Where mindless morphs stare vacantly with no purpose.

got

2006-09-15T14:12:02Z

milk?

Never browse applying_to_grad

2005-12-25T17:21:53Z

Just went over there for the first time in awhile. It's kind of sad. There are all these eager, idealistic people who think they really want to go into academia...and most of them are marginal at best (I really feel sorry for these people when they fail to get into a single program). I wonder how well departments really convey to the average undergrad what grad school is like.

So...people are stupid.

2005-11-20T06:27:22Z

Academics particularly. Certain unnamed 'academics' who get unduly excited by bullshit even more so. Further still, those who pile intellectual refuse onto bright eyed, eager undergraduates who lap it up. Possibly people are just insufficiently cynical. etc.

catullusa @ 2005-10-09T20:03:00

2005-10-10T00:06:45Z

“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained there a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.

You know, my own

2005-10-06T03:41:48Z

Magic Pixie Dust Grammar (MPDG) seems at least as convincing as the MP. Possibly I could start a spoof conference from it like w/ Unnatural Language Processing.

Old but sadly still topical

2005-10-04T01:34:25Z

The Gospel according to Chomsky

In the beginning was Bloomfield. And his theory was without form, and structuralist; and darkness was upon the face of Chomsky.
And Chomsky said: Let there be transformations, and there were transformations. And Chomsky saw the transformations, that they were good; and Chomsky divided the surface from the deep structure. And that was the start of generative grammars.

And Chomsky made three great lights. And the greatest light was explanatory adequacy; and the lesser lights were descriptive adequacy, and observational adequacy. And Chomsky set them into the firmament of the 'Aspects' meta-theory, and he said: Let all other grammars be judged by them.

Chomsky said: Let MIT bring forth grammarians and grammars yielding trees after my kind, and the trees yielding sentences after their kind. And Chomsky blessed them, and said: Be infinitely recursive, and multiply. And Chomsky saw that they were good.

And Chomsky said: Let us make graduate students in our image, and let them have dominion over the psychologist in the laboratory, and the philosophers in the ivory towers, and over every creeping linguist that creepeth over the earth.

And this was the `Aspects' model. And the `Aspects' model was with Chomsky, and, for a short while, the ` Aspects' model was Chomsky.

All grammars were made by him; and without him was not any linguistic theory that was made. In him was the Competence Hypothesis; and the Competence Hypothesis was the light of all grammarians. And the theory shineth upon the Behaviorists, but they comprehended it not.

And the doubters saith unto him, Noam. We know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way. Chomsky saith unto them. I am the way, the truth and the life of linguistics; no-one cometh unto a true grammar, but by the Competence Hypothesis.

For `Aspects' came not in old time by the will of Dualists; but by Chomsky as he was moved by the Holy Ghost of his linguistics degree.

Then Chomsky so loved linguistic theory, that he gave his most recently begotten child, Government and Binding, that whosoever believeth in it shall not suffer a paradigm change, but shall have everlasting validity.

For Chomsky sent not Government and Binding into linguistic theory to condemn transformations, but that transformations through it might be saved.

But there were false prophets among the linguists, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, like Categorial Grammar, even denying the book that begat their theoretical framework, and bringing swift disaster upon their heads and modifiers.

And they will gain many adherents to their dissolute practices, through whom the true way of Chomsky shall be brought into disrepute, especially in Edinburgh. And in their greed for SERC funding they will trade upon your credulity with sheer fabrications.

The judgement long decreed for them has not been idle; perdition waits for them with unsleeping eyes. The day of Chomsky will come again, unexpected as a thief.

On that day, `Heads without bars' shall disappear with a great gushing sound, and f-structures shall disintegrate in flames; and Universal Grammar and all that is in it, shall be laid bare.

Since even the whole of MIT is to break up in this way, think what sort of people you ought to be, what devout and dedicated lives you should live!

Wherefore, beloved, with these things to look forward to, be diligent that ye be at peace with ` Aspects', without blemish and above reproach in its sight. And remember that the patience of Chomsky is our salvation, as is shown in his writings in Linguistic Inquiry where he speaks of these things; though they contain some obscure passages, with which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also his other writings, unto their own destruction.

But you, my friends, are forewarned. Beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own steadfastness.

Big laughs

2005-09-17T00:47:18Z

While reshelving my logic books today (of which I now have far too many), I started skimming through Hodges A Shorter Model Theory. The first exercise of the book asks the reader to consider a structure (this is my paraphrase since I no longer have the book on me) "G with three elements 'pater', 'filius' and 'spiritus sanctus', in a signature consisting of one asymmetric binary relation R, 'relatio originis'. According to Aquinas these elements can be uniquely identified in terms of the relation R restricted to the domain of G. Deduce that is the pairs (pater, filius) and (pater, spiritus sanctus) lies in this relation, then exactly one of the pairs (filius, spiritus sanctus) and (spiritus sanctus, filius) also does."

In a related note, Mark Liberman is lending me his review copy of Simpler Syntax, so I'll soon be able to see if Jackendoff and Culicover really accomplish anything. I think I may really like it as it seems Jackendoff gets down and dirty with descriptive linguistics (something which he is amazing at. Consider the number of dissertations and papers that resulted from his work on focus which he pursued as a tertiary point when he was attacking Gen Semantics in the 70s) rather than wasting his talents with this empty speculating about lexical semantics (yeah, there's something to be said there, but the work he an Pustejovsky have pursued is ultimately unenlightening). Details to follow.

Rant on incompetence

2005-09-04T18:29:30Z

I haven't updated in awhile, but the incredible extent of the complaceny and incompetence displayed over the last week has really gotten to me. I acknowledge that the midst of a major disaster is maybe not the appropriate time or place to focus on blame, but I find the hand-washing and spinning being performed by federal officials to be grotesque. Evidently the official line is that noone could have (or did) anticipated such a disaster, even if we did the scope is too great to expect results, and that the federal response has been just dandy. Bullshit.
FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security can't be faulted for the fact that a Category 5 storm spun up over the Gulf. Much as wackos like the Dyno-Mat people might disagree, large-scale modification of hurricanes is not possible (see the aborted Stormfury project). However, the response has been abysmal. Consider that we have known the potential for whole-scale destruction in the New Orleans area at least since Betsy cam ashore east of NO in 1965. I can recall numerous reports over the last 25 years focusing in the susceptibility of the levee system to even a Category 3 hurricane. The levees are reasonable protection against moderate flooding of Lake Ponchartrain (and severe flooding of the Mississippi, which is blocked out by levees far higher than those around the rest of the bowl). FEMA planned for this scenario in the 90s following Andrew and as recently as last year Homeland Security ran an emergency scenario based on the premise of a Cat 5 passing just west of New Orleans. But if we are to believe Chertoff, the scenario of a hurricane passing east of the city, followed shortly afterwards by a breach of the levees was "unforseen," "unimagined." Evidently, we are to believe that it a coincidence that the levees failed shortly after being exposed to the pounding of a major storm's surge (while Katrina's winds were 'only' mid-level Cat 4 at the time that it passed New Orleans and the city was on the weaker half of the storm, the surge created by hours of 160+ mph winds when Katrina was over the Gulf remained). BS. This is a transparent attempt to distract the public from obvious gross incompetence.
In an interview days after landfall, Chertoff was asked to respond to criticisms that federal aid was slow to arrive in devestated areas. His response, that huge numbers troops and supplies were in the area, tactfully failed to address whether merely huge numbers were adequate for the situation. The relief effort has to be commensurate with the scale of the disaster. What is adequate for a hurricane like Hugo or Charley or Ivan or Opal is woefully inadequate for a Katrina or Andrew or any of the great unnamed storms that strafed the U.S. in the 30s. Why weren't greater numbers ready to go in in the wake of the disaster? Why weren't supplies and personnel prepositioned for faster response. FEMA response plans from the mid-90s called for the prepositioning of naval hospital ships and pump ships in the area BEFORE landfall. Instead we see naval resources being launched no earlier than the Friday after the storm and expected to make it to the area the week after at the earliest. And why in hells bells are responders relying on landlines and cell towers for communications? A frequent excuse given for the disorganization of the effort so far has been unreliable communications caused by the loss of landlines and cell towers. Excuse me? Were they honestly expecting an intact infrastructure.
Some of these issues can be directly linked to policy decisions of the Bush administration. Placing FEMA under the jurisdiction of Homeland Security likely has reduced its effectiveness as well as its autonomy. Both FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are now headed by men who have ZERO previous experience with disasters. I won't go so far as to place the blame entirely on Bush and his cronies as the chronic vulnerability of New Orleans has been ignored by many administrations. Congress historically has been reticent to approve billions and billions of dollars in funding to protect against a nebulous future catastrophe that can't have a time frame placed on it (money needed for wetland restoration along the coast, levee maintenance, infrastructure improvements, changes in building codes). But the general ineptness of how the response has been handled makes me physically ill.

I'm starting to tier of having to justify my

2005-05-23T01:04:44Z

grad school choice. What is it with people and names?

Anyone else see the irony here? Note the authors.

2005-04-18T19:23:46Z

[from A Festschrift for Morris Halle]

Preface

The editors and contributors did not originally intend that this volume should commemorate any particular occasion in Morris Halle's career, but because of various delays it now seems that it will appear close to his fiftieth birthday. This fact should be taken to be accidental; it woudl indeed be presumptuous for us to mark some special terminus now in Morris' life. Rather, the volume marks a stage in our own careers as his students and colleagues. Enough of us have by now spent enough time in collaboration with him to warrant some sort of accounting of his influence on us.
Morris Halle's work has laid the foundation for an impressively wide range of new areas of research in familiar areas. His books and articles on acoustic phonetics, Slavic studies, metrics and especially phonology and morphology are already classics. Less known is his interest in syntactic and semantic problems, but until very recently everyone who studied at M.I.T. had his views in this area shaped originally by Morris' beautifully taught introductory course, and he has often had as many students working on syntax as on phonology. The extent of this influence is reflected in the number of papers on such topics that appear here.
Morris' contributions to the field of linguistics have certainyl not been limited ot his own publications. His primary influence on just about all of us, in fact, has been his contribution to our work. Most of us would probably own upt to having publisedd at least one idea that was basically Morris', and we have all gotten from him more than is easily acknowledged, though arguments, comments on papers, conversations, and so on. The particular value of his classes, also, has been not so much in the factual material they convey (which could, after all, be conveyed in other ways) as in the fact that they genuinely make you think. What Morris says in class and on other semipublic or private occasions is often outrageous, but it sets off something productive in his listeners, and of course in himself. And the ensuing arguments, which may be a long time in maturing, invariably lead somewhere useful. It is impossible not to get excited in Morris' classes, and this more than anything else has created the sometimes particular lifestlye connected with graduate study in linguistics at M.I.T.
A paradox of Morris' teaching has always been the fact that with this ability to produce creative thought in others he couples an unrelenting insistence on disciplined argument, on the difference between devices that work and solutions to problems. [Neville: emphasis is mine] Few, if any, of the excesses that have appeared in the feld from time to time can be blamed on him, and he can be credited with having headed off more than oen of them. An index of Morris' own understandingof the relation between creativity and discipline can be found in the fact that, however incredible some of the things he has said to some us at times, he has selcom been wrong or trivial in print.

Stephen R. Anderson
Paul Kiparsky

Argggh.

2005-04-10T18:35:38Z

After 4 years I've come to regard the vast, vast majority of theoretical linguistics as bullshit.

Hell, even Jackendoff has gotten to the point where he will publicly disagree with Chomsky: http://people.brandeis.edu/~jackendo/Simpler_Syntax_Chapter1.pdf

Decisions

2005-02-11T22:17:35Z

Funny feuds among

2005-02-06T19:12:42Z

Sewel vs Ross
-------------
After a less-than-flattering profile in which Deborah Ross (The Independent) condemned art critic Brian Sewell for his 'pantomine dame' demeanour, he responded in the London Evening Standard by calling Ross a 'cacographer'

Burchill vs Paglia
-------------------
An exchange of agitated faxes enlivened the pages and brought much-needed publicity to Toby Young's fledgling Modern Review; for example, Paglia to Burchill: 'Alas, your letters have done mor damage to you than anything I could do' and Burchill to Paglia: 'Fuck off, you crazy old dyke.'

Pixies

2005-02-06T16:19:48Z

(whistle) Yeah
I love you
I do
I love you
All I'm saying pretty baby
La la love you don't mean maybe
All I'm saying pretty baby
First base
Second base
Third base
Home run
(whistle) Yeah
I love you
I do
I love you
All I'm saying pretty baby
La la love you, don't mean maybe
All I'm saying pretty baby

catullusa @ 2005-02-01T20:28:00

2005-02-02T01:33:27Z

Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but to-day by feeding is allay'd,
To-morrow sharpen'd in his former might:
So, love, be thou; although to-day thou fill
Thy hungry eyes even till they wink with fullness,
To-morrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love with a perpetual dullness.
Let this sad int'rim like the ocean b
Which parts the shore, where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that, when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view;
Or call it winter, which, being full of care,
Makes summer's welcome thrice more wisht,
more rare.

catullusa @ 2005-01-30T13:18:00

2005-01-30T18:38:31Z

Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,
Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
And there this night I walk in the white giant's thigh
Where barren as boulders women lie longing still

To labour and love though they lay down long ago.

Through throats where many rivers meet, the women pray,
Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow
Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,

And alone in the night's eternal, curving act
They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived
And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked

Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved
In the courters' lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun
In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay
Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with any one
Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay

Under the lighted shapes of faith, or shy with the rough riding boys,
Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,

Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.
Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,
Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush
Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,
Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun's bush
Rough as the cows' tongues and thrashed with bramble their
buttermilk
Manes, under his quenchless summer barbed gold to the bone,

Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk
And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.

Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse
Of the day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed

Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb
Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,
All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime

And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,
Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,
Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king
Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead
And gone that barley dark where their clogs dances in the spring,
And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran round--

(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives
Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose's ground
They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives)-

Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their dust.

The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro
Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust
As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low
And cut the birds' boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.
They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,
Who head the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead
And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard,
Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved
Grave, after Beloved on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed
Off by the sun and the Daughters no longer grieved
Save by their long desirers in the fox cubbed
Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these
Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
Love for ever meridian through the courters' trees

And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fire still.

catullusa @ 2005-01-29T12:53:00

2005-01-29T18:10:01Z

A man on his deathbed left instructions
for dividing up his goods among his three sons.
He had devoted his entire spirit to those sons
They stood like cypress trees around him,
quiet and strong.
He told the town judge
"Whichever of my sons is laziest,
give him all the inheritance."

Then he died, and the judge turned to the three,
"Each of you must give some account of your laziness,
so I can understand just how you are lazy."

Mystics are experts in laziness. They rely on it,
because they continuously see God working all around them.
The harvest keeps coming in, yet they
never even did the plowing!

"Come on. Say something about the ways you are lazy."

Every spoken word is a covering for the inner self.
A little curtain-flick no wider than a slice
of roast meat can reveal hundreds of exploding suns.
Even if what is being said is trivial and wrong,
the listener hears the source. One breeze comes
from across a garden. Another from across the ash-heap.
Think how different the voices of the fox
and the lion, and what they tell you!

Hearing someone is lifting the lid off the cooking pot.
You learn what's for supper. Though some people
can know just by the smell, a sweet stew
from a sour soup cooked with vinegar.

A man taps a clay pot before he buys it
to know by the sound if it has a crack.

The eldest of the three brothers told the judge,
"I can know a man by his voice,
and if he won't speak,
I wait three days, and then I know him intuitively."

The second brother, "I know him when he speaks,
and if he won't talk, I strike up a conversation."

"But what if he knows that trick?" asked the judge.

Which reminds me of the mother who tells her child,
"When you're walking through the graveyard at night,
and you see a boogeyman, run at it,
and it will go away."

"But what," replies the child, "if the boogeyman's
mother has told it to do the same thing?
Boogeyman have mothers too."

The second brother had no answer.

The judge then asked the youngest brother,
"What if a man cannot be made to say anything?
How do you learn his hidden nature?"

"I sit in front of him in silence,
and set up a ladder made of patience,
and if in his presence a language from beyond joy
and beyond grief begins to pour from my chest,
I know that his soul is as deep and bright
as the star Canopus rising over Yemen.

And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm
of words sweeping down, I know him from what I say,
and how I say it, because there's a window open
between us, mixing the night air of our beings."

The youngest was, obviously,
the laziest. He won.

If you like alcohol, don't live in Pennsylvania

2004-10-14T22:21:57Z

The state still has a number of Byzantine liquour laws restricting distribution of alcohol. While you can get beer from independent retailers, all other alcohol can only be obtained from state stores. And forget about internet deliveries: we aren't one of the reciprocity states so home delivery is illegal (you CAN have it delivered to a state owned Wine and Spirits Shop, but then they give you a 30% tariff). At least in KY the selection at places is good enough that I don't mind the fact that home delivery is a felony, but here the selection is shit except at the larger stores and even then it's only good for wine. Usually, there'll be one or two of the middle of the road single malts and bourbons. I mean, you can get Arbelour or Oban and usually can get Rock Hill Farms, but forget trying to get Ezra or AAA or Stagg. Oh, and a real shitty collection of Islays.
Oh yeah, and wine in restaurants is fucking expensive because the owners are required to buy wine through the state at near-retail prices instead of wholesale.

catullusa @ 2004-10-08T13:10:00

2004-10-08T17:12:20Z

"And your will shall decide your destiny," he said: "I offer you my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions...But, Jane, I summon you as my wife: it is you only I intend to marry... My bride is here,...because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?"

From the "Gee, we've made a lot of progress" Department

2004-10-05T22:12:55Z

Modern Living
-----------------
The Marketplace
-----------------
-----------------
The Plug-In Compact

Ever since the last Baker Electric hummed down Main Street, dowager at the tiller, rose in the bud vase, esoteric autophiles have been yearning for the return of the stately "bucket of volts" that were as cheap as a railroad watch and almost as cheap to operate.
Last week an enterprising young man named Barry Stuart, of Kalamazoo, Mich., was showing off the pilot model of a brand-new electric car. Designed to sell for around $1600, the Stuart is a boxy but commodius fiber-glass creation driven by a 4-h.p. motor, will hold two adults, two kids, and lots of groceries. It will go 40 miles at a safe-and-sane 35 m.p.h. on its small boat-trailer-size wheels, and its eight 6-volt batteries may be recharged overnight simply by plugging the whole thing into the garage socket. The cost of operation (including depreciation on the car itself) is estimated by Stuart to be around 4 cents a mile, as opposed to about 8 cents a mile for the standard gas compact.
There have been other entries in the electric-car field in recent years, though none have caused much anxiety in Detroit. Short range, slow speed, lack of power on the hills, together with high price, have kept most of them in the experimental stage. But Barry Stuart, 29, thinks his car is the answer--provided that people do not expect much from it. Requests for dealerships have come in by the score; 20 have been accepted. Say Stuart: "I'm convinced that there is a real market for a second car for limited town or suburban driving. I don't recommend it for thruways or turnpikes; it's an errand car."
Stuart also sees his car as a partial answer to the smog problem, since it burns no fuels, hence has no exhaust. "Some day," says Stuart, "unless we turn off the fumes, we may be legislated into using nonxhaust transportation. It's better to make a start now."

TIME, November 24, 1961

Update.

2004-10-03T05:28:17Z

As if.

catullusa @ 2004-07-11T02:20:00

2004-07-11T06:21:18Z

Evidently one of the works of fiction sampled by the Brown Corpus is Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land

Thank you Wayne Rooney!

2004-06-21T22:13:59Z

BTW, I think it is still safe to say that West Ham and Millwall supporters are the vilest out there. A couple of West Ham chants:

Wayne Rooney, Wayne Rooney
He's fat,
he's Scouse,
he's gonna rob your house,
Wayne Rooney, Wayne Rooney

or,

We'll be running 'round Tottenham with our willies hanging out
We'll be running' round Tottenham with our willies hanging out
We'll be running 'round Tottenham, running 'round Tottenham, running 'round Tottenham with our willies hanging out, singing I've got a bigger one than you ,singing I've got a bigger one than you, singing I've got a bigger, I've got a bigger, I've got a bigger one than you.

or,

West ham boys
we are here
whooooaa whooooaa
well sh*g you women
and drink your beer
whooooaa whoooaa

Some Millwall chants (when they aren't busy setting stands on fire or knocking off supporters' pubs:

if i had the wings of sparrow
and the arse of a crow,
i'd fly over selhurst park,
and shit on the bastards below.
shit on, shit on,
shit on the bastards below, below.
shit on, shit on,
I'd shit on the bastards below.

or,

Get Giro,
Go down road,
Then get f*ckin plastered,
Then go home and beat the wife,
Coz I'm a Northern Bastard!

Goddddddddddd. Shut up already

2004-06-12T12:24:20Z

A mediocre president dies and we have to deal with this. That window ledge looks more tempting all the time

catullusa @ 2004-06-05T10:37:00

2004-06-05T14:43:19Z

If I hear one more remark about Smarty Jones, one more cloyingly, cute pun like "Smarty Party," one more remark about how I should place a bet on "the surest thing you'll find" (this from someone who probably never followed racing before but feels he can give advice to someone from KY) I WILL FUCKING SCREAM. It's especially bad here in Philly where the media and everybody and their fucking brother are going googoo-eyed over the horse. You'd think he was some inhuman combination of Secretariat, Affirmed, and Buddha. Tell you what, when Rock Hard Ten (or any other horse actually bred to handle a distance race) wins, I will laugh so, so hard as the Philly faithful droop into a deep depression at the news of failure in yet another sport.