Linguistics, Dancing, and a Few Good Books

07 March 2003

Whew. Finished the paper. Now I just need to find someone tomorrow to sanity check it. I'm actually really proud of my exposition on the perceptron algorithm... maybe I'll post it here later.

This article is a bizarre little excursion into the wild world of automobile cupholders. I'd make some snide comment about the state of journalism these days, except it actually was pretty cool. (And it was in the car section, to be fair.)

"If you want to have a democracy, you gotta figure out how to have one, here." --Winona LaDuke

Posted 3:48 AM [+]

06 March 2003

Of course, snow has its downsides, too. Ouch.

dad@hvn, ur spshl. we want wot u want &urth2b like hvn. giv us food & 4giv r sins lyk we 4giv uvaz. don't test us! save us! bcos we kno ur boss, ur tuf & ur cool 4 eva! ok? --Matthew Campbell

Posted 1:04 PM [+]

It's so hard to keep at work with this much snow coming down outside my window. What a view. So pretty.

And yet, the writer's block finally broke, and I may actually finish this paper by 5 tomorrow. That'd be good.

"I would be a good girl." --David Tucker

Posted 11:09 AM [+]

05 March 2003

Today was Ash Wednesday. I went to Mass at noon, and as usual, it was one of the most crowded Masses all year (partially attributable to the APEX Catholics, but mostly because it had a lot of faculty and staff that go to their home parishes on weekends). And yet, rather to my surprise, I ran into no less than three people who had never seen that before, never heard of it, and (this probably goes without saying) thought it was bizarre. One was from mainland China, so I can at least assume that she hasn't met very many Catholics in her life; but the other two were from Seattle and New Zealand, both of which have a reasonably hefty Catholic population. Maybe they just weren't paying attention?

"The Yankees? Yeah, they're a baseball team. They're from the Bronx. Like me." --Dave Tucker
"And J Lo, too." --Yana Kucheva

Posted 9:01 PM [+]

Why haven't I posted in a while? Boy howdy have I been busy.

• Saturday, I danced at the Yale comp. That was fun, if a little odd---though the venue was otherwise fantastic, we were dancing on a polished concrete floor! Just asking for shin splints, really. Anyway, I got callbacks in silver samba/jive with Marissa, which was sort of exciting, and in the team match where Carrie and I were dancing American tango. (And the team placed sixth, so Carrie and I must've done a few things right!) Dave continued to have the magic touch (probably has something to do with all that practicing he does), and ribboned in all but one event, taking home at least one ribbon of each colour. The only events he didn't place in were tango/foxtrot, in which someone stepped on his foot and knocked him over (he bounced!); and the same-sex cha-cha, which was mostly because the floor was so damn crowded and we kept running into people. Ah well.
• Sunday I managed to while away the day at Matt and Pat's suite---after talking after Mass for an hour we headed there at 12:30 for brunch, and I ended up not leaving until almost 4! Funny I call it Matt and Pat's suite---that is how I think of it, but that day Pat wasn't even there, and Matt kept going off to drive people places, so I had a lovely afternoon mostly talked to Seth and Michael (who doesn't even live there). Then I got home and I needed to work.
• And work.
• And work. See, I'm trying to get back into working on my linguistics thesis, so this week I was trying to get a few pages written on the related work. In addition, there is a conference deadline this Friday that I really need to get something written for.
• Also, I'm going to Harvard this weekend. Last semester, my interest was starting to fade, and I didn't mind going to comps but didn't want to put a lot of practice time in. This semester I'm totally psyched and want to put in all this practice, but I just don't have time. ARGH.
• As if that all weren't enough, this weekend is also the recruiting weekend for the CS department, where we fly in a couple dozen prospective grad students and try to show them why we think Brown is so cool. I actually ran the weekend for the first two years we had it, and then helped out significantly the last two as FGL, but this year I've been too busy. It makes me sad. :(

So, yeah. I've been busy.

"It's hard to come up with a single journalist/pundit appearing on television who is even remotely as far to the left of the mainstream spectrum as most of these conservatives are to the right. To find the same combination of conviction, partisanship and ideological extremism on the far left, a network would need to convene a 'roundtable' featuring Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Fidel Castro." --Eric Alterman

Posted 6:18 PM [+]