Because every once in a while
…I can post silly things like what’s going on in my life.
#1: Leaving for California on Wednesday! Yes! This Wednesday! I’ve been looking forward to this ever since I got back from Spring Break (mostly because of weather-related annoyances). Sometime last week I realized that I actually wanted one more week in Providence to finish up some stuff (and really, what could I do for one whole week in Los Angeles? oh yeah.) Celeste & I are driving up to the Bay Area for the LSA Institute (weeeee! so very excited) on Friday, and I’m very excited (did I say that already?). Excited. I panicked about the apartment that I’m staying at being perhaps an annoying distance from the Caltrain station (I’m staying with Nathan in SF to save a few bucks), but then I realized that it actually will be just fine. (Although, who decided to make the Dimensions of Meaning class at 8am?? 10am for Computational Semantics might be kinda rough, but 8am…eep.)
#2: I have a really funny story about my run in with the law. If you haven’t heard it already, you should ask me about it. (As far as the offense, it was pretty tame. A driving thing. A stupid driving thing involving a parked car. And I mean “stupid” in both what I did and the resulting consequences.) This might also be a good place for me to whine about how obnoxious trying to figure basic things out in Rhode Island can be. (Examples: should I get an attorney? Should I give the sharky lawyer I was referred to the $750 retainer to avoid a year in jail? Who should I call? Can I get a public defender?–turns out, no, you can’t get a public defender until you’ve already been to court, which, um, seems a little silly. Should I try talking to the DA? HOW DO I FIND OUT WHO THE DA IS? Answer: Google will easily find you the DA for Los Angeles, but will have very little to say about Providence. How long should I wait in a courtroom before asking someone if they’ve forgotten about me? Answer: three hours. At which point, someone will come into the room to tell you that you were handed the wrong court papers and were sitting in the wrong room the whole time. Meanwhile, in the room where you should have been told to go to, the judge and prosecutor figured you had decided to become a fugitive of the law and skip town and were about to issue a warrant for your arrest. OOPS.)
#3: As far as I can tell, I’m making satisfactory progress on my first year project. Actually, it’s really hard to tell, especially because all of the other first years are on well-defined tracks (design experiment, run experiment, sort data, crunch numbers, etc.). I like the nature of theory-driven work, of course, but in this department, it’s really hard to gauge where I’m at. I think I’m making good progress, and I know that I’m working more on this now that I was during either of the two semesters. And it’s finally become a project that I really love and care about and feel completely comfortable and eager to share with people (or at least those who are willing to let me share). It’s just very very weird to be in a mostly cogsci department and have fellow members of my cohort ask, “so what is it that you actually do?”
#4: Speaking of, I’d wanted to post this. I was in Polly’s office last week, kvetching about this and that and somehow got onto the topic of how I get a lot of people both in the department and outside telling me about how theory-driven work isn’t science because we don’t do experiments. And Polly raised the very awesome point about how that’s not true at all! We do do experiments–our experiments just don’t involve human subjects or tons of variables with lots of numbers to crunch. But for all intents and purposes, theoretical linguists do run experiments following the scientific method. It just so happens that we can do our experiments while taking a bath.
#5: Just renewed the contract with my webhost (which I could have done ages ago but just kept putting off). I’m still not sure what I want so I only renewed for three months.
#6: Very excited for the LSA Institute. (Oh yeah! And Ben Russell is one of the invited speakers at the Conversational Games and Strategic Inference workshop! Brown will be well-represented at Stanford :-P)
#7: I was looking at my bookshelf today for no particular reason and saw Heim & Kratzer peeking out at me. I realized that I’d be gone for at least a month for the Institute, and it made me wonder if I should take H&K with me. ‘Cause, you know, I might forget how to do Predicate Modification while I’m gone.
#8: I don’t know why I just displayed these in list form.
Oh no, not predicate modification!