ok, bsg

So, Battlestar Galactica’s last run premiers this Friday. And, to be quite honest, I’m happy that it’s almost over because I can’t stand to follow such a disappointing show anymore. I was hoping to avoid having to watch altogether by reading spoilers, but there don’t seem to be very good ones online yet. But while reading through speculations on who the final Cylon could be, it struck me that people are perhaps mistaking Gricean violations for straight up lying.

(sort of spoilers ahead, but none of the upcoming season):

io9 has this list of possible final Cylons, but it’s all based on this observation:

Secondly, D’Anna Biers (Lucy Lawless) implied the final Cylon is not in the fleet, at the start of the most recent episode, “Revelations.” It seems unlikely that she’s lying. Actually, here’s what she says:

Leoben: We’ll rejoin your fleet within an hour.
Roslin: Then we will return the final five to you.
Biers: Four. There are four in your fleet.
Roslin: Four? Where’s the fifth?
Biers: I want the four in your fleet.

But D’Anna Biers wouldn’t be lying–she’d simply be failing to be as informative as possible! (see here for more on Gricean maxims) And we have evidence to suggest that Biers is linguistically savvy — at another point in the episode, when Roslin asks her about the final five, Biers responds “What, you didn’t know you were one of them?” (See projection of presuppositions here) Add in the fact that series writer Jane Espenson did her Ph.D. in linguistics at Berkeley (working with George Lakoff himself) and I think suddenly it’s not that implausible to suggest that maybe all five of the final Cylons *were* in the fleet.

Of course, there’s one more thing we have to consider. D’Anna’s demand that she wants “the four in your fleet”. The use of the definite article seems to presuppose that there are a distinct four–if there were five in the fleet, which four would be *the* four that she referred to?

And with that, this is hopefully the last I will ever blog about BSG ever again.

FAIL

Wikipedia demonstrates presupposition failure:

F.Y.I.

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

Ockham’s razor

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

NP+Dogg

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’.

“Airport ’86 Revisited” revisited

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.

LambdaCan

(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.

Them other boys don’t know how to act

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.

loltortilla

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’.

Y Combinator

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.)