I think those are the truest self-identifications ever applied to me. Everything else about me is relatively ancillary. Yesterday, I got to take the first steps on actually being a teacher. Today, I got to resume being a student. I’m taking two classes this semester: Syntactic Theory with Barbara Fox, and History of Linguistics in …
I’ve never understood the Quaker use of First Day for Sunday. It makes sense only if Saturday is your sabbath—He rested on the seventh day, right? However, that’s utterly irrelevant to what I intend to write. Today was the first day of my real graduate student career. I had a TA meeting and attended the …
So, I’ve met some nice other grad students—an Aerospace PhD student named Sibylle, a Ling Masters named Iris, and then … then I bumped into a friend from Swarthmore who’s also starting here, Fletcher. So there are at least five Swatties in town, including him and his girlfriend. The circle widens, or the world gets …
So, classes, and thus TAing, begin Monday. I’ve been going to some How to TA meetings, and it’s been good. I’ve realized that I have some relevant experience, from explaining ling to my friends all the time, to wrangling classes of 4th graders, to GMing games. As to classes, I remembered that I took a …
We went to Boulder Meeting today, and it was good. It was full of people from the homefront, it seemed: people who’d lived in Bucks County, Montclair, and even someone who was a fellow Buckingham Friends School alumnus. The world is small and weird. There were some new people in town, as well, so we …
I’m in Boulder, now. The server is, as you can see, back up. There may be some issues with the new networking setup to iron out; if so, email me and let me know. Boulder is as great as ever. Tonight, we had a celebratory dinner at Himalayas, the best restaurant in town. I’m full …
Billionaires are pledging massive giveaways. Google is canceling work on Wave. California’s absurd Prop 8 has been found unconstitutional. All of these bits of news today made me double-check the date. The Wave one is the only bad one, and it’s offset by promises to open-source a lot of the work so far. And I …