No big adventures today, really. The class that was postponed -- Mathematical Refresher for Computational Linguistics -- turned out to be boring and way more basic than what I need. I was hoping for some good ways to remember all those bits of information theory that I keep forgetting (note to self: purchase Cover & Thomas 1991 when I'm back home), but instead the dude was all "this is a vector and this is how you add them". To be fair, it was stated pretty clearly that the class was targetted at linguists who haven't done any math in a while (i.e. not me). Anyway, I lasted about 45 minutes and then bailed. That timeslot for tomorrow will be better spent reading, prepping for the regular session, and figuring out what I'm doing on Wednesday. This in turn involves planning my day around the big BBQ that the Institute is having for all of the summer school attendees, and there's a pile of us. Anyway, I'm thinking that the Transformers premiere will be de rigueur that day. I feel I owe it to my childhood self to go see it.
Oh yeah, I've taken to privately making fun of one of the lecturers. Robert Kluender, who's lecturing on ERPs (event-related potentials, basically reading brain waves), has this habit of unintentionally saying funny stuff. When he does this, I make a note somewhere of what he said and play a little name game. Here's what I've got so far:
- Robert "Like A Broken Zipper on Drugs" Kluender (in re: the propagation of action potential down the axonal fibre...I think he said "on drugs" five times in that lecture)
- Robert "Blood Is Actually a Great Conductor" Kluender (in re: impedance-lowering mishaps in prepping subjects for EEGs)
- Robert "I've Got a Small Inion" Kluender (in re: lining up the electrode cap on particular bones in the head and the variations in size of that little bone at the bottom of the back of your head)
- Robert "I'm Really Good at Staredowns" Kluender (in re: the fact that blinks screw up the EEG and good subjects have to be able to not blink while stimuli are presented...he then kinda bugged his eyes out and actually stared us down for a good 45 seconds while he continued to talk)
Funny shit indeed. In all seriousness, he's a pretty good lecturer, and I'm definitely enjoying the class. It's probably not having its intended effect, since I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that ERPs are pretty useless as a tool for understanding anything about language. (I'm kind of thinking that about fMRI and other imaging techniques, too)
Hmm. I guess that's about it for now. I'm feeling a bit antsy (just had a Rice Krispie square and a Diet Pepsi), so I think it's time for a short walk before I retire for the day. I've got a killer 80s playlist on my iPod so that should keep me feeling good for a bit. I'm plainly getting nostalgic as my twilight years approach.
That's all I've got, folks...Freddy out.
p.s. The photos should now be viewable.
1 comment:
In the math review's defense, I often find it interesting to watch the very very basics as they are taught by different individuals.
I know for a fact that the relation between a box and it's scalar-triple-product (or some permutation thereof) and it's volume was taught to me several times. But it was only as a PhD student that I was finally given a nice explanation with both a rigorous mathematical explanation couple d with a nice intuitive visual example.
Some might argue that perhaps I was simply not listening as a younger man. Those people support the terrorists.
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