Shipping up to Boston, part I

Today is the day that I realized that I don’t like traveling.  I like having traveled, but (in grammatical terms) a perfect is not a progressive—which is to say that in order to have done something you unfortunately have to do it.

I woke up today around 5:30 to get ready for a 7:20 flight. The plan: fly from Columbus, OH to Washington, DC, and from there to Boston. Not fifteen minutes later, I receive three messages from the airline saying that the Columbus to DC leg of the flight has been delayed for almost three hours.

Three hours?

This means my planned flight from DC to Boston will have left half an hour before I land. Clearly, this is a problem. I look out the window. It’s clear. It’s still. Neither a drop of rain nor a breath of wind.

Whatever.  Let’s go to the airport.

Apparently, that plane’s grounded for maintenance.  I bring this up at the counter, everyone’s really apologetic blah blah blah, US Air switches me over to Continental and I’m off instead to Newark in a small three-seat per row plan.

Flying into Newark is actually pretty cool, because you get a great view of New York on the descent.  Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Statue of Liberty—all plainly visible from the left side of the airplane.  I guess the folks on the right got to see New Jersey, which is… you know… fun.

I almost missed the flight to Boston.  I had a 40 minute layover and by the time I get from Terminal A to Terminal C, the flight’s already boarded, while I’m sitting there going “Hurr durr, this gate sure is deserted,” until the final boarding call sounds.

Hurr durr

Close call.

From Newark it’s a 42 minute flight to Boston, but it seems like we spent more time taxiing than flying.  I kid you not, at one point a piece of trash blowing in the wind was beating us down the runway.

But we finally got to Boston!  On the way down, it occurs to me that this is where I’ll be living for the next two years.  Big cities always strike some chord in me, especially after having been away from them for a while.  I chalk this up to 4 years in Chicago.

After landing, I receive another message.  The flight I was originally set to be on got delayed yet another two-and-a-half hours before finally getting canceled.  Thank goodness for wussing out—I could have persevered with the waiting and still been in Ohio.

Logan Airport has free Wi-Fi.  I like it here already.

A few observations from my travels around the city:

• While I normally find other people’s children (aged 4-8 or so) to be incredibly annoying, apparently they’re much more tolerable when they’re not speaking English.  There was a little French girl chattering away on the bus out of the airport who was apparently (according to the woman seated next to me) recounting the story of 9/11 to her mother. Adorable.

• People in Boston are either really nice or assholes (Massholes?).  There appears to be no in-between setting.  I was fortunately not the target of any Masshole rage, but did witness some being perpetrated against others, while everyone I asked for directions was really solicitous about it (and also gave good directions).  A random guy on the Red Line showed me some place I could go sailing for cheap and, when I mentioned I’d be studying Comp. Ling., suggested I go talk to Noam Chomsky at MIT and interview him for a master’s thesis.

• MBTA buses and CTA (Chicago) buses are almost identical.  Almost forgot I wasn’t in Chicago a few times.

• Commuter rail only runs every hour and a half.  Gonna need a bike.

So all in all, nothing too terrible.  But still, until we prefect jump or transporter technology, traveling’s a bit like doing the dishes—I like being in the state that results from having done the dishes.  Unfortunately, that means I still have to do them.

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Your beliefs aren’t worth someone else’s life

Ever.

Today, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner apparently shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona. Besides being absolutely unacceptable on multiple levels, this raises a number of issues.

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Album Review: Soilwork – The Panic Broadcast


Genre: Melodic death metal
Label: Nuclear Blast

I’m going to assume that anyone reading this knows who Soilwork is and has some familiarity with their back catalog. Moving on. This is the latest album I acquired (as of this writing), after months of eager waiting. The Panic Broadcast sees the return of founding member and guitarist Peter Wichers, who left the band in late 2005 only to rejoin again in 2008 to much rejoicing. The sole intervening Wichersless release, 2007′s Sworn To A Great Divide was a good record (probably better than many things released in 2007), but it wasn’t a great Soilwork record. Something was missing. The Panic Broadcast confirms my suspicions: that thing was Peter Wichers. Not to devalue the other members of the band (more on that later), but to me, the core of Soilwork really is Wichers and singer Björn Strid.

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Computers won’t be writing books anytime soon

First post.

Bored today.  Stumbled across this: http://iwl.me/  Put in samples of your writing and it’ll tell you what famous writer your style is most like.

My grad school statement of purpose reads most like H.P. Lovecraft.

Er, what?  The analyzed piece was 500 words about why I want to study computational linguistics at Georgetown (or UW or Brandeis or whichever one I copied and pasted from).  No use of the word “eldritch,” no paragraph about the god in the deep.  I may have used the word “cohort” once, but I doubt that’s enough to render a college application essay Lovecraftian.

While that tool is fun to play with, I can safely say it’s nothing to take seriously.  That being said, I think a more feature-rich version of the same idea could be a useful tool for writing analysis.  I know it doesn’t just generate a random writer as output, because I tried a few different samples repeatedly just to make sure they got the same result each time.  They did, so there is some kind of metric there, but you cannot see what it is, which, to my mind, defeats the purpose.

But what if you could?  A simple utility that matched you not only with a famous writer, but also showed you what it found with regard to your word choice (i.e. diversity of vocabulary, preference for loan words over native English words, etc.), the way you strung the words together (i.e. variance of sentence structure, simile and metaphor usage, prevalence of clichéd expressions, etc.), perhaps rhythmic and tonal considerations, and other mechanical aspects of writing that go beyond spelling and grammar, would give you a pile of data that goes a long way toward differentiating the stylistic contrasts between writers, at least on a gross level.  It’s not enough to tell me that I write like Lovecraft, or Tolkien, or Orwell, or whoever.  I want to know why.  How did the program arrive at that conclusion?  The “famous writer” thing is really more of a goody that may mask the actual meaning to be drawn from such analysis.

Computational linguistics, my field, is at present fairly ill-defined.  However, as language is one of the defining features of humanity and the computer is one of humanity’s most significant technological achievements, by the combining the two, you inevitably set yourself on a road toward finding out how closely one can truly emulate the other.  Is writing a strictly mechanical art, or is the person and process behind the words an indelible part of the final product?  I happen to believe the latter, but I am curious as to how close the two may end up being in the future.  With words alone, not knowing anything at all about the process that produced them, what is truly conveyed?  In short, show me the innards of a machine like this, and ask yourself how far a computer can go in recognizing the human “spark” of writing.

(This blog post, too, apparently reads like H.P. Lovecraft).

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