Going for lunch can be a dangerous proposition. One wakes up in the morning and goes to work in total anonymity, and comes back to discover the TypePad site statistics going wild -- 220 hits since inception, about 200 of which came today. I appreciate the kind welcomes from Mark Liberman, Ryan Gabbard, and Languagehat. One good link deserves another, so up they go on my linguistics blog list.
Prof. Liberman mentions that he tried to use the "Gender Genie" to figure out if Semantic Compositions is a man or a woman, and while it gave the right answer, he was then taken to task for not reading the part where SC uses a pronoun ([but it wasn't bound, so technically it didn't have to refer to you -- ed.]) and gives the game away. I appreciate his good humor in this one, and offer a story told by a professor who I took Fourier Analysis with as an undergrad to cheer him up:
As a graduate student, Professor deP. participated in a mathematical modeling competition involving real-world problems submitted by companies having difficulties with various manufacturing processes. Her team got a problem from a winery -- the machine used to glue labels to the bottles kept leaving air bubbles underneath. For a week, they worked 'round the clock, deriving all sorts of horrific differential equations to model the flow of the glue as it spread out onto the bottle, etc. Finally, the night before the deadline, one of her colleagues had the bright idea to ask the winery for a copy of the machine's operating manual. Right at the back, in the "troubleshooting" section, was a warning in bold letters that if the glue was not applied perpendicularly to the orientation of the label as it was pressed onto the bottle, air bubbles would form. Needless to say, the glue was being applied parallel to the label's orientation.
Comments