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.
Read MoreMy 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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This etsy color-driven interface is quite fun. Usually I think that more complicated interfaces (especially flash-driven ones) are more hindrance than help, but in this case it doesn’t seem like overkill. The two problems with it, however, are that it’s unclear when you might need something of a specific color but not care what that object might be (earrings! a notebook! a tea cozy!) and the search algorithm doesn’t seem to be able to pick out the main object in the photo, so if you choose green, you get green objects as well as objects photographed on a green background. But in general it’s a good way to explore what’s on offer at etsy.com.
Read MoreCynematic tagged me with the seven random/weird things idea. I only know one person who is “up-to-speed” enough on the technology for me to even consider tagging her, however she tagged me in the past and I lamed out (although to my credit, I was in Sri Lanka at the time), so I’m going to skip nos. 3 and 4, and hope that completing 50% of the assignment will get me partial credit.
- Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
- Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
- Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
- Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
So here goes:
- Up until August 2006 I had not “modified” my body in any way (at least permanently — in high school I was a big fan of Crazy Colours, like all the punk rock kids…). No tatoos, no plastic surgery, no piercings, not even pierced ears. Then I broke my leg while hiking the AT and had to have surgery, and now I have titanium wrapped around part of my right fibula.
- When I was younger I really liked the fife and drum corps all dressed up in their revolutionary times getups at Colonial Williamsburg. OK, by “younger” I actually mean last year.
- I can recite the list of all 50 U.S. states in alphabetical order, thanks to the “Fifty Nifty” song (see video below). It comes in handy quite a bit, most recently when trying to figure out a Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz puzzle that had to do with some state.
- I think the Pulaski Skyway is beautiful.
- Three of my great grandparents were alive when I was born, and two lived long enough that I remember them quite well. One taught me how to play chess.
- I prefer freezer-on-bottom to freezer-on-top, even though I realize it’s less efficient from an energy standpoint. It’s more efficient from a user standpoint. I’ve never bought a refrigerator, however, so the only place I’ve used a freezer-on-bottom is my parents’ house.
- I do not own a suit.
I used to complain a lot about how backwards it is that the Graduate Center couldn’t get their IT s**t together enough to provide wireless internet access on campus, a campus that consists of ONE BUILDING. It turns out that by beginning to provide it starting this year, the GC actually beat Queens College, Cambridge, which has promised that “[w]ireless access will become available during the 2007/2008 academic year.”
Many of the libraries at Cambridge, including those at Queens, use the Bliss classification system which was developed by Henry E. Bliss, a librarian at what is now City College, CUNY. It seems Bliss felt that the LOC system was useful only at the LOC, and he detested Dewey. Although he was American, his system lives on more commonly in British than American libraries.
Read MoreI’ve been running a lot this semester and I have to admit that a lot of my motivation comes from the ipod nike+ device I’m using:
Anyway, it uploads the results of my runs to a website that tracks them, and which also adds my distances to whichever “team challenges” I feel like joining. I’m currently in the white meat vs. dark meat challenge (on the dark meat team, of course), and this evening when I uploaded my run I realized that after an early lead, dark meat was now trailing white meat.
It’s not entirely clear to me why this is at all motivational, and yet I’m oddly compelled to run each day so that I can get an oval bar showing my distance on every day. I guess the good people at Nike/Apple did their research well, and someone like me, who detested gym in public school and would only run if chased (and sometimes not even then), ended up entering a 5K race this semester — and finishing!
Read MoreEvery semester I teach at Rutgers I try to get a “smart classroom” which means a classroom with a built-in beamer so that I can hook up my laptop and lecture with my slides. Rooms have already been assigned for Spring08, and it turns out that both of the courses I’ll be teaching are in rooms described as having “overhead projectors” in them. Great, I thought (non-sarcastically), I don’t have to plead to have the rooms switched! You see I had been thinking of the beamers the way they are set up at the GC, which is to say, suspended from the ceiling (this often makes for fun times when students have to stand on tables to press buttons when professors can’t figure out the remotes, but that’s another story). Sadly, however, this is not what is meant by an overhead projector. An overhead projector is that old-school box with a lamp and a fan and some mirrors and lenses that shines your transparencies (or your scroll of acetate, if you’re that kind of overhead projector user) first up and then out onto a screen. Why “overhead”? Nothing about the whole procedure is overhead — the box, the lenses, the mirrors, the projected image, nothing really ends up over your head, if you’re standing up. And as far as I know this is not a case of a description becoming a name and subsequently failing to describe when the object it denotes changes (see Dart, river, mouth of). So I went to the wikipedia article on overhead projectors, which, although failing to illuminate me on the origin of the name, did point me to both the overhead-projector-based art project The Art of the Overhead (check out their sweet interface!) and this video, which shows you how to make your own beamer out of an overhead projector and an lcd monitor. Make it so!
Read MoreSo I installed Leopard, the new Mac operating system, on a machine that we often use for watching dvds. This is pretty much our only moving picture consumption as we don’t have a television, so I’ve gotten pretty good with the Mac-supplied “DVD Player” software, and I knew lots of keyboard shortcuts. I say knew, because for some reason Apple has decided to change some of them in the new version. It used to be that cmd-0 was the shortcut to enter fullscreen, now it’s cmd-F. I guess I can understand this move, as it makes DVD Player conform with the Quicktime Player. But the really stupid and seemingly pointless change is on the controller. I no longer read the buttons on the controller as I know (knew!) their locations on the interface, and would just click a location. The first time I did this with the new DVD Player, instead of getting the menu screen, I ejected the disk! That’s right, the “menu” and “eject” buttons have traded places on the new controller. Here’s evidence:
The Old Interface
The New Interface
I’ve been playing around with templates for this site, an activity which can be a huge time-suck, so in the interest of finishing what I’m actually supposed to be finishing (i.e. not this website), I’m going to stick with Sandbox theme. It’s meant to be a canvas on which to work up your own theme, but I’m going to leave it as-is for now. Its blue/black/purple/white aesthetic appeals to me — reminds me of the olden days of yore when there wasn’t much else you could do. Also I sort of like that it looks “broken.”
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