cheesy humor

Last night exterra, thevorak and I had dinner together; red beans, greens, and yellow cheesy grits on dark blue plates. Beautiful.

And it inspired a collection of movie-style blurb reviews:
( more bad puns )

Apologies to Siskel, who is probably rolling in his grave.

In other news, I am still cranky and continue with low-grade sickness. I wish that imtboo and I could take a week and go out to an island in the Sound or a cabin in the Olympics. But spring break wasn't long enough and I still have more to do. And of course so does she.

computational metalinguistics

seems to me that the goal of computational linguistics should not really be trying to encode what we know about language into computers.

the goal should be encoding how we learn about language. We [linguists] have a terribly unclear picture of what it means to have a good theory -- we talk and talk about minimality, elegance and Ockham's Razor, but have lousy metrics for quantifying the quality of a theory.

My department is choosing among several candidates for a new computational linguistics position.

porter spent his entire talk explaining how he mapped multiple databases onto the same format. There were no linguistics results, and the mapping wasn't automatic. I wasn't even convinced that he had read his slides before presenting them, either.

haze spent his entire talk using interesting methods on an interesting (if simple) problem. But he showed no interest in exploring why his methods worked -- a few directed questions from the engineers in the audience revealed that he had no interest in the methods, not even well enough to understand them. Any member of my lab would be better qualified, even those of us who are pre-Master's.

glass spent her talk exploring a technique that tries to learn how linguists analyze data, using some mocked-up linguistics results. I wasn't convinced by the utility of the problem she was trying to solve, but she followed the approach I believe in:

linguists seem to know a good solution when they see it. But they can't pin down how it's measured. Therefore let us use a number of exemplars of good (and bad) solutions and try to infer the metric for "good solution".

This solution matches what I want.

Unfortunately, I think that the faculty will hire porter. This is not helping my mood today.

table pragmatics

I've just bought a new dining room table and matching chairs. I feel so gentrified. It was a bit of an ordeal, because the total was really astonishingly high.

anyway, I'm only writing about it because of the interesting locution that the gentleman who took my credit card had:

Hello, Macy's furniture, this is Rogelio! How may I provide you outstanding service today?

I can't tell what pragmatics rule this violates, but it seems to be startlingly off somehow.

Perhaps it's some kind of double-ironic Griceian toe-pick, intended to encode the phrase fuck you, I don't even know you, strictly by the mechanism of superfluity.