Month: December 2011

  • Gnu ears eavesdropping

    My mother sent me a link to this amazing doggerel (credited to G. Nolst Trenité) about the insane relationship between English spelling and pronunciation, which I quote from here (the link’s poem is much, much longer): Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I…

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-12-25

    I been under the weather all weekend: out of energy after two hours awake; 2 hr nap earns only 45 min more. No other symptoms. # Today is "mansplaining sentiment analysis" day over at Corpora-L, where everybody who "wrote a REALLY BIG regex that one time" is an expert. # Ugh. Four hours out enjoying…

  • Remembering Riddley Walker’s writing

    Some of you may have heard — Russell Hoban died ten days back. You may know him through the Frances The Badger books (which I remember as a child).  He’ll be remembered for Frances, of course, but I wanted to remember him for Riddley Walker, the novel, and also for Riddley Walker, the character. I…

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-12-18

    "The Rise of Developeronomics" is creepy as hell. Reads like "The Mount" or "To Serve Man" http://t.co/xi8hU0Br via @wordie #IAmNotATrophy # This short film introduced me to the AI Box experiment. Reminiscent of Haldeman's Forever Peace http://t.co/7gTPYA0Q (via J Noguchi) # En route to San Francisco, after the no-backscatter-please patdown. # They gave me the…

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-12-18

    "The Rise of Developeronomics" is creepy as hell. Reads like "The Mount" or "To Serve Man" http://t.co/xi8hU0Br via @wordie #IAmNotATrophy # This short film introduced me to the AI Box experiment. Reminiscent of Haldeman's Forever Peace http://t.co/7gTPYA0Q (via J Noguchi) # En route to San Francisco, after the no-backscatter-please patdown. # They gave me the…

  • Dolphins are nifty — but not magical

    I saw this, and thought others would find it interesting too. … said one of the phoneticians at my alma mater. It’s a collection of rather fantastic claims about “dolphin language”, mixed with breathless praise for their affirming-the-consequent “Aqua Thought Foundation” (slogan might as well be “we already know dolphins are better than us”) and…

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-12-11

    Mother Box only gets good cell coverage on New Genesis #FourthWorldProblems # How to answer academic hate mail: write a paraliptic (prosleptic, cataphrastic) refusal to respond. http://t.co/VVI220sh (via @Fritinancy) # To crush your soul, but in a goingforward synergistic way, google "commitment to excellence". with quotes. #chickendespairforthesoul # At Columbia City Theater with @eldang, waiting…

  • Mostly harmless

    I got to go out with three computationally-sharp alums of my linguistics department last night. I’m proud to be friends with all of them, and it’s nice to know there are reasons we all have the same “ancestry” — we have, at the very least, quite compatible senses of humor. Bill and I have a running…

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-12-04

    y'all know about Google Chrome's Genderswap Plugin, right? http://t.co/wnH4ruie via @The_MarySue #awesome #nlp #RegexAgainstTheMachine # VentureBeat has a nice piece about my employer @QuidLabs http://t.co/2oq3d2QF (with a few choice quotes from @sgourley!) # Fred Clark is my kind of emacs evangelist, but not in the way you think: http://t.co/TOnKDTs4 did you know you've been using…