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arthegall + language   179

Welcome - The Data Journalism Handbook
"Hackthons?" Are those like "Marthons?"
book  data  journalism  language  odd-usage 
13 days ago by arthegall
Bachwerk, Vogel, "Modelling Social Structures and Hierarchies in Language Evolution" (arXiv)
language  arxiv  research-article  linguistics  social-networks  social-science  evolution 
4 weeks ago by arthegall
Origin Myths, Contracts, and the Hunt for Pari Passu by Mark Weidemaier, Robert Scott, Gaurang Gulati :: SSRN
"Sovereign loans involve complex but largely standardized contracts, and these include some terms that no one understands. Lawyers often account for the existence of these terms through origin myths. Focusing on one contract term, the pari passu clause, this article explores two puzzling aspects of these myths."
ssrn  economics  finance  bonds  origin-myths  via:felix-salmon  language  argentina 
4 weeks ago by arthegall
Language Log » Winchester on Green and Lighter in NYRB
languagehat and Nunberg absolutely hating on Simon Winchester -- "He [Bryson] and Winchester should stick to the travel beat and let the grown-ups deal with important matters like language and lexicography." I enjoy this, from the outside, the same way that I enjoy (to some extent) a good round of TAL-bashing. (And actually, now that I think of it, that quote has a good bit of irony in it, whether intended or not.) I should probably forward this to Ale.
for-a-friend  language  simon-winchester  languagehat  geoff-nunberg  lexicography  humor  review 
9 weeks ago by arthegall
Zellig Harris, "The structure of science information" (Journal of Biomedical Informatics)
Zellig Harris! Sweet!
via:cshalizi  science  language  grammar  research-article  informatics  linguistics 
december 2011 by arthegall
Geoff Pullum, "Mistakes Are Made (but Using the Passive Isn’t One of Them) " (Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Epic: "The blind warning the blind about a danger that isn’t there."
grammar  humor  geoff-pullum  language  language-log  passive  rant 
october 2011 by arthegall
ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language
via:john-wilbanks  creative-commons  licenses  language  cc  w3c  ben-adida  web  copyright 
september 2011 by arthegall
Racket
The artist formerly known as DrScheme?
scheme  lisp  language  interpreter  jit 
july 2011 by arthegall
History News Network
OED tracks OMG back to 1917. ZOMG.
omg  humor  oed  language  etymology  via:someone-on-twitter 
march 2011 by arthegall
Orc – The Oil Runtime Compiler « Entropy Wave Open Source
via:chl  compiler  language  data-analysis  vectorization 
march 2011 by arthegall
Daylight Theory: SMARTS - A Language for Describing Molecular Patterns
"All SMILES expressions are also valid SMARTS expressions, but the semantics changes because SMILES describes molecules whereas SMARTS describes patterns. The molecule represented by a SMILES string is usually, but not always, matched by the same string when used as a SMARTS."
chemoinformatics  smarts  smiles  language  chemistry  structure-search  from delicious
january 2011 by arthegall
SBOL Semantic - OpenWetWare
to:comment  sbol  synthetic-biology  annotation  language  openwetware 
december 2010 by arthegall
20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World
"Here are a few examples of instances where other languages have found the right word and English simply falls speechless..." -- and then they proceed to *give English translations* for the "untranslatable" words. What's really awesomely untranslatable is the awesome feeling I get when I happen across a webpage, like this one, that's so immediately self-negating; try finding a word for *that*, English nerds!!
translation  language  the-inuit-have-a-hundred-words-for-idiot  english  funny  via:johnsnavely 
december 2010 by arthegall
microblogging-nanoformats · Microformats Wiki
"micro-" and "nano-" formats are less "formats," more "mini-languages." Next questions: where is abstraction? where is the naming? (*what* can you name?)
programminglanguages  twitter  microformats  nanoformats  annotation  language  abstraction  computerscience  notes  thoughts 
december 2010 by arthegall
The Kappa Language
"A rule-based language for modeling protein interaction networks" -- used by the Edinburgh iGem team, modeling light-sensitive bacteria.
modeling-language  protein-interactions  language  stochastic-grammar  software  tool  biology  synthetic-biology 
november 2010 by arthegall
Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com
Seems unusually well-written and even-handed, but maybe that's only because it's an area of research with which I'm not familiar on a first-hand basis.
language  thought  consciousness  nytimes  sapir-whorf 
september 2010 by arthegall
wavii's pfp at master - GitHub
pfp == "pretty fast parser." (== "like the Stanford NLP parser, but faster") Now all I need is a JavaCC grammar for JavaCC grammars, and we'll be good to go, right?
parsing  grammar  dynamic-programming  software  tool  opensource  nlp  language 
september 2010 by arthegall
A Software License Agreement Takes it On the Chin | Freedom to Tinker
"Interestingly, Wikipedia notes that the Brits broadly distrust the concept of gross negligence and that, as far back as 1843, in Wilson v. Brett, Baron Rolfe 'could see no difference between negligence and gross negligence; that it was the same thing, with the addition of a vituperative epithet.'"
law  humor  language  negligence  software  license-agreements  eula  quote 
september 2010 by arthegall
Wikipedia’s Lamest Edit Wars
"Compromise: seasoned."
via:chl  wikipedia  humor  web  language 
august 2010 by arthegall
When I use a word...: Homogenous/homogeneous
"Now take homogeneous, an older word than homogenous (the earliest citation in the OED comes from Milton)..." -- wait, wait, they're not the same word??
via:shivak  language  vocabulary  homo-whatever  genetics  history  biology 
july 2010 by arthegall
"CHAPEL." (languagehat.com)
'S: "Quelle delicatesse, les Anglais."'
humor  joke  etymology  language  chapel  chapeau 
july 2010 by arthegall
"Econ Jargon Watch" (Greg Mankiw's Blog)
Apparently, Greg Mankiw's correspondent isn't aware of *all* your academic-jargon traditions... (I've heard "first approximation" more than once in CS. Other over-represented phrases in my lexicon: "nontrivial," "as a first cut," and "X-complete.")
humor  language  academics  economics  greg-mankiw  jargon  computerscience 
july 2010 by arthegall
GATE.ac.uk - index.html
text-mining  java  opensource  language  nlp  tool  software 
july 2010 by arthegall
The Manute Bol Theory of "My Bad" : Word Routes : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus
"Given all the evidence, Montville's suggestion that Bol merely spread the phrase instead of inventing it is a lot more credible."
manute-bol  my-bad  language  culture  history  etymology  sports  basketball 
june 2010 by arthegall
"Pick-up basketballism reaches Ivy League faculty vocabulary" (Language Log)
A non-trivial possibility that Manute Bol was the origin of the phrase, "my bad."
manute-bol  basketball  language  etymology 
june 2010 by arthegall
Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)
"This is an alpha version of the 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), which is the largest structured corpus of historical English (or any language, for that matter)." -- Horrific web interface (terrible use of frames) but awesome tool nonetheless.
web  english  american-history  language  linguistics  database  text  search  via:languagelog 
june 2010 by arthegall
could we learn a new foreign language every week?
"So that gives us around 90k bits, which should require around 180k seconds of optimal memorization...! This would involve learning about two new vocabulary words per minute, which seems like a plausible rate. ... 50 hours is a rather remarkably small number. ... This is at least one order of magnitude better than commonly-observed performance in foreign-language learning. Why might this be? One possible explanation is that people are usually learning not only the vocabulary of the language, but also its alphabet, orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics at the same time. A second ... is that typical vocabulary memorization is very badly structured..." -- and the second one's the one you go with? I'm about 50% convinced that this is an extended joke, in which case, bravo.
glark  humor  language  learning  bits  via:chl  insanity  memorization  memory 
june 2010 by arthegall
"Questions that are rarely asked" (Marginal Revolution)
I feel like Tyler Cowen is confusing "punctuation marks" with the function of "asterisks" (or "footnotes"). Typical academic mistake, by the way -- a byproduct of submerging your entire intellectual existence in the warm bath of literate culture (not that there's anything wrong with that). But "real" punctuation marks would probably have breathy, vocal interpretations. Where's the punctuation for a whisper or a controlled stutter? What punctuation could we invent for an uncomfortably long pause?
punctuation  orality  literacy  language  academia  tyler-cowen 
may 2010 by arthegall
Memorising Milton's Paradise Lost: A study of a se... [Memory. 2010] - PubMed result
Really excited to read this!
john-milton  paradise-lost  poetry  memory  memorization  pubmed  language  via:cshalizi 
may 2010 by arthegall
The grammar of approximating number pairs — Memory & Cognition
This is like those XKCD graphs, where he looks up and graphs the google frequency of different numbers used in common phrases... "M girls, N cups."
memory  research-article  language  grammar  numbers 
may 2010 by arthegall
Efron & Thisted, "Estimating the number of unseen species: How many words did Shakespeare know?" (JSTOR)
[JSTOR: Biometrika, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Dec., 1976), pp. 435-447] Did I really not save a link to this already? There's an analogy to be drawn here with those social network papers that try to estimate the total number of X in a population by asking different people, "how many X do you know," etc.
networks  bradley-efron  jstor  statistics  research-article  estimation  shakespeare  language 
april 2010 by arthegall
"Iranian ICBM by 2015?" (ArmsControlWonk)
"Are the two estimates — “could by 2015” “unlikely before 2015” — consistent? As it turns out, yes! In the modern area of estimative language and politicized intelligence, the two estimates are perfectly consistent with one another. The word “could,” thanks to the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission, is estimatese (or estimative language) for “not likely.”" -- Good grief.
iran  nukes  language  humor  government 
april 2010 by arthegall
"Pictish writing?" (Language Log)
"I certainly don't mean to suggest that the ancient Picts generated their petroglyphs using throws of 7d6." -- Liberman reveals his background as a D&D-playing nerd (one of us, one of us....)
via:cshalizi  language  humor  picts  writing  entropy  information  history  dungeons-and-dragons  obscurely-referential 
april 2010 by arthegall
"Yay?" (Scott Kaufman)
"I wouldn't share so trivial an encounter but for the fact that I start teaching again tomorrow, and need to reacclimate myself to environs in which people write things in a language they don't actually know."
humor  teaching  language  literacy  writing 
january 2010 by arthegall
"Metaphysical overlap and violin supervenience" (Geoff Pullum, Language Log)
music  violins  ontology  semantics  language  platonic-idealism  supervenience  philosophy  metaphysics 
january 2010 by arthegall
"Listening to Braille: With New Technologies, Do Blind People Lose More Than They Gain?" (NYTimes)
Paging Dr. Ong ... Dr. Ong, to the white courtesy phone. (In fact, the story name-checks McLuhan on page 1 and Ong on page. 2) --- "It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report has inspired a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. “What we’re finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able — and illiterate,” Jim Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on Higher Education and Disability, told me." -- The article's contention that this change is occurring *only* for blind students seems extremely short-sighted, however.
orality-and-literacy  via:WanderingAengus  language  literacy  blindness  braille  nytimes 
january 2010 by arthegall
"What the hell?" (Radosh.net)
"Fusilli, you crazy bastard! How are you?"
humor  new-yorker  dan-radosh  swearing  language 
december 2009 by arthegall
"Lucene Analyzer, Tokenizer and TokenFilter" (Markus Tripp’s Weblog)
Very basic intro to writing a new Lucene Analyzer -- also introduced me to the "Luke" tool for inspecting Lucene indices, so that's important in and of itself.
luke  software  tutorial  lucene  java  analyzer  language  programming 
december 2009 by arthegall
Intentionality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
130 years of question-begging. (I could reference that Michael Mann quote, inserted into Miami Vice, about ships-as-vectors, but that would be putting lipstick on an ugly Scholastic pig.)
philosophy  history  intentionality  language  mind  theory-of-the-mind 
december 2009 by arthegall
Differentiating Parsers
parsing  ocaml  continuations  language  programming  via:manuel 
december 2009 by arthegall
Re ISSUE-41 versioning (again) from Jonathan Rees on 2009-11-29 (www-tag@w3.org from November 2009)
JAR's new blog is slowly bearing fruit. (Which is to say, he's slowly writing down stuff so I can argue with him. Which is great!)
via:jar  language  logic  meaning  email  web  semantics 
december 2009 by arthegall
OWL Web Ontology Language Semantics and Abstract Syntax
P. Hayes's OWL semantics document -- following up on the RDF Semantics document. I don't understand the interaction (or non-interaction) between OWL-DL and RDFS though.
semantics  owl  semanticweb  ontology  language  standard  pat-hayes 
november 2009 by arthegall
Horrocks, Parsia, Patel-Schneider, and Hendler. "Semantic Web Architecture: Stack, or Two Towers?" (2005, PDF)
More on closed- versus open-world assumptions, language stacks, etc.
owl  ontology  language  semantics  rdf  semanticweb  pdf  opinion 
november 2009 by arthegall
Uncanny! It's as if I'm seeing the world for the first time! -- Dinosaur Comics - October 27th, 2009
"Across language, time, and entire civilizations, we're united by pointing at our babbling babies and saying, "Yes. This child is DEFINITELY talking about me.""
children  language  culture  comic  humor  uncanny  via:mreid 
october 2009 by arthegall
Franz Brentano (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Sometimes I find myself worrying that I've become the disciple of some dead philosopher...
philosophy  science  work  language  analytic-philosophy 
september 2009 by arthegall
Zellig Harris, "Grammar on Mathematical Principles" (1978)
[JSTOR: Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Mar., 1978), pp. 1-20]
zellig-harris  grammar  mathematics  language  linguistics  jstor 
september 2009 by arthegall
Zellig Harris, "I. A Theory of Language Structure" (JSTOR)
[JSTOR: American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Oct., 1976), pp. 237-255]
language  philosophy  grammar  zellig-harris 
september 2009 by arthegall
"Fucking shut the fuck up" (Language Log)
"(I once offered to put five dollars in the tips jar at the Stevenson College Coffee House at UC Santa Cruz if they would stop playing the Van Morrison CD they had put on. They did, and I did. So his music has negative cash value for me: I have actually paid money to not hear it.)" -- It's like Geoff Pullum has been reading Andrew Gelman (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/07/there_is_no_uti.html)
humor  van-morrison  music  value  utility  language  linguistics  swearing 
july 2009 by arthegall
"Verbing up in the trademark business" (Language Log)
"Why else would Xerox try so hard to teach us to say " to photocopy" rather than "to xerox"? Always use your name as an adjective, "Xerox photocopiers." But the New York Times reports that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer doesn't much believe in common practice, and he's now busily ignoring what everyone else is doing. He wants us to say, "he will bing you tomorrow," which more problematically might lead to, "he banged you yesterday."" --- Awwwwesome.
language  trademarks  intellectual-property  microsoft  humor 
july 2009 by arthegall
Dinosaur Comics - July 6th, 2009 - awesome fun times!
"That's not really surprising, I guess, since every language EVER has been spoken by people who once were alive and are now totes dead." Totes.
totes  humor  dinosaur-comics  language  universals 
july 2009 by arthegall
"English as the Lingua Franca" (Stephen M. Walt)
I don't understand -- Stephen Walt talks about the languages used by the two competitors in their speeches after yesterday's French Open final -- "both [Federer and Soderling] gave their acceptance speeches in English... It’s possible that Robin Soderling (the Swedish runner-up) spoke to the crowd in English because he doesn't speak French. But Federer reportedly speaks fluent French, German, and Swiss-German, as well as English, so why wasn’t he addressing the local crowd in their native tongue?" -- But I don't understand. Federer *did* speak French to the crowd! He gave a bilingual acceptance speech, switching back and forth between the two languages, and I would have guessed that nearly a third of his speech was conducted in French! How did Walt just miss this?
stephen-walt  french  language  tennis  french-open  roger-federer  english  soft-power  diplomacy 
june 2009 by arthegall
"Linguists who count" (Language Log)
There's a lot to like in this, including a fantastic quote from Yeats on Bertrand Russell that I hadn't seen before, and some reasonable thoughts on calculus as a "gatekeeper" in American education -- but I think that this, "I happen to think that Russell was, on the whole, righter than Yeats was," is probably pretty narrow. I've had the Yeats poem, "The Stare's Nest by My Window" on my mind for the last couple of days (http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1144.html) and I can't get the (famous) last stanza out of my head. There's a certain amount of rightness there too, no?
poetry  yeats  russell  mathematics  education  calculus  language  journalism 
may 2009 by arthegall
"Indus: What did Rao <i>et al.</i> really do?" (E's flat, ah's flat too)
Mark Liberman shows up in the comments.
language  indus-script  conditional-entropy  statistics  peer-review 
april 2009 by arthegall
"Falling for the magic formula" (Earning My Turns)
"Once again, Science falls for a magic formula that purports to answer a contentious question about language: is a certain ancient symbolic system a writing system. They would not, I hope, fall for a similar hypothesis in biology." -- Heh.
language  science  research  biology  genomics  peer-review 
april 2009 by arthegall
"Conditional entropy and the Indus Script" (Language Log)
"To call a program that counts bigrams and calculates conditional entropy an "artificially intelligent computer" is … Well, you'll see." -- That's 'Wired' for you. (Down with Science Journalism!)
down-with-science-journalism  journamalism  language  indus-script  mark-liberman  wired 
april 2009 by arthegall
"Tail Recursion Elimination" (Neopythonic)
It's not like every language *has* to have TCO -- let a hundred flowers bloom, right? But I still think Guido's suggestion that "if programmers had TCO, then they would come to depend on it, and this is a reason to not implement it" has got to rate as one of the weirdest reasons not to do something ever. (The issue, as one of his commenters points out, is the ability to do propers continuation-passing-style programming, not just "iteration as recursion.")
python  language  recursion  tail-calls  guido-van-rossum  weird  programming  via:shivak 
april 2009 by arthegall
"Fark Off" (Geoff Pullum at the Language Log)
"To the guy who said 'my penis could type a better article': your girlfriend told me she doesn't think so." -- Taking it to the next level.
geoff-pullum  humor  language  fark  criticism 
april 2009 by arthegall
"I hope to never again hear the word 'ontology'" (Andrew Gelman)
Uh-oh.
andrew-gelman  humor  ontology  semanticweb  language  if-wishes-were-horses 
april 2009 by arthegall
"Thursday links get ideological" (Felix Salmon)
"'Some Technocrats Are Ideologues,' says Will Wilkinson. While I think that the opposite of an ideologue is a pragmatist, and that most technocrats are pragmatists." -- the problem is that 'pragmatism' has been redefined *as an ideology,* a term which is quickly becoming to the late 2000's what I seem to remember 'Liberal' being to the early '90s. Ree-dic-u-lous!!1! I say, just embrace the term "ideology," and just start arguing that technocrats are the *best kind* of ideologue. Better to be in the grip of some dead dataset than that of a dead philosophy.
empiricism  ideology  politics  will-wilkinson-used-to-be-cool  felix-salmon  language  technocrats 
april 2009 by arthegall
JS/CC Parser Generator Project Homepage
"JS/CC is the first available parser development system for JavaScript and ECMAScript-derivates. It has been developed, both, with the intention of building a productive compiler development system and with the intention of creating an easy-to-use academic environment for people interested in how parse table generation is done general in bottom-up parsing."
parser  generator  language  grammar  javascript  programming  library 
march 2009 by arthegall
"Scrabble rants" (Andrew Gelman)
"But I respect that Scrabble traditionalists enjoy the whole hide-the-Q game, so for them I guess I'd have to keep the Q as is." -- Best line I've read all morning. -- "I'm not surprised that, for example, the frequency of letters from a dictionary is different from that of spoken words..." -- reminds me of something I read this morning in Eisenstein. You're all going to have to listen to me carry on, amateurishly, about E.E. for the next few weeks. I hope you're ready for that.
humor  language  andrew-gelman  games  q-is-not-u  scrabble  letter-frequencies 
march 2009 by arthegall
"Only in England, part III" (Marginal Revolution)
Taxonomy? Also, the headline "only in England" is ridiculously off the mark. "Only in every nation that has ever existed on the face of the planet since the dawn of the printing press" is more like it.
language  words  ridiculous  england  communication  tyler-cowen  banned 
march 2009 by arthegall
IM Outtake of the Day, CDS Edition - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com
"In any case, I fail to see how the CDS market -- even broadly understood to include AIG -- was in any way responsible for the financial meltdown. Maybe it would have been, had AIG not been bailed out. But AIG was bailed out, so it wasn't." --- A philosophical question, if ever there was one. ("I broke my right hand in an accident, and therefore when I wrote my paper I wrote it with my left hand. But if I hadn't broken my hand, I would have written it with my right hand anyway. So we can't say that my accident was the cause of my paper being written...")
language  causality  finance  counterfactuals  derivatives  felix-salmon  AIG 
march 2009 by arthegall
"Kiton's Eye For Detail" (Felix Salmon)
I would've guessed at the answer proffered by commenter #1, ("neopolitan" as a portmanteau for "neo-cosmopolitan,") but then he refutes that suggestion by observing that Kiton is somehow based out of Naples. So Salmon's sarcasm was well-placed to begin with.
humor  language  sarcasm  clothing  felix-salmon  fashion  lifestyles-of-the-idiot-rich 
march 2009 by arthegall
Understanding Bidirectional (BIDI) Text in Unicode
"But how does this work? Not magic, but science." A semi-detailed introduction to right-to-left and left-to-right orderings in Unicode, including examples of how to switch between them in the same string. And of course, when you get to the end, the other shoe drops: properly-formatted Unicode strings are actually a context-free grammar -- every 'opening marker' has to have a paired 'closing marker.' Otherwise, if you're embedding user-entered Unicode in your website and you don't have a valid pairing of markers, you risk flipping all the rest of the text on your webpage.
web  tutorial  language  text  via:simon-willison  context-free-grammar  unicode 
march 2009 by arthegall
qwantz.com - dinosaur comics - March 09 2009
"DIRECTION IS A BUCKET THAT PEOPLE KEEP SNEAKING INTO."
humor  language  web  dinosaur-comics  comics  metaphor 
march 2009 by arthegall
"WU2WEI2: Do Nothing" (Language Log)
It's the ancient Chinese version of "No-Drama Obama."
politics  humor  language  obama  history  china  taoism 
march 2009 by arthegall
Real estate - Wikipedia
"Some have claimed that the word Real is derived from "royal" ... However, the "real" in "real property" is derived from the Latin for "thing"." --- Good to know.
language  word  etymology  real-estate 
march 2009 by arthegall
"Musical protolanguage: Darwin’s theory of language evolution revisited" (Tecumseh Fitch at the Language Log)
I was listening to a description of a paper Darwin wrote, "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant," about the development of his own son over his first four years, and comparing it to observations he had made earlier about a baby orangutan. At some point, I'd like to come back to this and track down that paper...
biology  evolution  language  linguistics  development  darwin 
february 2009 by arthegall
"Color vocabulary and pre-attentive color perception" (Language Log)
Lots of references on color naming and comparisons, both within and across culture and language boundaries.
language  perception  color  naming  sapir-whorf 
february 2009 by arthegall
John Hodgman on "meh" - Waxy.org
"It's part of the toxic Internet art of constant callous one upsmanship. And it is a sort of art, but not for me." --- And with that, Hodgman demonstrates his superior adherence to a deeper and more robustly-discomforting form of Internet Lifemanship. Truly awe-inspiring.
humor  language  internet  lifemanship  john-hodgman  meh 
february 2009 by arthegall
"Mark Halpern on Language Log" (Language Log)
The reason that many people "feel that the most exciting parts of Paradise Lost are those in which Satan speaks," is because when Satan *does* show up, he doesn't spend two paragraphs bitching about how "no one told me they were talking about my book on the interwebs." Silence should have been his good, all hope to him is lost, etc etc. (While thus he spake, the blogging squadron bright turn'd fiery red, sharpening in mooned horns their phalanx, and began to hem him round with ported comments, as thick as when a field of Ceres ripe for harvest waving bends her bearded grove of ears, which way the wind sways them; the careful ploughman doubting stands, lest on the threshing floor his hopeful bullet-pointed-response proves chaff.)
book  criticism  language  response  paradise-lost 
february 2009 by arthegall
"What’s Wrong with SQL?" (Haystack Blog)
"There should be a general and declarative way to make big joiny queries like the above work efficiently, returning the data in exactly the hierarchical form we want it — strictly relational result sets are not expressive enough. I am currently working on a simple SQL-like query language that does just this: send my generalized middleware a single big, declarative (no for loops or outer joins here!) query, and you’ll get back the JSON equivalent of the relational result set with the data nested into arrays and objects any way you want it." --- Graphs-at-a-time, man. (I'm pretty sure that Eirik was in my Database class, last semester.)
language  database  web  sql  json  haystack 
february 2009 by arthegall
"Lincoln’s Bicentennial" (The Unapologetic Mathematician)
"At last I said,- Lincoln, you never can make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means; and I left my situation in Springfield, went home to my father’s house, and stayed there till I could give any proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight. I then found out what demonstrate means, and went back to my law studies."
mathematics  history  language  law  proof  euclid  lincoln 
february 2009 by arthegall
"One shaman, two shamuses?" (Language Log)
"The usual plural of shaman is shamans. shamuses is the plural of shamus, American slang for "private detective", apparently from Yiddish shammes "sexton", due to an equation of the duties of the sexton of a synagogue with those of store security." -- What do you mean, like, an Irish monk?
humor  language  words  etymology  big-lebowski  shaman 
february 2009 by arthegall
"Formality and interpretation" (Language Log)
"The one positive conclusion from Fish's work that I believe I've grasped, so far, is the crucial role of what he calls "interpretive communities" in providing enough of a shared context — even if ephemeral and unfounded — for some minimal communication to take place. So it's ironic that he so completely fails to understand Kempson's work in the context of her native interpretive community." --- That sound you hear is Stanley Fish getting smacked down *with logic*. (That is to say, not only is it a logical smackdown, but its actual performance includes a prominent use of the phrase, "model theory.") Also, the Kempson article is really good.
humor  language  linguistics  logic  stanley-fish  representationalism 
february 2009 by arthegall
Sharon Goldwater's Bayesian language modeling reading list
A reading list that goes through (it appears) 2007, hitting most of the high points -- broad, but not overly deep.
language  list  research  bayesian-methods  modeling  nlp 
february 2009 by arthegall
"Not marble nor the gilded monuments" (Language Log)
Geoff Nunberg runs down the president's inaugural address. "There are 67 people in America who live for this stuff."
history  politics  obama  language  rhetoric  president  speech 
january 2009 by arthegall
"Tories then and now" (Language Log)
More on the Obama inauguration speech from Mark Liberman ... "The Wikipedia article cites historians' estimate that 15-20% of the white population of the American colonies were Loyalists — about the same as Dick Cheney's approval rating today. Not that there's any connection."
history  politics  obama  language  united-states 
january 2009 by arthegall
"Obama’s Indonesian redux" (Language Log)
"I still share Bill Poser's doubt, however, that Obama would be able "to carry out political negotiations with Indonesian leaders in Indonesian, or even to understand discussions of topics like politics and technology in an Indonesian newspaper." But as far as I know he's never made any claims to that level of proficiency. When Obama does eventually make a trip to Indonesia, I'm sure that simply throwing out his conversational pleasantries will go a long way in the eyes of many Indonesians." ---- I knew Obama spoke a form of Indonesian, but this is pretty awesome. Totes getting the warm fuzzies.
politics  obama  language  indonesia  diplomacy 
january 2009 by arthegall
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