some-antics.com

An LA friend of mine told me about this cool event, DJ Relay, hosted by Betalevel in a basement in Los Angeles’ Chinatown:

DJs and original composers create 20 minute sets of live electronic soundscapes and beats, showcasing their styles in unique blends of digital and analog, mind and body, hamster and corm.

Then prepare to mix it up with both hands and several feet in collaborative tag-team action relay with dj dali and the evening’s performers!

It’s this Friday, March 23, starting at 8:30 pm. Cost of admission: none!

emma :: Mar.22.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »

Today’s xkcd:

emma :: Mar.20.2007 :: misc, nerdiness :: 1 Comment »

NPR’s All Songs Considered is making Explosions in the Sky’s latest performance in Washington, D.C. available here, and also as a podcast (see the ASC site link to subscribe). The tracks are from the latest Explosions release All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone.

emma :: Mar.20.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »

By way of a link to a Lambda-the-Ultimate post from Nathan, here’s an interesting paper that attempts to avoid some paradox of Frege’s.

This paper claims that you can allow unrestricted impredicative quantification if you keep careful track of Frege’s sense-reference distinction, and distinguish between predicates and names of predicates. This (if it really works — I haven’t done more than skim the paper yet) would be a different method of using a predicative hierarchy to avoid the paradoxes.

Paul C. Gilmore’s An Intentional Type Theory: Motivation and Cut-Elimination

Disclaimer: I haven’t yet had the time to read the paper, so by “interesting”, I mean that I’m interested in looking at it myself :-P Mostly, this post was to serve as a later reminder for me to read it! And yes, I will indeed post comments & observations when I get around to it.

emma :: Mar.19.2007 :: misc, semantics, logic, philosophy :: 1 Comment »

The department’s open house/interview period has been going on this week (what those in the know call “Circus Days”) and there’s been some strict name-tag-wearing rule enforced. Polly came into syntax with hers, which was:

Polly Jacobson
λP[P(p)]

Simon’s was: [[Simon]]^{w, g_c} (And yes, Polly loved Simon’s g.)

And mine?

ιx[semanticist’(x)]

Whenever I came near Polly or Simon at dinner, I threw my hands up in the air and screamed “Undefined! Undefined!” Teehee.

emma :: Mar.16.2007 :: misc, semantics, linguistics, nerdiness :: No Comments »

…so asked one of the people in my prosody class during my presentation today of Gussenhoven’s 2002 paper on biological codes and universal vs. language-specific intonational meanings.

My response? “It’s a…a…an intonational thing that carries meaning.” I was looking for the word unit, grr. Instead, the whole class laughed at me. D’oh.

emma :: Mar.13.2007 :: misc, phonology, linguistics :: 16 Comments »

The Simpsons, on grad students.

(Props to Sophie for this.)

emma :: Mar.12.2007 :: misc, pop-culture :: No Comments »

Emma Cunningham: ok, so the million-dollar question: what do you do with a continuation?
Aidan Kehoe: the only good answer I’ve seen to that has been from Paul Graham*

And, of course, from Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan re: natural language semantics, teehee.

(Thanks again, Aidan, for your lovely explanation of continuations!)

*This is funny. I mention this only because I’m sure the non-Lispers of you reading this are probably thinking Why did she make a post out of this? So I explain, it’s funny. That’s why.

emma :: Mar.12.2007 :: misc, programming :: 1 Comment »

From Chapter 3 of Kratzer’s the Event Argument, discussed today at the Semantics Reading Group:

The theme relation may not qualify as a ‘natural’ category at all. What are natural categories? Any theory of lexical acquisition must make some distinction between categories that are natural and those that are not. Very roughly, the natural categories are those that humans take to be candidates for denotations of simple lexical items, spontaneously and without any explicit instruction or definition. The most famous example of a non-natural category is the property ‘grue’ discussed by Nelson Goodman in the fifties. An object is grue if it is green and has been examined before a fixed time, say December 31, 2010, or else it is blue, and has not been examined before December 31, 2010. All emeralds that have been examined so far are grue as well as green. But for some reason - and this is Goodman’s puzzle - grueness, unlike greenness, is not a category that humans come up with naturally when presented with emeralds, grass, or frogs, for example. To be sure, the concept of grueness can be grasped by human minds, but if it is, it’s on the basis of a verbal definition. The theme relation may not be quite as gruesome as grueness, but unlike the agent relation, it may still not qualify as a natural relation.

Grue just lends itself so nicely to all sorts of cute puns.  If I grue up, I’d stop being so amused by them ;-P

emma :: Mar.07.2007 :: misc, semantics, philosophy, linguistics :: No Comments »

I passed the 10,000 song mark in my iTunes library today.  Currently, I’m at 10,008 songs, 33.2 days, 66.37 GB.  Data hoarding, woo!

emma :: Mar.07.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »