a challenge.