Maria texted me this evening to see if I wanted to meet up with Karen for a beer at the Pear Tree. I felt guilty about doing it, as I hadn't really gotten a substantial amount of work done already by that time during the day. I had told myself that I was at least going to try to compose a very rough outline of where I was going with the final ( Read more... )

I think I've decided I'm going to bag the html coding for the Internet portion of my study. Daniel hooked me up with some great starter code, but it has just turned out to be too much to amend it to suit my purposes. I really need to get the stuff up on the Internet soon and time's a wasting. I've decided instead to go with this Internet survey ( Read more... )

I submitted the essay I wrote for my Language Origins course yesterday. The deadline was actually Saturday, not Sunday, but I felt like it still just wasn't ready to go quite yet. It still needed some finishing touches, and I wasn't about to sacrifice quality for just trying to get it in on time. The original "assigned" length, as when written as ( Read more... )

I had my first guitar lesson with Dave Houston this afternoon. I was kind of expecting we wouldn't get too much accomplished, once he saw my butter fingers, but it went amazingly well. The most valuable thing I think I got out of it was learning how to improve upon my finger control and chord transition. He showed me the proper way to practice a ( Read more... )

I went out to the jazz club off Chamber's Street last night. I met up with Karen, Lauren, a friend of Lauren's (her name escapes me at the moment), Maria, Maria's sister, and another of Maria's friends from Greece. Gareth and Peter were allegedly supposed to come, but apparently got too tired and sweaty from the day's grueling activities to want to ( Read more... )

The rescheduled exam for Simulating Language took place yesterday. I think I did ok. One would expect that that would be the last exam I will ever take, ever again, in the rest of my life, now that the classwork for the MSc is done. However- I'm skeptical! It seems hard to believe I won't be taking any more tests ever again. It certainly seems ( Read more... )

Karen invited me over for dinner Monday night. She had a friend in from New York, Joanne, who had been visiting Prague. Karen's smart friend from Texas (and I guess also my friend by now), John, was also there. Joanne got in late, so it turned out to be a late-night dinner around midnight. It was a good, home-cooked meal: chicken, steamed carrots, ( Read more... )

Yesterday morning, before Iian's BBQ, Graham Ritchie hosted an informal reading group on "Developmental Stress, Costly Signaling and the Evolution of Learned Communication". There was a reading assigned, but basically the idea was to provoke discussion about a thesis Graham had proposed concerning possible parallels between bird song and human ( Read more... )

Iian's World Cup Soccer BBQ party was a pretty good time. We watched top-10 ranked Germany play Costa Rica and beat their socks off. It was a bit overcast, but I think everyone still had a really good time. Weather in Edinburgh- so unpredictable, it seems. We played "soccer" outside for a little while using a metal pail and a flag of Germany as " ( Read more... )

Jim finally, *finally* got back to me about my Language Origins essay. I was glad that he did, but he didn't really have any grand suggestions, like which journals to think about, word length, etc. In other words, the whole reason I e-mailed him to begin with. He just agreed with me that I should try to submit it for publication. I swear to God- it ( Read more... )