some-antics.com

Wikipedia demonstrates presupposition failure:

emma :: May.08.2008 :: semantics, linguistics, nerdiness :: 1 Comment »

From now on, I am going to refer to this restaurant as Kabob and Schönfinkel.

emma :: May.01.2008 :: logic, nerdiness :: 1 Comment »

While searching for images related to Ockham’s razor today, I found this:

emma :: Apr.30.2008 :: nerdiness :: No Comments »

So today in Syntax, Polly was talking about how nouns don’t take other nouns to their right (but they do take PP modifiers). For example, you don’t say things like “husky dog” in English.

This isn’t a counterexample, but I couldn’t help but think of the ProperName+Dogg phenom.

Possible lexical entry for “Dogg” (following Jacobson’s triplet notation of phonological form, syntactic category, semantic extension):
“Dogg” = < /dɑg/ ; NP[+name]/ _LNP[+name]; λx_e[x[+gangsta]]>

So “Dogg” takes an individual and returns that individual with a +gangsta feature.

EDIT: so I was thinking about this on my way home for lunch, and I realized that my lexical entry needs to be revised a little. [+gangsta] should really just be a syntactic feature, allowing it to license other [+gangsta] constituents (e.g. “bling”, “fo-shizzle”). Semantically, “Dogg” has the extension of the identity function over individuals, defined only for individuals that are actually illin’–so really, its only effect is presuppositional.

Revised lexical entry:
“Dogg” = < /dɑg/ ; NP[+gangsta]/ _LNP[+name]; λx_e: x∈baller_S[x]>

where baller_S is the set of all individuals that be illin’.

emma :: Feb.26.2008 :: syntax, semantics, linguistics, pop-culture, nerdiness :: No Comments »

So right now, icanhascheezburger is having a caption contest for a series of pictures about poker. Here’s mine:

For the short version of the explanation, see sentence (6) here. For the long version, see the full-length Horn (2005) “Airport ‘86 Revisited: Toward a unified indefinite any“.

Hey! You should totally vote for this so I can go to Vegas.

emma :: Feb.21.2008 :: semantics, nerdiness :: 2 Comments »

(h/t to speicherCat for this)

Over the weekend, a link appeared in my inbox to something called Project LambdaCan.

Project LambdaCan is an amusing exercise in absurdity. It implements a reducer (interpreter) for the Lambda Calculus, a formal system (programming language) developed by Alonzo Church in the 1930’s to attack the deepest mathematical problem of the day. This was the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of whether or not there exists an algorithm capable of deciding the truth or falsehood of all statements in mathematics.

Project LambdaCan takes this tool for exploring the most profound mathematical problems and implements it on a microcontroller better suited to the most mundane of tasks, like running a vending machine or microwave oven. And it sticks the microcontroller in a can that you can connect to your PC using a USB cable.

Of course, the extreme overhead involved in supporting the painfully abstract Lambda Calculus notation makes LambdaCan struggle to compute arithmetic as simple as 11 + 12 = 23. The microcontroller would perform much better if programmed in its native language. Furthermore, the very idea of plugging a LambdaCan coprocessor into a typical PC to perform computations is absurd since the PC could undoubtedly handle much larger computations faster on its own.

emma :: Feb.11.2008 :: nerdiness :: No Comments »

A couple of minor observations you should be made aware of:

1) Portrait by: Elias Gottlob Haussmann, courtesy of Wikipedia
2) Director of the video for Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack”: Michael Haussman

kthx.

emma :: Feb.05.2008 :: nerdiness :: 1 Comment »

I’m sure someone else has already thought of this, but a couple of visits to jesustortilla and jesusoftheweek and miracletortilla inspired me to make some Jesus-in-a-tortilla inspired lolart:

By the way, SNEWS was absolutely wonderful. It was a great crowd this year, plenty of nice talks and fun dioramas. I finally got to meet Lance in person, received lovely feedback from Itamar and chatted it up with Elizabeth, a former student of Polly’s now working with David Dowty. And I must say, I’m pretty convinced by the arguments I made in my talk. That functional shifting rule really is somethin’.

emma :: Oct.20.2007 :: semantics, linguistics, nerdiness :: No Comments »

Currently, on Paul Graham’s homepage:

(Arm credit to Mark Eret, apparently.)

(EDIT: Dave commented just a few days ago and left me a link to that picture’s Flickr page. Unfortunately, his comment didn’t make it through the spam filter. Fortunately, I manually looked through the comments marked as spam today while waiting for my students to show up to section and found his comment. Thanks, Dave!)

(Yet another EDIT: More science-inspired tats here.)

emma :: Sep.25.2007 :: logic, nerdiness :: No Comments »

But I find this Wikipedia entry on vi vs. Emacs to be fascinating.

Re:

vi users enjoy joking that Emacs’s key-sequences induce carpal tunnel syndrome, or mentioning one of many satirical expansions of the acronym EMACS, such as “Escape Meta Alt Control Shift” (a jab at Emacs’s reliance on modifier keys).

On a Mac, Meta is really no problem–unless you also think the spacebar is carpal tunnel syndrome inducing. As for Control, reconfigure your Caps Lock to be Control, silly! (”But then HOW WOULD YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPS????”) Shift…really?

And anyway, the best way to reduce carpal tunnel is to pick up Dvorak, psha.

(Disclaimer: most opinions expressed here mostly exaggerated for comedic effect. :-P)

emma :: Aug.20.2007 :: nerdiness :: 6 Comments »