Ethan Weston & Carter Woodiel, "Paper Fully Written By iOS Autocomplete Accepted By Physics Conference", Newsy 10/23/2016: A nonsensical academic paper on nuclear physics written only by iOS autocomplete has been accepted for a scientific conference. Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at the Human Interface Technology laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New […]
From Donald Trump's 9/6/2016 Town Hall in Virginia Beach VA: Your browser does not support the audio element. Michael Flynn: and- and to stay- to stay on ISIS a little bit because this is a really- I think this is an important topic and it's certainly at the- it's- it's one of the national security […]
No matter where I go these days, I hear young people shouting to their friends, "I'm playing Pokémon Go", which they pronounce "pokey-mon go". It would be an understatement to say that, for the past few weeks, Pokémon Go has been a veritable craze. Yet most people who play the game probably do not realize […]
Looks like this year's winners are again co-champions and of Indian (South Asian) origin. Guessing from their names, one of them has a Karnataka heritage and the other an Andhra background. Quoting from "National spelling bee ends in a tie for third consecutive year" (USA Today, 5/27/16): For the third year in a row, the […]
From December 13-17, 2015, I participated in an international workshop at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) on the Edmond J. Safra campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The title of the workshop was "A Lasting Vision: Dandin’s Mirror in the World of Asian Letters". Here's the workshop website. The workshop was about Sanskrit […]
Ruth Blatt, "The Lean And Mean Led Zeppelin Organization", Forbes 9/6/2014: The Zeppelin organization was small by today’s standards, with a crew of only about 15 people traveling with the band. The band itself would arrive 30 minutes before a show. “They would turn up and they would go in the dressing room. There was no […]
Nick Wingfield, "Microsoft Pins Xbox One Hopes on Titanfall, a Sci-Fi Shooting Game", NYT 3/9/2014: “It’s hard to understate how incredibly important Titanfall is for Xbox,” Yusuf Mehdi, chief marketing and strategy officer for devices and studios at Microsoft, said in an interview. If it's not clear to you why this is semantically and psycholinguistically […]
I've occasionally complained that when it comes to comparing sampled distributions, modern western intellectuals are mostly just as clueless as the members of the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon are said to be with respect to counting (see e.g. "The Pirahã and us", 10/6/2007). And it doesn't take high-falutin concepts like "variance" or "effect size" to engage […]
In a 2010 NYT “On Language” column, Grant Barrett traced the claim that “cellar door” is the most beautiful phrase in English back as far as 1905 1903. I posted on the phrase a few years ago ("The Romantic Side of Familiar Words"), suggesting that there was a reason why linguistic folklore fixed on that […]
MedPage Today is an excellent source for medical news — but recently their email service has started juxtaposing headline-fragments in a way that takes me aback:
Lane asked "It would be great if someone had time to find some truly Obama signature phrases, doing the math properly. I'd be curious to know what words he actually does use unusually often." I have two classes to prepare for today, and a student study break to get ready for (bread and cheese, fruits […]
I'm in Minneapolis for the LSA 2014 annual meeting, about which more later. For this morning, all I have time for is a note about the curious cover of the Mpls St Paul magazine that the hotel put out for me: