Winchell Chung @nyrath@qoto.org

Okay let's talk about Lojban! No, this first post won't be in Lojban itself (but you gain enormous bonus points if you translate it).

Lojban is a natural, spoken language (like English, French, Swahili, Toki Pona, or Esperanto). It's also a constructed language or "conlang" (like Toki Pona or Esperanto). It's very easy to learn!

- la karda: a great tutorial: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la_karda
- a lojban dictionary: https://la-lojban.github.io/sutysisku/en/index.html

Toki Pona is fairly popular on the fediverse because it's such a cute language, and is in many ways the polar opposite of Lojban. Where Toki Pona is a fuzzy conlang, Lojban is a very crisp one. While spoken, it's also:

- Syntactically unambiguous! The "roles" in a sentence are always clear and parse cleanly. There's no such thing as "Time flies like an arrow" where you aren't sure if it's about the movement of time resembling a fired arrow or these creatures called time flies, who really love arrows.
- A predicate language. You can translate it into something like a problem solver and easily do analysis on statements, Good Ol' Fashioned Artificial Intelligence style

What it *DOESN'T* give you, and this is frequently misunderstood by various community members, is meaning disambiguity. The language tries fairly hard to reduce confusion there, but there are certain problems in language which are *inescapable*... the world changes, vocabulary drifts, two agents have different conceptions of things based on their experiences.

I AM NOT GOOD AT LOJBAN! But I really like it. It takes me a long time to interact via Lojban.

@cadey is probably one of our more prolific Lojban speakers. Who else speaks it? Let's use Lojban as much as possible in this thread!

A fast rising tidal disruption event from a candidate intermediate mass black hole: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00018 -> Death of a star reveals midsize black hole lurking in a dwarf galaxy: https://news.ucsc.edu/2022/11/dwarf-galaxy-tde.html

If you download your Twitter archive it arrives wrapped as a static HTML page, which is not very useful for doing anything with, and worse: it requires the original account to be still active to do useful things like enlarge the images since they use t.co links.

So here's a Python script to convert a Twitter archive to markdown or other formats: https://github.com/timhutton/twitter-archive-parser

Now you can archive your tweets in any way you want.

Live views from the Kennedy Space Center this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN50Gj7zejY - at least the Artemis I stack is still standung. Alas ... "wind gusts exceeded its design specification": https://twitter.com/alexwitze/status/1590694425252200448

The Puddle-jumper; a small electric plane the family uses to trade along Two-Sky River. Many parts were bought from traders across the Kiln, or made by Mother and other artisans out of local materials. #Birrin #scifi #sciencefiction #alien #illustration #art

I'm Rob, an illustrator from the UK. I love to draw spaceships, robots, and imaginary places. I've worked on several books, including my own sci-fi project - Weird Field World. I'm available for private and commercial commissions.

You can find me here…

https://t.co/xhb7rtK4E2

Started painting in oils again recently in my spare time. Personal projects looking for looser style. Water soluble oil on panel.