Back in Texas

I got back into Fort Worth last night - I had a layover in Cleveland and got onto the same plane as my sister.

First day back and what did I do? Do you have to ask? I went with Quang to eat pho dac biet! mmmm

Snow Day!!!

So it started snowing this morning. And it kept snowing. And snowing. And snowing. At this point I think there is over 6 inches, with no signs of letting up. There is a severe weather warning across southern Massachusetts.

The university was closed due to the snow, so I finally have a chance to get some work done! I've already finished my statistics project and proofread and commented on a friend's abstract. With any luck I'll get all the other immediately do-able outstanding work done tonight, so it'll be off my mind as I go into the weekend.

Let's hope the weather lets up before Tuesday - otherwise my trip home might get delayed.

International Human Rights Week

Here is a link to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, signed on December 10th 1948. It is fun (where by fun I mean sad) to go through the thing and consider how many of these agreements are or are not being kept by our (let alone other) governments in the 21st century.

26? Don't fret!

Another xkcd comic - appropriate, since me and a lot of my friends are 26 or thereabouts (click to expand). This should also keep my family's spirits up! (I think they want grandkids)











(I have spent a few weekends at home recently making graphs...)

last week of classes!!!

Tomorrow marks the first day of the last week of classes for me this fall. That doesn't mean I'll be done with my work after this week, but I will have more time to do it.

If you think I've fallen off the face of the planet, you will soon (for better or worse) being hearing from me again. I'll be heading back to Texas December 18th. I'm looking forward to lots of movies and Wii. Wii!

But for the immediate future, it's most likely that I will be experiencing sleepless nights and the effects of excess intake of diuretic substances. The fun never stops in the world of academia. Whee! (not Wii!...)

And 130 dollars later ...

... I have my car back. With a 25 dollar ticket, just to rub it in.

I want my 80 degree Decembers back.

Now to lighten things up - sort of

I'll end my crap day (see previous post) on a positive note with this oldie from xkcd:

lame

I woke up this morning to see a pristine street - free of snow, free of trash, and free of cars.

Free of my car.

Which had, as of last night, been parked there.

It turns out that when there is a "weather emergency", you can't be parked in the street from 12 to 6 am. It is your responsibility to know when there is a weather emergency. I don't get a local paper or watch tv, so I was not aware of all this. Consequence: my car has apparently been towed.

Whee.

A Christmas Request!

If it's not too late I would like to submit a Christmas "wish" to my dear readers (the ones who are shopping for me, anyway).

Go to this website and find the entry for the shirt that looks like this:

(Front)




(Back)











I wear a men's medium :)

(As for what this means ---- yeah ---- ummm ---- you know all that time and money that went into my fancy education? The main result is that I can understand geeky jokes like this.)

Understatement and media gullibility

I just saw an article on the BBC website about an upcoming "conference" about homeopathic treatments of HIV. For those of you who don't know, "homeopathic medicine" is a particularly insidious pseudo-medical bunk factory that eats up resources, diverts attention from real medicine, and even kills people. If you don't believe me, just read this.

Given the absurdity of this "field", it is outrageous how credulous the media reports about it are. The article I read gives the following quote without any qualification:

BBC health correspondent, Jane Dreaper explained: "The principle behind homeopathy is that an ailment can be cured by small quantities of substances that produce the same symptoms but some doctors say it's ineffective."

"Some" doctors? How about, almost all doctors, and certainly every competent doctor that is informed about the issue. The way the media just credulously presents "both sides" of non-issues like this is not just absurd, it's dangerous.

Update: More fun stuff - check this article out to see how the Society of Homeopaths responds to criticism of their quackery. Oh, I hope they sue me too!

The Golden Compass

I've seen a bit of noise in the media about an incipient Christian uproar about (and a Catholic League boycott against) the upcoming movie the Golden Compass, based on the first book of the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman. The fundamentalist reactionaries are telling you not to watch this movie or read the book. Which means of course that you should.

Seriously, I've read the first two books of the series. The book can't really be described as an "atheist" allegory. Pullman is no C.S. Lewis. Like most atheists and freethinkers, he isn't interested in "sneaking" atheism or agnosticism past people's radars. In any case, the book has a character called the Authority, against whom a war is waged by the protagonist. So there's the allegory. But it's not an atheist allegory. Because for an atheist there is no Authority.

But Bill Donohue and his ilk aren't interested in these kind of subtleties. Keep your ears open when you hear a "debate" about this issue on CNN (or, god forbid, Fox News). What you will hear, if someone manages to articulate the fact that the content of the movie itself doesn't reflect a particularly atheist agenda, is a retort along the lines of "But Philip Pullman is an outspoken atheist! What do you say to that!? Huh? Huh!?" This is called an ad hominem attack, and it's what you do when you can't defend your position on legitimate grounds, so you just start calling someone names. Listen for it. I guarantee you'll hear it.

Oh, and it should be mentioned how absurd it is that calling someone an atheist counts as an attack. Clearly it does, given that it used as a sort of trump card against someone in a debate when all legitimate ammunition is depleted. I shouldn't have to mention that you didn't see an atheist alliance calling for a ban on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for its subversive Christian themes. Apparently the atheist parents didn't feel threatened by the possibility that their kids might demand to be taken to church after seeing that poor old lion killed and resurrected. Maybe that's because such parents are thinking along these lines.

Protecting your kids from pornography, from violence, from the general stupidity and inanity that is so pervasive in our popular culture - fine. Good, even. But protecting them from ideas? What are you afraid of? If your beliefs rest on such a fragile foundation that a movie with talking polar bears can destroy them, then I'm afraid it's probably not the movie that you should be blaming.

Update: For the sake of completeness, an interview with Philip Pullman on his agenda and on religion.

Thanksgiving

As has been the case for a number of years now, this year I spent Thanksgiving away from my family. Some day when I am rich, I will go home every year. Ha.

Fortunately, my friends Shoichi and Yoko were nice enough to invite me over for a Thanksgiving lunch.































Classes start again tomorrow. The semester is almost over, which on the one hand makes me happy because I'm ready to head back to Texas, but on the other hand is stressing me out because I ahve quite a bit of work to do. Wish me luck.

Snow

I woke up late this morning, looked out my window, and was greeted by the snow-covered ground.

Winter is here.

Are you a genius? You are if you can read this blog.

Get a Cash Advance

Ubuntu 7.10

Time to "get my geek on", as they say.

The latest version of Ubuntu has been released, and I am currently in the process of getting it installed on my laptop.

I will post pictures (videos maybe?) of my new desktop, in the hopes of making you all jealous. In fact I doubt many of you care.

Puppets, Curry, Thanksgiving

This was a busy weekend. On Friday, I went with my friends Shoichi and Yoko to see a performance of Japanese puppetry and shinnai.

I was very impressed. This was my first chance to see Japanese puppetry. It was a bit different than the bunraku that I knew about; the style of puppetry we saw is called kuruma ningyo and, unlike bunraku, which has three performers manipulating a single puppet, has a single performer manipulating the puppet. He accomplishes this by sitting on a sort of stool with wheels (the kuruma), and manipulating the puppet's feet by grasping them between his toes, while manipulating the arms and head with his hands.

On Saturday, I met my friends again to watch Godzilla versus Ghidora (also featuring Mothra and Rodan). I received this DVD from my parents for my birthday (thanks!) and enjoyed it a lot. Shoichi made curry rice, and Yoko made katsu, and we all ate too much. Yum.

Then on Sunday, we celebrated Canadian thanksgiving at my house with a bunch of friends from the department. Again, I ate too much.

And today I'm celebrating Columbus's "discovery" by getting the work I should have been doing over the weekend done. Speaking of which...

No real news - but a funny comic from xkcd!

So I haven't been posting lately. Sue me. I'm busy. And lazy.

Here's a comic I didn't draw.

my life in a comic?

(an xkcd comic)

Wow

This is crazy. Watch it til the end.



Thanks to Quang for the link.

Secular Reproductionists

A new semester looms

Alright, alright - my posting delinquency is unabated. Are any of you really surprised?

. . .

I didn't think so.

The fall semester starts tomorrow. I am entering my *third* year as a linguistics grad student here at UMass. OK, so for the uninitiated, this is, believe it or not, NOT a consequence of delinquency. The PhD program is projected to take five years. This is standard. I notice a lot of raised eyebrows when I tell people how long this thing takes. Trust me - as my twenties (and my soul) are sucked mercilessly from my carpal-tunnel stricken fingers, I am well aware of just how long five years is.

In any case, at the end of this year, I'll be at roughly the halfway point.

To everybody in Texas - thanks for the much-needed break this summer. The less you hear from me this fall, the harder I'm working. Really. I'm not at the movie theater. I promise.

Heading back to Massachusetts

My time in Texas is up - I head back to Massachusetts later this morning.

My parents and I managed to hit the Kimbell and the Modern before I leave. There are excellent exhibits at each place right now. At the Kimbell they have an exhibit called Portraiture in the Age of Picasso. In addition to a number of interesting Picassos that I had previously only seen in books, there were paintings by Max Beckmann, Braque, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, and many more besides. The exhibit is arranged chronologically, from early modern to contemporary.

At the Modern we saw an exhibit of works by Ron Mueck, an artist I knew of but had never seen before. I highly recommend seeing this if you have a chance. Mueck creates ultra-realistic sculptures of people at either very small or very large scales. The oversized pieces are like nothing I've experienced before. Here's a picture of a piece we saw.
















You can view some more of Mueck's work here.

Wii!

Some pictures of me and my friends at Brad's house playing the Wii.

Here is my Mii (my avatar in the Wii - get it?):














And here we are playing Wii golf - which we figured out how to do while reclining. We are very lazy.

California pictures

Better later than never. Pictures courtesy of Meg and her digital camera.

Media Appearance

The Boston Globe ran a story about the grant I am working on this summer and fall.

Hmmm - part of that 200,000 dollars is putting food on my table. Guess I better get started on that search-and-rescue robot.

SALT photos

You can pictures of me and the all the other presenters at this year's SALT here.

Nationalized healthcare = terrorist threat (reasoning courtesy of Fox News)

long time no post

I've gone almost a month without posting. For those still checking, I'll put up some pictures of my recent trip to Austin.

On the road:




















Waiting for the Oasis to open



View from the Oasis



Lion dancing




















Now I'm staying at Stanford for the LSA Summer Institute. The campus is beautiful.















I rented a bicycle yesterday to ride around campus and to go to downtown Palo Alto. There is a theater in town (the Stanford Theater) that seems to exclusively play old movies (pre-1960s). There is a Fred Astaire festival coming up. But I'll be missing classics like The Mummy and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Darn.

Fry and Laurie on language

(This video appeared recently on Language Log)

Classic Games

My chance to be the first in the (immediate) family to be published is dashed. The professor of classic games beat me.

But - we'll soon get a chance soon to test whether the game guru's encyclopedic knowledge is built on a secure foundation of practical skill, or whether he is just an `armchair academic' of video games.

The challenger arrives in Texas in less than a week. Mwahaha.

Battle of Midway propaganda video

I came across this video by chance today. It's a propaganda film directed for the Navy by John Ford documenting the Battle of Midway, including actual footage of the battle.

ジパング (Zipang)

I just downloaded the first 26 episodes of the anime series Zipang from SUMO torrent. A friend brought me a bunch of the collected manga, volumes 18 to 29, from Japan. So I'm watching the anime to catch myself up to read the manga.

I've only watched the first episode, but it looks interesting so far. The premise is that a modern-day Japanese self-defense force naval ship is caught in a time warp that sends it back in time to the second World War. Fun stuff.

The rights to North American distribution are owned by Geneon, who are releasing the series on DVD. Check it out.

Car re-enabled

I changed my car battery today. How many man points does this earn me? I think at least five.

So now my car is running again. But it seems like someone's lawnmower launched a rock at the front window and gave it a good crack. Boo.

In other news, Shoichi and Yoko invited the first year students (and me) over for a very delicious dinner.



Yoko made about three dinners worth of food, including some excellent salmon kabobs, yakitori, nanbanduke style cod, and eggplant au gratin. Yum.

Just ten days til I head back to Texas. It's already hot here, so I imagine Texas is boiling by now.

McPost

An article I ran across just now describes how McDonalds is "starting a petition" to have the definition of "McJob" in the Oxford English Dictionary changed. According to the article, the current OED definition is "an unstimulating low-paid job with few prospects".

McDonald's complaints seem to rest on the premise that the role of a dictionary is to "define" words in a way such that, by the definition given the word in the dictionary, the word comes to have that meaning. Although this is a fairly prevalent view of the role of dictionary definitions (the dictionary as a set of commandments from on high), it is completely at odds with what lexicographers actually do, which is describe words as they are actually used.

When the folks that are responsible for putting words into the dictionary and giving them definitions do their work, they look for evidence of how the word they are defining is used. They don't impose a meaning on the word; they are simply describing the word's meaning as it is actually used.

So McDonald's can petition all it wants. The word will mean whatever people use it to mean, and the folks over at the OED will faithfully reflect that meaning in the definition(s) they give the word in their dictionary entry. Even if, as McDonald's senior VP David Fairhurst claims, "the current definition is extremely insulting" to the folks who work at McDonald's.

Now that I think of it, maybe McDonald's could take the "extremely insulting" claim seriously and attempt to persuade us that "McJobs" should be labeled as an epithet, making its use non-PC in the same way an "extremely insulting" racial epithet would be (These people should hire me - or rather, they should hire the unscrupulous but rich counterpart of me).

But looking further into the article, I'm afraid McDonald's is already sealing off this possible avenue of lexical revisionism:

Last year McDonald's tried to improve the image of its employment opportunities with the slogan: "McProspects - over half of our executive team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob."

Not sure they can complain at this point. Although maybe they could try to get away with a "reclaiming the word" sort of story - you know, we can say the word because its derogatory to us, but you can't - unless you're one of us too. Which reminds me - did you get a chance to fill out a McApplication?

Semester coming to a close

We administered the final exam for the 101 class I TA today - now we just have to grade it. The last month or so has been a struggle - but I'll be rejoining the land of the living shortly.

I'm heading home to Texas on June 12th (the plane ticket is purchased!). In July I head to Stanford for the 2007 Linguistic Institute. I'm taking some interesting courses - Constraint-Based Generative Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Particles, Computational Linguistics, and Conversational Inference.

After the institute, I'll head back to Texas for a few weeks before going back to Massachusetts.

SALT talk given - phew

Chris Potts and I gave a talk at SALT yesterday - if you're curious, the slides are here.

My sister is coming in tonight. I'm looking forward to seeing her, though it's hard to keep my eyes open...

I'm pretty tired.

Mavericks still in!

I kept checking the score of the Dallas - Golden State game tonight while writing my generals paper. I finally had to run down to a local bar to watch the end of the game. I arrived with 48 seconds to go. I was pretty nervous, but the Mavs came back to win by six. I'll be there for the whole game on Thursday, with my Josh Howard shirt on.

I insist: you are a veil!

In the middle of a very unfunny article, I found the following:

Many Somalis were unhappy with the more extreme rules of the Islamic Courts: closing down the cinemas, banning music and insisting women were veils.

That is pretty extreme.

(Note: even with the correct spelling, the sentence is ambiguous. It could mean `they insist that it is true that women wear veils.' But I probably wouldn't have noticed this ambiguity without the typo.)

Texas Tornado

Quang snapped this nice shot of a tornado from his front porch in
Watauga last night.

The white stuff in the foreground is hail.

Don't try this at home kids.

LibraryThing

I've stumbled across a site (actually, linked to courtesy of friends at Language Log) that looks fun for book geeks: LibraryThing. My user name is kuritaro and I've just posted my latest acquisition.

The Neti Pot

I came across this flyer on my last trip to the laundromat, on the same bulletin board as I found "Actual Texans".


Before you go out and buy your very own Neti Pot, click on the picture and look closely at the man's left nostril.

...

Yeah.

SALT program

The program for SALT 2007 is up - my talk is the last one on Friday. You can look at the abstract (if you really want to) here.

Posting from Georgetown University

I've just arrived at Georgetown University, finished checking in to the conference, and am now at the library. The campus is beautiful.

I left from Hartford today at 7am (yikes) and arrived in Maryland, then took the train to Washington. Union station is impressive.

Hopefully I'll have time to do some sightseeing in the next few days. But I'll be spending most of my time attending talks, and fretting about my own.

Will try to buy a disposable camera, take some pictures, and post after getting back to Massachusetts.

Over and out.

Accomodations in DC

I just reserved a room at a hostel in Washington DC. First class all the way.

Actual Texans

I came across this flier at the laundromat today:





















ACTUAL Texans?! Honey, quick, get the camera!

Back from a long hiatus

It's been almost two months since I've posted. Sorry.

In the interim since my last post, I have built a new computer, which I have up and running on Linux. I ended up going with the Mepis distribution - and have been quite happy with it. No more M$ for me.

I'm going to Washington DC next weekend to present at GURT 2007 (you can see my talk listed by clicking on conference program and then scrolling down to Saturday, 3pm).

I also found out last week that I'll be presenting a paper I'm co-authoring with Chris Potts and Peggy Speas at SALT.

In family news, there is a new canine member of the Davis family:






"Coal Davis"

aahhhh.

That's it for now.

Vilsack

I was watching John Stewart interviewing Tom Vilsack, current governor of Iowa and the first Democrat to announce he will run in the 2008 presidential campaign. Early in the interview (here's the link on youtube; the relevant comment occurs 3 minutes and 24 seconds into the interview - ain't technology great?), he discusses the war in Iraq, calling it a mistake and so on. OK, about as much as you can expect from the "opposition", I suppose. But then get this:

"We've created a culture of dependency with our presence there, and I think it's time for us to say to the Iraqis and their government, `hey, it's up to you, it's your country, you fight for it, you die for it.'"

....

Huh?! A "Culture of Dependency?" Is this guy serious? Who are you, Dr. Phil? This is perfect - how can we pull out of this thing without admitting that we're the bad guys? Oh, I know - make it the Iraqi's fault!

I think the post-hoc rationalization has come just about full circle now. Let's see:

1) Saddam has WMD. Iraq dangerous. Protect Americans.

2) Whoops. Saddam still dangerous - links to Al Quaeda. Protect Americans.

3) Whoops. Well, Saddam was bad. Protect Iraqis - give them democracy.

4) Hmmm.... OK, foreign insurgents bad, disrupting struggling democracy. Protect Iraqis.

5) Oh hell. Iraqis not grateful - keep killing our soldiers - need to take responsibility for their own problems. Protect Americans.

Perfect. Genius. Poor brave America - tried so hard to help, but now its time to let these people catch their own fish.

I really don't have much faith left to lose at this point, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope for a candidate who has the sack (sorry) to admit to the blood we have on our hands and deal in an honest way with our nation's responsibility to the people of Iraq.