RIP Dick Cheney you would've hated all of this

heard an actual [o] at the detroit airport

fielding questions about laryngeal realism in class Q: Is it very uncommon for people to argue [voice] is monovalent? A: It's not like a fringe theory or anything. Q: Ok, so people won't, like, argue about it. A: Oh, they'll *argue* about it!

when the classroom computer lock screen advertisements start to be for sports gambling, i’ll quit

I'm proud that I was able to get consistent angles for each contrast and not have overlapping labels. Place contrasts are each rotated 60°. +voice is rotated 30°, +continuant is rotated -30°, and +nasal is rotated 90°.

society is spending all this time and energy on LLMs and not something useful like an app for "Something just went 'plink' on my computer, what was it?"

it's even better to realize that the conversation leading up to this photo started with "Wait, are you the actor who plays Dr. Sturgis on Young Sheldon?"

if you liked the lenition hypercube, you'll love the phonological feature crystaline entity

is it even a dystopian setting if there’s not a location called “The Stacks” with a bunch of people living in shipping containers?

linguists yearn for the cube

the metaverse as a data layer over, and taking precedence over, physical reality

apropos of the shitty weather, "Why haven't all sounds lenited away?" is very similar to "I only ever see rain falling *down*, when will the sky run out?"

I present, the lenition hypercube

this is like the demonic form of imposter syndrome

having graded the first pen and paper exam i’ve given in a long time, i’d forgotten about how much fucking faster it is

small tidynorm update: There are now options to control its verbosity. If you turn off the informational messages, you can still double check what normalization was done with `check_norm()`

I want to plot how an event in proportional time shifts across generations. I think flipping the axes so that proportional time is on the horizontal makes sense. But should DOB run bottom up or top down? I think I prefer top down.

Also, the way you did vowel formant analysis then was to print out a narrowband spectrogram with a mirrored wideband spectrogram above on onion paper, then fold it in half to look at both simultaneously

I'm working on my NWAV talk, and I just want to meditate on the beauty and the chaos of the hand-drafted vowel plots from Labov, Yaeger, Steiner (1972)

i don’t think there’s such a thing as a perfect candidate. it’s all about weighing the balance between what you’ll get from their politics vs the cost of their politics. and imo, having a nazi tattoo is a no-brainer disqualifying cost

No heel turn more satisfying than getting phonetics students worked up about how there's no [g] in "long" then asking them to pronounce and describe "longer"

Threw together a minimal site for these animations jofrhwld.github.io/vocal_tract_...

A lot of laughter during linguistics talks, especially after playing or reading out interview extracts, is problematic

columbo walks the runway

i’m sorry, maybe you can help me. there’s one thing i haven’t been able to understand about this case since i started. do you have a pen i could borrow?

Saw “The Hands of Orlac” (1924) set to a live organ accompaniment last night. It’s about a pianist who gets a hand transplant from a donor who was a murderer, and he becomes convinced his hands want to murder again. imo it was a cyberpunk narrative.

*zizek voice* there is no such thing as a gentle reminder! <sniff> all reminders are violent

i hope the start bringing back conferences tees cause my pajamas could use a bit of a refresh

Now that I'm working at a US university, my time is way less pressurized than it was while working at a 🇬🇧 Uni, so it feels less costly to do peer review. But there *is* still a hypothetical percentage breakdown of my time to different tasks.

first time doing character art for one of the player characters

i post about the art i do for the D&D campaign, but i also really enjoy cultivating the backing music. Any time a letter is sent or received and read out loud, I play Ashokan Farewell from the Ken Burns’ Civil War soundtrack

The new "ask an LLM if there's a seahorse emoji" thing is a great illustration how how they (don't) work. They don't query a database or their "memory." They can't even "realize" that a highly activated emoji isn't a seahorse until after they generate it & added it to the context.

gave my first in-person on-paper midterm today in years, and I don't know if students realize how much anxiety *I* had about whether I'd forgotten how to calibrate length and difficulty to the time available.

Windows 10 goes out of support today. My fave useless fact about w10 is that the iconic blue desktop background is a *photograph* - not CGI. Tiny 'making of' vid here - youtu.be/_2RacX9DgWM...

“Have you seen the new strawberry” to mean “Have you seen the new thing that freaks LLMs out” is good pragmatics

i’m sure this will be fine for mental health issues

... it never occured to me to animate a transition between a narrowband to a wideband spectrogram. (made with praatpicture github.com/rpuggaardrod...)

Personally, I'm proud of this gray scale drawing of the larynx

have the people who say universal healthcare will result in long waitlists ever tried scheduling a doctor's appointment?

here's hoping teaching that Kiswahili has nine grammatical genders doesn't run afoul of avoiding controversial topics in the classroom

Kwisatz Haderach

me

"Paul Boersma giveth, and he taketh away."

this'll be a great test of Ezra Klein's hypothesis that it's a good idea for the democrats to burn all this time, money, & organizer goodwill to run a culture-war-lite candidate

if you're into R, @cranupdates.bsky.social is a great follow

an urbanist in 2024: I wish for a federally mandated public restrooms. *monkey’s paw curls”

JB Fletcher

brooklyn tweed doesn’t make yarn anymore 😯

i've added hyperlinks to my primary website as well as my WebLog jofrhwld.github.io/~joe/

ai apologists are one thing. “It might be useful” is another. but ai *enthusiasts* are not normal