(without really teaching it)
It’s Alligator Eggs!, a logic/puzzle game which uses alligators, their eggs and notions of familial bond and hunger to teach the basics of the (untyped) lambda calculus. I tend to cringe at “edutainment”, but this is just too cutesy to not love.
emma :: May.30.2007 :: misc, logic, nerdiness :: 1 Comment »
By way of Lambda the Ultimate, the announcement for a book called Real World Haskell:
Don Stewart, John Goerzen and I are excited to announce that we’re working on a book for O’Reilly, the title of which is “Real-World Haskell”. We hope that the book will be useful for getting people quickly bootstrapped into applying Haskell to real problems, and shedding the language’s undeserved “academic only” aura. We’re delighted that O’Reilly has agreed to publish the book under a Creative Commons license, so we’ll be able to make it available to as many people as possible.
W00t! The site for the book itself is here.
emma :: May.29.2007 :: misc, programming language, programming :: No Comments »
Going to school at USC had afforded me the privilege of knowing a lot of people in the cinema school (I was even a film minor for about a year, back when I thought I was going to go into some sort of law and I had this notion of going into entertainment law). A lot of the film people at ‘SC just seemed to be the same sort of I-like-George-Lucas-maybe-if-I-jump-through-the-right-hoops-I-can-be-like-him-too scenster people (sort of the same model of people you found in the business school but with some air of artistic pretension), but I had the pleasure of befriending one beautifully creative soul by the name of Elizabeth Acosta. Liz is one of the coolest people I know and even though we seem to be very different, I think we’re quite similar in a lot of ways. She’s one of those people who does what she loves, which shows in the work that she creates.
Check out her short “Over It”, which she’s about to enter into some fancy schmancy Echo Park film series:
emma :: May.20.2007 :: misc :: 1 Comment »
From W.V. Quine Word and Object Section 23 “Relative Clauses. Indefinite Singular Terms”, cited in Partee (1975):
“At any rate the peculiar genius of the relative clause is that it creates from a sentence ‘…x…’ a complex adjective summing up what that sentence says about x. Sometimes the same effect could be got by dropping ‘x is’, as in the last example, or by other expedients; thus in the case of ‘I bought x’, ‘bought by me’ (formed by conversion and application) would serve as well as the relative clause ‘which I bought’. But often, as in the case of ‘the bell tolls for x’, the relative clause is the most concise adjective available for the purpose.”
“The ’such that’ construction is thus more flexible than the ‘which’ construction. But what is more striking is the power and flexibility of either of these constructions as contrasted with the earlier or ‘algebraic’ ways of deriving general terms: such operations as attributive juxtaposition, application of relative terms, conversion to passive voice, derelativization (’brother’ from ‘brother of’), and the joining of terms by ‘and’ and ‘or’. It is not obvious that any preassigned finite set of algebraic operations could suffice for the work of all relative clauses; though actually Schönfinkel’s work, which marked the inception of combinatory logic, may be said to establish an affirmative answer to that question.”
emma :: May.18.2007 :: misc, semantics, philosophy, linguistics :: No Comments »
Last night there was a segment on the Daily Show called “Nip/Talk” in which a correspondent interviewed first a dermatologist and then a speech coach. The second half involved instruction on the importance of signaling your end of turn in an interview, reminiscent of the Beattie 1982 paper we read in Speech Prosody this semester, where the conversation styles of Margaret Thatcher and Jim Callahan were compared.
emma :: May.16.2007 :: misc, phonology, phonetics, linguistics, pop-culture :: No Comments »
I just got this e-mail from Brown’s Vice President of Administration:
The National Weather Service has issued a weather advisory for this afternoon and evening for potential strong thunderstorms. Also there is a tornado watch until 6:00 PM this evening.
I’ve never been in a place where a tornado watch was even possible.
Something about this is wonderful and absurd. I’ve been having cross reactions to almost everything I eat now (ah, the luxury of being a vegetarian), so I’m looking forward to rain. I guess a tornado watch isn’t the same as a tornado warning, but I still have my fingers crossed. I want to see some lightning and farmyard animals in the sky.
emma :: May.16.2007 :: misc :: 1 Comment »
I’ve never felt more miserable from the coming of a season that is supposed to be pleasant and relaxing. My mom has pretty bad allergies to pollen, but I’ve never had a problem with it or any of the other allergies she has (I think she’s allergic to penicillin or something quite ridiculous like that).
Seasonal allergies may also cause cross reactivity to some fruits and nuts which you may not normally be allergic to. This is quite amusing to me because it seems quite absurd that on top of all this misery, the pain in my eyes, my constant sneezing, the sore throat, I can’t enjoy a banana without feeling even more miserable (hey, at least I have a potential cause for my mystery illness). Ah, nature.
I used to complain quite a lot about the air quality in Los Angeles. But in Lady Los Angeles’ defense, the air there never made my eyes burn.
emma :: May.16.2007 :: misc :: 2 Comments »
With my Speech Prosody project & presentation done, the end of the semester is finally in sight. I really really like the SOF phenomenon – it covers issues both about the phonetics/phonology interface (is focus marking just a binary, discrete issue, pitch-accented or not pitch-accented? or is it a more gradient effect?) and the phonetics/semantics interface. So I’m really happy to have found this topic. I’ll post my presentation notes and the final paper when this whole thing is wrapped up.
I think I’ll take a break from all this for a few days, though, and focus on semantics for a bit. I have a lot of cool new things to think about.
emma :: May.08.2007 :: misc, semantics, phonology, phonetics, linguistics :: No Comments »
In the middle of my “oh my God, I have how many days to complete my Speech Prosody project?” panic, I started thinking about relative clauses again. It’s a nice comfortable place to rest my head sometimes. Anyway, here are some new thoughts on that.
Ok. Assume any theory of grammar. Whether you take a movement-based, variable-full, direct compositional, variable-free, whatever–any theory which takes the Det-Nom view of relative clauses is going to have to get intersection somehow. I should probably go back to Heim & Kratzer and check the standard theory, but to the best of my memory, the rule intersecting the lambda-abstracted relative clause with the noun has got to be pretty stipulative. (Can you do predicate modification there? Hm. I guess that’s not as bad as a whole separate rule. But when you have a theory which can take care of adjectives without predicate modification, it returns to being pretty stipulative.) Anyway, the categorial grammar version of Det-Nom that I’ve seen just builds that into the relativizer (remember we don’t need lambda abstraction here because we have function composition!). Which all seems nice and great except that this doesn’t really seem to capture the fact that relativizers can be optional sometimes. For that matter, neither does the standard theory.
So, let’s think about our N->N/RC rule again. Its semantics is λP[P∩N], where N is the set denoted by the noun, of course. This simple rule is something that the Det-Nom view could also use. And, whatever theory you pick, when you have this rule, you have a way to account for how to intersect the relative clause when you don’t have a relativizer.
You may be asking now then what’s a relativizer? A pronoun, of course! I think this makes a lot of sense. Take the distribution of relativizers. From what I can tell, they are not optional when the relativizer is occupying the subject position of the relative clause sentence. That is Every woman who loves John requires the relativizer whereas Every woman who John loves does not. I’m not quite sure why this should be (some syntactic constraint? without the relativizer there, there’s no reason to not just hear that NP as instead a full S–one reason to be skeptical of any approach that says that when there is no relativizer, there’s some silent, deleted thing there, I think), but I have this feeling that this will show the way to why relativizers should be thought of as pronouns.
I obviously haven’t been thinking about this long enough, but I really sort of like the observation about the distribution of relativizers and how the N->N/RC rule seems to be something that everyone (both Det-Nom’ers and NP-S’ers) will need.
emma :: May.07.2007 :: misc, syntax, semantics :: 2 Comments »
Here’s a really neat project that Nathan has been working on: it’s a website called Bring Light and its purpose is to give everyone “a place for you to find causes you care about, dialogue with charities and the community, and collaborate to fund a specific project.” Cool, yeah? The site is still in beta, but already I think it looks pretty great. Check it out!
emma :: May.05.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »