September 2009
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Overheard at the checkout
~6-year-old girl: Grandma, look that at boy!
Grandma: Yes, darling, he's very tall.
Girl: His legs are like trees!
Grandma: Shh, I think he can hear you.
Girl: *hushed voice* A real giant.
Grandma: Shhh! Help me with the basket.
Girl: Do you think he knows what heaven looks like?
I Fucking Hate Packing/Moving
Good news is that the Love Folder—all the dorky things I don’t want to throw away like birthday cards, ticket stubs, photos, corks, thank you notes, boxes of matches from weddings, etc.—has been upgraded to a more capacious pocket folder.
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Class Schedule
Follow-up to my state of affairs post: Registered for classes one hour ago. Anxiety over having slim pickings subsided as I got to play the optimization game of course scheduling.
Constraints to satisfy:
3-mile bike/bus commute: avoid unnecessary early-morning awakenings and trips to campus.
Fridays need to be open for trips to endocrinologist and in-network phlebotomists. Bonus: extended...
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August 2009
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WatchHIMYM: Barney’s Top Ten Names for the Ted’s Truck (Extended Version)
The Letterman impersonation is amusing, but it’s weird seeing the show without a laughtrack. The real bonus here is that after finishing the original list, NPH pulls out a surprise second list of much dirtier names, much to the amusement of the other cast-members.
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-8-30) →
Vampire Weekend (18)
Dirty Projectors (8)
Crystal Castles (8)
Radiohead (7)
Talking Heads (4)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
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Knowledge Bomb
Latin dissimilates liquids (r’s and l’s), and by virtue of our partitioned lexicon of classical and Germanic roots and affixes, we English speakers also dissimilate liquids and we’ve gone our whole lives without knowing it.
Exhibit A: The normal -al affix
radial, regional, hysterical, labial, digital, lateral, tribal
Exhibit B: The -ar words
polar (pole), solar, angular,...
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“Please do not remove memory card (8MB) (for (Playstation®2)”
– Remember how every single game said this?
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“Fate” is just what you call it when you don’t know the name of the...”
– Lois, Malcolm in the Middle
innate behaviors of human beings →
superdoofus-stratodrive:
biteofpythias:
i can’t keep putting down my drink to reply to this thread. i’ve lost interest in having two one-sided conversations with ourselves…
i blame nurture and chomsky’s work as it pertains to language and referents for this.
To be fair to Chomsky and your points, universal grammar says that humans have the innate ability to learn human language. But this...
which is to say
It’s not like the phonological argument against behaviorism is hard to make; only a small amount of introspection is necessary. But the revelatory part is that the point was finally made explicit: The very basis of our scientific methodology is an argument against behaviorism. Analogy: Shopping for Christmas presents is the best and only method to get presents for other people, and once you...
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yes! a phonological argument against behaviorism!
As part of my project of condensing and archiving my phonology notes into one super awesome moleskine, I reviewed the arguments for the dual-level hypothesis in Kenstowicz 1994, and I found a token mention of the disutility of extreme behaviorist empiricism in phonology. YES! I exclaimed. Most of generative linguistics’ anti-behaviorist (hence psychologically meaningful) arguments come from...
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re idiom syntax
tristn:
We spent a good half hour of class-time brainstorming and testing predicates and raising constructions for cat-out-of-the-bag sentences: the cat is begging/itching to be out of the bag, it is possible/probable…, etc.
yoshang:
Oh man we did that too. Although I think we started using “kicked the bucket” after a while.
Did you do “the shit hit the fan”? That’s...
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“So you know that website “tiny u-r-l” dot com? For the longest time,...”
– Mary. Related: I read earlsurl.com as “earl surl”.
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“Sometimes I think that the environment [in graduate school] changes how you view...”
– One of Mary’s grad school friends on the phd qualifiers and, um, life in general.
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Arpent Noir - Wikipedia →
wordsalso:
In various law journals, treatises, etc. in Louisiana, used as a placeholder name for the purpose of discussing rights concerning immovables. [i.e. Cajun for “Blackacre”]
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“1. Study the question carefully.
2. Confidently start work.
3. Appraise the...”
– James F. Fixx’s problem-solving rules in Solve it!, a collection of brain-teasers. (via welikesnow, Bons Mots)
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Dance For Me, Asshole
perpetua:
Yesterday Chris sent me an IM telling me that Fever Ray was about to release a cover of one of his favorite Nick Cave songs. As it turns out, the song is “Stranger Than Kindness,” but my guess was “Bitch Killed In The Moonlight.” This led us to brainstorm other song titles for artists that essentially summarize their lyrical themes. We came up with the following: Madonna “Dance For Me,...
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The Ragbag
It’s a testament to his larger-than-life je ne sais quoi—honestly how would you describe it?—that Raynor Ganan managed to infiltrate the typically community- and group-oriented Tumblr Tuesday recommendations. I know nothing about the person behind the persona, but I’ve long enjoyed his work: an almanac in the obscure and quixotic, a Consumer Reports of marginalia and all...
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State of Affairs
Even though I am all graduated, I have to go back to school for one semester. I originally enrolled at UW-Eau Claire, which is a teacher/nurse/engineer-mill commutable from my parents’ house. But they have a six-credit limit for “special” students, so I’m going back to Madison. I’ve arranged off-campus living with my generous older brother and his generous partner.
...
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“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t...”
– David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) (via astronauts) (via davidfosterwallace)
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Pitchfork: The Social History of the MP3 →
I give you “Music Rules,” a set of printable worksheets for teachers, who most certainly don’t need more externally-sanctioned frameworks telling them how to teach, let alone one that draws on a pedagogy built to create unthinking allegiance to an illogical law. Here’s an actual excerpt— this isn’t a joke— that draws on Cold War fear-mongering and a...
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2009-8-23) →
Dirty Projectors (82)
Talulah Gosh (70)
Passion Pit (52)
DJ /rupture (21)
Brian Wilson (18)
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
first mp3 you downloaded/bought?
In light of this article: I can remember the first CD I bought—the one with “Bittersweet Symphony”—but have only a vague idea of what my first mp3 was. I want to say Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin” or some other rap song from that summer. The first mp3s I bought were Interpol’s Antics.
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Patton Oswalt - Bubble of Sanity
marykgo:
This...
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#25: Laurie Anderson, "O Superman (For Massenet)" →
Probably my favorite thing I’ve written for the track-down. Nothing flashy—just pleased with the exercise. I started writing and finished with an even greater appreciation for the song, as opposed to a temporary grudge against the artist/song which happens sometimes when I get frustrated writing about music. Also, it’s nice to see this get 200+ plays.
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GRE Flashcards →
I have to take the GRE in a couple months, so to help me study, I made a simple flashcard-tumblr for GRE vocabulary. All I have to do at this point is pump in more entries. Maybe I’ll enable submissions too.