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 ›
He moved up in the world (from Providence to Brattleboro), changed his name, and then…
And then he became the murder victim in Archer Mayor’s latest novel, Marked Man. Of course “moving up in the world” is a matter of opinion; I don’t mean that he moved north, although he definitely did do that. No… Read More ›
Linguistics/math interface
People keep wondering how I journeyed from linguistics to math. Maybe they’re the same thing:
When you pronounce that middle consonant, do you hear z or s?
How do you pronounce “Tesla”? Do you pronounce the middle consonant like a z, as the Italians do, or like an s, as it is spelled? Both pronunciations are “correct,” but how do you say it? Linguists will tell you… Read More ›
No pirates. And it’s not in Penzance. But it’s nearby: It’s Death in Cornwall.
What, I wonder, draws me to the Celtic languages and Celtic lands, when I’ve never even been there and speak none of those languages? Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish…all are missing from my language repertoire. And I’ve never visited… Read More ›
The books of the century (Which century? The 20th, of course!)
You’re surely wondering which books were the most influential, or most popular, or most important in the 20th Century. Fortunately, Daniel Immerwahr has done the work for you. “Who’s he when he’s at home?” you’re asking. Well, in his own… Read More ›
Interdisciplinarity (if there really is such a word)
Yesterday was the final day for this summer’s session of the Crimson Summer Academy. It was a successful return to in-person teaching after two summers of Zoom. We were all relieved to be back in front of real people instead… Read More ›
Dan Kennedy is part of the solution!
Northeastern University professor Dan Kennedy is always worth reading. And also worth listening to—on Beat the Press with Emily Rooney and other shows. For my just-concluded Quantitative Reasoning class at the Crimson Summer Academy I wish we had had time… Read More ›
No, Mark Twain didn’t say that!
“I never said half of the things I said,” remarked Yogi Berra. Or so the story goes. Similarly, Mark Twain is often credited with writing things that he never wrote. As are Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli and other distinguished… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 