Progress! You have to understand that these take ages to paint. I spent two hours last night doing just one of those hexagons.
Remote
Ergative Absolutive
@ergative@wandering.shop
mastodon 4.7.3SFF booknerd; calligrapher; Islamic geometric art doer; figure skating appreciater; coffee-drinking, granola-baking, tofu-eating wokeratum; psycholinguist by vocation, fretful porpentine by aspiration.
Header & avatar: Islamic geometric patterns from the Alhambra Palace (header) and Alcazar of Seville (avatar)
Yes, I KNOW it's a nazi coup; I just don't talk about it that much on here.
Contributer at Nerds of A Feather (http://www.nerds-feather.com/)
591 Followers
221 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 19, 2022
Instagram (mostly geometric art):
Long form book reviews:
Welp, just sent an all-staff email about the importance of getting feedback to students in a timely manner, and unfortunately typed (and sent) 'feedy speedback' without noticing.
Naturally, a colleague immediately noticed. I guess I'm glad they're reading what I send!
Work in progress of my Uzbek ceramics-inspired panel. Designs taken from Dr Esra Almahal's excellent book on Islamic biomorphic patterns. Materials are gouache on hot-press watercolour paper.
Tumblr still serving up the wisdoms.
Did you know about Pikiwedia? If you don't know about Pikiwedia, you need to learn about Pikewedia. I swear, I'm got to assign something about speech errors and spoonerisms from this.
https://pikiwedia.netlify.app/Dog
#linguistics
Yes, I COULD just whip up a quick placeholder figure in paint or powerpoint and plop a screenshot in my document draft. OR --- and bear with me here --- I could spend an hour coding it up in tikz, because my brain is shot from drafting this all day and I can't write words any more.
Just clicked off a youtube video (that had already been feeling fairly AI-ish in its script) at the line, 'Now, I don't have the math skills to work this out, but ChatGPT tells me . ..'
Recruitment call!
A student of mine is looking for #Italian native speakers, or Italian-English bilinguals, over the age of 18, to participate in an experiment. Entirely online, 30 minutes, boosts welcome!
#linguistics #psycholinguistics
Experiment link:
https://research.sc/participant/login/dynamic/0EE0511C-C95B-4A56-97C4-42D4B25E5E6B
Any questions? Contact 3115621P@student.gla.ac.uk
Horatio: So Milo Yiannopoulos goes to 't.
Hamlet: Why, man, he did make love to this employment.
He is not near my conscience. His defeat
Does by his own insinuation grow.
’Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensèd points
Of mighty opposites.
Hey, @thisismyglasgow@mastodon.scot , do you have any photographs of that gorgeous white art-deco building right across from the Argyle St exit of St Enoch subway station? I've tried to photograph it many times from my phone, but I don't have the right lens or something, and the decorative features never come out quite right.
These ebay ads for this snail-shaped ruling pen dotted-line drawer are hilarious. Clearly ai-generated by a model that has absolutely no idea how they're supposed to be used. I'm debating buying one anyway, because I've never seen these available for purchase outside of wildly expensive vintage technical drawing sets. I did buy a vintage one, actually, so I can compare the original with the modern reproduction.
RE: @404mediaco@mastodon.social
One of the best things I ever did for my own wedding was work at a bakery that did wedding cakes for a couple of years beforehand. The number of stressed out, miserable brides I had to talk to during consultations about wedding cake design was why we got married at the county clerk's office with only our immediate families, and ate homemade pie at a picnic in the woods afterwards.
PhD student just casually noting in her chapter draft that she noticed the degrees of freedom were wrong in her ANOVA, and tracked that back to accidentally omitting a participant's data from the analysis.
How many of y'all actually properly check your dfs like this?
I chucked a self-nomination at BFA back in 2022 -- before I was contributing to Nerds of a Feather, without any credibility of any sort in the field -- and all I had to say was 'I read a lot, I have opinions, I consider myself reasonably familiar with the state of fantasy fiction these days, please pick me.' And they did! It was a great experience.
You, too, can be an opinionated nobody who likes to read, who decides the BFA awards!
I just subscribe to @404mediaco@mastodon.social , because they keep linking interesting articles, the ones that aren't paywalled are worth reading, and many others that look just as interesting are paywalled.
And they promise never to use AI to write anything.
I gotta say, that last promise is a big part of why I'm giving them my money.
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@proprietor Cats, books, armchairs.
Alcoves. Armchairs in book-lined alcoves.
Interconnected rooms with passageways that don't quite make sense, with steps and half-steps that don't align with something as artificial as floors. Sometimes you end up in a room where you didn't mean to go.
But you're never truly lost, because you can follow the scent of coffee or the sound of the grinder to the coffee bar, which does NOT CLOSE BY PM, GOOD GRIEF.
Praise me everyone. I saw a bad take came across my feed. (NB: it was a harmless bad take.)
I thought about responding, 'well, actually...'.
I did not.
I thought about vagueposting a response with no link.
I did not.
Instead of directly engaging and adding toxicity, or indirectly engaging and adding unnecessary snark to the zeitgeist, I am instead meta-engaging as an object lesson about how to be a nicer person on the internet.
Also I'm fishing for praise. I'm not perfect.
Ok, Down Cemetary Road is lots of fun, but the bit that has me scratching my head is when they catch a train from King's Cross that announces it's 'non-stop to Glasgow'.
EXCUSE ME? I would VERY MUCH Like a non-stop train to Glasgow. Please may I have such a train? Please may it exist?
In honour of the holiday, we watched Sinners last night, a film about rising from the dead to build a worldwide community of peace and fellowship.
It actually happened! There was a roll of thunder followed a second later by the sound of rain coming down! I thought it only happened in the movies! But it actually happened in real life!
Serap Ekizler Sonmez's books on Islamic geometry are great fun to work through, because they assume a baseline level of familiarity with geometric construction, so often there are missing steps that I have to figure out myself. Usually I can do that. Sometimes, however, it really does feel like 'draw the rest of the fucking owl'.
Any linguists who teach the role of prosody and intonation in conveying meaning, you might find this a useful demonstration. I think the use of contrastive focus at about 0:48 particularly striking.
SPECIAL EGG AND CHEESE SANDWICH! Yeh 👍
Replying to
Mr A is pulling up old emails to re-send, containing expressions like 'merry band of murderers'. My mother is reminding him that she reposts the St Crispin's Day speech on facebook every St Crispin's Day.
I'm just trying to spend my Saturday morning reading Benoit Blanc fanfiction!
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@nyhan@fediscience.org Yeah, I got all the way to the end and saw that and felt disgusted and outraged that I'd wasted my time reading it.
It's another example of people saying, 'yeah, after careful consideration I've decided that AI is no good for my particular specialism, but for other things it's great!'
During the family zoom last night, I was going off on my nonsense about how an author of a book I was reading made a choice i didn't agree with.
And, like clockwork, my family suggested, as they always do, 'you should write to them and tell them what you think!'
NO! I'M NOT GOING TO DO THAT!
Who wants Reviewer 2 to follow you home? The book is PUBLISHED. It's DONE!
Beloved authors, if you ever get an email from me about your work, it's only ever going to be gushing praise.
Replying to
Is that the strategy, maybe? Impress some dummies with too much cash by using humanoid robots, in order to fund the next generation of ACTUALLY functional automated baggage-handling systems?
Huh.
The underuse of scumwit must be rectified! That one is downright Shakespearean!
OMG, Scotland has its own Four Seasons Total Landscaping event!
Replying to
@rosscampbell@mas.to @famousblueben@mas.to Correct. I remember thinking it was sort of cheesy fun for a while, and then I got to the episode Tin Man and suddenly I was all aboard.
Yes, academic publishing is broken. But these heroes have a plan to fix it...
Replying to
@lakens@mastodon.social Nice, thanks! The original website also only did positive correlations, so this is better in that respect too.
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@GoodAaron@mastodon.social I think the theory is amenable to that. Corpse (agonist) has tendency to remain dead. Necromancer (antagonist) operates against that tendency.
Not sure how the torment fits in, though. Depends whether you think the default state of being is tormented or untormented.
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@ellane@pkm.social I saw this idea once and loved it so much that I actually went to one of those 'design-your-own-clocks' places to order it!
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But if it's a gimmick, what's the ultimate goal? Attracting funding from dumb, easily-impressed investors? What would that accomplish? This is a response to a labour shortage. More money wouldn't fix the absence of people, except by building machines to replace them.
And in that case, wouldn't you want to build GOOD machines?
Replying to
Is it the case that humanoid form genuinely is optimum for this task? I just find that very hard to believe. Or is it that designing optimum form for baggage handling machines, or re-designing baggage handling systems to need fewer humans, is too expensive, and humanoid robots already exist?
RE: @NerdsofaFeather@wandering.shop
Hi, friends! The penultimate in my Realm of the Elderlings reread project on Nerds of a Feather is now up!
Replying to
@alarith I think having them explain their answers to other groups is a really good learning opportunity for the groups that finish early. Nothing crystallises knowledge like having to explain it.
You could also give challenge exercises for groups that finish early.
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@alarith I've definitely applied for grants where they ask for super-duper simple lay summaries in the application, and then use those lay summaries on their website once they announce the funded projects.
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@naominovik I was on vacation on the Isle of Arran in Scotland, and as I worked through books 3, 4, 5 of the series, I just turned around and bought the next for my kindle.
I think the bit in South America was my favourite. It was where I could see the full scope of the story taking shape, as it shifted from 'familiar history, but with dragons' to 'well, but why SHOULD the history be familiar? There's DRAGONS!'
Hey, folks! Do you know of any unisex/open toilets? Add them here! I just went on and added my work building, which is fully open to the public during business hours, and has single-sex toilets on the ground floor, but two single-occupancy unisex rooms on the upper floors. (There's a space to add notes to clarify this kind of thing.)
To do: find more cases like this on my uni campus and add them.
https://openlavs.com/
Replying to
@GoodAaron@mastodon.social In cognitive linguistics, it's also used to describe force dynamic relationships in utterances expressing causality. I once wrote a term paper for which I conducted a mini-experiment exploring how people perceive events in terms of agonists (objects tending to remain at rest or in motion) and antagonists (forces acting to change that tendency).