January 2012
2 posts
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The Best of Alex Whines →
I’ve been doing this tumblr thing for about 2 and a half years, accumulating 291 posts in that time. Of those 291, some were not bad. If you follow the link, you’ll find a list of these better posts, organized by topic. Here are the topics:
Games
Music
Nesting and recursion in fun places
Food
More words
Aren’t you intrigued? If you’ve been following this blog for...
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Nicknames for someone named Stuart or Stewart
I don’t know anyone named Stewart or Stuart, but the internet hasn’t done a very good job on the Stewart Nickname front so far, so here are several for all types of Stus.
Alliterative, mean:
Stupid Stu
Stinky Stuart
Stressful Stu
Stalker Stu
Alliterative, nice:
Studly Stu
Stunning Stu
Stainless Stuart
Food based, mean:
Chicken Stu
Cold Stu
Bouillabaisse (Fishy Stu)
...
December 2011
2 posts
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one year smarter
Here are some things I have learned in 2011:
Even if tickets are $60 dollars and nobody will go with you, you should go see an R Kelly concert.
The trick to making sure nobody sits next to you on the Megabus is to sit in the aisle seat with tissues and a bag of beef jerky on your lap.
A nonboolean treatment of the truth conditions of disjunction is compositionally problematic.
Supa Dupa Fly by...
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November 2011
2 posts
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Dummy content you can type with your left hand
irondavy:
So you can keep clicking with the right hand.
Names
Abed
Bart
Dave
Tag
Xerxes
Descartes
Nouns
Fart
Swagger
Tartar
Czar
Dwarf
Adjectives
Deaf
Starved
Free
Erect
Tart
Verbs
Exacerbate
Fret
Stargaze
Stab
Ebb
Phrases
Caged rats get free water!
Stewardesses dread reggae barf
Sad serfs serve sad cabbage
Vests are cravats! we assert
Cave scarabs scare savages
...
October 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Sleepy is happy
The course I’m teaching has three problem sets throughout the quarter that make up the bulk of students’ grades. The one went kind of badly, gradewise. Rather than assigning blame for this, it’s time to assign Problem Set 2, on some basics of modeling word and sentence meaning.
As it stands, the main characters of the problem set are a partial cast of Snow White and the Seven...
Count Bass D and J. Rawls - 6 Days Till Halloween
...
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crosshatch/diametrical pizza debate update
You might recall that last year, shortly after moving to Columbus, I was perplexed by the manner in which much of the pizza was sliced here. I had grown up with circluar pizzas cut through their diameters, forming eight or so wedge-shaped slices that are more or less identical.
But here, there is a tendency to make a series of paralel and perpendicular cuts, leaving several rectangles of...
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-boy, -girl, -man, -woman
Here are some good word facts. According to sowpods:
There are 2 prefixes that can attach to -boy, -girl, -man, and -woman and form valid words: bat, news
There is 1 more that can attach to all but -girl: post
2 for all but -boy: work, sales
And 5 for all but -woman: shop, cow, bus, school, choir
5 work with just -boy and -girl: home, play, paper, copy, atta
16 for -man and -boy: fly,...
September 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Alex vs. Public Speaking
I was bar mitzahed. I threw up beforehand, squeaked out my haftorah, and sped through my thank-you speech, never looking up to acknowledge the audience.
My freshman year of high school, in Ms. Bruska’s biology class, we had to make DNA models. Mine was pretty awesome: black and cherry twizzler nibs, threaded onto unfurled wire hangers and attached with markered toothpicks. We had to...
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My two best ideas this week
A cross between battleship and hangman, played with two scrabble boards.
There’s an important paper on modality called What ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean. Someone should write a paper in response to it and called it What “What ‘must and ‘can’ must and can mean” must and can mean. This isn’t particularly likely, since the...
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August 2011
5 posts
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“We have to face the fact that maybe we won’t be able to stop every...”
– So, sometimes my ‘academic research’ involves searching online for good sentences. Playing around on the Corpus for Contemporary American English, I came across this gem. it features five modal terms, which is a ton, especially given how densely packed they are.
You might wonder what...
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I’m at logic camp. Here’s a simple, fun puzzle that I learned:
You and your friends Andy and Brandy—two friends who happen to be pretty good at reasoning—are all wearing hats. A third friend, Candy, has such a deft touch that she can place a feather in one’s hat without them knowing. The hats are brimmed, so if there is a feather in it, the hat wearer would not be...
July 2011
7 posts
2 tags
Excellent rap songs that sample Otis Redding that are definitely better than the new Kanye and Jay-Z song:
Marley Marl and the Juice Crew - The Symphony (Hard to Handle)
De La Soul - Eye Know (Dock of the Bay)
Kanye West - Gone (It’s Too Late)
EPMD - The Steve Martin (Let Me Come Home)
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The word I'm currently finding interesting
Improbably is the word I’m currently finding interesting. One would think that improbably would just be a straight antonym of probably—the way unlikely just means not likely—but they behave pretty differently. Consider the following sentences:
The Pirates will probably lose tomorrow.
The Pirates will improbably lose tomorrow.
I take (1) to basically mean: of all the possible...
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pterodactyls asked: What kind of information do you wish there had been accurate, reliable statistics on? There are no historical limitations here. What would you do with the data?
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June 2011
6 posts
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“Our social and sexual patterns have changed more in the last fifty years than in...”
– This quote from Helen Fischer, head scientist behind Chemistry.com, is in this New Yorker article about internet dating. It’s a really, very amazingly stupid sentence. If you were thinking about joining Chemistry.com, it’s important for you to know that the person behind it is this big...
Penny and The Quarters - You and Me
I watched...
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May 2011
9 posts
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Selfish shellfish sell fish shellfish.
As you probably know, there are 164 words in SOWPODS that end in -FISH. These seem to fit into three categories: 1) Types of fish: CAT-, JEW-, SABLE-; 2) Ways to fish: OVER-, UNDER-; 3) adjectives that don’t have anything to do with fish: STANDOF-, WEREWOL-, UNSEL-.
So I figured I’d combine the ‘hurt people hurt people’ fun with the ‘fish fish fish’ fun to...
Galactic featuring Juvenile & Soul Rebels...
kozmikdalga asked: Hi, I am a follower of songsfromtreme. My question is that will you continue to post songs on tumblr?
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The-Dream - Kellys 12 Play
On this song,...
Example Sentences
It turns out, I suck a little at example sentences. Back in the fall, I was really psyched about getting to make up example sentences. Examples sentences are a great place to show how clever I am, or to make people I don’t like do mildly embarrassing things, or just to throw in some Wu Tang references or something. But I guess I’m not clever enough, because my example sentences have...
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velocipedeandcontreras asked: Who will win the FIDE candidates matches to challenge Vishy Anand for the title of World Chess Champion? (Veselin Topalov is out now and so is Shakhriyar Mamedyarov). Who would you prefer if you could pick any active chess player?
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bthny asked: If you could only eat one type of cheese for the rest of your life, what kind of cheese would it be?
- OR -
You decide to open a museum. What is it dedicated to?
- OR -
You decide to open a museum. What is it dedicated to?
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What are the two best ideas you've had since...
[After asking you yesterday to ask me questions, only one person did, and I’ll need to think on that one a little longer. So I’m stuck asking myself more questions.]
Filling out a change of address form for “Current Resident”.
Romeo and Juliet but with rival urban dance crews. The sequel will be Hamlet with urban dance crews.
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What it has come to
The most observant among you will have noticed that I haven’t posted much lately. Rather than make excuses, I’m making solutions.
Tumblr has this fancy ask feature, that you might not know about. Back last year, when everyone was asking and answering for the first time, I wasn’t ready. I wanted my first ask response to be special. I didn’t want to be one of those...
April 2011
3 posts
2 tags
turnlizer replied to your post: Buffalo people buffalo people
but couldn’t people people people people people? and what if the people people were fond of other people people (à la “dog people”): people people people people people people.
Yes, people people could people people people. In fact, you can throw relative clauses in and get any string of “people” you want (greater...
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Buffalo people buffalo people
I saw Greenberg a little while ago, and the “Hurt people hurt people” line really stuck with me. Not the sentiment, but the language. It’s a pretty gorgeous construction. There are very few verbs where the bare form is the same as the past participle, and even when that happens, you still need a transitive verb that can take the same type of subject and object (“Put...
March 2011
6 posts
1 tag
Scrabble facts, pt. 4
On Friday, A-V-P had a post on Scrabble and profanity. She argued that dirty words “tend to be worth more in Scrabble!” Sadly, she didn’t specify what they were worth more than, and without a control of any sort, her argument had very little force. She also only used 7 swears, which is too small a sample to draw any conclusions from.
Well, there happens to be a list of Dirty...
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Scrabble facts, pt. 1
There 272,013 words in my SOWPODS list, a list for international Scrabble tournaments (that is also used for the Facebook program where I do my boggling). All, but 4,262 are fifteen letters or less—the maximum length to fit on a Scrabble board—but not all of the rest can conceivably be played in a game of Scrabble. 18 of them, for instance cannot be formed because, even with the...
Gregory Isaacs - Bits and Pieces
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February 2011
7 posts
