I make things on the internet
Wordle seems to be the game of the moment on social media. This was my first attempt a few days ago. The last few times I’ve been using audio as my starting word (4/5 vowels)
Worth noting that the popular emoji shares are not accessible, not a great screen reader experience. If you’re posting results to twitter, it would be better to screenshot and use alt text.
The latest novel use to which like is being put is as an infix. Infixes are a pretty small set in English, so a new one is a genuine surprise, linguistically. In some ways it is unlikeprecedented.
The period is pissed. It seems that using the period at the end of text messages is starting to be seen as passive aggressive.
The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.”
I saw this commercial for IGA air during the 2nd Stanley Cup playoff game. I’m pretty sure the kid says “fail” at the end. It has to be one of the most mainstream applications of the fail meme that I’ve seen. There’s also a French version of the commercial.
Update: I realized after the post, that it was a certain kind of mainstream. Honestly, there’s a relatively small Anglo population watching CBC in Montreal, but the commercial aired… so a reasonable number of people must have seen it.
MIT neuroscientists have found that parts of the brain can switch functions, and aren’t necessarily predetermined by a genetic blueprint.
The finding suggests that the visual cortex can dramatically change its function — from visual processing to language — and it also appears to overturn the idea that language processing can only occur in highly specialized brain regions that are genetically programmed for language tasks.
The recent set of Jeopardy! matches between Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter and Watson, IBM’s question-answering machine, has been entertaining. Sure, there’s a lot of self-promotion going on, but that’s par for the course with the show. As a trivia nut and computer scientist, this challenge appealed to me on multiple levels. As much as I would have loved to see our carbon-based brethren dominate, I’m not surprised by Watson’s victory. The format of the show presents some challenges. Watson bombed some questions in spectacular fashion, but for straight-up knowledge questions, the machine was dominant.
If you want to read more about the match, there’s lots of commentary, so I’ll leave it at that. However, there is a particular article that I wanted to point out. In his answer to the final question, Jennings riffed on a classic Simpson’s line in welcoming our new computer overlords. Ben Zimmer takes exception to the comment in his piece about the match for The Atlantic.
Elsewhere, Ferrucci has been more circumspect about Watson’s level of “understanding.” In an interview with IBM’s own magazine ForwardView, he said, “For a computer, there is no connection from words to human experience and human cognition. The words are just symbols to the computer. How does it know what they really mean?” In other words, for all of the impressive NLP programming that has gone into Watson, the computer is unable to penetrate the semantics of language, or comprehend how meanings of words are shot through with allusions to human culture and the experience of daily life.
We still have a long way to go before we have computers with true natural language processing.
Baker’s undoubtedly right about that, but we’re still dealing with the limited task of question-answering, not anything even vaguely approaching full-fledged comprehension of natural language, with all of its “nuance, slang, and metaphor.” If Watson had chuckled at that “computer overlords” jab, then I’d be a little worried.
After the Toronto answer to the question about U.S. cities, I remember thinking that Watson must be joking. I actually thought the machines were mocking us on national television. It concerned me. Time to figure out where I put that red pill.
The Google Translate app for Android can translate live speech and offer a translation. The Babel fish approacheth.
Andrew West examines the rules for long s:
It transpires that the rules are quite complicated, with various exceptions, and vary subtly from country to country as well as over time. I have summarized below my current understanding of the rules as used in roman and italic typography in various different countries.
A map of North American English dialects by Rick Aschmann. You can zoom in on areas of the map to hear audio samples.
Caitlin Burke solved a puzzle on Wheel of Fortune with just one letter on the board. Pat Sajak and the contestant beside her seemed stunned, thinking it was a miracle, but it wasn’t — she used logic.
Part of the art of designing a game show is making the basic and routine seem chaotic and unpredictable. The trick is, most people watch a show like Wheel of Fortune, and their heads begin swimming with the nearly endless possibilities: twenty-six letters and those hundreds of thousands of words. Burke’s strategy, her puzzles-within-puzzles way of thinking, is designed to narrow the range. That’s why she started with the smallest words first.
Very impressive. There’s a clip of her solving the puzzle in the Esquire article.