phew…i think i finally got all this ironed out…
- 2004/06/02 (Wed)
- 1610 : Depart LAX
Northwest Airlines
FLT: 8602
Seat 27H
Boeing 747
- 2004/06/03 (Thu)
- 1140 : Arrive Amsterdam
- 1345 : Depart Amsterdam
Northwest Airlines
FLT: 8743
Fokker 100
- 1405 : arrive Manchester
Terminal 1
- picked up from airport by Sarah
- Check out Sheffiled, hang w/ Maria & Sarah’s family (and Dan , too)
- 2004/06/04 (Fri) : York
- Chilling
- buying earl grey
- visitting quaint english countryside townes buying ice cremes and cakes and other delightful niblettes
- 2004/06/05 (Sat) : Sheffield and surrounding area
- Weekend activities near sheffield
- Pub lunch
- Nite life
- Markets & delightful little shoppes
- Caves (Castleton)
- 2004/06/06 (Sun)
- church (morning)
- Dan leaving
- Salsa Dancing (night)
- 2004/06/07 (mon) - 2004/06/08 (tue) : Bath & Norton
- visit Burnt Norton, reflect and stuff
- rose-garden and the bluebell walk
- For further information, ring (01386) 841488.
- visit Ben
- take a Bath
- (stay overnight @ youth hostel)
- visit stonehenge
- (stay perhaps another night @ youth hostel)
- 04/06/09 (wed)
- more chilling…soak up more of sheffield lifestyle
- 2004/06/10 (thu) - 2004/06/12 (sat) : Scotland
- Edinburgh
- the highlands?
- train past berwick
- Edinburgh castle (& perhaps other castles)
- Sarah’s friend
- 2004/06/13 (sun)
- chill day
- go to london in the p.m.
- 2004/06/14 (mon) : London
- millenium wheel/London Eye
- a few Classic-type Churches
- A museum or two
- British Museum
- Tate
- others…
- and then perhaps…
- westminster abbey
- st paul’s cathedral
- changing of guard?
- tower bridge?
- 2004/06/15 (tue)
- Relax for my 1 day before italy
- 2004/06/16 (wed)
- morning train down from Sheffield to Stansted
- 1325: depart from Stansted (Ryan Air FR 796)
- 1620: arrive Venice Treviso
- Checkin @ Hotel Florida Venezia:
Address: Calle Priuli 106
30121 Venezia
Telephone: 39 041 715253
- 2004/06/17 (Thu)
- 2004/06/18 (Fri)
- 2004/06/19 (Sat)
- 2004/06/20 (Sun)
- checkout of Hotel
- 0400 (yawn) take a taxi to the airport
- 0625 (yawn) depart LV: Venice
Northwest Airlines FLT: 8484
- 0830 arrive: Amsterdam
- 1130 depart Amsterdam
Northwest Airlines
FLT: 8601
seat 25C
- 1345 arrive: Los Angeles
Strange… I had been following the Semantic Compositions blog , along with a few others of the linguistics/AI ilk, for a good number of months now.
I’d never given a second thought to who was behind SC’s anonymity until I came across this post this morning. It was quite strange to read about Laurie’s mixer and realize “Wait, this party the guy was talking about, I was there! Who is this guy?”.
It’s a disconcerting thing to suddenly not be able to treat the online world and the “real” world as so distinct. It’s like finding out two acquaintances of yours are the same person.
With regards to what SC’s take on the evening, though I must say that my experiences differ from his. Perhaps it’s because i’m thoroughly entrenched in academia (and will be for the next couple of years at least), but I didn’t catch any “oh no, nlp jobs are so hard to find” vibe from the night, nor did i overhear any begging/schmoozing for jobs. In fact, most of the recent CL grads from our school were able to find jobs pretty easily. But, then, the plural of “annecdote” is not “data”, so I can’t say if this actually means anything…
Hilarious. Evidently, Wikipedia used to have an entry for Uqbar that followed in the spirit of Borges’ original story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
The story is an amazing work of art, blurring in the mind of the reader the lines between fiction and nonfiction, reality and nonreality. Borges basically tells of this imaginary (?) world called Tlön, in whose realm some of the most basic philosophies of man (not to mention laws of the universe) diverge from our own.
What originally made me love Borges’ story was the discussion of how language shapes culture (a la the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)… quoted below is some interesting stuff on what life would be like without nouns…
Here’s an excerpt:
Hume noted for all time that Berkeley’s arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language - religion, letters, metaphysics - all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön’s conjectural Ursprache, from which the “present” languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word “moon,”, but there is a verb which in English would be “to moon” or “to moonate.” “The moon rose above the river” is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned.”
For more reading, Wikipedia itself has an good insightful entry on the subject (and a fun discussion on the old Uqbar entry.)
What: The Charter Meeting for the AI Grads Weekly Reading Group
Where: 9th Floor Conference Room
When: 2004/05/27 @ 1300
Topic:
AUTHOR: TIM BERNERS-LEE, JAMES HENDLER and ORA LASSILA
TITLE: THE SEMANTIC WEB
SOURCE: Scientific American v284 no5 p34-43 My 2001
Grab it here:
Tim Berners-Lee: The Semantic Web
–
my thoughts to follow…
- a good counterpoint to the metadata utopia is Cory Doctorow’s metacrap
