Thoughts ( Read more... )

Poem, currently untitled. If you can think of something better than "Ode to the Tunnels", leave it in the comments and I'll give you a cookie. Footnotes for people not familiar with MIT.

( Cut for length. )

I started working on this post a loooooong time ago -- back in February of this year, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I wrote up about 4/5 of it, was called away, and forgot to ever return to it. So yes, the blog posts I'm linking to are several months out of date, and I'm sure this debate probably progressed quite nicely without me. But I'm ( Read more... )

Well, not really. It was just an essay contest. But the results did arrive in the form of a relatively shiny book full of essays.

( Here is my entry, to the prompt 'What high school course (that is not currently mandatory) do you think should be mandatory?' )

I'm going to write some random sentences to test/exemplify the expressive range of my conlang. This is mostly for documentation's sake and for my own reference, though you're invited to give impressions/opinions/criticism. Lay readers please ignore the middle two lines of each example. Also, I will forgo giving pronunciation info here...it's messy ( Read more... )

So TomHChappell in the "Trochaic Tetrameter Quatrains" thread asked me if I would "sing Lobachevsky" -- I took this to mean "translate Lobachevsky into trochaic tetrameter". Turns out he didn't mean that, but since I'd started working on it I figured it was worth finishing.

( Here's how far I've gotten )

Yesterday I noticed something ( Read more... )

I was on the ZBB just now, and in keeping with the recent trend of "monosyllabic thread" and "lipogrammatic postings" and "limerick thread", someone started a thread where you have to post in trochaic tetrameter quatrains. Then someone pointed out that the thread title, "Trochaic Tetrameter Quatrains", was a limerick beginner line, not a line of ( Read more... )

[WARNING: linguistic speculation ahead - those of you who know a hell of a lot more than me, please correct me.]

"Did language appear completely out of the blue as suggested by Chomsky? Or did it evolve from a more primitive gestural language that was already in place?"

Ehhhmm, how about neither?

In this article about mirror neurons, ( Read more... )

So I finally finished my personal essay for Mr. Mackey. As arujei can attest, this assignment has been the subject of serious ranting (on my part) and angst (on everyone's part). The idea, as Mackey explained, was to write about something deeply personal that you are really afraid of revealing to anyone because omfg you'll be ostracized and never have ( Read more... )