Trochaisms

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-05-15

    First day on site at a new (old) job! Already talking about parallelization, machine learning, linguist/engineer contact, and more. # For the p.m. crowd (a.m. in Europe): New Trochaism: Chomsky and "walks like a duck" empiricism https://trochee.net/2011/05/walks-like-a-duck/ # GET reports on Kenobi covert action, via @stevesilberman : http://wrd.tw/khyZID ("Too soon?" he says) nails it. the…

  • Bay to Breakers 2011

    I’ve signed up for Bay to Breakers 2011 on Sunday. It’s the 100th Bay to Breakers race across San Francisco.  I’m in Corral C (criterion: 12km under 90 minutes), which isn’t pushing too hard. Unfortunately, at least one of the people who was supposed to run with me is making noises about backing out (“debilitating…

  • Where’s Jeremy?

    Many of you know (or have inferred from my LinkedIn or Twitter updates), but let me point it out explicitly here: I’m working for this summer as a Research Linguist at SRI International, in the same STAR lab that hosted me as a Visiting Fellow while I finished my Ph.D. It’s interesting, diverse work —…

  • Chomsky and “walks like a duck” empiricism

    Replicated Typo and @jasonbaldridge inter alia have been discussing a recent forum where Chomsky and Minsky and Labov (among others) met to discuss the past and future of artificial intelligence. Replicated Typo points out the most interesting contribution from Chomsky: Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that…

  • private key punchlines

    Has anybody written about humor as a sign of a successful encryption strategy? I think that a good joke might be a lot like a sweet encryption, and I’d like to explore this notion: The sweet spot of jokes is actually the same as the sweet spot of sweet cryptography schemes. Consider two failed joke…

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-05-08

    BLOG. In which I complain about Baekdal's passphrase suggestions and draw some connections between LM and crypto http://wp.me/p1uO6s-B # OMG a spectacular eggcorn lode: http://shitmystudentswrite.tumblr.com/ (via @Iron_Spike) #also #iweepforouryouth #curmudgeon # Welcome to @docfreeride, my 500th follower, who probably doesn't have much patience for round number superstitions like this one. # Ashcroft as Xe "ethics…

  • broadsheets from the empirical underground

    I’ve been corresponding with Zoltán Varjú, an enthusiastic proponent of what he describes as “rationalist” linguistics, and Melody Dye, who I would describe as a strongly “empirical” linguist — or rather, psychologist of language.  Also chiming in on that conversation has been Asad Sayeed, an old colleague of mine at the 2005 2003 JHU CLSP…

  • sentence fragments will not save us

    Thomas Baekdal’s post on using passphrases (from 2007) came up again two weeks back. In that post, Baekdal maintained the following thesis (I paraphrase): Passphrases are better than passwords, because they are easier to remember and (because they are longer) they are “mathematically” harder to crack. A series of security articles last week pointed to…

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-05-01

    What Inception *should* have been & what Dark Knight *could* have been, but it's only in the mind of a mad fan: http://youtu.be/6RppxhOdby4 #

  • Twitterlog for the week of 2011-04-24

    RT @cmunell: "I think "Battle of Yavin" is a #MilitaryConflict (http://t.co/gZflI69)" well, it was definitely asymmetric #ewoktaliban # Rt @amandapalmer: "spent 20 min…sorting 4 writing-utensil-orphanage-jars… http://t.co/qZrZzWZ&quot; I <3 these categories. Custom ontology FTW! # you *know* [w]rap is played out: "Queen" Martha gets in on t'game, now't she's done'er time (photo via @jadoogan http://twitpic.com/4mlz0e) #…