I scienced all last weekend. Except for a few hours when my fiancée and I watched The Hobbit on DVD, I scienced almost nonstop, and I actually have something to show for it.
Count me among the nonbelievers. Now an atheist, I was raised a kind of vaguely-observant Hindu in a place where Christianity was shoved down your throat nearly 24/7. Needless to say, my sympathy for Christian thought these days is anemic at best.
So I’ve paradoxically been watching the History Channel’s new docudrama, The Bible.
Unlike God, the Higgs Boson is probably real.
I’m writing an annotation specification. If that sounds really tedious and science-y, it probably is, but I think that when most people think “linguistics,” the first free-association word isn’t “science.”
But depending on how you look at it, linguistics is either the softest hard science or the hardest soft science. I prefer the former, because I like my science like I like my eggs—hard enough for Occam’s razor but squishy enough for Hume’s fork.
UC Berkley is welding two of my linguistic loves: large amounts of data and dead languages. I have to try and bring this kind of thing to Brandeis. We love large amounts of properly formatted data.
I’ve always had a thing for dead languages and historical linguistics. I don’t know what it is, but the notions of sound change and language families has fascinated me for most of my life. I don’t know if it started when I saw a map of the major language families of Europe in a book, or when my dad dropped the bombshell that English and German actually had something in common, or when I read the last appendix to The Return of the King and realized you could actually simulate this stuff wholesale, but as a result, language construction and language reconstructions are areas I wish I could do some real research in. Maybe someday.
For the first time in almost 600 years*, the Pope is stepping down. Apparently, he thinks he’s getting old. I knew all that Force lightning would take its toll.
Pictured: Benedict XVI during his “black” phase
I’ve been lucky this semester. Although I’m enrolled in three courses, all the work in those courses rolls into my thesis somehow. In essence, I’ve managed to talk my way into having just one very large assignment due at the end of April. The upside is that I get to expend my energy into something I care about and get a jump start on my Ph.D. research. The downside is that it’s a lot of work that I have to, you know… do.
When I say I’m studying “computational linguistics,” most people say “what’s that?” I say don’t worry about it: it’s only the stuff that makes Google and Siri work, and much more besides. I work in the “much more besides” area—specifically semantics. I’ll maybe get into more details later, but suffice it to day that I research why things mean what they mean, and it does’t get much more esoteric than that.
I’m approaching the phase that every computational linguistic project enters at some point: that of throwing gobs of data at the problem until it gets better. I get to wade through reams and reams of text looking for verbs, pulling out patterns, and trying to figure out how to mark it all up so I can feed it all to a computer program at some later date. If that isn’t fun, I don’t know what is. Before I get there, however, I get to nail down the theoretical background of the work. Given that much of this amounts to “what makes a word that word?” this is a bit like trying to wrestle a balloon animal underwater.
PhDComics has a good one about how this feels, though my advisor is a lot nicer about it.
There’s a problem with English. Okay, there are lots of problems with English, from a spelling system that hasn’t been made sense since the 15th century to an undue love of Latin grammatical standards in a language that wasn’t made for them, but this case I mean the pronouns.
If someone tells me they’re going to introduce me to a friend, Tom, I can say with reasonable certainty that I’m looking forward to meeting him (or not). If I’m going to be introduced to Mary, I can look forward to meeting her. But maybe I’m about to be introduced to Alex, or Taylor, or Jamie, and I’m really looking forward to meeting… hopefully you see the problem here.
According to what you learned in 8th grade grammar, English doesn’t really have neat and tidy way of referring to a person of unknown gender or who falls outside the conventional gender binary. Of course, life being what it is, we as English speakers are constantly forced into situations where we have to do just this. For example, in the U.S. Constitution, the qualifications of members of the House of Representatives are set as follows: Continue reading
A hapax legomenon (Greek: “what is said once”) is a word that appears only a single time in a given context, be it a single document, the complete works of an author, or the written record of an entire language. You usually don’t go looking for hapax legomena. You usually find one by accident and don’t realize what it was until it’s gone and you can’t find it again–much like whatever force it is that moves me to write things on the internet.
I’ve had this blog thing installed on my website for about two years now and have barely done anything with it. I think I wrote a grand total of four posts, got swamped with spam, and effectively gave up. But that’s all gone now. It’s become clear that I can’t persist in writing anything if I don’t have a goal. Previously, I had none. There was no narrative, no structure to fill. Hopefully that’s changed now, so it felt better to start over. I’ve just learned that I’ve been accepted into the doctoral program at my university, studying computational linguistics, and I’ve officially begun work on my Master’s thesis in the same, which is, in theory, the beginning of my doctoral research: in other words, the next five years or more of my life. What I tell myself is that I’ll use this space to post periodic updates on whatever work I’m doing, because if there’s one thing I need to do more of, it’s write things that no one else will read. What will probably happen is a little bit of that along with random raving about current events, music, science, language, and whatever happens to flit through my cobweb-infested brain.
So perhaps these things, things that I’m frantically committing to bytes before they fly away forever and I realize they weren’t as witty and insightful and brilliant as they seemed when they first materialized at the crusty edges of my consciousness, aren’t things said just once, but things thought just once, that I’m trying to get to stick around. Hapax skepsikon, maybe? I don’t know. I don’t speak Greek. Stay tuned.
