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Admin
It's possible. What's her first name and roughly how old is she?
Edit: it would be hilarious if it were the same person. At my last company I worked with an H-1B visa guy from India; at this job i work with a different one. As the Progress pool of talent is relatively small, and there are occasional jokes about "hey, do you know this guy in [other country], since you're both from there" I asked the second guy if he'd ever met [name of the first one.] A billion Indian people, and it turns out he did.
Admin
Hah, I'd give this even lower odds.
Admin
Really? There's fewer people in the US than in India. :) Strictly speaking it seems unlikely.
My life is full of weird shit like that: I mentioned t'other day that a guy I worked with from 2003-5, I also turned out to have worked at the same company with several years ealier, although we didn't cross paths.
A friend of mine from Connecticut got divorced a few years ago, and got back together with his teen-era sweetheart, who'd ALSO recently gotten divorced. It turns out she had moved to the town I grew up in in the Berkshires with the first husband, and then stayed after the divorce, so imagine my surprise when my friend mentioned being in that town.
Admin
Yes, given that I'd give it less than a one-in-a-billion chance of her having a sibling that I don't know about.
Admin
Oh, right, I forgot about that. But you have to admit it would be hilarious, and as I said above, it's happened to me enough times I wouldn't discount it like you normally would.
Admin
Click on the word ColdFusion in the article for unicorn and rainbow magic!
Admin
You wouldn't happen to have a sister named Alexandra, would you? :smirk:
Admin
Nope, you were right, it's not her, unless she's taken some kind of stage name or bartender name, the latter of which probably isn't a thing.
Admin
I'd still say that the odds of you and I knowing someone in common are probably higher than what one would expect.
Admin
Given how this stuff happens to me, you and I probably went to high school together or something.
Admin
Sounds like you spent more time in MA than RI/CT, where I was.
Admin
Yup.
Admin
[size=8] I don't have cookies disabled, though. Maybe some adblocking/antitrackingcookies thing [/size]
Admin
I believe you were thinking of the ECJ, not the EC. The directive passed by the EC actually says you can take statistical data into account. It was the ECJ that ruled that it went against the core treaties of the EU - and reading the text, I believe they were legally correct.
But Europeans weren't the first - thirty years ago, the SCOTUS had said the same with regard to pension plans - you can't take gender into account to determine employee contributions, in City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power v. Manhart.
But I think you're wrong to think of it as not waiting to be offended. These rullings, and the law that supported them, are part of a system of welfare / income redistribution. It's not that we can't put into question whether the gender is correlated with this or that, it's that "we" recognize that certain subsets of the population were and are discriminated, and these equality laws are a way to "level the balance" in a way.
Admin
Quoting Eminem on TDWTF?
Admin
Google thinks I like MITSUBISHI!?
I think I looked up a part for a coworker's Mistushitsu Lancer once. And it doesn't list any of the 11ty trillion makes of vehicle that I do own or appreciate.
Admin
117 posts and nobody went with the "Default gender is male! Whaa!" trollbait? You people are losing your touch. I am extremely disappointed.
Admin
So this is kind of an idea salad...
First idea: This genderize function seems fine: It works for me. (Smallest constraint on the word "me"...also for "Coyne".)
Second idea: This article comments preview page thingie: Did you guys really decide to show the first 29 comments? Or was it supposed to be 30, but you were off by one? I guess I'm asking which is TRWTF...
Third idea: I had the idea of automatically converting names to upper and lower case (from our database, which stores only upper case). The idea foundered on names like "MacAdam" and "Macadam". Turns out that even case is a "hard" problem. Though I'm pretty sure I've seen a couple of RWTF's around that do it anyway...
Fourth idea: The genderize function seems broken to me: It doesn't work at all for my male friend "Leslie".
Admin
That's been done, hopefully to death. The new hotness is "I can't believe you're defaulting to binary gender, which only covers the vast majority of the population!"
Admin
Thanks for posting that, went and deleted a bunch of interests it thought I had but really don't.
Google did correctly guess my gender as male (though my name ends in an a so who knows?). But it nevertheless thought that makeup and cosmetics were one of my key interests, which I can assure you is not the case. Nor is hair and beauty. Nor Washington State.
Added on mathematics and physics and science in general, and video games in general (it had shooter games, which is odd because I don't play those much at all). It'll be interesting to see what difference it makes to the ads I get, if I remember to look at them.
Admin
If you get a really good printer it might happen. Our first printer was a reasonably cheap Panasonic laser. Tiny footprint, simple paper path, worked like an absolute champ. I think we went through three of the same model (one was stolen) before they stopped making them and we had to diversify.
Admin
Damn typo :/
Admin
Boy named Sue?
Admin
Wouldn't a link be more helpful? http://www.heise.de/ct/ftp/07/17/182/ They say something about "you need to read the article to be able to use the program properly" on the page though - even though there is a rather long readme inside the zip. The download link is at the bottom.
Admin
The new design is actually good. I even think Discourse can be good. It both just needs (a lot) more tweaking. Why are most of us so conservative about changing lay-outs?
Admin
@FrostCat, @chubertdev, you act like you've never heard of the birthday paradox. And the small world network.
Admin
A web site I went to had the following options under Gender
Male Female It's Complicated
Admin
You must be going to the interesting clubs :smile:
Admin
High five!
Of the names in this house it only has a 20% success rate.
Admin
No, no, no! I't should return FILENOTFOUND in this case.
Admin
The difference in my situation is that I was an anti-social, introverted shut-in when I lived on the east coast, so I barely knew anyone there. Living on the west coast now, I usually bump into someone I know when I go out. So I'm less surprised when I have mutual friends with someone out here than I was back home.
Admin
[quote="Nzall, post:5, topic:5135, full:true"] Names are notoriously hard to connect to genders. Ask Chris, Sam, Alex, Morgan, Tracy and about 100 other names.
[edit - I stand corrected on Russian. I'm withdrawing this post as it is inaccurate.]
Admin
Actually, modern CFML has looked like this for years:
Admin
While most traditional female names indeed end in 'а' or 'я' or sometimes even 'ь', I personally know a few exceptions. More importantly 'а' ending does not guarantee name's owner will be female - for counterexample consider 'Никита' or 'Илья' which are exclusively male names.
<Secretly hoping to get pedantic badge
Admin
There are DEFINITELY people who are named Chris without it being a nickname. In my home country, we have a male comedian called Chris van den Durpel and a actress named Chris Lomme. Similarly, Alex Gordon and Alex Gronlund are both natively namex Alex, There are similar people for Sam.
Admin
Since some idiot proposed to use Belgium as a test word for the nasty words list ....
Admin
Blame Douglas Adams and US censorship.
Admin
I'll blame myself because I thought it was funny to propose it to @PJH as a test word. I'll ware the country name with a double entendre proudly. As if we need a reason to piss off 'muricans and their silly hang for political correctness.
Admin
Sense #2, yes? :imp:
Yes, I know ESL, but still...
Admin
The ESL people are generally way better at writing English than native speakers.
Admin
I'm writing/speaking English, French and Dutch daily but I suck at all three.
Admin
This is an example of "nicknamification", the process by which contracted forms of names become themselves full names. Another example is Gwendolen -> Wendy, where at one point Wendy was quite popular but Gwendolen almost ceased to exist. And the commonest contraction of all, Yochanan -> Johannes -> John. When naughty ladies refer to "johns", how many of them know that the name originally meant "God is gracious"?
Admin
As I posted on another thread, the question is can you be easily understood. If so, your use of a language is good. The Hungarian writer George Mikes once described how an English lady tried to let him down gracefully. "Oh Mr. Mikes", she said "You speak a perfect accent without the slightest English". In the same way there are people who write a language which is grammatically correct, correct spelling and punctuation, but it is quite impossible to work out their meaning. If you use a language every day, you probably prioritise meaning over spelling and grammar.
Admin
Not necessarily. In informal circumstances, yes, usually; but in formal circumstances (especially in formal writing) you won't be taken seriously if you make mistakes.
Admin
Not only that, every mistake, every misspelling, every grammatical slip, every stray punctuation mark is a speed bump for your readers. Even if they can derive your meaning you are forcing them to do more work and increasing the chance of misunderstandings. If you respect your readers, do them a favour and proofread your work.
Admin
Adding suffix to women's surname appears in all Slavic languages, but it is primarily for flexing, so some surnames use different flexing rule and don't get the suffix or get different one.
What could probably be used in Russian is the middle name. The middle name is derived from father's name with ‘-ич’ for men and ‘-на’ for women and that may be reasonably reliable. As long as the person gives you their middle name.
Admin
Better yet, get someone else to do it. It's amazing how easy it is to miss errors in something you've written that another person will pick up straight away.
Admin
Depends who is doing the reading. We are all familiar with academic papers which look and sound impressive but are actually almost completely devoid of content. And I guess most people here are aware that Richard Feynman was notorious for his colloquial language, whereas Schwinger was equally notorious for his extreme precision of language, even in speech. But when push came to shove in 20th century physics, Feynman is still rated close to the top and Schwinger is merely a footnote. I would say, to the less well educated, presentation is important because it seems to indicate superiority. But to the really well educated, what matters is the content, not how it is expressed. This is how a paper from the self-taught Indian mathematician Ramanujan could result in Hardy being despatched to India to bring him back to Cambridge.
FWIW, my first degree was in a humanities subject from the University of Cambridge. So I had that experience of writing three essays a week which were then critically reviewed by my supervisors. I'm not seeking to justify my own sloppy use of language, just pointing out that, in years of working in international business, I would rather have a report from someone for whom English was a second language that explained the situation correctly, rather than one that was in perfect English but conveyed very little, because the author would not risk trying to write something beyond what he or she had learned in English class.
As a fully qualified editor and proofreader, I'm aware of that argument. In theory, print media has the resources to do that editing and proofreading; traditionally authors were not expected to do this. Many well known novelists and writers, in fact, could not edit or proofread their work. The great majority of us do not have the time or the resources to do this. Do I want a report with grammatical and punctuation errors where someone spent ten hours on the content, or a perfectly written report where someone spent an hour on the content, four hours messing with the grammar checker and the rules of punctuation, and five hours prettying it up in Word? (That's an exaggeration to make the point, but Word is a terrible absorber of mental effort for little benefit).Admin
Edit: okay, so if you expand the quote it actually shows the post. Discourse is doing well here, for a change.
Admin
It's a lot easier to work effectively with Word if you've previously learned to use LaTeX, as you know to write the content first and then use styles to make it look reasonable.