Blog of Revelation

What does "blind" mean?

2009-09-02T02:57:00.000-07:00

When I read stories like this one, about a man who "sees" without being able to see, I'm filled with a kind of joy and wonder that is difficult to accurately describe.

There's so much that we still need to understand about how our brain works and one of the best ways to learn is to study truly bizarre cases like that one, or like the "split brain" cases.

The problem with opposition to health care reform by reasonable americans

2009-08-29T03:36:00.001-07:00

Maybe I'm stating the obvious. But here it goes.

It is my experience that reasonable americans (not the real crazies who shout like idiots at those town halls, but the ones that might nod in agreement when someone else does), these regular people who are, generally but not always, conservative leaning and happen to have a problem with "the government option" to health care reform; these generally decent reasonable americans who are kind and usually thoughtful and that don't really think Obama is Hitler or some other crazy hyperbolic thing like that, these people typically haven't given a lot of consideration to the current system in America.

I've had a chance to interact with these reasonable people who think that a public option will cost too much money, and that a large chunk of the population is very corrupt and will game the public system and not play by the rules and cause it to cost more money, and that a public option will make their private plan (which they are happy with) turn to shit, and so on. I think a lot of these worries are grounded in reality, but that's not the point.

These interactions have taught me that, in order to have a meaningful conversation with these reasonable americans, it is useless to try to just simply defend a public plan. To defend a public plan is to defend a hypothetical, to collect evidence from nothing more substantial than a thought experiment (what happens in other countries is generally inconsequential to many of these reasonable people). In order to have a decent, intelligent conversation about truly changing health care, and to set up a good reason to incorporate the government/public option, we all first need to get educated about the current system.

Everyone involved first needs to understand the absolute horrible state of the health care PAYMENT industry as it currently stands. People need to understand that, even though their situation appears to be just fine, that there are problems in the system that are going to potentially affect their individual, "fine" situation negatively.

It is my experience that when people really consider the problem with making health-care a commodity, when people truly understand how the BUSINESS of paying for health care works, when people put themselves in the shoes of an insurance company executive and think about how he/she has to deal with share holders AND NOT SICK PEOPLE, when people are made aware of the actual stories of poor bastards with pre-existing conditions who are denied coverage, then they begin to understand why the current American system is not necessarily the best we could do. They begin to understand why a standard capitalist model is not really compatible with providing access to healthcare, just like it isn't compatible with providing education, and fire/police departments, etc. It is my experience that when a person understands this, then they become open to thinking about what we might do to FIX the current system. That doesn't mean they will be any more keen on the public option. But they'll at least realize that there's a problem and it needs to be fixed FAST. And what we need in this country now is to get everyone on the side of REFORM.

The problem as I see it is that there is an opposition to any kind of reform in the health care payment industry because all reform is being characterized as socialist. The whole discussion should have started with making every single american understand why the current system is unworkable, how it is broken. Once the vast majority of the country is on this same page, then we can take an incremental step toward fixing it.

Instead, what's happening is that these reasonable americans, who are busy trying to keep their jobs and doing other things and so don't have time to educate themselves about the status quo, these reasonable americans who are getting their information from sensationalist and piss-poor reporting by the 24 hour news channels, these reasonable americans are being (and letting themselves be) consciously and sub-consciously turned against any kind of reform.

If you have an opportunity to communicate with these reasonable americans or if you happen to be one of these reasonable americans, I suggest you start fresh. Forget all that you may have learned about the current state of the health care payment system and research the basics for yourself. Use what you learn to form the basis of your conversation, when you're discussing health care reform.

Here is an example of how this strategy is used explicitly to promote the government/public option:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Estonians rock?

2009-08-16T03:34:00.001-07:00

There was a time, once, when I thought absolutely nothing good could ever come out of the republic of Estonia (except, of course, Brandon Fraser via Encino Man which also starred a young, de-hobbitized Samwise Gamgee, but I digress...).

That is no longer the case thanks to Opium Flirt.

Several years ago, I downloaded the title track from Opium Flirt's first album "Saint European King Days" and thought it was pretty good (I found it on the very decent music blog "said the gramophone"). So I saved it along with the rest of the mp3s that I download weekly from the internets. As often happens, these single track downloads get lost in that sea of mp3s that fill up my hard drive. And because I've got my itunes playlists set so that I only listen to music that I haven't heard in the past 6 months, it was at least a year or two after I downloaded it that this Opium Flirt track pleased my ears again.

But upon a second listen I became mesmerized. Opium Flirt's "saint European King Days" is a hauntingly wonderful song. So I checked out some more songs by the band and discovered that they are all over the place (in terms of style). This is a sure plus for any band, in my book. You might be able to categorize Opium Flirt as "ambient psychedelic", but then you'd only be accurately describing about half of their songs.

Anyway, I highly recommend taking a listen. Three words of warning:

listen to the whole song and not just the intro (their intro's are often long and can be monotonous)
listen to more than one track
the song "Saint European King Days" would make me want to cry, if I wasn't such a manly masculine man

Vonnegut said it well

2009-08-11T15:35:00.000-07:00

porn on the floor? possibly knotcaphe fourwirk

2009-08-08T03:57:00.000-07:00

Is this the greatest music video of the current generation? Probably not. But it's still frickkin awesome.

Major Lazer "Pon De Floor" from Eric Wareheim on Vimeo.

Singlish + comedy = singlish comedy?

2009-08-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

This is what a lot of my in-laws sound like when they speak English:

It's pretty awesome.

You and me, in the nude, if that's what you're into

2009-07-29T05:47:00.000-07:00

Further evidence of the supreme greatness of Flight of the Conchords.

(old clip, but one of my favorite songs)

Lewontin wrote a book with Chomskey and it has fuck-all to do with linguistics

2009-07-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

Nicely put: "Humans and chimpanzees are nevertheless very similar in their proteins, on the average, but vastly different in the sizes of their brains and their ability to write books about each other.”- R. Lewontin 1998. Very clever, so long as you pick the appropriate referents for the reciprocal expression.

Science can be creative (and fun)

2009-07-24T05:38:00.000-07:00

Events in my life have conspired to create an interesting state in my academic life. It appears that I will be spending a good portion of my near future designing an experiment which studies human gesture and the development of phonology (or sub-lexical compositionality) using a fucking WII-mote.

There's a small, but significant part of me that is giddy at that proposition. That is the WII-msical side of me which causes me to spend a good part of my free time playing video games. The serious, pragmatic, scientist part of me is apprehensive, concerned about the aspect of these events that leads to the future state in which I'm, potentially, publishing the results of such a study (under, what is likely to be, a very clever title).

One really awesome aspect of my recent work is that it's actually involving a lot more creativity than I've experienced in much of my previous academic work. I love doing simple research, but there's something really appealing about stepping in new territory, the kind of territory where a linguistically trained graduate student is programming an unintuitive input/output mapping from a fucking WII-mote to a three dimensional space represented in a computer screen. If you would have asked me in my undergraduate days whether I thought that computer programming for academic purposes would become one of the few creative outlets of my future career, I may have laughed at the question.

Speaking of creativity: I'm just loving the band "Immaculate Machine". At their best, they sound like an interesting mix between "the new pornographers" and a classic rock cover-band. At their worst they sound like a classic rock inspired folk rock group (which actually doesn't sound so bad).

Even though it doesn't sound anything like what I just described, I'm particularly taken by the song "Dear Confessor" from their 2007 release "Fable" (see video).

They later re-recorded that song in what I think is Mandarin Chinese (see Wo Xian Tanbai below, from "wont be pretty", their 2008 7-inch EP) which I think is really awesome because, up till now, the vast majority of music I've heard in Mandarin has been boring top 40 adult contemporary.

It's always fun to hear foreigners sing rock (see l'aventurier for an example of how cool the 80's were for France, though I prefer the more recent ska version made by a bunch of CANADIANS) (I'm being tongue-in-cheek condescending here. No hate mail please).

Anyway, Immaculate Machine, along with "Fanfarlo" and a few others, are setting up 2009 to be the year of group-chanty-folk rock for me.

extreme

2009-07-20T13:58:00.000-07:00

Video Games - E3 2009 - Web Soup

11 year old alcoholics

2009-07-19T07:32:00.000-07:00

I used to think that having a drinking age, denying 18 year olds the ability to imbibe, played a big role in creating the allure of alcohol and thereby being largely responsible for causing alcohol related troubles like binge drinking.

Today I heard this headline on BBC radio: Milan to enforce teen drink ban. The article talks about the problems with underage drinking in Milan. To my (mostly) american ears, that meant that 18 or 19 year olds are overdoing it. But Italy's drinking age is 16. The underage problems the article talks about involve 11 year olds. 11 year olds with drinking problems...

I guess no matter what you do, what laws you pass, what limits you arbitrarily install, there will always be people taking things a bit too far. I guess that in itself doesn't come as a shock. But paired with the notion of drunken 11 year olds publicly urinating: oh yeah, shock.

300th post: revisitng intuitiveness and sports science

2009-07-15T03:36:00.001-07:00

Talk about counter-intuative:

When I was a young'un playing baseball, on the on-deck circle I would practice swinging a bat with a weight on the tip. When I was up to bat, the weight-less bat felt incredibly light and I felt like I could swing much harder.

Well, someone went ahead and actually tested whether practicing with a weighted bat actually made a difference to your swing in the batter's box. It turns out that it actually slows you down rather than speeds you up. If you want to swing faster, you actually have to practice with a lighter bat, not a heavier one.

Now, swinging faster doesn't necessarily mean you'll hit better. It may, for example, be detrimental to your accuracy. But, what I find fascinating is that, from personal experience, it certainly feels like you're swinging a normally weighted bat twice as fast if you've just practiced with a weighted bat. And this is likely why baseball players have practiced on the on-deck circle with weighted bats since... well who knows since when, but they do it all the time (see photo above).

I fucking love science, and I'm especially becoming enamored with Sports Science. I heard on the BBC radio station earlier this week an obituary for one of the first Sports scientists in the UK. A fellow, whose name I forget, who did his PhD in the sixties on how football (soccer) players injure themselves. He was also an expert on altitude effects on athletes, which is on a lot of Europeans' minds these days as the world cup next year will be held in South Africa, where many of the stadiums are significantly above sea level.

Sports science doesn't even have to be psycho-physical or biomedical in nature. It can be about counter-intuitive statistics as the 60 minutes video below will explain:

I suspect there's a general intuition that academics who excel in the science fields are likely to be nerds who care little for sports. Maybe that intuition is accurate of the mean, we'd need more data to find out if that's true, but some of the most interesting things happen when science moves into new territories which are typically not noted for drawing scientists.

science v culture multiplied by infants

2009-06-28T03:07:00.000-07:00

I often joke around about all the crazy psycho-social experiments I'm going to put my children through. I kid about how I'll make a conscious effort to fail to invert auxiliary verbs in the appropriate contexts, or that I'll only read adult science fiction for their bedtime stories, or that every weekend they'll be getting training on how to 'cheat' on IQ tests.

Today I stumbled across this story. The scientist with me is intrigued while the human in me is horrified. I'm fairly certain that both of those reactions are inappropriate.

Leave it to the swedes, I guess.

Sybiotic birds

2009-06-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

Usually, when you see a symbiotic relationship between birds and large mammals, it is a mutually beneficial one, such as the case with the oxpecker and large grazing mammals in africa.

Not this time.

That is scary. I would not want to be a whale who's getting eaten alive by seagulls...

How things are done on one side of the Atlantic

2009-06-24T07:58:00.001-07:00

In order for me to get 24 hour access to the academic building I'm currently making use of, I had to go through a 'fire induction tour'. This was an event that sounds more interesting than it actually was. I pictured some kind of hazing ritual, or at least something which required the use of a torch. However, a 'fire induction tour' is actually inherently interesting to someone who has never experienced one before.

Basically, since I would be given stewardship of the building on those odd cases where I might be the only one within it, they had to teach me what to do in case of all kinds of emergencies (such as if I were to suddenly bite into my own flesh with my teeth, accidentally, and needed something to staunch [the blood] with).

The tour was interesting in that it showed me the locations of the departmental dish washer and oven (why don't we have those?), the departmental first aid boxes (they've got one or two on every floor), the departmental printers, copiers, and supply cupboards (they've got armfulls of all kinds of stationary and stationary related products, none of which is under lock and key), and the departmental showers (that's right, 2 of them, about 20 feet within walking in from the front door of the building, you know, in case you walk, run, or cycle from home).

Artificial languages on 70's television

2009-06-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

I just learned that the late Vicky Fromkin was hired by the producers of the 1974 television series "land of the lost" to create an artificial language for that tv show's characters "the Pakuni" people.

That's awesome.

Jack Churchill was a badass

2009-06-03T13:45:00.000-07:00

Jack Churchill. He did more than just invent a new kind of surf board. When I first heard about him I assumed that Neal Stephenson had based his 'Shaftoe' characters (from cryptonomicon and the baroque cycle trilogy) on him.

Total badass.

You have to be rich to be poor

2009-05-20T08:50:00.001-07:00

This is one of those articles where, if they're even only accurate on about half of what they claim/suggest, things look pretty bleak indeed.

Things cost more in poor neighborhoods.

I have no idea what can really be done about that. One of those cogs in the perpetual cycles.

Komodo Dragons are still cool, just less so

2009-05-19T08:06:00.000-07:00

I remember how giddy I was when I first learned about Komodo Dragons. (yes, I was probably a geeky teenager) They were these prehistorically scary lizards that could kill and eat even humans, those who were silly enough to decide to live on the island upon which Komodo Dragons existed.

The coolest thing about the Komodo Dragons was that they killed their pray, not with poison, or sheer strength of their jaws. No, what they did was something totally crazy: They cultivated killer strains of bacteria in their mouths and, upon biting pray, would transfer that killer bacteria to the poor animal, killing it in a relatively short time. At which point, the komodo dragon would simply have to track the dying animal and feast. It sounded pretty crazy, but totally cool. Symbiosis on a killer-cool level (much cooler than the human-ecoli crap we get).

Well, it turns out all that is bullshit. Komodo Dragons use venom. I hate it when herpetologists get their shit wrong.

I guess it'll be up to me to prove that you can kill prey with a bio-bite .

English is English, except when it's not

2009-05-14T09:42:00.000-07:00

Susan Boyle. If you don't know who she is, you can google her to find out. The minimum you need to know is that she's from an area in Scotland near Edinburgh

She appeared on Oprah, with subtitles. I don't really know what to think about that. The linguist part of me says that this is acceptable as the phonological differences can be very difficult to parse and would make comprehension difficult even though the syntax might be familiar. But there's a part of me that wishes that Americans had more experience TRYING to understand (learn to listen to) the myriad of world Englishes that exist out there.

I wonder what it's going to be like, communicating with Edinbrughers.

Seriously: Jonathan Coulton

2009-05-11T09:02:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Coulton

I don't remember when it was that I first heard of him, but I'm pretty sure the first song I heard was this one:

	Jonathan Coulton - First of May

	Found at skreemr.com

It was love at first sound. This guy, JoCo, was a computer programmer who stopped being a computer programmer to try his hand at writing music:

	Jonathan Coulton - Code Monkey

	Found at skreemr.com

His lyrics are witty and absolutely relateable to a 28 year old geek. His music, though 'campy' in style, displays a knack for writing some pretty amazing melodies. Case in point is "RE: your brains" a song about an office worker turned zombie trying to debate with an ex-colleague about whether the zombie hoard (of which he is a part) should be let into his mall fortress.

	Jonathan Coulton - Re Your Brains

	Found at skreemr.com

JoCo is best known for his "thing a week" project, where he attempted to write. produce, and record one song per week throughout a 52 week period (sept '05 to '06 for a total of 52 songs)--quite an amazing feat, if you ask me. You can read about that here.

	Jonathan Coulton - Tom Cruise Crazy

	Found at skreemr.com

The best part was that he released all of the songs, for free, on the internet. And he still ended up making more money than he had working as a programmer (at least by 2007, he did). Oh, and Valve paid him some money for writing the ending song to their hit game "Portal"

	Jonathan Coulton - Still Alive (J.C. Mix)

	Found at skreemr.com

JoCo is playing a show at a local watering hole this Thursday. I can't wait:

Zombies and the absurd

2009-05-05T13:49:00.000-07:00

If you know me well, you also know that I'm a big fan of zombies. In addition to my zombie fandom, I'm a fan of absurdist comedy. What do you get when you put them together. Well, the answer was not clear until Andy put the following bit together:

Scientists, they can be right, then wrong, then right again, finally ending up on being wrong

2009-05-05T13:43:00.001-07:00

We all need to constantly re-evaluate our beliefs.

Art

2009-05-05T13:37:00.001-07:00

If there is one piece of art that I would like to own in my future home it is the time fountain.

Gender stereotypes are funny

2009-05-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

There's Luke not tipping on account of poor service!

Judge Antonin Scalia needs to pay attention to that modern-fangled technology

2009-05-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

I do have respect for justice Scalia, even though I probably disagree with most of his views about interpreting the constitution and about government in general. I don't know him personally, but I've read and seen enough interviews of him to know that I respect his intelligence and his tenacity.

But it's always great to read stories like this. (Scalia [possibly?] has previously stated in a public forum that he doesn't think the government should be making more laws to protect privacy)

More on this interesting character known as Scalia.

euler and the pitfalls of foreign surname pronunciation

2009-05-04T10:51:00.001-07:00

When I first came across the name Euler, I pronounced it as it would be pronounced in English from its spelling: /ˈjuːlər/ or EW-lər. I was quickly corrected and told that it was actually pronounced /ˈɔɪlər/ or OY-lər. This led me to crack stupid nerd jokes about how the mathematical value known as 'e' which I believe is named after the mathematician/physicist L. Euler, shouldn't be pronounced /ii/ as the alphabetic letter is pronounced, but instead should be pronounced /ɔɔ/ (the vowel sound in 'fought or cough' which is the sound Euler's name begins with). To this day, when I have to use 'e' in some equation I think of it as /ɔɔ/. HYUDG NURD ALLURT!

Use headphones to get the fullest effect

2009-05-03T20:39:00.000-07:00

Audio illusions are awesome.

When politics, religion, and health crises clash

2009-04-30T08:42:00.000-07:00

Egypt is trying to slaughter all of the country's pigs. Is this because they are trying to prevent swine flu from getting a foot-hold in the country?

That's what the government is telling people. But I wonder if this decision wasn't made easier by the fact that the pigs are raised for consumption by the Christian minority (being considered 'unclean' and therefore not consumable by the Muslim majority).

Of course, the Christians are going to have no trouble surviving without pork chops or ham for a few months. But those poor pig farmers are going to hurt. They're not even given compensation... Ouch.

This story made me think of the possibility that this flu outbreak can be seen by radical (and some not so radical) muslims as clear evidence that god disfavors the decadent pig-eaters from the west.

The WHO tells us that we're at threat level 5. I guess the religious wars are over. Muslims win. Oh wait, The other chosen people are still in the game.

Oh pigs... why'd you have to go an be so damn tasty!

Homer: Are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal.
Homer: Heh heh heh. Ooh, yeah, right, Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

Paper Hearts

2009-04-23T08:08:00.000-07:00

This is not a documentary (although everyone seems to be playing themselves).

I'm not sure if it is because of my love affair with michael cera, or maybe it just plain looks like a fun movie, but I can't wait to see it.

How we (liguists) roll.

2009-04-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

A parable in several, unlabeled acts.

A zoologist goes out into the field, maybe even a literal field, and finds a brand new species of rabbit. He captures that rabbit and brings it back to his university/zoo (they are often hard to tell apart, universities and zoos).

He then proceeds to skin the rabbit, gut it and put all of it's different inner bits into separate jars. He then sends the carcass, the pelt, and each organ to the respective fur/carcass/organ specialists. He does this in the hope that, some day soon when the results of each specialist's analyses come back, we will understand something about the rabbit, something that we wouldn't be able to understand from observing the living rabbit itself as well as everything that we could. (that last, difficult to comprehend sentence involves what linguists call grammatically questionable ELLIPSIS)

But the zoologist doesn't wait for the results. In fact, there's no one waiting for the results.

The gallbladder expert gets his sample and then analyzes the rabbit's gallbladder (do rabbits have gallbladders?). He publishes his results, which are then read by a small handful of gallbladder experts who use what he learned from the rabbit's gallbladder and apply it to other gallbladders. The heart expert does the same, as does the fur expert, etc. Once in a while, the stomach expert chats with the intestine expert and, together they learn something new about the digestive system of all the animals they've seen. A few people get excited, but they all soon go back to work since the toe-nail, eyeball, and ulna experts aren't quite sure what to make of that exciting new research. The spleen expert hasn't even heard of it.

In the meantime, the zoologist goes back out to the field and gets a mouse and repeats the process.

Certainly, to some extent, real world biology works this way, or at least it does in my twisted mind. But the critical difference is that zoologists exist not to feed anatomical biologists' grisly need for carcasses (although it would be fun to picture Dr. Frankenstein's Igor as a zoologist). There are several scientists in the field of biology who study whole, living rabbits: their diets, environments, sexual habits (perverts), etc.

The problem in linguistics is that no linguists are studying the sexual habits of the Ob-Ugric language family. And what I mean by that is, as hard as it might seem, more linguists need to attempt to make a career out of designing clever ways to put all that shit together, or fuckin' stop tearing up rabbits.

This hyperbole was brought to you by Coffee and viewers like you.

Como hacer un Bebe

2009-04-20T17:36:00.000-07:00

Frikkin adorable

Hidden Camera's are one of humanity's greatest and worst invention

2009-04-20T13:21:00.000-07:00

I had a great time with this website (no it isn't porn). In my very short life I have maintained a 100% success rate at job interviews (7 interviews, 7 job offers). I think, now, I'm realizing why.

[Updated] where the hell did that apostrophe in the title come from?

A whole new take on Zipf's Law

2009-04-16T14:31:00.000-07:00

Damn

more youtube genius

2009-04-16T14:01:00.000-07:00

It is all in the music

Stop motion excellence, from the people that brought you Sushi and Toyotas

2009-04-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

new york screamers

2009-04-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

what the hell is all this about:

They were this really funny comedy troupe

2009-04-08T12:03:00.000-07:00

at long last, my DVD collection will finally be complete.

The State is finally coming.

I just hope that it's as good as I remember it.

Shenanigans

2009-04-08T11:04:00.000-07:00

Shenanigans! I declare shenanigans!

PS. I've always wanted to declare shenanigans. I think I'll do it more often from now on.

South Park Shenanigans:

Supertrooper shenanigans:

PPS. While the OED doesn't seem to have an entry for 'shenanigans', M-W does. But M-W doesn't seem to know where it came from. I'd put the word Shenanigans on my top ten list of coolest words in English. Sesquipedalian would be on there too. I'm still waiting for a good opportunity to use sesquipedalian.

God protects us, don't you know

2009-04-05T12:05:00.000-07:00

You know what? Maybe this guy (a congressman) is right. Maybe the bible is all the evidence we need to know, without doubt, that there is no reason to fear global climate change.

Then again, maybe this is about as sad and pathetic as irrational, unquestioning, blind devotion can get.

Mad scientists?

2009-03-31T16:04:00.000-07:00

I found this comic illuminating.

I used to respect the UN

2009-03-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

WTF?

They urge member nations to enact legislation to make illegal the criticism of religion?

Not that I'm a fan of everyone criticizing everyone else, but this kind of crap is why people don't respect the UN.

Kings

2009-03-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

Kings.

A Shakespearean Drama, with biblical intrigue and the technical sensibilities of Battlestar Galactica.

It's got good characters (and decent actors portraying them). It's a good show and you should watch it.

Work and Play

2009-03-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

Susan Garnsey is a really awesome professor of Psychology at the U of I. When I was there I had the wonderful experience of being a lowly undergrad worker in her Language & Brain lab (I ran ERPs for a comparison study of Japanese and English on garden path sentences).

I remember one of those stereotype shattering moments in my early academic career when I was sitting on the couch next to Gary Dell and some graduate students at one of Susan's Parties. We were talking about some such crazy thing related to sentence processing when I looked over to Susan's CD collection and was struck by her musical tastes. I pulled out a copy of the Magnetic Fields' 69 love songs which spun the group's conversation into a totally different (and totally awesome) realm.

Suddenly, I was no longer in an intimidating professor's home in some nerve-wrecking conversation where, at any moment I was in danger of saying something stupid that was going to make evident how little my undergraduate brain knew about sentence processing. Instead, we were talking about the qualities of Stephin Merritt's voice and his multi-talented cast of friends, a conversation I may have been having with peers at some house party later that weekend.

I guess I should have probably taken advantage of my surroundings that day and maybe gained a little more insight on the wonderful world of psycholinguistics, but it was pretty cool talking about music with these people who spent a large part of their week lecturing to undergraduates like me and grading our homeworks, and doing cutting-edge research. In a very profound way, it made a carreer in acadamics actually seem within grasp. These people could be so well versed in the processing literature AND know about Stephin Merritt? They didn't have to spend all of their time with their nose in a journal?

Sometimes I feel like that's really not the case, that I was imagining that whole event, and that I'll spend the rest of my life in front of the computer, typing, committed to the reality that popular culture is going to escape further and further from my ability to know it, understand it. At times like these, I fire up my PS3 and play some video games, assuming netflix hasn't sent me my next movie yet.

do I or don't I double that L?

2009-03-25T15:34:00.000-07:00

I'm having a real hard time figuring out what distinction, if any, is made by native speakers of English between the two spellings for modelling/modeling.

Is one British and the other English? if so, which is which?
Do they refer to different things? is modeling what fashion models do and modelling what scientists do?

The verb 'compel' gets an additional 'l' when derived (compelling and not compeling)
But the verb 'boil' doesn't (boiling and not boilling)

Does it have to do with how many syllables are in the root? It doesn't seem that way since:
Counsel becomes counseling and not counselling...

WTF? Are there any other -l ending words that have this dichotomy of spelling choice?

Either the internet is no help or my googling skills are becoming worthless in my old age. I'll be super embarrassed if it's something incredibly obvious that I'm too dumb to see...

I think it should be called FACE DANCE (or feesu daansu)

2009-03-19T20:09:00.000-07:00

Yet another way the Japanese can be CrazyCool.

I think what's happening in the video below is: one of the four people rigged up a system that converts tones to electical impulses. Those electrical impulses are then sent to these poor people's face muscles. The music starts playing, and what you get is

FACE DANCE

That dream where you forget you signed up for that class and haven't gone to it all semester and a project/final is coming up...

2009-03-18T14:56:00.000-07:00

Today's XKCD hits home.

I didn't realize other people had this dream.
I've had it countless times, at least once every semester during my undergraduate career. But I haven't had it so often since I've become a grad student. I can only remember having it once in the past 2 years.

I wonder if Randall is right about this dream haunting me for the rest of my life...

Damn

2009-03-17T09:09:00.000-07:00

Brain decline begins at 27.

In related but lighter news, this week I calculated that I am nearly 342 months old.

Take-off rap

2009-03-16T13:47:00.001-07:00

If you are a flight attendant, this is how you get people to pay attention to you during those boring pre-flight instructions:

Yet another way Southwest is better than any other US airline.

Critical Discourse Analysis and why I fucking despise it

2009-03-16T08:32:00.001-07:00

Sohail Karmani forwards the following question (from some person named tom nagy) to a newsgroup interested in Critical Discourse Analysis:

"Is discourse analysis at the primative level of medicine 100 years ago when it could diagnose but not intervene successfully? If this is so, it would be critical to be aware of this dismal state of affairs."

and he continues with his own point

This is precisely the problem I have with CDA. As I see it, the whole thing is based on the self-serving assumption that society desperately needs a vanguard class of experts who can unravel the encoded messages in a given text that elude the dumb and stupid masses. Only such a class is best placed to carry out this function because it exclusively possesses all the tools, jargon and "insights" that are even beyond normal capabilities of your average academic. Taxi drivers, builders, single mothers, cleaning ladies, janitors and so on just wouldn't have a clue what goes on in the marvellous world of CDA. Of course the whole thing (like other specializations in academia) is a total fraud! All you need all is a modicum of intelligence and a bit of critical awareness and anyone can unravel the "deep meanings" that reside in texts. The bottom line (as I see it) is CDA is embarrassingly straightforward stuff dressed up in layers and layers of self-serving unintelligible jargon.

And this is the response he received (if you're like me, you had a hard time making it past point #4, so if you want to know what I think of all of this, scroll all the way down):

1) The problem of human activity being "self-serving" isn't necessarily a critical point of contention here though.

2) In our quasi-solipsist existence, with no real access to the inner, word-defying (CDA-defying at that) flux of emotional appeal or subjective contemplation or whatever you want to call, humans can obviosly act little beyond their unavoidable "self-serving" ways.

3) Capitalist greed is reified and hits a certain bulwark (based in ordained careerism and defined sycophantism, etc.) telling it where to end; revolutionaries, on the other hand, are too greedy for greed.

4) Putting an end to these moronic vanguard thought specialists requires unpredented levels of greed based in the concept of self-management (we cannot manage ourselvves, attempt to act autonomously, etc. without facing, whether to our chagrin or not, the complete necessity to be greedy -- how else can we act for ourselves as opposed to how a certain elitist group of specialists might want us to act?)

5) http://www.point-of-departure.org/Lust-For-Life/RTBGreedy-v1_2_5-en.htm

6) We are necessarily greedy, this isn't really the problem -- to see the problem in CDA, we must go beyond this typical condescension for those "greedy capitalist pigs."

7) Nothing can be new which is already expressed, in that such an expression itself is already an unavoidable reification (including all of those popular greed concepts) even if it hasn't been extracted from the mind yet into the concurrence of linguistic reality; even if it hasn't come into a replication of its own outside of the individual's thought processes.

8) It takes on the form of a reification even at the point of becoming an object within consciousness.

9) Any sort of synthesized language, "subjective" or "objective" is already reified.

10) However, what is felt (the ineffable) can never be expressed in the same way that what is expressed can never be known beyond the concurring linguistic "fact" that it, in fact, isn't known outside of its pragmatic relationships or rational connections -- it isn't known within the mind of an individual subject, but merely represented or signified; it isn't felt or sensed in word-defying manner based in the infinite continuum of euphoria to chagrin (and everything in between), but merely projected in a boring, commensurable manner.

11) In a basic sense, the ineffability of subjective emotion, desire and sensation is the affirmation of our current solipsist reality (which is the reality comprised of human / object interrelation housing the existence comprised of unverifiable meaning outside of mind).

For the solipsist, it is not merely the case that he believes that his thoughts, experiences, and emotions are, as a matter of contingent fact, the only thoughts, experiences, and emotions. Rather, the solipsist can attach no meaning to the supposition that there could be thoughts, experiences, and emotions other than his own. In short, the true solipsist understands the word 'pain,' for example, to mean 'my pain.' He cannot accordingly conceive how this word is to be applied in any sense other than this exclusively egocentric one.

-- Stephen P. Thornton

12) When I touch briefly on solipsism, I basically mean it in a sense closely related to the well articulated and aforementioned excerpt -- in the sense that if we are to use the example of "pain," obviously, the dominant ideology (set up by the dictionary and other forms of CDAist mediated concurrence) used to define pain will never be able to define the arbitrary sensation of pain existing subjectively within an individual as such a sensation is inherently ineffable and simply cannot take on any genuine meaning beyond a reified description of what it once "felt" like at some point in the past and in concurrence with a grand, syncretistic, etymological narrative comprising descriptions of what certain types of pain might have felt like to certain types of people.

13) This sort of gathered, learned synthesis of what one might assume pain to be in terms of objective projections of past language will never be able to represent (although it would have you believe otherwise) its actualized, internal meaning for a peculiar subject, as such representations are always based in the past -- i.e. Phil Graham's boring Hilter references -- while what is felt is always based in the transient and elusive present.

14) The ever changing semantics of language simply cannot come close to comprehending the unknown regions of the mind born of "impressions" (as Hume -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#Ideas_and_impressions -- might say).

15) The more one assumes that one's past synthesis comprising spontaneously felt pain can ever hold its own as a truthful definition regarding the ineffable subjectivity of what pain actually is in the ephemeral moment existing just beyond the rationalized meaning of historical narratives, the more one is susceptible to the spectacle of "pain."

16) None the less, autonomous and ad hominem based attempts at interpreting the ineffable are important in that they represent the non-profit and explicit study of the transference of meaning (existing in a personal ambience of their own attempted autonomy and hence outside of the condescending commerce of "official" -- psychology, psychiatry, subsidized/curriculum-based philosophy, CDAist bullshit, etc. -- forms of such study which are almost always quite insidiously in the name of mere utility and workforce augmentation despite their pseudo-subversive claims in the other direction) -- an attempted transient acknowledgement of the emotions and content existing below and thrashing against, for relevant instance, Debord's concept of "spectacle."

17) We must be too greedy to accept the careerist-greed spectacle as a transient, subversive solution... it is the exact opposite and filled to the brim with little more than charlatans...

What a bunch of bullshit (the question almost as much as the 17-part answer).

MICROsoft!

2009-03-10T13:26:00.001-07:00

Microsoft Excel can be a fabulous tool.
or
Microsoft Excel can lead to inaccurate results and irreparably ruin your research.

You decide

2 things I miss

2009-03-02T22:10:00.001-08:00

One thing I really miss about japan is good, simple, japanese sushi.

Another thing I really miss about japan is the kindness of the people, their good nature. You didn't have to worry about most people trying to swindle or cheat you. You could feel pretty confident that if you forgot your jacket on a train station platform, you could go back on the same train line (in the other direction) and find it where you left it (or one of the attendants will have it safe and waiting for you).

So when I see videos like the one below (the second of its kind) it brings me back and makes me miss the place a bit more.

John turturro

2009-02-27T10:12:00.001-08:00

John Turturro is one of my favorite actors (I'd easily put him in the top three). I first saw him in the Coen Bros movie "Barton Fink" and, at that time I didn't think too much of him. But since then I've seen him play a lot of different roles (Miller's Crossing, Jungle Fever, Cradle will rock, Mr. Deeds, oh brother where art thou, you don't mess with the zohan). Despite having a very unique voice and look, he has managed to easily persuade me that each character was real.

By far, my favorite of his roles was 'the Jesus' from the big lebowski. Below is a video of him talking about how he made that character real.

The thatcher effect

2009-02-25T08:54:00.000-08:00

I'd never heard of the thatcher effect before I saw this video. It's pretty wild.

Interpret your dissertation through dance

2009-02-22T17:22:00.001-08:00

This is the first I've heard of it, but it turns out that there's a contest for dancing your PhD dissertation.

I guess the following video is this year's postdoc winner. It's a neurolinguistics dissertation.

Don't lay down on train tracks, especially when you are sleepy

2009-02-20T09:10:00.000-08:00

Last year, a couple of girls fell asleep on some train tracks and, surprise surprise, they got ran over by a train (and, luckily, only suffered a foot and a leg amputation).

Yesterday, I saw this report on NPR "2 Teen Girls, Injured by Train, Cope With Change." I listened to it hoping that it would redeem my impression of these two children and their parents as complete fools. I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt in cases like these, but it was particularly difficult in this case: Even if they did not intend to take a nap, even if they held in their minds a belief that the tracks were unused, in what circumstances can you excuse two girls for laying down on train tracks?

Anyway, I listened to that story and, if anything, it actually made my opinion of these two girls and their parents worse then it was before. I don't like being judgmental. I sometimes find myself going out of my way to assume people are better, kinder, cleverer than they seem. But I'm having a really hard time with this story.

I was a nerd

2009-02-19T14:45:00.000-08:00

If you were a pbs-watching geography buff/nerd growing up in the early 90's then this page on YTMND will make you smile.

Good ole Bernie always knows what to say to cheer me up

2009-02-17T16:58:00.001-08:00

Bertrand Russell

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

Brands

2009-02-11T12:32:00.001-08:00

I don't know what brand of coffee beans I grind up and drink in the morning. I couldn't tell you what brand of napkins are sitting on my dining room table. If you asked me right now what brand of jeans I am wearing at this moment, I would not be able to tell you without bending awkwardly and looking at the tag by my ass (even then, they're probably so cheap and so old that the ink on that faux-leather patch is all worn).

Here's what I can tell you: I am currently using a microsoft OS and the firefox browser, I have an apple laptop, an apple i-pod, and a sony portable CD player, and my toilet paper is Charmin. I'm not immune to brand recognition but I guess I only pay attention to those of things that are truly relevant to me and my life.

Oh, and I love the in-and-out burger. I've begun to spot their signs more efficiently than the other big burger chains, even despite the jack-in-box rebranding campaign.

At last, the circle is complete

2009-02-11T12:28:00.001-08:00

No, there's no video in this post. Instead, I found a story on slashdot that I really enjoyed:

"Germany has a new minister of economic affairs. Mr. von und zu Guttenberg is descended from an old and noble lineage, so his official name is very long: Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. When first there were rumors that he would be appointed to the post, someone changed his Wikipedia entry and added the name 'Wilhelm,' so Wikipedia stated his full name as: Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. What resulted from this edit points up a big problem for our information society (in German; Google translation). The German and international press picked up the wrong name from Wikipedia — including well-known newspapers, Internet sites, and TV news such as spiegel.de, Bild, heute.de, TAZ, or Süddeutsche Zeitung. In the meantime, the change on Wikipedia was reverted, with a request for proof of the name. The proof was quickly found. On spiegel.de an article cites Mr. von und zu Guttenberg using his 'full name'; however, while the quote might have been real, the full name seems to have been looked up on Wikipedia while the false edit was in place. So the circle was closed: Wikipedia states a false fact, a reputable media outlet copies the false fact, and this outlet is then used as the source to prove the false fact to Wikipedia."

It was only a matter of time before this happened. I guess when you don't want to pay for your newspaper (and therefore the news reporters) then you shouldn't be surprised when wikipedia becomes one of their major research resources.

Putin's a badass

2009-02-06T12:56:00.000-08:00

So, how horrible would it be if the world found out you dig ABBA? Probably not so horrible, unless you're the ex-leader of Russia.

Even then, it probably wouldn't be so bad. But the BBC is reporting the story, so it must be important, right?

No, probably not.

Obama has a mouth on him.

2009-02-06T12:25:00.000-08:00

Obama like you've never thought you'd hear a president.

Let the splicing begin.

2009-02-04T12:51:00.000-08:00

Man gets quoted cost of data download for his cellphone = .002 cents per kilobyte
Man gets charged .002 dollars per kilobyte
Man calls company to complain and it turns out that the company (Verizon?) thinks .002 cents per kilobyte is equivalent to .oo2 dollars per kilobyte

An actual quote from the video:

Customer: "Do you recognize that there's a difference between One Dollar and One Cent?"
Manager: "Definitely"
Customer: "Do you recognize that there's a difference between Half a Dollar and Half Cent?"
Manager: "Definitely"
Customer: "Then do you recognize that there's a difference between .002 Dollars and .002 Cents?"
Manager: "No"

If we can't get this right, then what hope is there for rational thinking?

The video

It's not a difference of opinion... sigh.

Dear Deer

2009-02-02T00:52:00.000-08:00

This here is officially my favoritest music video of ALL TIME:

You've gotta be more careful

2009-01-28T14:14:00.000-08:00

What was that guy thinking?

the obameter

2009-01-22T13:52:00.001-08:00

It's awesome when the internet does all the work for you. Now, you don't need to do any remembering, or any research to know if Obama is screwing with you: The good people at PolitiFact are doing it all for you with the Obameter.

I'm going to assume that "Obameter" is pronounced with the same vowels and stress pattern as "odometer".

I'm going to assume that it is impossible for all 500+ promises to be kept. But we'll see.

I laughed out loud, several times

2009-01-20T12:05:00.000-08:00

Superuseless superpowers.

It's still relatively young and fresh, and hilarious...

my favorite is "left side levitation", with "13th bullet bulletproof" as a close second.

Christvertising Inc

2009-01-16T10:43:00.001-08:00

I think that this website is supposed to be a joke... but I really can't be sure.

hands

2009-01-16T10:28:00.000-08:00

I thought this video was super clever:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

the fine line between scientist and a-hole

2009-01-06T14:37:00.000-08:00

These pranksters are actually good socio-cognitive researchers.

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

singing duets

2008-12-19T08:05:00.000-08:00

I learned to enjoy Kara-oke (kara=self oke=okestra=orchestra) when I spent time in Japan. At first I hated karaoke because I thought I was a horrible singer and I didn't want to subject anyone to my terrible voice. But then I learned that I'm not actually tone deaf and if I tried I could do a half decent job singing most songs that I was familiar with. Upon that realization I started enjoying karaoke a bit more. But not too much.

The problem was that in Japan the selection of english songs, while large, consisted of the standard items: Golden oldies, The Beatles, 80's long-standers, and modern pop songs by brittany spears and her clones. You could find Green day or Nirvana at some places but that's not so fun to sing. These standard items are ok, but I don't know them so well because they're the kind of music that I deliberately try to stay away from - because I've heard them so much (typically when they first came out, or when I first started listening to the oldies station) . My dislike of a vast majority of songs (very few exceptions) exponentially increases with every listen. And since I don't pay much attention to lyrics I have a ton of trouble karaokeing these tunes.

My biggest problem was male-female duets. They were all basically songs I didn't know so when I was asked to take part it just wasn't easy or fun. I've since thought to myself "what is it about duets that I don't seem to like?"

It turns out that there's probably nothing wrong with duets. Today, as I was listening to my iTunes collection while working, a song from a cd that I've owned for a while came on. It was a duet, and one that I actually liked quite a lot. That song is from a more-than-half-decent-band who call themselves "Stars."

Here it is:

	Stars - Your Ex-Lover Is Dead

	Found at skreemr.com

So there's a duet that I'd be happy to sing (especially since it's short and I know most of the lyrics). Now to find a karaoke place in California that actually has it on their machine...

Of course there won't be, because I'm sure songs need to be licensed for karaoke use and pitzy little indie bands don't (or aren't asked to) license their songs.

language and the brain

2008-12-17T13:31:00.000-08:00

This old woman suffering from dementia was having trouble remembering words for actions (verbs). She didn't seem to have trouble remembering names for items or locations (nouns). Scientists were a little stumped so they did tests and sure enough this old lady seemed clearly to have trouble with verbs but not nouns. This looked like a new form of aphasia... pretty crazy stuff.

Then these other researchers did another test, using a different methodology, with the woman. they showed her a video of an action (instead of a picture of an action, like the other researchers were doing) and she was able to remember the names for the verbs she saw performed.

So it turns out, this woman can only remember verbs when she actually sees them performed, but she cannot if she sees them drawn as in a comic book.

Yet another reason why it's absolutely ridiculous that there are linguists still out there who are doing linguistics while ignoring all other aspects of cognition...

Television

2008-12-17T09:29:00.000-08:00

I don't often say that I love some tv show, but I love Flight of the Conchords. The last show that I said I loved was Firefly. Flight of the Conchords is at least as good as Firefly but in a very different way. If you haven't seen Flight of the Conchords I highly recommend renting the two DVDs of their first (and currently only) season.

Today I found out that they have begun broadcasting their diminished second season. The first episode is available online. But I don't recommend watching it if you haven't seen the first season, not because it won't be funny to you -- because it will... it will be funny to the MAX -- but because if you are set up for all the jokes it might be funny to the MAX times 10. And you shouldn't deprive yourself of the that much funny.

in harmony with one's self

2008-12-15T10:12:00.000-08:00

I first heard of fredo viola a couple of years ago when the internet brought me his 'sad song'.

His full album was recently released on itunes. But to more easily appreciate his music you should get a taste for how he makes it by going to its flash-heavy website.

Prop 8: the musical!

2008-12-03T19:58:00.001-08:00

coolest thing I've seen all week:

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

When two people disagree, usually, one of them is wrong

2008-11-24T18:44:00.000-08:00

This Peter Schiff guy got it exactly right, over two years ago. I'm sure he wasn't the only guy to have this idea, he was the guy who stuck his neck out on tv and said it would happen in a couple of years. Kudos to him.

I'm not really surprised

2008-11-24T18:04:00.000-08:00

We elect people into public office. We'd like to think that those people have a good knowledge of basic civics. We'd like to think that, but we probably shouldn't.

It turns out that, on average, they can be more ignorant about civics than the average shmo.

Here is the quiz.

I got 88% right, or 29/33.

Are you a bad person if you got 44%? Certainly not. But of the various general knowledge that is critical to know in order to be a proficient US citizen, I'd put civics pretty high up there... I'd go as far as to say that you might want to get at least a C on this test if you want to consider yourself a knowledgeable voter. As for myself... I'm ashamed of my 88%.

Don't read webcomics in lecture.

2008-11-24T09:05:00.000-08:00

This comic made me giggle out loud, in class. It's ok though, I'm a TA and I've already heard the lecture.

via The Joy of Tech

Genesis 8

2008-11-21T13:23:00.000-08:00

We had recently read that 40 days (and an equal number of nights) go by with constant rain. However, in the initial few passages it seems that the waters took an additional 110 to recede.

But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; ²the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, ³and the waters gradually receded from the earth. At the end of one hundred and fifty days the waters had abated; ⁴and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. ⁵The waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared.

Eventually, we saw, the tops of the mountains appeared. Our author then takes us back forty days before the waters receded (I think) in verse 6.

6 At the end of forty days Noah opened the window of the ark that he had made ⁷and sent out the raven; and it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth.

Whatever happened to the raven? Nevermore.

⁸Then he sent out the dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground; ⁹but the dove found no place to set its foot, and it returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took it and brought it into the ark with him. ¹⁰He waited another seven days, and again he sent out the dove from the ark; ¹¹and the dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth. ¹²Then he waited another seven days, and sent out the dove; and it did not return to him any more.

Can you imagine a scenario where you are stuck on a mountain and you can't tell if the waters have receded from the earth, such that you need to release a dove to tell you? Remember, you are in a boat, immobilized, it seems, on top of a mountain. You'd think that if you open the boat's window and, remember you are on top of a mountain, you see water all around you, on top of a mountain, then you can be pretty sure that if you drop in elevation you are going to find more water. I guess that it's possible that you might be in a high altitude lake... One so large that you can't see land in any direction (no such lake exists on earth currently, but after a worldwide flood a temporary one may have existed). I guess my point here is that I don't understand how it's logically possible that Noah's bird could have grabbed an olive branch somewhere on earth while at the same time Noah's Ark was stuck on mt ararat. It would be possible for the dove to have gotten hold of an olive branch IF the ark was floating freely somewhere far away from any elevated place. But this simply does not fit with the events as they are chronologically described.

13 In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth; and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and saw that the face of the ground was drying. ¹⁴In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth was dry. ¹⁵Then God said to Noah, ¹⁶‘Go out of the ark, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. ¹⁷Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.’ ¹⁸So Noah went out with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. ¹⁹And every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out of the ark by families.
20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt-offerings on the altar.

So we've got Noah sacrificing all the clean animals here (at least I think that's what's happening, since I'm not sure what "took of every clean animal" means). It doesn't specify whether he sacrifices all of the additional 6 pairs, or just a single animal, such that the pairs of clean animals are still grater than any individual unclean animal pair type.

²¹And when the Lord smelt the pleasing odour, the Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.

God smells burning scents (either the animal's flesh or some kind of pleasant smelling herb) and decides then not to do any more mass killings, regardless of whether the human race becomes wicked again.

²²As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night,
shall not cease.’

At least this sounds like good news. But I wonder about God's intentions here. Does he simply know that we'll never be as evil again, or is he sorry he had to kill everything the first time and vows never to do it again regardless of what happens?

Despite our inability to ever truly know what God's intentions were and are, I think it's strange that we can allow ourselves to believe the stories of Noah and not question everyone's motives. If there is anything to be learned from this story, I think it's that God has the power to end everything in the an incredibly horrible way, but he promises not to do it... again.

the worst day of my life

2008-11-21T13:21:00.001-08:00

I believe the children are our future.

out of touch

2008-11-14T10:27:00.000-08:00

Kudos to the ASU Men's and Women's track teams for making Bush pose with the shocker.

I wonder how long that picture will be up on the white house website.

Intuiton

2008-11-11T07:17:00.000-08:00

In popular culture "human intuition" is exalted. Intuition is what helps the clever police detective to catch the evil doer. Intuition is what helps the scientist discover flubber. Intuition gets the job done.

In reality, however, intuition probably causes more problems than it actually solves.

Let me explain.

I remember the day, many many years ago, when I first learned about the gravity experiments which claim that it doesn't matter how heavy an object is, everything is pulled to earth at the same speed. This means that if you have two iron balls of equal size and shape, but one is hollow and the other is solid, they will still hit the earth at the same time if dropped from an equal distance. Of course, there is the problem of terminal velocity, which is the maximum speed attainable by an object due to environmental drag (basically, as you fall through the air, there is wind resistance. Depending on your mass and shape, there is a critical speed at which you can no longer accelerate toward the ground due to the friction). But if you eliminate wind resistance a feather and a hammer, dropped from anywhere in the sky will fall with the exact same (incrasing) velocity and hit the ground together.

But this goes well against our intuition. I know this because I was blown away when I first learned this. I remember thinking "why is my teacher lying to us?". Then I saw the video of a tube containing a feather and a coin. Air is removed from this tube, the tube is then quickly flipped and, sure enough, the feather and the coin fall at the exact same speed and hit the other end of the tube together.

My intuition about falling objects was wrong. It was based on faulty assumptions which ignored things like friction of the air or faulty assumptions which didn't take into account what 'mass' or 'weight' actually meant or what gravity really referred to.

Throughout my life I've repeatedly learned how our human intuition is continuously wrong.

Other examples of human intution or faulty logic getting things wrong:

When you are hit by a bullet, your body does not fly backward. The bullet has high velocity but low mass. So the force (and momentum) is not large enough to displace your much more massive body (thanks for filming the proof, Mythbusters!)
The reason you shouldn't go swimming after eating is because of the exertion on your muscle tissue can cause cramps which could cause you to drown. It has nothing to do with the water making contact with your body. So it's perfectly fine to eat in the shower.
You can divide any finite line, say a one inch long line drawn on piece of paper, into an infinite number of segments.
If you give your baby up for adoption and a couple from Germany adopts her, the child will grow up speaking German. And when they start learning English in school, she will not have some kind of benefit, or advantage, learning English just because English is the native language of her parents.

Now, that last one might seem obvious, but it really isn't obvious to people who don't think through their intuition logically. In his interesting book "Mr China" Tim Clissold recounts an anecdote where he is speaking to a large community of older Chinese folks. He asks them how they feel about so many westerners adopting Chinese babies. All of the folks are actually happy that people are adopting the children. Tim is surprised by this answer and asks "well, aren't you sad that the child will grow up not knowing the culture, not speaking the language?" and the people respond with incredulity. They say "of course they'll learn the language. They're Chinese! How can they not speak Chinese?"

The people Tim was talking to had an intuition that the Chinese language was a inextricable component of the Chinese person, that it didn't matter where a Chinese person was raised, they would always be able to speak Chinese because it was in their blood (I'm not sure that they would have assumed it was genetic since I'm not sure how sophisticated their knowledge of genetics actually is).

Our human intuitions (accompanied by unexamination or faulty logic) leads us to make some pretty stupid decisions.

I believe that it is this faulty intuition that passed Proposition 8 in California. People have this intuition that the institution of marriage is inextricably linked to religion and it thusly falls under a moral rubric. Supporters of prop 8 did not see this as a proposition to take away people's right to marry. They saw this as a proposition which would redefine what marriage is. Many people who voted yes on prop 8 did so with the assumption that they weren't taking anything away since homosexual couples could still get civil unions. They just felt that marriage was a covenant of God and God does not want two men or two women entering that covenant.

There are two main failures of intuition here (probably more):

The first is that marriage acutally holds a place in our society that goes beyond the bounds of religion. It is a social institution. The feeling that marriage is religiusly bounded and therefore applicable to redefinition in a constitution is faulty intuition.

The second is that homosexuality is not a choice. If a gay person wants to get married now they can't just choose to fall in love with a person of the opposite sex. The idea that homosexuality is unnatural is faulty intuition. (God is not testing or punishing gay people either, so if you think that, you need to re-examine your logic)

These two faulty intuitions come together to trump Californian's aversion to "taking rights away". The argument that Proposition 8 is akin to the "seperate but equal," J.Crow laws is absolutely accurate. But a person who is holding the two faulty intutions above can refute this by saying:

"Marriage is a religius institution, it isn't a water fountain. You need the public service of a water fountain, but you don't need to get married. After all, you can still get a civil union! Also being black and being gay are not the same. Being black is genetic, being gay is a choice."

So prop 8 passed.

I don't think it will be long before prop 8, and all the other constitutional amendments made accross the country's states will be talked about in history classes as the Jim Crow laws are talked about now: A relic of our ignorant past.

But there are even more pressing issues, like in Arkansas.
There, the faulty intution is that kids growing up in a home with a mother and a father are better off than kids growing up in a home with a mother and a mother. This intuition is so faulty that it isn't only NOT backed up by any data, but it is actually REFUTED by the data.

I'm happy that our country was able to elect a black president but we still have a long way to go.

Vote! because your neighbors are watching.

2008-10-27T15:51:00.000-07:00

Is this really cool or really sad?

Funny

2008-10-27T12:49:00.001-07:00

I was eating my lunch when I put the following video on. It made me laugh so hard that spewed my food all over my keyboard.

Maxwell Street

2008-10-27T09:42:00.000-07:00

When I was a high school student taking a semester (or a year) of American History, we did a week or two on local History. For that class I wrote a research paper on Chicago's famous Maxwell Street (which, at the time, had disappeared only a few years prior). My history teacher sent that paper in to some contest, without informing me, and I won some prize. The prize wasn't monetary, it was more like something that I can put on my college application (I don't think I ever did).

Anyway, what's my point? Well, I don't think I won that contest because I was a great writer (though, without knowing the writing ability of my peers, I can't say for sure how to define mediocrity) . Instead, I think that I just really cared about the subject matter. My research on Maxwell street was my introduction to American Sociology. It was an example of how despite all the differences between American culture and the European/Italian culture I grew up in there were some really fundamental similarities. It's a lesson that has stayed with me for the rest of my life.

A few months ago, I learned of this movie and I really hope to get to see it soon.

I speak about 150 languages.

2008-10-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

When I tell someone I study Linguistics the first question I get (95% of the time) is "How many languages do you speak?".

The answer is 2 fluently, 2 barely. But I know the characteristics of dozens of languages, I just can't speak them. But linguists don't need to speak more than one or two languages. And the only reason why they're expected to know more than one has to do with historical accident. A linguist just has to know things about languages.

The thing that interests me most about linguistics is that there's so much interesting stuff happening when we talk (in any language) and we typically never think about it.

But none of that really matters because the average joe the plumber knows little about Linguistics. So they'll keep asking "How many languages do you speak?" when I tell them I study Linguistics. From now on, I'm going to answer "About 150"

My new favoritest quote

2008-10-24T08:57:00.000-07:00

"I have so often seen how people come by the name of genius; in the same way, that is, as certain insects come by the name of millipede — not because they have that number of feet, but because most people won't count up to fourteen." — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

rednecks for obama

2008-10-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed reading this article on 'rednecks for obama' a couple of days ago. Just stumbled on it again because firefox's address bar is all complicated.

Genesis 7, after a long absence.

2008-10-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

I'm not giving up on a critical reading of the bible. I've just been very busy with life. Here we go:

Then the Lord said to Noah, ‘Go into the ark, you and all your household, for I have seen that you alone are righteous before me in this generation. ²Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and its mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate; ³and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth. ⁴For in seven days I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights; and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.’ ⁵And Noah did all that the Lord had commanded him.

When I first heard this story I was actually 11 years old. At that age I was still an avid lover of animals. I had been since I was at least 5. I had a set of collector's cards, printed on each of these cards were the facts of some animal (things like their location and habitat on earth, what they ate, whether they were diurnal or nocturnal, etc). I had about 600 of these cards and I didn't even have the complete set. So when I was told this story my first thought was NO WAY! You can't fit all these animals on a boat, there's too many! And they wouldn't get along, most would be pray but many would be predators. They need room to survive!

I brought that up in my chatechism class (where I remember first hearing this story) and I was given two possible answers. The first was definitely NOT part of canon "Noah didn't take all the animals. he left some behind and they either survived by swimming or God re-created them later." The second answer was the answer that people who believe in the literal interpretation continue to use: "It was a miracle."

I certainly couldn't argue with that. So then came my second question: "what's an unclean animal?" I assume there must be one true answer to this question, but it seems that different religions have different answers to these questions. But what did God mean when he used this terminology? Will we ever know? Why do they get a slimmer chance to survive? Does unclean mean bad?

6 Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters came on the earth. ⁷And Noah with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives went into the ark to escape the waters of the flood. ⁸Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of birds, and of everything that creeps on the ground, ⁹two and two, male and female, went into the ark with Noah, as God had commanded Noah. ¹⁰And after seven days the waters of the flood came on the earth.
11 In the six-hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. ¹²The rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights. ¹³On the very same day Noah with his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons, entered the ark, ¹⁴they and every wild animal of every kind, and all domestic animals of every kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every bird of every kind—every bird, every winged creature. ¹⁵They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of life. ¹⁶And those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him; and the Lord shut him in.
17 The flood continued for forty days on the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it rose high above the earth. ¹⁸The waters swelled and increased greatly on the earth; and the ark floated on the face of the waters. ¹⁹The waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered; ²⁰the waters swelled above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. ²¹And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings; ²²everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. ²³He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. ²⁴And the waters swelled on the earth for one hundred and fifty days.

God could have snapped his fingers and made all evil things dissappear. God can do anything. God, decided that the horrifying method of death by drowning would be more fitting. It wasn't until I got to High School that I realized how horrifying this was. God loves all of his children, so I've been told. Tough love doesn't even begin to describe Genesis 7.

Why are we so complacent about the TSA?

2008-10-22T09:14:00.001-07:00

The TSA doesn't make us safe. The TSA makes a lot of us simply feel safe. So my question to you is "How much are you willing to pay for that feeling of safety?" Are you willing to pay 6.8 billion dollars?

I'm not willing to pay the 6.8 billion dollars they're getting.

Now, you might be one of those people who thinks that the TSA is keeping us safe. That may be a debatable point. Now, I know that the TSA is not mostly responsible for preventing us from taking a bottle of water onto the plane, or making us put our mini tube of toothpaste into a plastic baggie. I know that they also put "security officers" onto trains and subway stations. I just don't think that this is money well spent. 6.8 billion dollars! For the illusion of safety?

Read this article.

I've had plenty of personal experience with the TSA at airports and I have never been pleased with their work. At their very best their presence delays me by a minute.

The only way that the Aviation division of the TSA is going to catch a terrorist is to literally arrest anyone attempting to take a container of liquid larger than 3oz. Any leniency, any mistake can lead to a disaster. We've fixed a leaky bucket by putting it over another leaky bucket. Only the second leaky bucket costs an average of 3.8 billion dollars a year (since 2001).

I'm sick of our complacency about this. Just because the average American never goes anywhere near an airport doesn't mean we should put up with the inanity of the TSA's aviation division. And we definitely shouldn't put up with giving them another 6.8 billion dollars.

But seriously. Read that article.

Sarah Palin

2008-10-12T16:05:00.001-07:00

I got this before the crew at language log!

Proof that I have free time, but not enough

2008-10-06T13:10:00.000-07:00

If I had more free time I would be having this argument with someone. However, I do seem to find the time to discover that the argument has been had before.

Want to be informed?

2008-10-03T13:00:00.000-07:00

Read this article and be more informed. It'll only take 15 minutes of your life. I promise, it's worth it.

Why I wouldn't vote for McCain

2008-10-03T10:37:00.000-07:00

I listen to political stories on NPR very often (I basically use their rss feed to hand pick the stories I want to listen to) and, as with any other news organization, they often interview the man or woman 'on the street' about who they think they'll vote for and why.

A bit more than half the time I hear supporters of McCain talking about how they like his experience and his character. The rest of the time, McCain supporters just don't like Obama for one reason or another (they don't seem to mention any of McCain's positive qualities, they just focus on Obama's negative ones).

As for the Obama supporters, half the time I hear them talking about that mystical "change" while the other half they talk about how horrible the past 8 years have been (like the McCain supporters, choosing to focus on the negative qualities of a republican administration rather than Obama's positive qualities).

If I were to be interviewed by an organization like NPR and they asked me who I would support in this election, here's what I would say:

"I can't guarantee that I would vote for Obama because living in a state which is strongly democratic, I believe my vote might best be served as a vote to a third party candidate since I strongly object to a party system, let alone a dual party system, for the presidency (for the house and senate seats, a party system is fine, though I would prefer a multi-party system).

However, if the choice was between these two men alone I would choose Obama.

There are several reasons why I would choose Obama over McCain. Here are three.

Obama has managed to make me strongly believe that he is an intelligent, clever, and thoughtful human being. Despite his incredibly busy lifestyle he seems to be remarkably informed about so many different subjects: From issues related to what ethanol means to midwestern farmers, to issues related to what is the fundamental differences among Sunni and Shia muslims. He can learn and digest these issues quickly and he can speak intelligently about them to audiences of different knowledge levels. He is smart, and that shouldn't just count for something in a president. That should be the number one most important issue (not the only issue, but the most important). Somehow, the issue of intelligence has become embroiled into this other issue of Elitism. That's incredibly disheartening but that's for another rant.

Second, I feel more comfortable with where Obama comes from, his child hood, the difficulties he was able to overcome (with respect to his race and his lack of contact with his father and mother). Any human being who can go through that and come out as well adjusted as Obama gets additional points. Not to mention the fact that Obama didn't grow up well-to-do. He may not have been poor, but the majority of the opportunities he has had he had to fight for. I believe that the kind of childhood that Obama experienced leads a person to mature at an early age. But more importantly, it gives a person the perspective shared by a much larger portion of the US population. Obama knows what it's like to be middle class because he was middle class and he has friends who are middle class.

Furthermore, Obama has more or less stuck to his promise to eliminate special interest groups from the presidential procedure. I have never understood how ANYONE could see lobbying as a positive thing. I mean, I understand that somebody needs to be in Washington speaking for those issues that are being ignored, issues that don't have a voice. But the fact that this system of lobbying has devolved into what it is today is shocking, embarrassing, and completely maddening. The fact that people around me are not as appalled as I am about this makes me very sad, mostly because it has forced the Obama campaign to stop using this as a major talking point since nobody gives a shit. But Obama has done a good job stepping away from the pockets of oil companies and other big corporations, and he has managed to get pretty far doing so when no one thought it could happen.

Those are the main reasons why I would vote for Obama. There are many others, but we'll stick to those for now.

Why wouldn't I vote for McCain?

McCain has not given me enough evidence that he is an intelligent man. That's not to say that he doesn't know things. His experience has certainly made him knowledgeable. And McCain has many great qualities, qualities that he fostered in his time in the military and as the progenitor of two four-star generals. Qualities like honor and courage and a well developed sense of justice. These are all qualities which will serve a president well, but they aren't enough. John McCain doesn't seem to be able to quickly think himself through a tough question. John McCain lacks information about a great many topics. Despite his long time in the Senate, John McCain has not kept up with or dove deep into many issues which are going to be critical in the next 4 years. Issues like the Economy, African Geopolitics, Midwestern issues, Science: These are issues that John McCain has not been able to speak about intelligently without being prepped by his advisers. Now, I know that advisers are going to be necessary. No human being can know something about everything. But I do want my president to take a personal interest in all of the issues, not just the ones which happen to be critical for you because you are a member of some subcommittee. I want my president to know everything that I know about the world PLUS MORE. I know John McCain knows more about certain things than I do, but McCain lacks knowledge about things that I know very well, things that I'm not even that interested about, things that I just managed to learn because I picked up a national geographic magazine or a news paper, and things that a president should know. On the other hand, Obama's level of knowledge about these things always seems to shock and surprise me. Obama has proven to me that he knows more than I do about things a president should know.

Next, McCain had a privileged childhood. The grandson of a four-star general and the son of a four-star general is going to be a member of the upper class. He's never going to grow up eating Spam or mac and cheese. He's going to go to some of the best schools and he's going to interact with children who are going to be tomorrow's CEOs. There are benefits to growing up privileged, of course. Going to the best schools is going to give you a leg up in terms of knowledge. You'll have the opportunities to travel the world and learn more about it. You are (presumably) not going to have to waste your time flipping burgers or working retail to make enough money to buy a beat up chevy to drive your ass around. But it's going to give you a profound sense of what America is that is certainly not the sense I (and many other Americans) share.

Lastly, McCain is absolutely going to enforce the status quo. There was a time when McCain deserved the moniker "Maverick". He actually did approach the middle of the aisle on many issues. In 2000, if I hadn't vote for Nader, I would have actually considered McCain as a possibility (whereas Bush couldn't hold a candle to anyone else in that election). But he must have learned a brutal lesson in 2000. The only way to win the republican vote (or, arguably, the democratic vote) is to polarize, to stick to the yelling points and to hug and appease the televangelists and to complain about the size of government and reduce the opposition to the phrase "tax and spend liberal", repeating it until it loses all meaning. McCain of 2000 is not McCain of 2008. I respect the fact that he disagreed with a lot of what Bush stood for, but McCain's agenda is no longer what it used to be. McCain's agenda is now equivalent to the Republican agenda. And the Republican agenda simply doesn't work. It hasn't worked for 8 years and it isn't going to work in the next 4.

Listen, I'm all for smaller government and state's rights. If each individual state chose how it wanted to handle abortion or health care things would be more manageable. But I don't share the optimism that Republicans share about how human beings go about their daily lives. People are greedy, people are mean, people don't trust each other, people don't make rational decisions and choices, people don't know how to save their money, people in high places don't care about people in low places because they can't relate or because there are more pressing issues, people will only look out for themselves and their immediate family members, people will drive drunk, people will use their weapons to kill other people (guns, knives, baseball bats, or electrical wire), people will speed on the highway, people will put dangerous chemicals in the cheetos because it is cost effective, people will not follow emissions standards because it if fantastically easy to rationalize it as someone else's problem.

For as early as I can remember, the republican agenda, while often admirable like the libertarian agenda, seems to rest on this notion that people are generally good and things will work out on their own without the intervention of some oppressive government. I would like that to be true, and I also think that people are generally good BUT NOT WHEN IT COUNTS. I've seen people I care about a lot, and think very highly of, be complete assholes about really important things. It is a constant struggle for me to keep myself in check, I do stupid things that harm others more often than I care to admit! Therefore I fundamentally deny the conclusions resulting from the republican perspective. Ironically, the republican ideologies of 'lower spending', 'smaller government,' and 'pull yourselves up by your bootstraps interaction with the citizenry' are disappearing from the party actions even though they are more prevolent in the rhetoric, basing the differences between the Democrats and Republicans on false ideologies. But that's for another rant.

In short: McCain is not clever enough to be president, he doesn't share my basic values, and he is stuck in the non-functioning republican ideology, mostly as a result of his campaign tactics. Obama is smart, shares my basic values, and truly wants to change the way the political process runs (whether he'll be able to or not is a different question). Am i going to vote for Obama? I'm not sure yet since I have the luxury of living in California. But if McCain gets into office it will be another blow to my already crumbling expectations of my fellow Americans.

Oh, and if I hear another man on the street interview where the man on the street says "McCain has experience and Obama hasn't got any" or "I think we need Change and Obama can bring us that change" I'm going to throw my shoe at the tv/radio. If a person can't have a more complex thought about these two men running for the highest office in the land then either
A: you aren't doing your interview right
B: they are uninformed and don't deserve to be interviewed and put on the radio
C: they haven't thought about the issue hard enough and don't deserve to be interviewed and put on the radio
D: we are truly doomed as a society.

Thank you"

That's how I would answer the question. It would be edited by the producers, or cut entirely.

Agreed

2008-10-02T15:52:00.000-07:00

The funny funny-man John Hodgman makes a sobering point in his blog.

ADVANTAGE PALIN.

The daily show gets daily showed?

2008-10-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday Bill Maher came on the daily show. In '99, Bill Maher came on the daily show and had some pretty interesting things to tell John Stewart about McCain.

I think sarah silverman is very funny

2008-09-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if a gentile is allowed to find this video hilarious, but I do:

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

Yeah, low poverty and a good lifestyle provides you with the opportunity to grow taller

2008-09-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

John McCain, in the debate last Friday, mentioned that North Koreans are an average 3 inches shorter than their South Korean counterparts. He was using this as striking evidence for the difference in lifestyle between a free nation (S.Korean) and a nation under tyranny (N.Korea).

Today I read a cool article in the NYT which uses the population height measure to compare Americans to Western Europeans.

Guess who's shorter?

McCain wins debate?

2008-09-26T12:43:00.000-07:00

According to a blog post on the washington post's website, internet ads are appearing which make the claim that McCain 'won' the debate (which hasn't taken place yet).

This is silliness on at least 2 levels.

Blog of Revelation

What does "blind" mean?

The problem with opposition to health care reform by reasonable americans

Estonians rock?

Vonnegut said it well

porn on the floor? possibly knotcaphe fourwirk

Singlish + comedy = singlish comedy?

You and me, in the nude, if that's what you're into

Lewontin wrote a book with Chomskey and it has fuck-all to do with linguistics

Science can be creative (and fun)

extreme

11 year old alcoholics

300th post: revisitng intuitiveness and sports science

science v culture multiplied by infants

Sybiotic birds

How things are done on one side of the Atlantic

Artificial languages on 70's television

Jack Churchill was a badass

You have to be rich to be poor

Komodo Dragons are still cool, just less so

English is English, except when it's not

Seriously: Jonathan Coulton

Zombies and the absurd

Scientists, they can be right, then wrong, then right again, finally ending up on being wrong

Art

Gender stereotypes are funny

Judge Antonin Scalia needs to pay attention to that modern-fangled technology

euler and the pitfalls of foreign surname pronunciation

Use headphones to get the fullest effect

When politics, religion, and health crises clash

Paper Hearts

How we (liguists) roll.

Como hacer un Bebe

Hidden Camera's are one of humanity's greatest and worst invention

A whole new take on Zipf's Law

more youtube genius

Stop motion excellence, from the people that brought you Sushi and Toyotas

new york screamers

They were this really funny comedy troupe

Shenanigans

God protects us, don't you know

Mad scientists?

I used to respect the UN

Kings

Work and Play

do I or don't I double that L?

I think it should be called FACE DANCE (or feesu daansu)

That dream where you forget you signed up for that class and haven't gone to it all semester and a project/final is coming up...

Damn

Take-off rap

Critical Discourse Analysis and why I fucking despise it

MICROsoft!

2 things I miss

John turturro

The thatcher effect

Interpret your dissertation through dance

Don't lay down on train tracks, especially when you are sleepy

I was a nerd

Good ole Bernie always knows what to say to cheer me up

Brands

At last, the circle is complete

Putin's a badass

Obama has a mouth on him.

Dear Deer

You've gotta be more careful

the obameter

I laughed out loud, several times

Christvertising Inc

more and more videos

hands

the fine line between scientist and a-hole

singing duets

language and the brain

Television

in harmony with one's self

Prop 8: the musical!

When two people disagree, usually, one of them is wrong

I'm not really surprised

Don't read webcomics in lecture.

Genesis 8