freenode/#sicl - IRC Chatlog

5:59:02 no-defun-allowed Good morning beach!

6:05:55 no-defun-allowed On the bus going home from university again; this time everything went to plan transport-wise.

6:06:56 beach Whew!

6:07:24 beach What is the nominal duration of your commute?

6:08:23 no-defun-allowed I'm still not sure as there has been high variance, but somewhere between 1h20 and 2 hours.

6:09:20 beach That's still considerable in my opinion.

6:11:16 no-defun-allowed Today we were welcomed to country by some of the local aboriginal people, met our course directors, and I attended a lecture on academic writing.

6:11:55 beach Quite a day.

6:12:29 beach I the lecture about how academic writing *is* or how it *ought to be*? :)

6:13:18 no-defun-allowed Indeed. There were also many stalls for the communities at the university (but I didn't look at many because someone was playing music very loudly)...

6:13:31 no-defun-allowed ...and there was plenty of time to go for pointless walks around the campus.

6:14:09 no-defun-allowed I would say the lecture was about how it is currently.

6:14:27 beach Oh dear!

6:15:10 beach If you watch some of Steven Pinker's YouTube presentations related to his book "A Sense of Style", you get some very good examples of how it both is and ought not to be.

6:16:45 no-defun-allowed I should probably take a look then.

6:20:48 no-defun-allowed My problems may more likely be that I am too terse and have to elaborate more (supposedly like my mother); but there were many examples where the appropriate style was considerably longer.

6:52:37 beach According to Pinker, the main problem in scientific writing is that it is hard for writers to imagine themselves in a situation where they *don't* know something that they actually *do* know. And he shows some examples of psychological experiments that demonstrate this phenomenon.

6:54:22 beach So then the writing (or any teaching-like activity) becomes incomprehensible to everyone except a very narrow audience that shares the same knowledge, and sometimes that audience consists mainly of only the author.

6:54:43 no-defun-allowed I see.

7:59:04 splittist Good morning.

8:00:21 splittist I distrust a lack of terseness. I feat that either the writer is trying to avoid clarity, or they are trying to sell you something.

8:02:21 splittist s/feat/fear/

8:13:43 beach Hello splittist.

8:23:12 no-defun-allowed Good morning splittist.

9:48:11 heisig Good morning!

9:48:51 no-defun-allowed Good morning heisig!

9:49:31 beach Hello heisig.

9:50:31 heisig Hmm, the logs tell me that people care about CALL-NEXT-METHOD with arguments. Dammit, now I have to make it work :)

9:51:19 beach Heh!

10:00:05 splittist heisig: I read some version of your paper over the weekend. I really enjoyed it.

10:09:44 heisig splittist: Thanks! I had a lot of fun writing that library.

10:10:06 heisig Now I am looking forward to using it for sicl-sequence.

10:11:05 heisig I am also proud of how portable it is. My only dependencies are closer-mop and trivial-macroexpand-all.

10:11:17 heisig I might even get by without the latter.