An abstract for a talk by Erez Levon (Queen Mary, University of London) this coming Friday (1:30-3) at Stanford. I won’t be able to be there, but obviously the topic is of great interest to me.
Archive for the ‘Events’ Category
Language, religion, same-sex desire
June 2, 2014Holidays and events
May 4, 2014Anniversaries and holidays
November 29, 2013Various 50th anniversaries have come up this year, and now we are impelled into the midst of the Christmas Shopping Season; today is Black Friday, with sales everywhere.
Folsom Street Fair
September 29, 2013Today is a big event in San Francisco: from Wikipedia:
The Folsom Street Fair (FSF) is an annual BDSM and leather subculture street fair held on the last Sunday in September and caps San Francisco’s “Leather Pride Week”. The Folsom Street Fair, sometimes simply referred to as “Folsom”, takes place on Folsom Street between 7th and 12th Streets, in San Francisco’s South of Market district.
The event started in 1984 and is California’s third largest single-day, outdoor spectator event and the world’s largest leather event and showcase for BDSM products and culture.
A somber anniversary
July 2, 2013In the NYT Book Review on Sunday, a review by David W. Blight of Allen C. Guelzo’s Gettysburg: The Last Invasion — from which:
Spread over 15 square miles around a small Pennsylvania town on the first three days of July 1863, involving more than 160,000 soldiers and huge numbers of camp laborers, including between 10,000 and 30,000 slaves forced to serve the invading Southern army, the conflagration caused a degree of slaughter like no other in American history.
That is, 150 years ago this week.
The album cover
April 30, 2013Today is the third and last day of the IvanFest at Stanford (Structure and Evidence in Linguistics, a conference honoring Ivan Sag). A slideshow of Ivan photos goes by before the sessions begin and in breaks. My favorite:
This shows Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, and Sag, in alphabetical order from left to right, in (I think) 1984, while they were finishing the manuscript of:
Gerald Gazdar, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum & Ivan Sag, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. Basil Blackwell, 1985.
— looking for all the world (except for that computer) like a reasonably well-behaved rock group on an album cover.
The IvanFest
April 20, 2013April 28th-30th in Cordura Hall at Stanford: Structure and Evidence in Linguistics, a conference honoring Ivan Sag. Program here.
A few more details:
Sunday 4/28, 2:30-5:30: Elisabet Engdahl, Ted Gibson, Philip Hofmeister and Laura Staum Casasanto, Carl Pollard, Stefan Müller, Geoffrey Pullum
Monday 4/29, 2:00-5:40: Jorge Hankamer, Pauline Jacobson, Jong-Bok Kim and Peter Sells, Philip Miller, Jonathan Ginzburg, Joanna Nykiel, Roger Levy, Farrell Ackerman and Rob Malouf and John Moore
Tuesday 4/30, 2:00-5:40: Erhard Hinrichs and Tsuneko Nakazawa, Gosse Bouma, Frank Van Eynde, Lauri Karttunen and Annie Zaenen, Stephen Wechsler, Alex Lascarides, Gert Webelhuth, James Blevins
[Added 4/21, in answer to questions about the participants: The invited participants are from Ivan’s collaborators and students — a very large group of people. (Ivan’s university colleagues who were not his collaborators or students, and his teachers who were not also collaborators, were not invited.) And preference was given to people from outside Stanford.]
In the comics
July 13, 2012In San Diego, going on right now at the San Diego Convention Center: this year’s Comic-Con International. From Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (Da Capo Press, 2007), p. 64:
The blessing and the curse of comics as a medium is that there is such a thing as “comics culture.” The core audience of comics is really into them …
… Comic-Con International is where everybody goes – around a hundred thousand attendees paralyze the entire city of San Diego.
And the people who are really into comics have been into superhero comics (aimed at boys and young men), though “art comics” (especially graphic novels) have been gaining ground for some years now.
Turing at 100
April 8, 2012In the April 4th Princeton Alumni Magazine, “Daybreak of the Digital Age: The world celebrates the man who imagined the computer”, by W. Barksdale Maynard: a piece on Alan Turing, the great mathematician (and, during WWII, an extraordinary code-breaker) who got his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1938. His 100th birthday comes on June 23rd, to celebrations in Princeton and in the U.K. There’s even a commemorative stamp, in the Britons of Distinction series for this year:
Alas, the stamp depicts, not Turing, but the Bombe, the electromechanical device used by the World War II codebreakers at Bletchley Park to decipher messages encoded by Nazi Germany using Enigma machines.
In a little while, I’ll get to my connections to Turing. But first, various bits of background. (more…)