thinking about tools.
Something has possessed me to write down, here in this space that no one knows about or reads, a list of tools I use every day and could not get work done without. Note that inclusion in this list is not intended to imply quality. Indeed, many of these tools (I’m looking at you, Praat) are proof of the old adage that sometimes even when you fill a vacuum it still stucks.
In no particular order.
- vi
- python
- latex
- perl
- sox
- praat
- wavesurfer
- audacity
- awk
- egrep
- gcc
- cvs
- rcs
- make
- rsync
- r
- bash
- Preview.app
- ghostscript
- Terminal.app
- graphviz
- ssh
I’m a fairly jealous protector of good tools. The only time I’ve ever knowingly given up a really, really good tool for an inferior solution was when I switched from mh to Mail.app for my mail. I’ve regretted it ever since and should move back.
widely considered Hispanic
detroit free press on Michigan’s new football coach
“Rodriguez is widely considered one of two Hispanic coaches in Division I-A football.”
It must be nice to be widely considered Hispanic. Maybe he’s widely considered a coach in Division I-A football? As far as I can tell there is no way to parse this sentence that isn’t ridiculous unless one of Hispanic or coach or Division I-A are fuzzy categories whose memberships are contentions.
my definition is this
fitchify: to mistake uninformed simplification for accessible summarization. alternatively, to produce such an uninformed oversimplification.
rough day
In theory I’ve just learned a fairly valuable lesson in running experiments: always make sure you have the data analysis you’re planning to do working before you run subjects. In particular, make sure you’re really collecting what you think you’re collecting before you waste $130 of department money, the time of 12 participants, and a week of your own life running subjects.
Turns out Superlab has an extra special magical “Do not suck at the task you were designed to do” checkbox. This checkbox defaults to “off”, of course, so SuperLab starts out in the ever-helpful “Suck” mode. It wasn’t until I was puzzling over some extraordinarily long response times to fairly simple auditory stimuli that I realized that “Super”Lab was including the time showing instruction screens (and releasing the button) in the final RT measurement. Now I’m starting from zero rerunning all of the subjects for a submission that is due Thursday.
On a related note, if you’re reading this before Thursday the 15th and you are an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan please send me e-mail. I’d love to have you participate in my experiment. ;)
rule 34?
apparently they make an ultrasound specifically for checking to see if your pig is pregnant. what I can’t decide is whether this falls under rule 34 or whether I’m meant to be genuinely surprised.
vim: vi *improved*? my ass.
Excuse me, but vi did not need to be improved. It was fine as it was. What’s with the broken undo behavior in vim? Visual mode selection? yuck. Tabbed editing? wtf.
I say this thing should be called ‘vid’ for ‘vi defiled’.
/grumpy
I feel compelled.
I have to complete an ethics quiz to be allowed do my research, but I don’t think this says what IRB means it to say: “Only qualified scientists must conduct research.”
Now of course I’m pretty sure they intend this to mean that research must only be conducted by qualified research scientists — there are to be no amateurs with clipboards in the lab. What it actually says, though, is that only those individuals who are qualified scientists are compelled to conduct research. Carpenters, plumbers, lawyers, and poets are free to conduct research at their discretion.
So in the elitist, pedantic spirit of the original rule I propose my own: Only qualified linguists may compose sentences. It’s every bit as full of shit as the original, but at least I got the modal right.
no electrodes on the baby.
jen issued her first rule about the baby today.
she looked across the dinner table at me
very seriously
I was talking about language acquisition and babies
and experiments
she had this flash of recognition and said
“no electrodes on the baby!”, and started wagging her finger at me.
I laughed nervously, waiting for the grin.
Jen, not laughing, repeated “none!”
She was dead serious.
I’m not sure if I’m more disturbed by the fact that she was seriously worried that I would put electrodes on our precious baby or that her rule slightly changes my plans for the first three months.
I’m not sure how else I’m supposed to get ERP data.
cheers for chomsky?
$24.00 seems a pretty steep price to pay for some Chomsky-alike when you can use the chomskybot for free.
turing the gutter
Gizmodo already plugged moanmyip.com but it’s worth mentioning that there probably really is a (commercial) research avenue here for convincing sexually-provocative speech synthesis. Maybe if the actual project I’m working on right now doesn’t pan out I’ll submit a research proposal for a project to build titillating interactive dialogue systems. ;) I mean, these guys didn’t even take the time to record multiple versions of each numeral for concatenation when numerals repeat.
Who knows, it could be the killer app for speech? Broader societal impact: providing pornographic content without exploiting any actual people (other than the customers).
Of course, the first corollary of rule 34 suggests that such technology already exists and is deployed somewhere on the Internet.