full-fledged pidgin

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
• google
• 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.

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.

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.

$24.00 seems a pretty steep price to pay for some Chomsky-alike when you can use the chomskybot for free.

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.

The Internet (yes, it’s capitalized, the atechnical pseudo-nerds over at Wired can bite me) has turned up the following amazing image:

This would be a more endearing compliment if the bear were to employ the continuative ‘be’ — implying that the recipient was habitually fine. Still, though, even an ephemeral admission of fineness, when printed on a silk-look pillow and delivered by a wide-eyed stuffed toy, must turn the young ladies’ disinterest to passion.

I started writing a long post analyzing the humorous impact of this low-quality stuffed bear (the sort one might win at a carnival or boardwalk) controlling this gruff, urban vernacular but, really, the bear speak for hisself.

there’s only a 16% chance that these titles were arranged in this way by pure chance — and that assumes that they all arrived at the theater on the same date. Other arrangements are interpretable, but nothing else is this funny. “knocked up shrek pirates” is still pretty good, but it’s only an NP (people who pirate copies of shrek and have been impregnated).

As an aside, why in the world is WordPress putting a definite article in date strings? Perhaps I can write a paper: The English Date String in its Sentential Aspect.

I’ll bet my advisor could help with that. ;)