Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 21

• Dinner at The Bowery

  By ljd42 on August 29, 2022

  

  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.

  By ljd42 on August 28, 2022

  

  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?

  By ljd42 on August 24, 2022

  

  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.”

  By ljd42 on August 21, 2022

  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?

  By ljd42 on August 19, 2022

  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

  By ljd42 on August 17, 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

  By ljd42 on August 16, 2022

  

  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?

  By ljd42 on August 15, 2022

  

  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…

  By ljd42 on August 13, 2022

  

  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

  By ljd42 on August 12, 2022

  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?

  By ljd42 on August 11, 2022

  

  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.

  By ljd42 on August 9, 2022

  

  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 ›

• Happy International Cat Day!

  By ljd42 on August 8, 2022

  

• The books of the century (Which century? The 20th, of course!)

  By ljd42 on August 7, 2022

  

  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)

  By ljd42 on August 6, 2022

  

  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!

  By ljd42 on August 4, 2022

  

  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!

  By ljd42 on August 2, 2022

  

  “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 ›

• Another Jersey Girl Mystery

  By ljd42 on July 31, 2022

  

  Five days ago I wrote a brief review of E.J. Copperman’s third mystery novel in his Jersey Girl series. I pointed out that I had inadvertently skipped the second novel in the series, Judgment at Santa Monica. I commented that it… Read More ›

• We have hope for the future: My students’ interdisciplinary presentations

  By ljd42 on July 30, 2022

  

  👏 We just finished listening to the interdisciplinary presentations from my students’ end-of-summer projects. As you know, the course is an applied math course called Quantitative Reasoning; these rising sophomores showed just that with passion and commitment. In the words… Read More ›

• Books with linguists

  By ljd42 on July 29, 2022

  

  Read that title again: it’s books with linguists, not books for linguists. This thought came from a post on Language Log, in which Barbara Phillips Long asks whether “there are books with linguists as major characters.” Commenters came to the rescue, with… Read More ›

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