some-antics.com

The following is guaranteed to make you laugh:(via jwz)

emma :: Apr.06.2008 :: misc :: 2 Comments »

This is the first thing that results when you search for “bertrand russell” on Google Video:

(h/t Ben)

emma :: Mar.27.2008 :: pop-culture :: No Comments »

Today, as we were waiting for the light so that we could cross the street, an old man waiting alongside started chatting up Ben. I should mention that Ben is sick right now and can’t hear very well. (Ben adds, “Some sort of ear, nose and throat deal. Can’t hear out of his right ear.”) So the old man asked about where Ben went to school, found out it was MIT, said something about his high school and then asked if Ben knew the MIT student who did this. Ben said that he didn’t, so the old man started telling him about the invention, saying something about how “he figured out a way to climb mountains”. Then he said something like, “so firemen don’t have to use ladders to climb up, they can just self-propel.”

To which Ben casually responds, “Firetrucks, hmm. Interesting.”

To which the old man responds, “Not trucks! People! People!”

(Ben says, “You have to explain: I can’t hear well, he’s an old man who starts randomly talking to me, I thought he said ‘firetrucks’ and I thought he had said something utterly ridiculous about firetrucks being able to propel themselves up mountains. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I just said, ‘Firetrucks, hmm. Interesting.’”)

Hmm. Interesting.

emma :: Mar.27.2008 :: misc :: No Comments »

I intend the interpretation where the universal quantifier has wide scope.

1. For the Curb Your Enthusiasm fans:
Last weekend I fell down a flight of stairs. (Well, I didn’t fall down the entire flight. I fell, landed on my back, then slid the rest of the way down. Note to self: don’t hurry in socks down carpeted steps, ever.) I spent most of the weekend chilling out and went to Health Services on Monday where I was told that no structural damage was done, but I had strained some pretty bad muscle tension. I was then prescribed a painkiller and a muscle relaxant. The muscle relaxant was cyclobenzaprine. Which is exactly what Larry David is handed in the seventh episode of the last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm:

(h/t Ben for pointing this out to me and also lifting everything over half a pound for me.)

2. Quantification over times and individuals
I love Garfield minus Garfield. Pretty much every strip makes me laugh out loud. For several minutes. And a recent gmg has an example of quantification over times and individuals and how you don’t seem to get inverse scope:

3. There was something else, I swear. But I forgot.

emma :: Mar.23.2008 :: semantics, linguistics, pop-culture :: No Comments »

…but it had to be maded.

if u eats meh, i r ACC

emma :: Mar.12.2008 :: misc, syntax, linguistics :: 4 Comments »

This just in:

BERLIN, Germany (CNN) — A storm dubbed “Emma” slammed into Europe Saturday with high winds and heavy rain, killing at least two people, authorities said.

[…]

Europe began feeling the effects of Emma late Friday night, according to Deutchscher Wetter Dienst (DWD), Germany’s national weather service.

Wind gusts of up to 190 km/h (118 mph) — the strength of a Category 3 hurricane — were clocked in the higher elevations of Austria, Corriveau said. Sustained winds as of Saturday night ranged from 50 km/h to nearly 80 km/h (31 mph to 50 mph). Winds were clocked at 98 km/hr (61 mph) in Denmark.

(h/t Ben Ellis)

emma :: Mar.03.2008 :: misc :: 1 Comment »

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 »

Raj said to Jeff about nothing remotely linguisticky at all: “it gets a little combinatorially explosive.” (He was talking about how to interface Traktor with the real mixer. Some mess of RCA jacks involved.)

Also, in episode 59 of the Wire (S05E09, also known as the penultimate), the character Michael Lee delivers an epicly sweet case of contrastive focus reduplication [see the Salad-Salad Paper]: “Is that Big Walter-Big Walter or skinny Big Walter?”

EDIT (about an hour after posting Raj’s quote I read in the Wagner dissertation, p. 62):

The important lesson to learn from the combinatorics of coordination is that whichever of the two options in (68) we employ, we should pick exactly one of them, since otherwise the combinatorial possibilities explode.

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

I’ve been reading Michael Wagner’s 2005 dissertation Prosody and Recursion and his examples pulled from Gleitman (1965) remind me of this thing that’s not all that interesting but cute. Check it after the flip »

emma :: Feb.25.2008 :: syntax, phonology, linguistics :: No Comments »

F. Cardone and J. R. Hindley. History of Lambda-Calculus and Combinatory logic. To appear as a chapter in Volume 5 of the Handbook of the History of Logic.

(h/t to LtU)

emma :: Feb.24.2008 :: logic :: No Comments »