Linguistics, Dancing, and a Few Good Books

05 February 2003

I've been downloading more stuff for my Mac, and it is so sweet. In addition to uControl and Virtual Desktop, I grabbed WeatherPop (which displays the current temperature and weather in my menubar, with a pull-down showing the 5-day forecast) and PTHiTunesNotifier (which lets me make hotkeys for playing, pausing, and forward-skipping iTunes, as well as popping up a little semi-transparent window with the name of each new song that comes on, and a hotkey to let me pop that up again at will). And in a fit of virtuosity, I went ahead and registered VirtualDesktop and WeatherPop, as well as OmniWeb (which last I've been meaning to register for well over a year now).

And I finally got some reading done to get back into my linguistics stuff. It's hard, starting up again after a two-month hiatus. Well, I'm going to be spending four hours on a plane tomorrow (to Northfield, MN, to interview at Carleton), maybe I can get something done then.

"Our English language is, after all, the end product of an informal committee made up of several hundred million people over the course of several centuries, and it shows." --Evan Morris

Posted 2:02 AM [+]

04 February 2003

Ok, for a long time my biggest linguistic pet peeve was when people would carelessly write "Ghandi" instead of "Gandhi" (compounded by the fact that they usually didn't even care). This has now been totally eclipsed by all the idiots out there—YES YOU ARE IDIOTS—who persist in going on and on about how dumb the President is for being unable to say the word "nuclear".

There are excellent linguistic reasons why people (and it's a whole lot more people than just the President) do this. The process is called metathesis, and it is one that happens in many languages. It tends to happen where the reversed syllable ends up making the word easier to pronounce—in the case of "nuclear", the standard pronunciation has a front vowel between two back vowels, but the metathesised version has all back vowels. Another commonly-cited example in English is the word "comfortable", where the T and R are switched, allowing the following schwa vowel to drop out entirely and reducing the word to three syllables. Crucially, this is a regular phonological process affecting speakers of many languages, and not something that is indicative of intelligence.

It bothers me most, though, because there are so many totally legitimate things to bash the President for, many of which do impugn his intelligence (others his ethics, morality, and wisdom); calling him on how he pronounces one word makes it look like we need to grasp at straws. We really really don't.

"And as with most things I bet the truth is somewhere in the land of moderation. Milk and meat won't kill you, lack of milk and meat won't kill you, milk and meat have some good things for you in them, and they also have some bad things for you in them. Your mileage and your diet may vary and don't forget to exercise." --Zach Miller

Posted 1:48 AM [+]

03 February 2003

Just did my taxes for the year. OY GEVALT it's a pain in the ass to file 1040---which I had to because of some of my mutual funds dividends. Thing is, even though the tax difference amounts to a few bucks, I still had to file a Schedule D and the full 1040... anyway, it still only took a couple hours, so cheapskate me feels justified in filling it out myself. I'm already dreading next year, though, when I will have to file for income from two states, probably with the same mutual funds dividends, and estimated tax (I'm not even trying to estimate for the RI tax, but might as well for the US tax), and conceivably even a house purchase. If I buy a house wherever I end up this year, you better believe I'm hiring an accountant to do my 2003 taxes.

"Give a man a fire and you'll keep him warm for a day. Light a man on fire and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life." --Terry Pratchett

Posted 11:12 PM [+]

Well. Today Matt and I went through our fridge and freezer, claiming what was ours (or at least what we'd eat), and pitching everything else, and cleaning. There wasn't anything really gross in there, but there were definitely some items I suspect of being upwards of two years old. Clean now, though.

Also today, I discovered two really nifty, useful little programs for my tiBook. One is uControl, which lets me turn my capslock key into a control key, which makes much more sense. I mean, come on, when was the last time you used the caps lock key? And yet it sucks up valuable keyboard real estate right there where my pinky finger sits, while I have to contort my hand to hit the control key, which I use all the time. Sun keyboards did it right, but they never hit the mass market. Anyway, that's fixed now.

The other I found because I was looking for a way to get "focus-follows-mouse", that is, the keyboard sends input to whatever window the mouse cursor is in. Not the way it's normally done in Windows or on the Mac, but common in the Unix/X world; and once you're used to it, it's super convenient. Sure, you can bring forward a window if you want—but if you just want to type into it, you don't need for that window to block some other window you're using. Anyway, I got a few pointers to VirtualDesktop, but its variety of focus-follows-mouse also brings the window forward when the mouse merely passes over it, which is jarring and not useful to me. But I got it (and paid for it) anyway, because its main function is to be a really slick multiple-desktop manager: meaning that I can have nine (or however many) virtual desktops in the background, and not all my windows need to be on the screen at once. This program is really, really well put together.

Also, Howard Dean is as cool as ever.

"You voted for Perot?? I voted for Bush, but I was insane then. That's different." --Kelly Martin

Posted 12:48 AM [+]

02 February 2003

I've just edited a notestring off the IMSA notesfiles in which I gave an account of my week living and teaching there. You can read it here.

"Honestly, I really wouldn't care if the rich kept getting richer, if only they weren't such assholes about it." --Sam Walker

Posted 3:18 AM [+]