Pi Day

By susan | Published: March 17, 2009

My method of celebrating Pi Day (March 14) did not involve pizza (“pizza pie” as it is sometimes known in this area), but if it had I could have deployed the Second Pizza Theorem to calculate how much I was eating.

A friend points out that since I’ll be living in Europe this summer, I will also be able to officially celebrate Pi Approximation Day with the correct date format.

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Install Pragmatics Module

By susan | Published: March 3, 2009

I think I just realized another reason why I don’t like Facebook — it doesn’t work so well with my pragmatics module. I can’t tell what my speech acts actually mean there, and I don’t know how failure to “friend” everyone I know, or lack of response to “notes” or “wall” or whatever that shit is comes across. I suppose there must be some academic papers I could read on the topic, although I imagine they would have Derrida or someone equally obscurantist in the bibliography. There’s just too much structure there, too many holders for content with not enough content. Maybe I’m worried about this more these days since I’m going to be moving to another country and I’m counting on the internet to keep me in touch with friends. Also I might just be too old.

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The man with the golden pen and lighter and cigarette case

By susan | Published: January 31, 2009

Some interesting facts I learned this evening from the program (yes, program!) I got at the Loew’s Jersey theater where I saw The Man with the Golden Gun:

Roger Moore was the oldest starting Bond; his did his first film in the franchise, Live and Let Die, when he was 45 (he’s actually older than Sean Connery).

Moore suffers from hoplophobia, which is the fear of weapons.  It would perhaps be overkill to point out that this doesn’t seem like a good feature in someone who plays James Bond regularly.

Moore is the longest serving Bond actor to date; his Fleming franchise films span twelve years.

Artist's Impression of Gun Assembly

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Am I considered a person of good character?

By susan | Published: December 1, 2008

These are some of the questions I had to consider when applying for a UK visa:

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Discourse Anaphora

By susan | Published: November 19, 2008

My dashboard tells me that up to now, I’ve written 99 posts (in this incarnation of SS), and the pressure of a round number bore down mightily, intimating that I had to come up with something good at this milestone.  That, and other other down-bearing elements of my life, like papers, teaching, grading, etc.  But recently, after finishing up a paper (on time!) I realized that I had to just jump back in with both feet if I’m ever going to use this site again.  So here goes, with a comment on metafilter as a starting point, and because I’ve been thinking a lot about discourse anaphora recently:

His father, Nick Begich, won an election posthumously, only they didn’t know for sure that it was posthumous because his plane just disappeared. It still hasn’t turned up. It’s why locators are now required in all US planes.

Notice that there are three instances of “it” in the above.  The first one, I think it’s clear, refers to the election winning event.  But notice the second and third instances of “it” — the second refers to the lost airplane, which is to say it is the “it” that picks out a singular object in the world.  But the third “it” refers to the event of the airplane being lost.  I think this is fascinating because not only does it refer to a larger entity than what the previous “it” picks out, but it also refers to a proposition that isn’t the closest one, as it bypasses “it still hasn’t turned up,” which is closer, and instead is linked with the event of the airplane disappearing.  If you’re confused, I made a little chart:

Resolving this kind of anaphora is something that humans do flawlessly, without thinking, all the time, but I bet it would be rather difficult to automate using a non-human.

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New Host

By susan | Published: September 28, 2008

I’ve moved to a new host, after over ten years of increasingly sucky customer service at the old host.  My new hosting company is great, and I’m just getting set up over here.  Hopefully I’ll get around to migrating all my old content soon.

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On a road trip

By susan | Published: May 18, 2008

On a road trip

Originally uploaded by thatgirl

I’m currently in Wyoming, and although gas prices are hitting record highs, we’re really glad we drove instead of flying. This country is so wide and full of sky and space.

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NJ-Penn.-Ohio-Ind.-Ill.-Iowa-NB-WY-Mont.-etc.

By susan | Published: May 7, 2008

So we’re leaving on a crazy road trip this weekend, which involves the states above, plus some others on the way back.  The initial goal is the 36th annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy (hah hah, yes, Grice, is there any “inexact philosophy”, implicature, etc.) and then who knows.  Yellowstone, visiting our friend Melissa (formerly of Merce Cunningham and lately of Headwaters Dance Company) in Montana.  Then maybe a Cary Grant-esque jaunt through Mt. Rushmore, and across the UP (where perhaps we’ll see our “wife at the K-Mart“), down to the family, and then back home.

Apparently there are no escalators in Wyoming.  We shall investigate.  Stay tuned, or whatever.

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what syntactic rule did I violate Walt’s preference and?

By susan | Published: February 16, 2008

I’m at the point in the semester where I’m knee deep in teaching syntax, which is good as it’s something I don’t often think about but feel that I should know better than I do. It does, however, have the additional effect of making me notice how my idiolect contains all sorts of examples of constructions that many people judge ungrammatical (most grievously, according to Walt, the dreaded resumptive pronoun).

So yesterday, I was with my sister at NYU’s lovely Bobst Library (now less scary with plexiglass barriers — photo of the amazing internal atrium here). Walt called, and wanted to meet up with us later at Old Town, but didn’t recall exactly where it was. So in the course of explaining to him how to get there, I said:

You know that street that the Union Square Petco is on the corner of Broadway and?

So apparently I can extract out of a coordinate construction.  Now all I have to is come up with a naturally occurring subjacency violation (cause that’s the one that loads of papers about have been written) and I can just declare my own dialect.

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super-meta

By susan | Published: January 28, 2008

Saw this when installing from some old Adobe media today:

meta.png

But who will police the police? Or, “Police police police police police police police.”  See also: buffalo.

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