Guess he’s never been to Canada, eh?

“Bilingual countries don’t work”
- Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo

Guess he’s never been to Canada… Or Belgium… Or Luxembourg… (the list goes on…)

Are you pro or anti?

The season 3 finale of The 4400 ends with a question: are you in favor of, or against Promicin? (To avoid spoilers, I’ll not explain what Promicin is, or why people would feel one way or the other about it).

I went to the 4400 website to see when season 4 begins, and was greeted with three choices: pro, undecided, and anti.

Each of these choices takes you to a content-rich fake website talking about the pros and cons of Promicin (promicinpower.com, promicininfo.com, and promicinterror.com, respectively). Not only do the websites look exactly as you’d expect from the groups supporting each side, but they’re complete with personal testimonials, articles, viewer-created video, and videos of politicians (in the show’s world) taking their stand.

My favorite video is a wonderful take on the famous LBJ 1964 Daisy Ad:

I guess this is all to say “Good job, USA Network. This is how to involve your viewers.”

Update (6/17/07): In preparation for the season premiere, USA has changed the 4400’s website. The whole “pro or anti” bit has been moved here.

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The next chapter

Starting in the fall, I’ll officially be a PhD student!

On Friday, I took a trip down to scenic New Brunswick, New Jersey to visit the Linguistics Department at Rutgers.

I wasn’t exactly thrilled to take a 6am train, but at least the scenery was pretty:

In spite of the early morning travel, I had a great time. The profs were all fantastic, and the students were incredibly friendly. I am excited and proud to say that I will be spending my next five years in this building:

And if there was any doubt that I’m going to the right place, JonW points out that the location is… “advantageous” :

NB: This entry was originally going to be deep and profound, but after JonW sent me that chart, I just couldn’t do it

Overheard… (Mildly NSFW)

Very interesting things are said when people don’t think you can understand them.

The other week when I was at UMB to meet with Luis Alonso-Ovalle, I overheard two custodians engaged in the following conversation, translated from the Spanish.

Mildly NSFW…

This has, um, never happened to me before?

Is it sad when your life is captured by what is supposed to be a hyperbole?

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Inside the Battlestar Writer’s Room

I’m fairly certain that this is how every meeting Inside the writer’s room of Battlestar Galactica starts:

“Ok guys, which characters’ lives can we completely ruin even more than we’ve already done?”

Teaching English in 6939

BoingBoing recently linked to the “book of record” for the time capsule buried at the 1939 World’s Fair, meant to be opened 5000 years later, in 6939.

Of course, the most interesting part for me was the section attempting to teach English to the future-Earthlings. It details the sounds and syntax of “1939 English”, includes some word-lists (in both English spelling and their lovely phonetic transcription), and even includes the perennial North Wind and Sun fable. In the actual time capsule, the apparently included the fable in 25 “1939 Earth languages”, but alas the booklet only has the English.

Read the section on English [pdf] or the whole thing.

   

Thanks for taking our parking spot!

Last night, Danny and I went to my favorite Indian restaurant, Diva Indian Bistro in Davis Square.

Now, it being a Friday night, and Davis Square being a pretty happenin’ spot, parking was… tough… to say the least. After fifteen minutes of circling, we found a spot at last. As we were about to pull in, a car swerved into the parking lot, blocking our entry into said spot. It was a veritable stand-off, but due to some fancy driving on our opponent’s part, they got the spot. Even though we had our blinker on, and were clearly there first.

At first we were a bit angry, but ended up finding a better spot that wasn’t metered, anyway. In order to show our appreciation to the other car, at having forced us into finding a *free* parking spot, we went into the drug store on the corner and left them the following card on their windshield (click the image to see it full-sized):

  

Thank you, silver car, wherever you are.

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Compy woes

It looks like my laptop (a 3+ year old 15" 1Ghz G4 Powerbook) is in its final throes At least, the hard drive is. It keeps making clicking sounds and then crashing, much like a banshee’s shriek signaling imminent death.

I have a few options (which I’d appreciate your opinion on):

1. Replace the hard drive (somewhere between $100-$200, which is especially frustrating considering the extended warranty *just* expired)
2. Hope she doesn’t die, and just wait it out ’til I graduate, at which point I can hopefully get a shiny new MacBook Pro, and keep that for the next 3 years
3. Spend my summer earnings now and get a new MacBook (not Pro) to love and cherish for the next 2 years or so (about $1200 - ugh!)
4. Put out a collection plate and try to scrounge up the money to get a MacBook Pro now (about $2000 - yeah, not likely).

I like the idea of getting a new computer now, especially considering how slow my current one is (sorry, Xev!) - even a low-end MacBook (not Pro) would be a noticeable increase in speed. That would, though, mean losing some screen space - going from a 15" screen to a 13" one. And a glossy one, at that. I wonder, though, if I’d regret not having gone for the Pro (not that it’s an affordable option).

Thoughts/comments? Leave ‘em here.

Discomfort

Discomfort dis·com·fort /dɪsˈkʌmfərt/ [dis-kuhm-fert]
- noun
1. Finding out that your peanut butter and your bar of soap are made by the same company

While rummaging through the cupboard making breakfast today, I noticed a strange logo on the jar of peanut butter - a U comprised of lots of small graphics.

That’s right folks, Unilever, the people who make Dove, Lever 2000, and Vaseline also make Skippy Peanut Butter.

Now that causes more discomfort than my social life!

The Future of Linguistics

Mark Liberman finally put up the slides from his LSA talk, The Future of Linguistics.

I think they’re an interesting read, even (and perhaps especially to non-linguists. Liberman’s narrative is full of wonderful anecdotes, and explains why linguistics is in the state it’s in, and what can be done to change it.

Pop Psych is huge. Why not Pop Ling?

From the abstract:

Those who are resigned to the fate of our academic discipline should still be disturbed that contemporary intellectuals learn almost no skills for analyzing the form and content of speech and text, so that few writing instructors can even identify instances of the passive voice that they urge their students to avoid. More seriously, the teaching of reading is so widely based on false or nonsensical ideas about speech and language that a quarter of all students emerge from elementary school with difficulties serious enough to interfere with the rest of their education.

To break the grip of familiarity, it may help to view the past 150 years of intellectual history as a poker game. The academic disciplines concerned with speech and language began with a bigger stake than almost anyone else at the table and have been dealt a series of very strong hands. However, the role of linguistic research and teaching in English, foreign languages, and anthropology is dramatically smaller than it once was, and the field of linguistics itself is a marginal player, in danger of being busted out of the game entirely.

See also Semantic Compositions’ summary and comments

LaTeX

A tree made with qtree

So, I’ve been playing a lot with LaTeX the last few days (brought on, in part, but the LSA conference), and I’m really starting to like it.

You can see the results of my playing here (pdf).

Aside from being able to easily typeset really pretty trees, tables, and OT tableaux, a really neat feature of LaTeX is BibTeX, which manages your references. You create a reference database, which can contain pretty much every article you’ve ever read in your career, and then refer to that database in documents. It then automatically creates in-text citations and your references pages, all perfectly formatted [for those interested, my custom .bst, which I’ve been told is very nice, is online here].

That all being said, a question for the lazyweb: If you use LaTeX, how do you do versioning and/or change-tracking. I really don’t want to run CVS or SNV for my LaTeX files (I know that some people do that). It’s nice that in MS Word (yuck, I know) I can go back and see what sections I’ve cut, edited, or added, and when, and I’d like to have that functionality while working on my thesis. Is the best way to do it just to write and edit in Word, then follow up by typesetting in LaTeX? Doesn’t that defeat the point of LaTeX (to avoid dealing with formatting)? Thoughts in the comments are appreciated.

LSA ‘07

Well, I survived my first LSA conference! In fact, I’d go as far as to say I did more than survive - I even had a good time and learned a few things!

The Tensor organized a little linguablogger meetup, and even though I don’t fall into that category, housing JonW has certain benefits and I was allowed to attend. I was quite star-struck, getting to hang out with Mark Liberman (of Language Log), Anggarrgooon, Heideas, and their ilk. Aside from being generally hip froods, they helped confirm that I’m going into the right field (which is good, considering how much money I just spent on grad school apps).

I really enjoyed Mark Liberman’s talk entitled The Future of Linguistics, complete with a quote from Linus Torvalds (”World domination… Fast…”). At the end of the talk, an ad hoc group of advocates of opportunities for undergrad linguists sprung up in response to a comment, putting me in contact with Nassira to hopefully help out in that regard. Also, Alison, pretty much the only other undergrad there, made a provocative comment, leading Mark Aranoff and Geoff Pullum to go and talk to her - except she didn’t realize who they were! The look on her face when I told her later was pretty priceless.

I also had brief conversations with William Lewis (UW) and Jason Riggle (UChicago) about computational linguistics and UChicago, respectively.

Funny moments and some further thoughts behind the cut…

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Mental type-casting

I have this problem where when I see an actor in something, the next thing I see them in, I sometimes carry over that last role into the new thing I’m watching. (How was that for mangling English?)

For example, the first movie I ever saw with Edward Norton was Death to Smoochy. Anything else I see him in, I can’t divorce the big pink rhino from, say, the gangster, Norton is supposed to be portraying.

I just saw an advertisement for a movie called Code Name: The Cleaners, starring Cedric the Entertainer - clearly a comedy. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw something - Leoben. That’s right, Callum Keith Rennie, the actor who plays the Cylon Leobin on BSG, will be in a comedy. Something about having seen chopsticks jammed through his throat makes me think that I won’t be able to get comfortable with him in that new role.

Good thing I have a policy against movies with Cedric the Entertainer anyway.