Humor Random Comments Thread

[jedidia]

It looks frickin' wicked from the rear. Would like to see it from the front.

 

[Urwumpe]

The real one might even look more familiar :

POLARIS to Begin Testing Fourth Spaceplane Demonstrator From September

Germany’s POLARIS Spaceplanes has received approval to begin testing its fourth demonstrator from September 2023.

europeanspaceflight.com

 

[Urwumpe]

And what joyful news. I am supposed to spontaneously organize a small training session for our Czech coworkers to be held next week.

For VBA.

With all due respect boss, you have a really weird sense of humour...

I am pretty sure, the last time I did "professional VBA"* was 9 years ago.

* Just hacking the code into the application without a clue, but with better documentation.

 

[jedidia]

For VBA.

I'm sorry. I know this is serious and I should feel sympathy or pitty and offer words of encouragment and support and all, but right now I just can't stop laughing. I'm really sorry!

 

[Urwumpe]

I'm sorry. I know this is serious and I should feel sympathy or pitty and offer words of encouragment and support and all, but right now I just can't stop laughing. I'm really sorry!

Don't worry, this is laughable. If I am really the best teacher ( ) for VBA ( ) in at the least northern Europe range of my company, we are really screwed....

 

[Arvil]

The best teaching method is ‘go find VBA script that does similar to what you want then edit it’. That was always my method. Never good at scratch building.

 

[Urwumpe]

The best teaching method is ‘go find VBA script that does similar to what you want then edit it’. That was always my method. Never good at scratch building.

I had to do some lot of scratch building in the past, because I needed scripts that didn't exist yet. Like solving layout problems on a timeline without using recursions...

 

[kuddel]

Beware of the localization nonsense!
You might be able to guess what "Select Case var Case 1 ..." might be in german locale ("Prüfe Fall var Fall 1 ..."),
but do you have the skills to guess it in Czech
I hope your "VBA skills" don't have to be used in EXCEL 95

 

[Linguofreak]

Sine oder cosine, das ist die Frage...

This has been your daily dose of cross-language humor.

 

[jedidia]

Sine oder cosine, das ist die Frage...

This has been your daily dose of cross-language humor.

The traditional translation is "... das ist hier die Frage".

 

[TheShuttleExperience]

While I'm typing this comment, we are traveling with 230 km/s around the center of our galaxy (which takes 240 million years for one revolution). Simultaneously we orbit the Sun with about 30 km/s while we also rotate around our Earth's axis, depending on the latitude (mine is 51° north which translates to 1051 km/h). The Milky Way certainly also is moving with reference to other galaxies.

Not taking into account any other additional movements by foot/bike/ship/car/train/plane etc. on Earth.

This is very weird actually.

 

[Linguofreak]

The traditional translation is "... das ist hier die Frage".

For the meter, I guess?

 

[Linguofreak]

The Milky Way certainly also is moving with reference to other galaxies.

At intergalactic scales, velocities tend to be measured with respect to the rest frame of the CMB. For our neighboring galaxies, this is about 600 km/s.

 

[jedidia]

For the meter, I guess?

No, actually, that's the proper way to say it. Saying "das ist die Frage", while being grammaticaly perfectly fine, sounds wrong. Anybody would throw in the specifying "hier" automatically. Don't ask me why. Knowing what I know about german I wouldn't be surprised if somebody formulated some esoteric grammatical rule to explain this, but I've never heard it.

Though it may be that it was just for the meter, and the conviction that "hier" just has to be part of that sentence might go back to the original translation of the work. It is the most famous shakespear quote in german. Close to 100% of germans will have heard the name shakespear, and probably 80% of them will know nothing more about him save for that quote, and almost everybody will make the association to shakespear whenever someone says "...Das ist hier die Frage" in any context whatsoever. So it's a possibility.

 

[Linguofreak]

It is the most famous shakespear quote in german. Close to 100% of germans will have heard the name shakespear, and probably 80% of them will know nothing more about him save for that quote, and almost everybody will make the association to shakespear whenever someone says "...Das ist hier die Frage" in any context whatsoever. So it's a possibility.

It's also about the most famous Shakespeare quote in English.

It kind of sounds wrong with anything more than "that is the question" to me, and I'm not really familiar with blank verse as poetry, so I don't have enough of a sense for how it's supposed to sound metrically to be bothered by the meter being perturbed by a missing syllable (plus, I think there may be intonation and thing changes between Shakespeare's dialect and my own that disrupt the meter). So the natural way for me to translate the line is without "hier".

But both the English original and the traditional German translation have exactly 11 syllables, so "originally done for meter, now tradition" is probably the answer.

I think there may also be some conflict between the cultural norms for European poetry vs. the natural timing structure of the Germanic languages that's causing my brain to prefer a rhythm that's less poetically "correct". The concept of meter we have in the modern West is built on poetic forms that originated with the mora-timed classical languages and continued in their syllable-timed descendants. But the Germanic languages are stress-timed (stresses are approximately evenly spaced, and intervening unstressed syllables are rushed), and in their native poetic forms (now rarely used), unstressed syllables don't count in the meter at all (there can be any number between two stressed beats):

BA-ba BLACK sheep HAVE you any WOOL?
YES sir, YES sir, THREE bags FULL.
ONE for my MASTer and ONE for my DAME,
and ONE for the LITtle boy who CRIES down the LANE.

we HEARD the HORNS in the HILLS RINGing
the SWORDS SHINing in the SOUTH-KINGdom
STEEDS went STRIDing to the STONing-LAND
as WIND in the MORNing. WAR was KINdled.

So if you're used to an English original like this:

to BE - or NOT - to BE, - THAT is - the QUEStion

The "poetically correct" way to translate that to German is maybe to rearrange the metrical feet a bit, but to keep the same number of syllables per foot:

SEIN od - er NICHT - sein, DAS - IST hier - die FRAge

But to someone whose two best languages are Germanic languages who lacks a literature degree, this may sound like a more natural translation:

SEIN - oder NICHT - SEIN, - DAS ist die - FRAge

And they may interpret the metrical structure of the original somewhat differently:

to BE - or NOT - to BE, - THAT is the - QUEStion

The only difference is in the arrangement of unstressed syllables in the first half of the line, which get glossed over in stress-timed languages.

 

[Linguofreak]

Ba ba black sheep is a really weird specimen of poetry.

It's got medieval/modern European style rhyming, old Germanic meter with four stresses per line and no pattern in the unstressed syllables, and a good amount of Germanic-style alliteration, but not in keeping with the usual rules about which stresses in the line could alliterate with each other.

 

[Urwumpe]

Ba ba black sheep is a really weird specimen of poetry.

It's got medieval/modern European style rhyming, old Germanic meter with four stresses per line and no pattern in the unstressed syllables, and a good amount of Germanic-style alliteration, but not in keeping with the usual rules about which stresses in the line could alliterate with each other.

So you mean, it could orgin from a transition period between old Germanic style literature and poetry and medieval poetry? And thus, must have happened somewhere in the phase between Beowulf and Parsival? and of course, far earlier than the tales of Chaucer or the German Neidhard tales. Maybe happened at the same time as the Nibelungen saga was written in Germany? (Which shared a similar mix of old and new style elements)

 

[Linguofreak]

So you mean, it could orgin from a transition period between old Germanic style literature and poetry and medieval poetry? And thus, must have happened somewhere in the phase between Beowulf and Parsival? and of course, far earlier than the tales of Chaucer or the German Neidhard tales. Maybe happened at the same time as the Nibelungen saga was written in Germany? (Which shared a similar mix of old and new style elements)

Maybe, but the language in the song is decently modern and it's not attested before the mid 1700s. That doesn't say that it can't have an unwritten provenance going back much further, but the whole thing is just generally weird.

 

[jedidia]

Maybe, but the language in the song is decently modern and it's not attested before the mid 1700s. That doesn't say that it can't have an unwritten provenance going back much further, but the whole thing is just generally weird.

Reading up on it, apparently some think it might go back to the old wool tax, which goes as far back as 1275, which would indeed be contemporary with the mentioned Niebelungenlied.

 

[Matias Saibene]

What is this GUI?

Me trying to understand how to configure a joystick in Orbiter Linux: