I brought my mom in for a guest lecture today. She did zero prep and killed it

Working on a new board game prototype for the first time in a long time...

First day of xenolinguistics class! I have the coolest job in the world 👽🌍

Me: we didn't get anything done this past year, but at least we didn't spend any of our seed grant money! PI: actually it makes us look bad if our neuroimaging center can't produce research even when we give people free money to do so Me: ah, well

I will only add to this post that a lot of deaf ASL signers do read English, which is frankly pretty incredible given that it represents a language they've never heard and don't speak (English). This would be like reading Korean fluently despite not knowing how any of it is supposed to sound!

Get hype

Couldn't agree more

It's a new year, so I thought I'd do a thread highlighting some of the content from my Cog Sci YouTube channel - Language of Mind! I'm really into language, the brain, cognition, and the connection between them - and I love science communication. So I made YouTube videos!

Every semester I offer an extra credit assignment where students have to explain a concept from class to someone outside of class (a parent, sibling, roommate, friend) and report back what they learned. This semester I received this gem. This kid gets it 👇

Recently I was trying to think of whether there were any languages that mark present and non-present tense (like English marks past/non-past). And today I realized English has this distinction in "now" (present) and "then" (past or future). So at least it exists in deictic terms!

Are you a recent PhD grad in cog sci, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, or other cog sci-adjacent field? Do you love teaching? Rutgers is hiring new teaching postdocs! Apply here! jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/240...

If you had to create terms to differentiate Merge and its outputs (nested unordered sets of lexical items) and linearization and its outputs (concatenated strings of lexical items), what terms would you choose? Which would you call "Language"?

all my core memories are embarrassing injuries

When children learn about number, they go through distinct phases. First they learn 1 and become 1-knowers. Then 2-knowers, then 3-knowers. Once they learn 4, they unlock everything. Question: do you think you could teach a 1-knower to do binary arithmetic?

Yes Ronald Fisher, please tell me more about your lady tasting problem

The English word "horse" doesn't come from the typical PIE root for horse! Instead, it derives from PIE *ḱers- ("run"). So a horse is a running thing! And likewise for bear: the typical PIE *h₂ŕ̥tḱos was replaced by *bʰerH- ("brown"), so a bear is literally a brown one!

I wear my Ecuadorian alpaca wool poncho and drink ginger lemon kombucha while my wife slums it up in a ten-year-old hoodie she got for free from a work vendor and slams a black coffee. We're a modern couple

Wanted to spend the last day of class work shopping student papers, but instead they decided to teach me the true meaning of Christmas

A student has just informed me that this is called a "drug rug"

Just came across this meme in my old course files. I don't remember making it, I think it came from a student. Hope they got an A+

Tabletop gamers don't say "alea jacta est" nearly often enough

I'm honestly jealous of people who teach humanities. I love science, but the thought of exposing students to something that might fundamentally change the way they live their life or see themselves... How can you top that

Very honored to win this year's Mind Challenge! I had a lot of fun making this video, and I'm glad people enjoyed it 😁

One of my students was handing out little plastic dinosaurs! Officially the best day of the semester

The city of Cartagena in Spain was founded by Phoenicians, who named it Qart Hadasht (Carthage), meaning "new city". When Rome conquered Iberia, they renamed the city Carthago Nova, meaning "New Carthage". So, Cartagena means "new new city" Very Futurama vibes

I'm fascinated by all the English terms for different media. Novel (it's new!), the news (all the new stuff!), movie (it moves!), film (strip of celluloid), play (they're playing characters) opera (work), album (from Latin albus "white", like a blank tablet). Very sad to have lost "talkie", but alas

Do you think the fremen also dance without rhythm? Seems like it would be good practice

Has AI “killed” Marr’s ‘three’-levels framework? jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/k4lytubp @jocnforum.bsky.social from @bradpostle.bsky.social

Anyone have any recommendations for good annotated editions of Shakespeare? Especially interested in Henry V!

I hate being negative, but what in the world do we learn from studies like this? Creepy whistle that both kinda does and doesn't sound like a human scream activates brain areas associated with scary noises and also other brain areas? www.sciencealert.com/creepy-aztec...

Guys I messed up I looked up so many etymologies

Graded one paper? Guess I'll treat myself by looking up one etymology

This week on the blog, armor! We're discussing body armor in speculative fiction (mostly sci-fi, particular Dune and Mass Effect), both some of the problems with the way it is depicted and structured and also some the reasons I think those visual tropes exist. acoup.blog/2024/11/29/c...

Question: when students submit applications to 10+ programs, do you personalize your letter of rec for each school? Or just write one generic one and fire it off like a machine gun

thinking of calling this "The Illusion Illusion" (more examples below)

Official phonetics post

Hot take: this genre was popular because it allowed anglo Americans to introspect about their neuroses while laughing at Jews and maintaining a facade of normalcy at their expense

My gladiator 2 review: In the opening scene, we find the exiled son of Lucilla, now an adult, tending a farm in Numidia. He's growing a variety of cucurbita, a genus of gourds native to the Americas. Literally unwatchable

You all MOCKED George Lucas and said this was boring or dumb but who’s laughing now???

This is so rude. He's just a little guy

Why did every dinosaur book I had as a kid show dinosaurs chilling in front of a volcano? Why was that like a dinosaur-specific thing? We still have volcanoes now, why don't kids books show okapis or Malayan tapirs chilling in front of a volcano?

Just started a new Pathfinder game set in a kind of early 20th century fantasy setting (our first session took place on a train!). Vibes similar to Legend of Korra meets classic D&D. I thought the setting lent itself to a colorful, Moebius aesthetic, so I decided to draw my wizard 👇

"An extrapolation of its present rate of growth reveals that in the not too distant future Physical Review will fill bookshelves at a speed exceeding that of light. This is not forbidden by general relativity since no information is being conveyed" (Mermin, 1990)

Never felt better about my decision to publish as little as possible

How does a caterpillar know when to build their cocoon initiate their metamorphosis? Does it ever fail to trigger and they just live as a caterpillar, eating leaves and being fat forever?

A person on a bicycle is by far the most energy-efficient among animals and machines per distance traveled relative to body weight. The bicycle is magic. www.jstor.org/stable/24923...

I used to think babies on airplanes and in restaurants were crying because they were uncomfortable, tired, in strange places far from home... But it turns out babies just sort of cry all the time

For anyone who's been watching the Netflix series Nautilus and is wondering about the weird language the guy with the beard speaks, it's a #conlang (called Kita Til) I made for the series based on a (totally made up) creolization of a bunch of putatively relevant languages. #nautilus #linguistics