June 2008
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May 2008
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Top 5 Things I Learned From Videogames →
I attribute a lot of my gradeschool interests and success to things I learned from gaming. For instance, a game with a high school system will teach a first-grader about how numbers add up, or at least, this is what I tell myself.
Anyway, this article is a spot-on study of the intellectual skills at work in many games.
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The Six Most Badass Stunts Ever Pulled in the Name... →
Number five: Drs. Warren and Barry Marshall Drink Stomach-Eating Germs
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Ten Popular Food Myths Debunked →
As a skeptic and as a person who eats, I enjoyed this list.
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Stuff White People Like: Being Offended →
“To be offended is usually a rather unpleasant experience, one that can expose a person to intolerance, cultural misunderstandings, and even evoke the scars of the past. This is such an unpleasant experience that many people develop a thick skin and try to only be offended in the most egregious and awful situations. In many circumstances, they can allow smaller offenses to slip by as...
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List of Scrabble Words That Have a 'Q' and no 'U'
I found this handy list on the Scrabble website. To keep things compact, I denote simple plural forms with (S):
FAQIR(S) – Variation of fakir, a Hindu ascetic
QAID(S) – A variation of caid, a Muslim leader
QANAT(S) – A system of underground tunnels and wells in the Middle East
QAT(S) – Variation of kat, an evergreen shrub
QINDAR(S) – Variation of qintar, a monetary unit of Albania...
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“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he...”
– Some smart guy (via malfunction)
The so-called Problem of Evil
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National Spelling Bee Brings Out Protesters Who R... →
sarahchristine:
boutofcontext:
Rebecca Dana sums up the latest in an epochs-long, inconsistently waged war for phonetic spellings, warmed over anew by the National Spelling Bee press coverage:
A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel.
While this scheme has flaws, such as extant dialectal...
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friendssharingmusic:
Brian Eno - King’s Lead...
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M83 - We Own The Sky
The essential paradox (pun)...
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“Look. All that matters in a relationship is that you like the same pizza...”
– Daria Morgendorffer (Daria)
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“You guys never fail to disappoint me.”
– A forum poster comments on the recent success of the particular show and provides a classic example of overnegation. Studying and interpreting multiple negation is, to me, the most mind-bending area in semantics. (If you’re feeling confused, as I often am with overnegation, this sentence says...
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Wikipedia: List of Unusual Articles →
Hands down, the best page on Wikipedia.
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Nobody Likes Onions →
In honor of their current donation drive, I’d like to post my favorite comedy podcast. I appreciate its edgy, decidedly un-PC comedy. Though it’s superficially crass at times, I personally find it intellectually rewarding (the hosts are skeptical pragmatists). Plus, I can’t stop myself from using Net Sassy in everyday conversation now.
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“Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.”
– Conway’s Law. (via cubicle17)
Great quote. I wonder how this applies to game design.
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
My whole impression of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull can be reduced to the following analogy: Indiana Jones 4 is to Indiana Jones 1-3 as Star Wars Episodes 1-3 are to Star Wars Episodes 4-6. So what do I mean with the previous analogy? Just as with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, our expectations for the film are driven primarily by our nostalgia for the previous films. The...
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“How about everyone keeps their opinions to themselves and shuts up?”
– This is a really neat sentence syntactically. By the time I get to “shuts up”, I forget that the subject “everyone” is singular (under the influence of “their” and “themselves”) and I get a momentary loss of grammaticality. Plus, I want to convert...
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If You're Like Me, Then You Love '80s Music And... →
“I don’t know about you, but I’ll never forget the music of my youth. Ah, yes, the 1980s: those good times you never wanted to end—and now they don’t have to! Because Time Life has put together an incredible collection with all your favorite hits from the ’80s, that totally tubular decade when we went a little punk, rode the New Wave, and saw the beginnings of a...
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Why are some summatives labeled "vague"? →
The straight dope on discourse-oriented uses of that/which as in “You talk too much, which bothers me.” I never realized that people discouraged these; indeed, I’m a big fan of using summative which to start sentences as in (arbitrary example) “There are too many self-proclaimed language experts out there. Which is a problem…”.
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For Kate, Tristan's Animal Collective List
Off the top of my head
Did You See The Words?
Purple Bottle
Leaf House
Who Could Win A Rabbit?
Fireworks / #1 (pretend this is one song)
Winter’s Love
I Remember Learning How To Dive
Baby Day
We Tigers
Covered In Frogs
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What A Linguist Does
tristanjay7:
Calls up friends during the middle of the day to ask what the plural to “runner-up” is.
vietkate:
It’s runners-up.
Runner-up for favorite hyphenated plural: sons-of-bitches.
Holy shit! What a good example!
This is going in my next email to our morphologist.
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What A Linguist Does
Calls up friends during the middle of the day to ask what the plural to “runner-up” is.
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Note to self: Track down the live version of the Talking Heads song with the lyric “I wish you wouldn’t say that”.
I just heard the track at the 7-11, and it fucking rocked. I’m ashamed that I don’t know the track offhand, as the Talking Heads are probably my favorite band.
Edit: Turns out, the track is “I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That” and it’s...
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Developing Graves Disease really screwed me up this year, and as a result, I couldn’t graduate this year. Thus, yesterday at Mary’s graduation ceremony, it was sad seeing most my friends graduate, and it was annoying knowing that I wouldn’t be able to hang out with them next year. It wasn’t all bad, as it was a relief knowing that I wouldn’t be seeing many of my...
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Defining Plagiarism in Video Games →
Interesting article on shared game mechanics vis-a-vis plagiarism.
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“The horse raced past the barn fell.”
– The classic garden-path sentence
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I’m done with school for the semester. First order of business: Freaks and Geek: The Complete Series.
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The 9 Most Obnoxious Memes to Ever Escape the Web →
I can’t agree with the ranking rickrolling gets because as an Internet gag, any effective translation of it into the real world is going to take some cleverness. Personal example: On my campus’s big hill, it is not uncommon to see a couple hundred or a few thousand of those little flags being used to protest something like the War or the deathtoll of something. You just get used to...
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Favorite Things I Had To Read For School
Post your list.
Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest
Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Milton - Paradise Lost
Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
Joyce - “Araby” and “The Dead”
Shelley - Frankenstein
Pope - The Rape of the Lock
Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Crane - “The Monster”
Shakespeare - King Lear
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My Linguist Stance of Official Language...
Excerpt from my triple book review:
So pervasive is English worldwide, Crystal argues, that the only place where an English backlash could have significant effects on global English is the United States, and with 95% of the population speaking English, one would think that the U.S. wouldn’t have to worry about the viability of English. But amazingly, Crystal notes, that there has been...
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Examples of Analogical Language Change
Mechanism Analogy: a word becomes more like another word, a set of words, or a morphological paradigm. Examples backformation: break a word into smaller pieces perceiving a derivation that didn’t actually happen as one that did happen, yielding new roots in the process (1) “editor” -> “edit+or” and “edit” becomes a verb (2) “burglar” ->...
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Berlin and Kay's Color Name Study
In 1969, Berlin and Kay demonstrated a hierarchy in color names across languages. Here were the findings. The chart is read implicationally, so the first line says “If your language has only two colors, then they are a term for ‘dark’ and a term for ‘light’.” Thus, all language with six colors are going to have words for the six listed below.
2 Terms >...
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All You Had To Say Was 'Owen Wilson Befriends A... →
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“A middle position would assert 50% loss in the next 100 years. This is the view...”
– David Crystal, Language Death.
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“A language is a dialect with an army and navy”
– Linguistics Aphorism
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Reading List For Night
David Crystal - English as a Global Language
David Crystal - Language Death
David Crystal - Language and the Internet
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“White people love rules. It explains why so they get upset when people cut in...”
– Stuff White People Like: Grammar
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“I am a fan of Nintendo by the way, just not in a blinkered way.”
– I had never seen the word blinkered before. Merriam-Webster defines it as “limited in scope or understanding : narrow-minded,” basically a metaphorical extension of what horses would wear on their sides. Unfortunately, when I read the word, I think of car blinkers, and I lose the...
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“A Touchstone for the formal and tonal properties we are concerned with [in...”
– Some random website I found while poking around the Internet to find sample essay prompts for my Shakespeare exam.
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Shakespeare Night
Tonight’s Agenda:
Get to know the following plays inside and out
Henry VIII
Cymbeline
The Winter’s Tale
The Tempest
Understand the thematic relations of the previous plays
Tragedy
Tragedy of Character
Tragicomedy
Tragedy of Fate
The Nature of Evil: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear
The Question of Divine Providence
The Fortunate Fall: Henry VII,...
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“The crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery is coming over in a few weeks and it...”
– Helen Donnelly, Astronaut Mom, This International Space Station Is A Pig Sty