I'll never get over how, on Blackboard, the way you make your course materials available to students is under the "customization" menu. As if "being available to students" is a fine-tuning option like the background theme for the pages and the directory path in which course files are stored.

I know they say you can't cross the same river twice or whatever, but I get very excited about the fact that you can. When I visited Cooperstown for fieldwork in 2008, I wasn't excited about the Baseball Hall of Fame; I was excited about the fact that I got to cross the Susquehanna River right at its source-especially since earlier that month I'd ( Read more... )

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I'm reading a dialectology paper in Journal X, a linguistics journal that does not specialize in sociolinguistics ( Read more... )

I really love the Tony Awards, you guys. Some thoughts on this year's show:

• James Corden was a pretty good host. Certainly better than last year's unfunny and uninteresting combination of Alan Cumming and Kristin Chenoweth. Corden was funny and seemed sincerely delighted to be there, and he didn't take up too much space in the show either-he did a ( Read more... )

When I download a paper on a topic related to my research, the first thing I do is ⌘F for my own name to see whether they've cited me.

( Read more... )

The historic counties of England, sorted by the number of counties in the United States named after or sharing a name with them:
(Including New York County NY, New Kent County VA, and Warrick County IN)Lincoln(shire): 24 (AR, CO, GA, ID, KS, KY, LA, ME, MN, MS, MO, MT, NE, NV, NM, NC, OK, OR, SD, TN, WA, WV, WI, WY ( Read more... )

The website for the computer science department of the University of Toronto can be found at cs.toronto.edu.

That seems very sensible, except for one thing. There is no toronto.edu. The domain name for the University of Toronto is utoronto.ca. There's nothing at www.toronto.edu, for example ( Read more... )

This year's Mystery Hunt happened ( Read more... )