Head in a cloud

March 17, 2009 in geekiness, links, nerd, technology, williams, work

I have become suddenly and completely smitten with the idea of cloud computing, which as far as I can tell is just a fancy way of saying “just trust Google with all of your data.” Highlights include: Having email and AIM/gchat all in a single, shiny web interface that will likely run at the speed [...]

On gers and flat tires

August 12, 2008 in bloomington, geekiness, links, maps, on...

I forgot to put this in teh big life update, but I think it deserves it’s own mention. Last week I decided to finally drag my butt down to the Bloomington Tibetan/Mongolian Cultural Center (whence the previous picture came), since the weather was wonderfully cool and I just wanted to ride my bike somewhere far [...]

End of week wrap-up

July 20, 2008 in geekiness, history, ordinary

In reverse chronological order, no less! Tonight I watched the Red Sox finish getting swept by the Angels, over a pint of beer that was not an IPA that I actually really really liked. Earlier I got a call from Bob inviting me out for a sail, which was just the thing to lift me [...]

Ah, the good old days

July 16, 2008 in geekiness, links, thought

Back in the days of the Ministry of Supply Signals Research and Development Establishment, when stodgy old phoneticians like Peter Ladefoged deemed it not only appropriate but necessary to make sweeping generalizations and to explain what formants are (“regions of the auditory spectrum in which there is a relatively large amount of spectral energy”), in [...]

…has gone over to the dark side

July 13, 2008 in geekiness, ordinary

I’ve gone and done it: I got a twitter.  You can now track my every move, documented more-or-less obsessively for the whole world to see.  You should get one too!  So we can pretend that we’re always hanging out together even though we will often be in entirely different places. In other news, today was [...]

On philosophers and futurists

July 12, 2008 in bloomington, geekiness, science, thought

Right now Indiana University is hosting the 2008 North American Conference on Computing and Philosophy that opened Friday afternoon with a talk by Luciano Floridi, a philosopher of information and major European intellectual. He proclaimed the dawn of the Fourth Revolution, the Information Revolution. In the same way that the first three revolutions fundamentally changed [...]

Is Chinglish the savior of English spelling?

July 8, 2008 in geekiness, thought

In Wired today there is a delightful little article by Michael Erard which suggests that the future of English may very well lie in the often-humorous misuse of English by non-native speakers in China and other Asian countries. Due to a lack of native-English-speaking teachers and a lack of spoken practice, Chinglish is a sort [...]

What’s this? A recipe?

June 19, 2008 in drink, food, geekiness

I know, I didn’t think I could cook, either, but I enjoyed this marinade (as did my roommate) and made it up on the spot, to boot, so allow me to revel in my culinary success. I was frankly terrified at the prospect of having to actually feed myself all summer, instead of just stuffing [...]

Oh, yeah…

June 18, 2008 in coffee, flickr, geekiness, history, images, photos, places, thought

So I’m in Indiana now, for the summer. Forgot to mention that. I’m (kind of) hard at work on trying to find a project to start designing an experiment I may or may not run this summer, maybe about mora-timing in Japanese, or maybe about direct and mediated lexicon-access models. Hurrah! I kept meaning to [...]

Post-partem musings

March 8, 2008 in geekiness, thought

With two papers (one of them the aforementioned life history…) behind me and spring break and seeing Ruth ahead of me, I’m feeling pretty good this evening. Today was a lazy day of sitting around reading the New Yorker, eating Resees’ Peanut Butter Cups (from America!), eating pizza in Dharamkot, and drinking coffee and chatting [...]