No, that is not a misprint. And no, I didn’t watch the same movie twice—although I’ve been known to do that with a very few carefully selected movies. In this case it’s simply that I watched two versions: the 1974… Read More ›
Month: August 2022
How has Phillips Academy Andover changed in a little over half a century?
Cover of Andover Magazine, August 1968: Cover of Andover Magazine, Summer 2022:
Dinner at The Bowery
Barbara and I had dinner last night on the beautiful patio of The Bowery in Lower Mills. Lobster roll with gigantic tater tots for her, properly cooked (i.e. rare, as ordered) steakhouse burger with side salad for me. Good food… Read More ›
It’s not Hillbilly Elegy. Fortunately.
Let’s suppose Hillbilly Elegy were a novel, i.e. fiction. And suppose its author, J.D. Vance, were an honest writer. Then Hillbilly Elegy would turn into Lady Chevy. Of course Hillbilly Elegy is actually a memoir, not a novel. And J.D…. Read More ›
Bad linguistics is bad science. Is it also bad politics?
You might think that the subject that we call linguistics is purely academic—in both senses of the word. But of course linguistics is also political, as is seen in all the controversies about pronouns, Ebonics, and PC language. This post,… Read More ›
More about “There’s no word for X in language Y.”
All too often I hear (or read) that “there’s no word for ________________ in __________” for some particular word and some particular language. I wrote about this kind of claim three years ago. I think I need to quote that… Read More ›
Superintelligence?
Probably this debate is esoteric enough for you. But let’s see. We start with a remark by Scott Aaronson on his Shtetl-Optimized Blog: Last month, you’ll recall, Steve [Pinker} and I debated the implications of scaling AI models such as GPT-3 and… Read More ›
RIP Vincent, 2004–2022
Vincent died today. He could barely stand up, and he had almost entirely stopped eating. For his last meal he managed to eat a couple of teaspoons of chicken-flavored baby food. At the end he weighed 5.8 pounds. He was… Read More ›
Nominal patterns
My older niece is named Hannah. My younger niece is named Aviva. My older great-niece is named Eve. And now, as of last night, my younger great-niece is named Ada. Aha! Do you detect a pattern?
Are we now in the Twilight Zone?
This is not the only Twilight Zone episode that one never forgets. At least it’s not the only one that I never forgot, and it seems more and more relevant every year, especially this summer. I first saw it when… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 