...nothing is left to guesswork.

Moving again

2006-08-12T01:08:00.000-04:00

It's been a nice run here at boundvariable, but I need a blogging service with a little more flexibility, which I may have found in Geeklog. Anyhow, the new blog is at http://some-antics/log. Nothing too exciting there yet, but it's starting to really take shape and I'm doing a lot more there than I have here in the past month or so.

Finals

2006-07-23T12:46:00.000-04:00

EDIT: Nevermind! I've picked a domain name and will be working on the site for the rest of the day. Expect at least a mock homepage and the link thereto by the end of today.

After much consideration, I've narrowed down possible choices for the domain name of the new site to the following:

lambdasaurus.com -or- lambdasaur.us (It would be accompanied by a spruced up version of this graphic:

series-of-tubes.com

tante-emmas-ecke.com (which, granted, not everyone would get but just the right people would)

dotcompositionality.com (which has an awkwardness similar to slashdot)

salva-veritate.com as in Salva veritate

or, to make the transition easier for everyone here,

boundvariable.com

Vote now or add another candidate! (Though initially I thought about all the variations on 'semantics' that would make for a good domain name, I eventually decided against it because I'd like the site to cover semantics, programming, and other topics.) The final decision will be made more on which name has the better argument(s) for it than popular vote, so be sure to explain your choice(s) :-) Enough of this silliness and back to work!

2006-07-22T21:46:00.000-04:00

I've been promising this (among many other things) all summer, but it's almost finally time for the new blog. Now...any suggestions for the name of the blog?

2006-07-06T03:11:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone, a quick little personal update:

In less than 24 hours, I'll be boarding a flight to Providence, where I'll be staying for the rest of the summer so I can get a good feel for the place and also get a head start on working (which I'm really excited about since, if you read this blog with any regularity you'd notice, I have been sort of like a tumbleweed blowing about the semantics landscape so far). I'm excited with a fair supplement of my usual travel anxiety (more that usual, actually, since I get nervous about flights to Phoenix, AZ when I'm just going for the weekend...and this is certainly a much more intense trip than that). Anyways, there's that! Hope everyone is doing well. Look forward to my next post...from Providence! :-)

+1 Google

2006-07-06T00:14:00.000-04:00

For a while now, I've been wondering what Google was going to do about the whole Net Neutrality issue. Well, it looks like they're willing to take action if need be, according to a recent Reuters article. Nice to see Google stepping up on the plate to this, although I'm afraid that this Net Neutrality thing could get very messy.

Policymakers need to learn about technology before they make policy regulating technology

2006-07-03T23:06:00.000-04:00

Last week, the US Senate Commerce Committee voted a narrow 11-11 on passing an amendment that would enforce basic Net Neutrality provisions in a telecommunications bill that was just passed. The most astonishing part of all of this is Senator Ted Stevens' (of Alaska) explanation of why he voted against the bill. A partial transcript is available at the Wired blog, and the full audio recording of Stevens' speech is available at Public Knowledge.

I think what's most startling about this is just how wrong Stevens' ideas are about how the internet both functions and is used. Stevens seems to think that a staggering majority of the average user uses the internet solely as a means of communication in its most primitive form: e-mail and chat. It is not enough to say that he is wrong and that many users (and many more with each new batch of kids getting exposed at an early age) do use the internet for more than e-mail and chat. The point that Stevens actually misses is that there is much more that the internet can offer as far as communication services go. The internet is turning the act of communicating into something more than a two-person back-and-forth dialogue. Knowledge and creativity are now capable to take any shape beyond the restrictions of text when being passed from creator to audience. This isn't just businessmen and family members communicating, as Stevens claims, this is humanity communicating with itself! The senator uses the example of the amount of bandwidth hogged by users downloading movies; even if this is the case, shouldn't the solution be to foster research in making the internet faster so that more people can enjoy this luxury at a lower cost? It just so happens that the senator's example does not represent the full potential of use of the internet and net neutrality. The big corporations that are using the internet as a distribution method for their commercial goods (which, by the way, is not really being done by anyone except Apple's iTunes Music Store anyways) will still use the internet to do that in the absence of net neutrality and in the presence of a multi-tiered system. Warner Bros. et al will certainly be able to fork over the appropriate amount of money to make their site as fast as need be to allow users to download movies fast. YouTube, on the other hand, will surely languish. But moving beyond just video, what about other media that's shared across the internet? What about programmers trying to share code or documentation about certain software that they've written? Most of these projects won't have enough money to get their site operating at the same speed as Disney or Google. Scholars in academia won't be able to properly fund a fair connection speed for their archives or personal webpages (i.e. forget about semanticsarchive). Effectively, the absence of net neutrality provisions is equivalent to the creation of the carpool lane that single-passenger cars can pay to get into.

Listening to the Net Neutrality debates, it becomes very clear very quickly who's thought about the issue carefully and who hasn't; who is open to learning more before making such a rash and important decision and who just doesn't care. And then there's Senator Stevens, who seems to be under the impression that one can send an internet, which is made up of tubes.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

No Senator, do you?

Puzzling!

2006-07-03T13:36:00.000-04:00

Jeff Veen (found by way of del.icio.us Hotlist in the past hour) has a nutty anecdote about a mysterious woman at a payphone instructing the person at the other end of the conversation to rm -r *. My command-line skills are paltry at best, but I'm glad that should someone ever tell me to enter that in my command line, I'll know well how to react. (Also of interest about that story, I think, is that the person issuing the command was a woman...see what happens when women start getting a little tech-savvy? ;-)

2006-06-30T21:03:00.000-04:00

Bummer that gre.gario.us is gone.

2006-06-30T00:07:00.000-04:00

Suddenly very interested in MAMP (the Mac version of LAMP), which I suppose means I need to jump programming ship yet again. Hrm. I suppose I should learn PHP eventually someday anyways.

Find out who killed the electric car and why

2006-06-29T20:27:00.000-04:00

I remember seeing the electric vehicle being introduced onto the market when I was in middle school and seeing it on the news. I also remember seeing news coverage of the EVs about their lack of efficiency and the high cost. At the time, I was impressed by the idea of a car that ran without gas (I was an idealist middle schooler, after all), but the network news did a good job of convincing me that this just wasn't a practical solution.

It's too bad that I wasn't the only one convinced by the naysayers because it appears that in reality, electric vehicles were great, fast, clean; the only thing possibly offensive about the electric car would be that it was a car (vs. mass public transit). But when GM and other automakers were let off the hook by CARB in 2003 and were no longer required to comply with a zero-emissions mandate, they pulled the plug on their entire line...and demande all of their cars back. It turns out that no one ever owned an electric vehicle; the cars were leased (very exclusively, too) and when the time came, none of the leasees were granted the opportunity to extend their leases or purchase the vehicle.

In a time when the nation is embroiled in tensions with the Middle East, at war (though no one will ever admit it, except maybe Rupert Murdoch) with Iraq for cheaper oil, and facing possible environmental doom à la global warming/ever-increasing carbon emissions...shouldn't we be embracing technology that would significantly start a trend to less dependency on oil? And shouldn't the ghost of the electric car be an active reminder of what is possible? Instead, people are trying to sweep the electric car under the rug:

Chelsea Sexton, who loved the EV-1 so much that she became a sales specialist for GM, is seen next to the car, reiterating how great they are and that Peterson is one of few places where the public can see them. Seems innocent enough. But Paine just received word “that I will never be invited to the Peterson Automotive Museum again.” He then mentioned that the Smithsonian recently removed its own EV display—and replaced it with a robotic Hummer SUV. Both museums rely on contributions from corporations like GM. (From the OC Weekly.)

Don't let the EV disappear into obscurity. Go see "Who Killed the Electric Car?" this weekend if you're near LA (at the NuWilshire, 14th & Wilshire Blvd. in Santa Monica), NY or Orange County (not sure of where else the movie is opening and/or when). And if you really want the "fair and balanced" perspective on the issue, check out GM's response to the film.

And if you're not able to see the film this weekend, then take a look at these groups working to force automakers to build lower-emissions cars:
http://www.pluginamerica.com/
http://www.pluginpartners.com/
http://www.drivingthefuture.com/

Yet another Common Lisp implementation

2006-06-28T03:56:00.000-04:00

OpenMCL is an opensourced version of MCL (Macintosh Common Lisp by Digitool) that runs on ppc hardware under Darwin/Mac OS X, Linux ppc, and also x86-64 hardware under Linux. Supposedly a good pick for OS X Common-Lisp hackers as it "compiles to machine code, supports threads, and has quite good integration with OS X's Carbon and Cocoa toolkits," says Seibel in Chapter 2 of Practical Common Lisp. And I'm sure you're all wondering now what the difference between OpenMCL and MCL is...well, straight from the OpenMCL FAQ, here's the answer:

There are some obvious ways in which the enviornments differ. OpenMCL is essentially a UNIX command-line application: it uses #\LineFeed as the #\NewLine character, believes that file systems are case-sensitive (even though this isn't necessarily the case on OSX) and that physical pathname components are delimited by "/" characters.

There are some intentional implementation differences, most notably in the way that CL FLOAT types map to IEEE float types. In MCL, LONG-FLOAT, DOUBLE-FLOAT, and SINGLE-FLOAT all map to (64-bit) IEEE double and SHORT-FLOAT maps to (32-bit) IEEE single; in OpenMCL, LONG-FLOAT and DOUBLE-FLOAT map to IEEE double and SINGLE-FLOAT and SHORT-FLOAT denote IEEE single. Since *READ-DEFAULT-FLOAT-FORMAT* defaults to SINGLE-FLOAT in Common Lisp, unqualified floating-point constants (among other things) denote different IEEE floating-point types in the two implementations.

The implementations began diverging in 1999; there's still a lot of code in common, but there's never been any real effort to keep them in synch. Code that deals with stream internals, network I/O, physical pathnames, threading, etc. is probably not generally much easier to port between MCL and OpenMCL than between any two other CL implementations (though there may be cases where it is.)

2006-06-27T10:34:00.000-04:00

A whole dissertation about the band Radiohead and their work.

2006-06-26T17:44:00.000-04:00

Peter Norvig has an interesting comparison of Java v. Lisp when used to solve a programming challenge. The challenge was originally posted by Erann Gat, who published the results of the study in Lisp as an Alterative to Java. Gat has a directory of the supplemental materials to the study; of particular interest might be the raw figures from his study.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

2006-06-26T14:39:00.000-04:00

Who Killed the Electric Car?, a documentary about the electric car and its death by big oil and corrupt polititicians, debuted this weekend at the LA Film Festival. It opens this Wednesday in Los Angeles at the Landmark NuWilshire.

2006-06-22T20:24:00.000-04:00

Oh nooooo, today is my first zero-hit day. Looks like I need to start posting more regularly as previously promised.

2006-06-17T11:42:00.000-04:00

The EFF is cool and funny. See their animated short The Corruptibles here.

Web two-point-oh-no!

2006-06-15T01:45:00.000-04:00

I'm starting to toy around a bit with some more aesthetics of the blog...I'd eventually like the blog to be command central for all things me, something sort of similar to Chris's kampers.net. I think the del.icio.us tag map is pretty sweet, but I'm not too sure about the link roll. I'm also not sure if I like any of the layout as it is right now, but I'm just modifying someone's template. Mostly, I'm playing around with what sorts of things I would like on a blog and how things will look. I know it's a little cluttery, and perhaps by the time some of you read this, things will have changed again. Just excuse the mess in the sidebar if it's too much :-)

I was certainly shy as a child . . .

2006-06-15T01:21:00.000-04:00

Because shy children appear to be more sensitive to winning and losing, they may experience emotions more strongly than others, putting them at risk for emotional disorders such as anxiety and depression. On the flip side, shy children may experience positive emotions such as success very strongly, helping them succeed, Knutson says.

"The Rewards of Being Shy"

"Use functional programming techniques to write elegant JavaScript"

2006-06-15T01:16:00.000-04:00

"Functional, or declarative, programming is a very powerful programming method and is gaining popularity in the software industry. This article introduces some of the relevant functional programming concepts, and provides examples to use those concepts effectively. The author explains how to write elegant code with JavaScript™, which can import constructs and features from functional programming."

Hehe.

Blaaargh.

2006-06-14T17:56:00.000-04:00

I somehow managed to install SBCL all on my own (despite my super shoddy knowledge of Unix commands), only to find that Practical Common Lisp offers a number of implementations with its Lisp in a Box packages. The packages also come with the old-school gnu-icon'ed Emacs, so I feel double silly now. Oh well, at least I'm up and running again.

(My first introduction to functional programming–to programming, for that matter–was with Common Lisp, but it only lasted about 2 weeks before I found my way to Scheme. At the time, Scheme was a better language for me because it was so simple. But as there's no Practical Scheme book, it seems like now might be a good time to make the switch back to CL.)

Oh, infix notation...how I have missed thee!

Carbon Emacs Mar 06 package

2006-06-14T17:10:00.000-04:00

Wow. It's been so long that I've done anything requiring Emacs that I missed the March 06 update...and the new icon! I miss the old, goofy looking gnu :-( I suppose the new icon is more elegant and simpler...bah.

Michael Bloomberg's address to JHU graduates

2006-06-13T13:18:00.000-04:00

One of the things that I've been doing in my spare time is going through the hundreds of articles my aggregator has picked up (mostly from /.) and flagging the ones of interest.

Here's one that I found particularly share-worthy: NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg's address to the graduates of Johns Hopkins' School of Medicine.

2006-06-12T20:26:00.000-04:00

Waterfire 2006!

Success!

2006-06-12T19:52:00.000-04:00

Took about 10 minutes total to fix toolkit.jar and add the appropriate entries to the XML file with all the bindings...and now...wonderful Emacs-y-ness! Even better than Safari! Hooray!

2006-06-12T15:25:00.000-04:00

After all that complaining about Custom Keywords, I realize that there's no hassle at all, and so far, nothing but absolute pleasure.

Back to Firefox...waaaaah.

2006-06-12T14:39:00.000-04:00

About a month ago, as school was winding down, I switched from Firefox to Safari as my default browser. There was really only one motivation for this: Safari, as a native Cocoa application, has the cool perk of coming with the basic Emacs keybindings. Emacs keybindings, of course, are not impossible to achieve with Firefox, but involve more tweaking of XML and JAR files than I felt comfortable (or patient) with at the time. At the time, Emacs keybindings for free was all I wanted...

A month later, and now I'm ready to switch back. For one, Safari is slow. So slow that within a week, I made a habit of opening up Firefox when I needed to get something from EasyNews or when I wanted to watch something on Google Video. Second reason: I might as well get used to tweaking things, and getting Emacs keybindings in Firefox (or whatever keybindings I want, for that matter) will not be all that hard. The only remaining grievance is that I will have to update toolkit.jar with every update of Firefox. But considering how much time I spend on other silly things, like sitting in my bathrobe reading /., I think I can manage that. Yet another motivation to switch back is that very occasionally, a site will have been designed without keeping Safari in mind. Rarely do I have that problem with Firefox (and while it is still rare that I have that problem with Safari, it is significantly enough more of a problem with Safari than Firefox). (Amtrak's site, for example, freaks out when I use Safari. And many of Blogger's HTML editing tools (by many, it's at most 4) are unavailable for Safari. That's fairly ignorable since I don't use Blogger to update unless I'm away from my computer or I need to do some super fancy HTML (which reminds me, I should look into switching to something much more robust than MacJournal)).

Thankfully, I don't expect switching back to take more than an hour, but one annoyance remains...custom keywords! I had been loving Safari Search in Address Bar, though I knew it wasn't a Safari-specific ability. In fact, Mozilla Custom Keywords does exactly the same thing, but my annoyance is that to modify or add a custom keyword, I'll have to do it through the bookmarks manager in Firefox. Safari just kept a little list of those keywords that I wanted to use without requiring the bookmarking part. I suppose it's a minor difference that I will eventually get used to, and it does make it nice that I will have access to all my bookmarks (something that I could do in SIA but would have had to add each one manually myself) in the address bar via keyword now.

And, I should remember that I went through the pain of switching to the Dvorak keyboard layout when I was in Germany and had recently had my laptop stolen. If I can do that, I think I can deal with toolkit.jar and Bookmark Manager.

2006-06-12T10:49:00.000-04:00

I want an Oink's Pink Palace account. Anyone have a free invite?

Web2.0

2006-06-12T02:25:00.000-04:00

I am slowly doing all the silly Web2.0 things that I have always wanted to do but never got a chance to before because I had been so busy. Finally fixed my del.icio.us so that most things are tagged appropriately. I must do a better job of del.icio.us-ing now that everything is tidy. A few weeks ago, Chris Kampmeier mentioned Yahoo's MyWeb to me and said that he liked it a lot better. I am not sure what I think about this quite yet, but since I have the time to pansy about a little bit, I'll be reporting back thoughts about del.icio.us v. MyWeb. Speaking of, although this is way outdated, I want del.icio.us velour pants.

Yes, very good that Emma is now well-rested and unemployed so that she can try out bookmark-tagging services and blog about such activities 'round the clock!

I promise promise promise that there will be something about Frege...TOMORROW! (Or at least by Wednesday ;-))

More Lisp.

2006-06-12T01:49:00.000-04:00

Perhaps I don't need Mr. Graham! David Lamkins has his book, Successful Lisp, and customized tracks for learning up on the web. Having worked quite a bit with Scheme, I guessed that I could call myself a former acquaintance and take the Former User Track. Add that to the stack of summer activities...Although, the summer activities belong more to some sort of crazy heap...aww.

Thanks, Amazon!

2006-06-12T01:40:00.000-04:00

I just got a recommendation for Practical Common Lisp, which tickles my interest just a wee bit as one of the things that I have never done, always wanted to, but just didn't know how...was write useful programs with Lisp. Of course, this probably would require me transitioning from the world of Scheme to Common Lisp...at least there's Paul Graham for that!

I hate that I am moving so soon so that I have to wait to buy more books (so that I am not shipping things twice within a month).

2006-06-12T01:18:00.000-04:00

Net Neutrality

I never post things like this here, so it must be a sign that this is really important! And anyways, it's less than two minutes long.

2006-06-12T00:02:00.000-04:00

CRAIGSLIST IS DOWN?!

2006-06-07T15:00:00.000-04:00

To all the Google China naysayers...ha!

Back into Functional Land...

2006-05-29T15:58:00.000-04:00

Today I did what I have done about four times already: I fired up DrScheme and opened to the first page of Essentials of Programming Languages (due to the chaos of being in school and working full time, the farthest I'd previously gotten to was about chapter 3). If you look further down the page, you'll notice that one of the courses that uses EOPL as a text is one taught at Brown. Don't the assignments look delicious?

Now to define occurs-bound? all over again. Wonder if all this time in Java Land will have changed things much. (The last time I had to recursively define something was perhaps two months ago!)

2006-05-27T09:54:00.000-04:00

Unsure what's more grueling: debugging all night or debugging all day.

Sometimes, I care to be succint.

2006-05-26T09:33:00.000-04:00

!!! What I have been wanting since I was first forced into the world of imperative programming: a book written by Guy Steele! The Java Language Specification

Moral of the story: good things can happen when you're looking for a good Java book before the sun rises.

Must really get back to Essentials of Programming Languages, too. Must know about continuations like the back of my hand. And must really really finish Haskell. Must know more about monads. Fwah, perhaps really will sit in front of computer all summer long.

"We call it lies..."

2006-05-25T04:08:00.000-04:00

Just came back from seeing "An Inconvenient Truth" or "the Al Gore movie" as we've been referring to it. By the people who should see it most, it will probably get dismissed as just another liberal propaganda film (also saw a trailer for that Nick Cage 9/11 movie... :-/). This is unfortunate because the film and its message have so much more to offer than just politics, whether or not this is really just a (very clever) ploy to get a Gore 2008 campaign going (although at least from this naïve perspective, Gore's efforts seem to be earnest and genuine).

There's plenty of press out already about how Gore's charisma is fantastic and how it would have been great to have seen him display even a fraction of it during the 2000 campaign, but I just wanted to post a few thoughts on it and announce that as of today, the film's out in LA and NYC with more cities on the way. It's well made, entertaining, and pretty moving. Sometimes a little hokey, but it was reasonable enough.

Also, I've been really interested in the negative criticism that the movie has stirred up, especially the Competitive Enterprise Institute's recently aired tv ads. CEI is, conveniently enough, funded in large part by the American Petroleum Institute and Exxon. How is it that "they call it pollution; we call it life" can be an actual slogan?

And, if you're wondering as I was, G-dub probably won't be seeing the film.

Go see it when you can. If you're in LA, I'll take you!

2006-05-23T04:23:00.000-04:00

As promised, more regular posts!

Today was yet another code-oriented day. Fiddled more with GWT and Google Maps, and an exciting romp with Yahoo's very suave geocoding API. Then fiddled with JiBX, an XML databinding framework that binds XML data to objects in Java. Then got completely frustrated and decided to waste time updating blog in case anobody who used to read it still does.

I'm afraid that I am probably not cut out for professional software development or anything greater than, oh, a prime number searcher. I don't have the patience to use other people's code and figure out what's happened if (or more appropriately, when) something goes wrong. I suppose this is the hard part of programming–working with everyone else's code and making yours and theirs somehow dance together. (And of course there's the do-it-yourself route, which one seems forced to in any Scheme implementation, and in any other programming language is usually largely foolish. Why re-invent the wheel?) Maybe I should learn to have the patience for that sort of stuff because the other part of programming, the abstract part, is fun and exciting and certainly very cool and probably worth the patience. But ugh I hate cryptic compiler error messages.

And now for my usual boring inanity:
Got an e-mail today from Degree Progress today confirming that I will be awarded my degree, hurray. Though probably unfounded in any reasonable interpretation of reality, I had feared all semester that I would not be graduating and would be turned away from Brown and would then live a horrible life as a college drop-out, probably making balloon animals on the Venice boardwalk and eating seals for dinner.

I'm thinking about making plans to go to Germany over Christmas break this year. I have several friends who have been funded to spend a year there (Fulbright and DAAD) starting this fall, and, of course, the Berliners. I've been very nostalgic for Berlin lately and would very much love to be there again. Weihnachtsmärkte and Glühwein! Hrm, I will need to investigate whether a one-month sublet is even possible in Berlin.

Oh, and!: an endorsement for Matt Beckman's photos of his travels in Istanbul because I don't know when I'm ever going there and I cherish the ability to live vicariously. Matty is one of my more adventuresome friends (he was last living in Montana, just for the hell of it) and is one of those Smarty McSmartPants that will be a Fulbright Scholar in Germany this fall.

2006-05-22T03:21:00.000-04:00

I'm aware of the fact that to have a steady readership, one must regularly update one's blog with interesting content, and that recently, I haven't been doing that at all. A few reasons for this include:

1) Anxiety over my ability to actually produce interesting content for an entry, and losing at attempt to overcome the anxiety to actually post.

2) I've been learning Java. And while I'd someday like for my blog to tackle both issues of language and computation, there's very little report as far as programming goes right now. Anonymous inner classes are great, but I don't think they're news to anyone else. Although, I have been tinkering with Google's Web Tookit, and it's very cool. Anyways, so there's really not much I can say about programming right now that will be either useful or interesting to anybody, and as I'm spending most of my time getting more proficient with programming, I've been spending less time on language. But I've been reading Syntactic Structures, and perhaps there will be some thoughts later on that.

3) I've been in sort of a malaise since commencement. Not needing to wake up at 5am makes me confused in the mornings.

That's really all I have to say for now. Banal, I know. But keep coming back! There will be more to come (I hope).

Thanks, Mr. Graham.

2006-05-10T12:24:00.000-04:00

You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else-- even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.

- Paul Graham, How to Do What You Love

It seemed only appropriate to post one of my favorite links in the world in celebration of doing what I love. (And about two deep breaths before I return to it...many many places to follow up on exceptives...)

Oh! And in celebration of the upcoming "holiday", another fitting Paul Graham piece: Undergraduation.

Paper to be posted shortly...look under "Recent Works" for it and maybe if I'm feeling super desperate, I'll make an entry of it, too.

2006-05-10T06:06:00.000-04:00

My analysis of exceptive constructions (closed, that is) with respect to scalarity to come shortly. For now, a criticism of Moltmann 1995 that will not make the current draft of the paper, but much more interesting than that scalarity stuff.

Moltmann argues that the Homogeneity Condition is required to secure that only universal and negative universal quantification is allowed when a (closed) exceptive is involved. She claims that von Fintel's (1993) Uniqueness Condition is not enough to guarantee that "Most students/More than half of the students but John went to the party" is ungrammatical. And true enough, the Uniqueness Condition would yield true given the correct model for such constructions. However, is it necessary to encode the Quantifier Constraint explicitly as a presupposition? After all, the Uniqueness Condition will require that whenever such sentences are true, so too are their stronger universal counterparts. That is, given a model when the relevant individuals are {Mary, Sue, John, Tom, Bill}, then only way "More than half the students but John went to the party" can be true (or at least pass the Uniqueness Condition) is when {John} is the uniquely smallest set which when subtracted from "more than half the students" makes that quantification true. However, that means that a logically stronger statement could be made; that EVERY student but John went to the party. One then wonders if perhaps the failure to fulfill a Gricean maxim could account for the oddness of "More than half the students but John" and if the Homogeneity Condition is not superfluous.

2006-05-08T22:25:00.000-04:00

Semantics papers are easy to write...when you know what you're writing about.

morning angst!

2006-05-05T13:08:00.000-04:00

I am weirded out by the whole commencement thing. I don't find it a big deal that I'm getting a piece of paper that says I've jumped through the right hoops for four years. It wasn't that hard. What was hard was being in a foreign country for a year, getting the courage to try to take graduate classes, finding out that graduate classes are really quite a lot of fun, reading actual papers in linguistics, pushing myself to do more than what the degree required me. Because when I think about it, that piece of paper just says that I took the required eight courses for the major, three of those being intro courses (ironically, I think the other five were made up by one advanced class, three grad courses, and philosophy of language...). It doesn't mention how I struggled to understand the basic concepts of semantics early on in my advanced semantics class and how it made me desperate to understand what seemed at least to be really important, and how that search led me to really sort of love semantics and discover that I liked it, I like the questions it asked and how it tried to answer those questions.

2006-05-04T12:39:00.000-04:00

Notes for my presentation on exceptive constructions can be found here. It's nothing new, just an overview of von Fintel 1993, Moltmann 1995, and Gajewski 2004. Thanks to comments from Elena and Janet, though, I hope to be more fruitfully investigating the relationship with "only" in the paper, perhaps looking at scalarity.

2006-05-03T11:09:00.000-04:00

Exceptive constructions: 2; Emma: 0; Gajewski: many, I think.

Last night's celebration was pre-emptive, indeed. If only any topic in semantics could be half as easy as the entirety of phonology... On the up side, the phonology paper was easily written and it looks like I'll at least be graduating.

2006-05-02T18:56:00.000-04:00

Figuring out how much caffeine my body needs is tricky and hard; I often overshoot or undershoot, both resulting in headaches and nausea. Despite that, I believe I'm making good headway on work for tomorrow. Presentation notes will be completed shortly, as will the paper by Friday (I hope).

So, in pre-emptive celebration (as an American, I am entitled to pre-emptivite action), I've gotten myself another delicious slice of reading:

I also ordered my own copy of Syntactic Structures. Yay inane purchase bragging post.

And your bird can sing!

2006-05-01T22:03:00.000-04:00

Is it possible to think of operators such as "only" or "even" (and perhaps others that are not necessarily focus operators..."and"?) as polymorphic, as in the same polymorphism of, say, Objective-C?

I'm trying to get a handle on exceptive constructions (yes, I've been dreaming about them, too). The paper and presentation notes will go up shortly, but for now, one of the larger questions I'm concerned with: can exceptives be analyzed similarly to "only", perhaps even as a focus operator? In particular, it seems that there are many but-phrases that haven't been considered (or perhaps have, but not given a treatment). Moltmann 1995 gives several interesting examples that don't come up in von Fintel 1993: John painted the house except for the door. But what about when the exceptive phrase complement is not a noun? As in: Kate can be a good cook, except for today. Or: Kate could do anything except cook the risotto.

That's it for now. If I kept going on about it here, I'd have to turn in a blog entry as my term paper. Just wanted to post a little teaser and also let everyone know that I'm still alive.

2006-04-22T10:10:00.000-04:00

"Emmie...why are you up so early?"

2006-04-21T17:18:00.000-04:00

"There'll be time enough to sleep when we're dead tired."

2006-04-20T22:39:00.000-04:00

Today's Wikipedia picture of the day. Pollution is so cute.

Inane post while I wait to end my 72+hour day.

2006-04-20T21:20:00.000-04:00

The girl who took an appointment for the study today and then failed to show up has caused me much misery. MISERY!

I had lunch and conversation with a couple of people from my phonetics/phonology class and it was nice. I like smart and sassy people who talk about smart things.

Nathan is making me have dinner with him tonight at Versailles...for the third time this week. I should have never told him about it. Fried plantains are tasty but so is variety, which I don't get exposed to as a weenie vegetarian.

I've had two Red Bulls today. Three coffees. Four nights to finish work for Tuesday's presentation.

I like doxastically possible worlds.

Ugh. Nothing but caffeinated beverages are keeping me going right now. And an intense desire to find out exactly what Friederike Moltmann is going to say next.

EDIT She just called. Estimated time of departure just pushed forward by thirty minutes. Waaaaah.

2006-04-20T16:55:00.000-04:00

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

2006-04-19T13:56:00.000-04:00

I stubbed my toe while walking to the lab this morning on some sort of metal crate thing that I had completely failed to see in front of me. I think I may have broken the toe; it's certainly not looking very happy.

That's ok, I didn't like that one anyway.

Conversations I've had with my cell phone: Part I.

2006-04-18T10:37:00.000-04:00

Me: Cell phone, are you going to wakey me later?
Cell phone: (looks demure)
Me: Ok, that's a yes then.

And wouldn't you know it, but it did vibrate jut 10 minutes later. Perhaps I should give the cell phone a name, like Rosinante.

I have a feeling that even if I hadn't been awoken by the buzzing, the pain in my shoulders would have gotten me up still. I've developed some sort of lovely disorder where my shoulders are so tense that when I try to sleep, they cause me enough pain to wake me within twenty minutes. How does one achieve such a feat? The tried-and-true method of no sleep + stress + more no sleep + more stress. Repeat as necessary for the duration of nine months.

No student but Emma talks in her sleep to her cell phone. Oooh. Binding.

2006-04-18T09:26:00.000-04:00

Why didn't anybody tell me that comments were disabled? (Or rather, reserved for registered members only?) Problem has been noted and fixed; I think Blogger sets it as default, and it didn't occur to me to check until just now because I think of important things when I haven't slept for a good three days. I'm looking to beat last semester's 9-day-sleep-deprivation streak.

All I want to do right now is take a nap, wake up around 9, get some Irish Breakfast tea with milk and sugar, and read Friederike Moltmann's paper on exceptives. But there is costume shopping, my final rehearsal for Solo Performance, mandatory lunch and 'getting-to-know-you' session for Phonetics/Phonology (why???) and then work. I wish I could take semantics classes and semantics classes only so that class as a whole would not feel like a terrible burden. It's ok. I think the liquor store is open so I can get some of my favorite energy drinks now. Hooray.

Cooperative housing at Brown: I just put in an application to live there next year.

2006-04-18T08:27:00.000-04:00

Some time ago, I posted about a talk given by John Hawkins, uploaded the audio recording of the talk to the Internet Archive and shared it with everyone. Well, I just checked back at the Archive to see how the file is doing, only to be pleasantly suprised to see that someone has expanded the options for the file (from my one dinky WAVE): see here. So thanks to whoever did that, apologies still for the original recording being rather shabby.

2006-04-17T13:05:00.000-04:00

I read Kai von Fintel's "Exceptive Constructions" this weekend (after another stupidly long battle with the USC library system) and am overwhelmed. Now to think about what exceptives and "only" have to do with each other...I find free exceptives very interesting, especially since they seem to be more lenient in what the exception may be.

I'm also finding that I have a hard time sleeping. I've been having nightmares about...graduate school, the hog industry, showing up late for class, being chased by lambda, and the solo performance show next week:

And unfortunately, I'm much more interested in exceptives than rehearsing.

An Inconvenient Truth

2006-04-13T14:24:00.000-04:00

I went to YouTube, looking to see what a search for "Eben Moglen" would get me, and instead got sidetracked when I saw a trailer for "An Inconvenient Truth". I thought Al Gore was a sort of tool-ish candidate way back when...but 6 years later, younger Bush and his crew have done and let happen plenty of nasty events, and I'm learning all about Al Gore and liking him quite a bit. Anyways, this movie is hopefully not one of those faux-documenteries a la Michael Ruppert's Peak Oil flick. Here are the opening weekend dates:

May 24 - New York and Los Angeles
June 2 - Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington D.C.
June 9 - Atlanta, Detroit, Houston, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Denver, Sacramento, St. Louis, San Diego, Miami, Baltimore, Portland
June 16 - in theaters everywhere

Even, only, also and but are coming soon...

2006-04-12T14:29:00.000-04:00

A quick word on the status of my decision, since I sort of baited everyone with the previous post and then never actually said what the decision was. I've decided on Brown, which I had my concerns about, but which I think I will grow to love. I was a little worried about Providence being not so much a city like NYC or Montreal, but I think having lived in cities all my life, the tranquility will be nice. Besides Polly Jacobson being there, which was my primary motivation for looking at the program in the first place, there were a couple of other factors that made me like Brown: its location on the East Coast and Richard Heck. I have been trying to really dig into Frege since my second semester in Germany, so it will be nice to have someone like Heck around. So yup, Providence in the fall. I'm giddy and excited, but to be honest, I'm mostly just relieved that I don't have to kill myself with anxiety everyday over the decisions. I felt a bit sad declining McGill's offer because I really did find everyone I met very delightful and worry that I missed an opportunity to be exposed to many different flavors of linguistics, but direct compositionality is important to me, even though I've become very interested in PPIs and NPIs lately (the influence of Elena and her seminar), not that I couldn't have had both. The other concern I had was that the courseload was just so heavy at McGill and while I like classes, I have been taking advanced and graduate courses for two years now and think that I would like to have the time to focus on particular issues I am interested in as soon as possible. I actually do hope that I get to see the people I met at McGill again. I'm disappointed that I won't get to work with Chris Barker as I think our interests were very similar, but I think being at Brown will at least give me to opportunity to perhaps interact occasionally with him.

Despite all these feelings, though, I'm thrilled. Brown has been sort of a dream for me ever since I read Polly's VFS paper last year, and it's all still very surreal that I'll be going there now.

Unrelated: I'm going to post soon (hopefully soon) some thoughts I have about even, only, also and exceptives. But oh! Rehearsal time...

Decisions!

2006-04-11T01:56:00.000-04:00

...have been made. But it would be too late to go into it all now, so I'll leave off until tomorrow to reveal and dote.

For now, I'd like to bitch and moan a bit about the library services at USC. I have been trying to track down the holy trio of papers on exceptives: Moltmann, von Fintel, Gajewski. Certainly, I am understanding that the Gajewski is hard to get ahold of, it being a dissertation and whatnot. But the other two are published in well-known and widely-circulated journals. It is annoying enough that for whatever reason a copy of each of the articles run $30 a pop. And I had just about gotten mildly excited to go to Doheny and make copies from the paper journals myself...EXCEPT: Doheny has all but two volumes of NLS...and guess which two? Oh, could it be 1 and 2??? Ok, but surely USC has a recent enough collection of L&P volumes. This I wasn't able to find out because L&P is locked away in the Hoose Philosophy Library which closes at 5 pm Mondays through Fridays (and which appropriately closes for good on the weekends; can't have kids actually pursuing knowledge on the weekends! then who will go to the football games and get plastered?). (Oh, related annoying fact: Doheny, which houses the majority of USC's books and journals, closes at 5 pm on Fridays.) Doesn't anybody think that perhaps some students have work + class schedules that keep them occupied 8 am - 7 pm Mondays through (yes) Saturdays? Is it so unreasonable to think that my one and only joy after a long week might be to comfort of being able to read?

Here endeth the bitching and moaning, which I was told not to do since it is useless to focus on silly things that will soon not matter.

For all I dislike about USC, I should also mention, the faculty in the Linguistics department have been amazing and have made days like today (and many even worse) surprisingly tolerable. As the number of days to graduation grow shorter, my excitement to leave a place where I have found few intellectual compatriots grows greater, but so too does the feeling that I will very much miss the few people that made these four years worth remembering.

2006-04-10T12:31:00.000-04:00

Dear Los Angeles,

Just saw the weather forecast for the next 10 days.

Please stop raining. Somebody has to take to bus to school at 7 am six days a week from Venice and then back at 7 pm. It's bad enough as it is without being wet all day with no hope of dryness, not even when I get home due to living in a shed. And now, I have a nasty puncture wound on my foot where a girl at a concert wearing high heels stomped. If you could ask your scenesters to chill out and stop being a pain in the ass (or foot! har har), that would be nice. Also, please stop raining. The wetness is bound to get that nasty wound infected.

Thanks,
Emma

As promised!

2006-04-07T18:59:00.000-04:00

If you've been waiting by the seat of your pants (is that the phrase? I'm no good with those) for the promised upload of the Hawkins talk, aren't you pleased that you regularly look at this blog? I tried to host it on USC space myself, but that I'm hosting too much as it is there. It's probably a better idea to have it the Internet Archive store it.

The audio isn't terribly great; I was using the Griffin iTalk microphone on my iPod and sitting to the left, so it's fairly echo-y. Also, it didn't occur to me to do this until after Elaine Andersen presented the speaker, so you miss out on her introducing. But that's ok. I heard that she had someone videotape the whole talk as well, so if you really really want to have the full experience, email her and get the goods.

For now, here's Jack Hawkins' talk from yesterday: Building Bridges in the Language Sciences. (Sorry the URL is so long...I got very confused at some of the things Archive asked me about.)

OH! One last thing: the file format, as you may soon find out, is WAVE. If that's in any way offensive to you, comment your preference and I'll get on top of that.

2006-04-07T14:00:00.000-04:00

Aloha friends and neighbors. Jack Hawkins spoke yesterday about interdisiplinarity and the language sciences. I was lucky enough to catch an audio recording of the entire thing which Professor Hawkins kindly gave me permission to share. So, stay tuned. There's more yet to come!

Frege Hair Color Center (huh?)

2006-04-04T00:36:00.000-04:00

frege1
Originally uploaded by Nat Hansen.

Yes. Somehow the words "Frege", "hair", and "color" all are related enough for there to be some sort of center where all their semantic values compose with one another. I'm not sure how exactly, but I'm dying to visit this place now. It's near UCLA and easily accessible via Big Blue Bus.

2006-04-03T12:26:00.000-04:00

I spent most of this weekend tinkering about with Objective-C. We've gotten the parser functioning pretty well and have even made a primitive front-end for it in Cocoa. The UI helper in Cocoa is really sweet...it's so easy, it reminds me of those 'make your own interactive computer program' programs that we used in middle school. Two really strange problems arose yesterday. First, we were trying to get the text from the NSTextView (which was linked to the text field in our front-end) to store temporarily in a tempfile to feed to the parser. And hooray! We seemed to have found the perfect C function to do this: fmemopen. Except, as we found out after 15 minutes of trying to figure out why it wouldn't recognize fmemopen, we didn't have this or open_mem or anything useful available to us over in BSD-land. So we searched and searched and searched for something; thanks to the internet, it only took us the afternoon. There were some other problems; thinking we had to declare a variable that Yacc already provided; and! (my favorite) forgetting to mention EOF anywhere in the program. But once those things were fixed, the program ran nicely and spat out cute abstract parse trees to the run log.

The other strange problem came while we were implementing the evaluation methods so that we could run [prog eval] and have, say, add1(0) return 1 instead of ADD1 ( NUMBER ) . The implementation went fairly smoothly and straightforwardly; there was one SNAFU where we couldn't inherit any of NSMutableArray's methods in the subclass of it that we created, but we just hacked through that problem by creating the array in the subclass and then creating our own method for adding an object. So we worked thought the errors that the compiler brought up (most of them, perhaps all, were silly things like forgetting to import a header file). Any then we finally had built the program and it ran! Except that add1(0) returned...4! 4! That's right, 4! So we ran the debugger and ran the debugger and ran the debugger...and we couldn't figure out why at one point of the program's run, it had taken the value 0...but then when it had the add1 function applied to it, it became 4! It was maddening. We tried everything, until finally we noticed that the program worked as it should when we type-casted the value as int. And then add1(0) returned 1. Hooray!

One other thing I should mention. I was at first terribly enthusiastic about Objective-C when I first started tinkering with it last weekend. It doesn't feel as clunky and idiosyncratic as C++ (it's dynamic-ness is really nice, too). But then, working with it extensively this weekend, I saw that Objective-C really is still an imperative language and an object-oriented one. Actually, I think OOPLs are pretty neat, and I am excited to have some time to look at OCAML this summer to see a more functional way of doing OOP. And Objective-C has fantastic advantages and is usually fun to work with. But some of the more complicated methods were such a pain in the ass to implement, and I see all over again why functional programming is such a wonder. From my incredibly CS ignorant point of view, functional programming languages seem much easier than imperative ones. And I don't mean that they're better, I just mean that one needs to be so precise and meticulous with a language like C...in ways that Scheme never requires you to be. In Scheme, you need only to think about what the most efficient levels of abstraction are and which algorithm will serve your function best. The worst that can happen in a Scheme program is an endless loop. C has all sorts of goofy errors waiting for you to make them. Functional programming is all about abstract ideas and what must be a Platonic universe, where imperative programming seems to really involve the programmer with the machine. Imperative programming is more of a challenge, and I suppose that's why it intrigues me.