K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@DenialShown

> It's not even the Greek letters Greek people use.

> the math was actually fine in Arabic

I guess it evens out because we don't use the same numbers Arab people use (1, 2, 3, ... vs ۱, ۲, ۳, ...).

I like the Greek letters because they indicate information about what the symbol represents - in the same way you might use x for a scalar but X for a matrix, or typeset ***x*** in bold to show it's a vector, seeing φ and θ and π floating around tells you that you're likely dealing with angles. In another context I might have x, y in physical space and χ, η in Joukowsky coordinates, so when I see z and ζ I have a good idea which system each belongs to right away, and thus I'm unlikely to get them mixed up as I manipulate my equations.

On the other hand, despite their distinctness, they're close enough to Latin letters that they're often intuitive (α looks like "a", β like "B", etc.), so between that and the limited number you use at any one time, it's never felt particularly onerous to learn them. That's an advantage I think you'd lose with wingdings.

@Bahais_Mexicali

> The "menus" are on the left and right-hand side of QGIS.

Ah, okay.
- Top left, browser: View > Panels > Browser
- Bottom left, layers: View > Panels > Layers
- Top right, processing toolbox: Processing > Toolbox
- Bottom right, identify results: "Attributes" toolbar > Identify Features (you can see this icon selected near the top centre of my screenshot)

> i wonder if i can get the polygons to show in different, pretty colors, like yours

In the processing toolbox:
- Cartography > Topological coloring
- Advanced > Algorithm Settings > Invalid Feature Filtering > Do Not Filter
- Run

Then in the layers pane:
- Right-click the new layer > Properties > Symbology
- Top dropdown (probably reading "Single Symbol" by default) > Categorized
- Value > "color_id"
- Classify

@mitch

@Bahais_Mexicali

> What did you use to open it with

I opened it with QGIS. That's the screenshot you see. The version in our repository is 3.38.2 "Grenoble".

> you said you found a bunch of menus as well

I don't think I said that - can you point me to the quote you're referencing?

@mitch

@Bahais_Mexicali

I got the initial file from [this link](https://www.inegi.org.mx/app/biblioteca/ficha.html?upc=702825296827) - it's a zip file containing more zip files, and the one you'd want for Mexicali is 020020001. That'll have a bunch of shapefiles called `020020001<SUFFIX>.shp`, and the "asentamiento" ones have a suffix of `as`.

@mitch

@Bahais_Mexicali are you looking for something like this? This is based on the "asentamiento" category from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography. I don't think Google lets you scrape their data like you're describing - their general model is to sell products based on data, not the data itself.

@mitch

@bibliolater Former QOTO user @peterdrake made [a game](https://redslash12.itch.io/gerrymander) on this theme a while back. Not much replay value but a neat puzzle to solve once.

@sunflowerinrain Culinary Cargo Cult! I like it.

@mitch kam kam, rúz be rúz

@sunflowerinrain my best guess is than the man/men distinction is easier to remember because changing the vowel changes its pronunciation. For some reason, in the woman/women distinction, the orthographic change is on the second vowel but the pronunciation change is on the first.

@mitch ah man it's there if I zoom in or read the mouseover text.

@mitch took me a minute, but I think I got it: "no'úmah"? I was trying to make the thin lines be diacritics at first.

@AnnemarieBridy [obligatory xkcd](https://xkcd.com/984/)

@mitch here's an alias for your `.bashrc`:

`alias resudo="(export \$(compgen -v); fc -ln -- | grep -Pv '^\s*resudo(?![^\s])' | tail -n 1 | envsubst | sudo su)"`

This handles one-liners with pipes, semicolons, ampersands, etc., which the double-bang version can't. It's slightly different from your request in that it executes the whole one-liner with a single privilege escalation rather than one for each constituent command, which no doubt will prove important in some edge case.

Briefly explained, the core idea is to pipe `fc` to `su`. The `export`, `compgen`, and `envsubst` parts are there to ensure that any environment variables get expanded. The `grep` and `tail` are there to exclude itself from the definition of "last-used one-liner", in case you should want to repeatedly invoke it. The whole thing is in a subshell to insulate you from the side effects of `export`.

@aarbrk

@sabbatical that works way better than I expected. I'm impressed!

@selzero as an undecided voter in a swing state who's getting really tired of political ads, please spend less time on us too ;-)

@mitch I'd love to learn how the video driver breaks the swapfile; that sounds like a story with a twist ending.

Just learned the specs for both MBR and GPT flavours of partition table, and rolled my own in a hex editor to solve a problem that `fdisk` and `parted` weren't able to handle. It's hard to express how pumped I was when this box booted, but I think Andy Weir did a pretty good job in "The Martian":

> **LOG ENTRY: SOL 211**
> I am smiling a great smile. The smile of a man who ****ed with his car and *didn't break it*. This is considerably more rare than you might think.

@mitch I don't think that'll be their problem. The trick is that salt corrosion occurs extremely slowly at the temperatures where we need road salt, so if you have a long prairie winter with very little time spent above zero, you can ignore it until spring. Then you just wash it well come springtime, and the CT might actually be better in that regard if it's smoother and there's less salt residue hidden in nooks and crannies that escapes the washing process.

I expect the bigger issue will be the weight of the thing; it's three tonnes and they had to make the tire pressure stupid high to bear the load. So it will have a much greater shear loading on its contact patches (easier to break free on ice) and somewhat worse flotation (sinks in deeper in snow).

@mitch when I was living in Philly I got the chance to see Streetlight Manifesto perform which was a real treat.