Had to prove that I was nerdier than Paul:

Also, my score on the 500 Question Nerdity Test comes to 58.2%, which I believe is higher than it's ever been. Huzzah.

Yeah, I haven't posted in a while. My sleeping has been really weird lately (trying to forcibly put myself on a semi-normal schedule before the Spring semester begins). As a result, I've been extremely lethargic and entirely unmotivated to post.

So, to make up for it, here are a couple of links that most anyone who reads this probably isn't that interested in. But I thought they were cool. That's right, kids! It's Language Blogs!!

• Languagehat. Found via MeFi link. Interesting reading from a fellow language geek.
• Language Log. Via Languagehat's links sidebar. More interesting tidbits from a group of linguists.

Despite the esoteric nature of the links, I'm contractually obligated to say "Enjoy!"

So, I slept literally almost all of Sunday. At one point I think I switched the TV to the Lexington Public Library channel and fell asleep to the soothing sound of some old British man reading The Silmarillion or something. Then I woke up at like 3 AM!

So now, having installed my FireWire card, started a re-format of my removable hard disk, cleaned up my desk a bit, and realized that I haven't blogged since last year, I thought I'd point out that I'm currently watching Imus in the Morning on MSNBC and posting a blog that in no way references the fact that it is now 2005.

Doh.

Happy New Year!

Totally random entry today, to hopefully kick off a long streak of other random (yet somehow, strangely cohesive) entries. That's right, kids: It's time for Esperanto Poetry!

Je Unua Neĝaŝtormo Ĉisezona

de Ralph Dumain

Por fortikig', dozego
  de John Coltrane kaj mi flugas
    celante liberigi ĉiun,
      liberigi ĉiun frazon, ĉiun vorton,
        ĉiun vorteton, ĝis atomoj krevos
          pro ĝojo ne milito.
        Jen ampleksiĝ' kaj malo —
      tensio maksimuma —
    el notoj ordo
  fajna kaj ekstaza.

Purigi per belo,
  tuŝi per belo.
    Ja estas ondoj
      el kiuj ĉiu estas mar'
        da saĝo.
      Ne bezonatas religi' fatrasa
    por forviŝi ĉian dubon.
  Jen ontologi' de materi'
kaj ĝia ekstaziĝo,
  kaj ĝia animiĝo.

Miaj Blake-eroj da mensa furiozo
  ripetas:
    "Demetu sanktecon,
      surmetu penson."
    Ne flustru ĝin, kriu ĝin.
  Ne diru ĝin, montru ĝin;

"ĝis filinoj de memoro cedos
al filinoj de inspiro."

I love those last two lines: "Until the daughters of memory give way to the daughters of inspiration." And "liberigi ĉiun frazon, ĉiun vorton, / ĉiun vorteton, ĝis atomoj krevos." "Liberate every sentence, every word, every morpheme, until atoms burst." Great lines. :)

I sort of lost interest in blogging for a while... dunno why. But I rather missed having an outlet for expression. Even if no one reads it. So, perhaps I'll start posting more often.

And, yeah. Kerry lost. :(

I'll probably go to hell for posting this, but I think it's time we all got a good solid introduction to the sport of Wheelchair Rugby.

We've been decorating the living room with flags, so I've been looking at flags.net to find some cool flags.

I promised links, but didn't deliver. I'm going to post one at the time of this writing, and post more after I finish my two summer session finals today. Woo.

Update: 12:47 pm; One test down, one to go. Matrix Algebra went surprisingly well. Posting few more links, then going to cram a bit for Astronomy.

Update: 2:45 pm; Both tests finished. The difficulty of the Astronomy final was, as Dr. Bhavsar noted prior, incongruent to the difficulty of the rest of the exams. I did well on it, though. I think. Shouldn't need to good a grade to pull the requisite A in the course though. I recommend any AST class taught by Dr. Bhavsar. He's cool.

• The Story of IMDB: Who was in that one movie? IMDB knows all. :D
• Connect The Dots?: Blogger analyzes patterns in Homeland Defense terror threat announcements. Are they being abused as a political tactic? You decide.
• VillainSupply.com: THE Online Source for Everything Evil. Bwah hah hah. Funny stuff.
• The Future of Copyright: What will copyright be like in 8 years? Lessig et al. discuss.
• The New Batmobile: MPEG of the new Batmobile in action. It looks retarded.
• MC Hawking: The Venerable Idaho just IMed me with this, his latest discovery. Although I've been a fan of Hawking's rhymez for some time, I see no reason not to post this. Enjoy.

Math: a subject close to my heart (I am a big geek after all). Slate has an interesting article about the International Math Olympiad. More interestingly, the bulk of the article discusses the questions: is math a sport? What defines an activity as a sport? Most interestingly, there's the inevitable reference to beer pong.

The web design behind this blog is utterly amazing. I'm duly impressed. Interesting content as well. Righto.

Found an interesting link. Someone ranked the influence of various works of 20th century art via content analysis: the more times a work was referenced in various art/art history textbooks, the higher the rank. The list is interesting, and there were a bunch of pieces I hadn't seen before, and several old favorites that I hadn't seen in a long time. A lot of the links are broken, but if something strikes your fancy, I had good luck with google to fill in the blanks.

Currently listening to: "Technovo" by Volapük. Weird, engaging, interesting instrumental music is fine by me. It's even better when the band name is a reference to an obscure constructed auxiliary language!

Yes, dear readers (all one of you. Hi mom!), I've been neglecting the Sector the past few days. It's all good. I spent a long (four days!) weekend at home. Stayed offline most of the time (logged on long enough to check my UK account balance and get in some Kings of Chaos attacks) and haven't found the time to post since getting back. Let me tell you, 7 credit hours during a summer session is bad times. But here's an update.

This weekend: Spent time with family. That was nice, as always. Played some video games, mostly messing around with NHL 2004, which is just about played out as far as I'm concerned.

Did a little work on my lab report for Thursday. Excel is some good. The fill down button makes my life easier. Still have to do the writing and plot a graph and whatnot, but I'm not too worried and I'll finish it up tomorrow night. After posting this, I'm going to do exactly 4 practice problems for Matrix Algebra (wacky Steve Kovacs, the Hungarian Hellion, the Master of Matrices, is giving a quiz!) then log off.

A note: overlong parentheticals make my writing less clear. On the other hand, I appreciate stream-of-conciousness writing and my thought processes are generally wrought with parentheticals. So there.

Hoping to go see some movies this weekend. Saved is at the Kentucky Theater, and looks cool. We might rent some DVDs as well. Someone mentioned an Ace Ventura marathon, but I think that's about as good an idea as my plan during Spring semester to rent early Wrestlemania tapes and have an old-school WWF marathon.

Okay. I'm a terrible blogger. Life has, in general, been rather odd the past couple of months, but things are looking up. So here we go.

Right now, I'm sitting in my dorm. What's that, you say? It's June! Yes. Don't remind me. I'm attending the summer session here at ol' U of K. Taking Linear Algebra, Astronomy, and, shudder, Physics Lab II. Oh boy. That, folks, is a full load.

Oddly enough, I have a boatload of free time. I've been reading a lot (The Mirrodin Cycle of Magic: the Gathering novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit at the moment), and sitting on my computer a lot. And that's about it. Campus is uncool this time of year. Oh. That pun was unintended, and now that I think about it, not all that funny. In any event. I have plenty of time to use for blogging and other questionably productive activities.

For example, I've been hitting Soulseek hard. Listened to a bunch of new music. The Thermal's album Fuckin A is terrific. Erlend Oye's DJ Kicks is a fun listen as well. I've also become somewhat obsessed with the band Clinic. They're back catalogue is pretty slim, but it's uniformly kick-ass. And they're as-yet-unreleased album Winchester Cathedral is really, really good.

Ben, of Me, Tim and Ben are renting a place in the fall fame, coerced me into taking up the game Kings of Chaos. It's pretty fun. Reminds me of this web game I played back in like 9th grade that I really enjoyed. If you have excessive free time, you might give it a try.

That's all for today.

Apparently, Lexington, KY, is a pretty smart place. At least according to the Census Bureau. Percent of People With a Bachelor's Degree or More. Ninth? Impressive. Ahead of Boston, even. Particularly impressive given the questionable leadership in the area...

Not surprising, of course, is the fact that Lexington far outpaces Louisville in that department.

Kurt Vonnegut. One of my favorite writers. Here's a link to an editorial he wrote recently. Quite good.

Walking back from class just now, I had a thought: would it be possible for a language to be purely semantic, that is, with absolutely no syntactic structures? The conclusion I came to was that, yes, it would be possible, but only theoretically. The language would have to have a symbol for every possible expression. That's extremely impractical. But maybe I'm missing something.

Another related question: what is the minimal syntactic structure needed for a language to be (and I'm making this term up) "linguistically complete" (think Turing complete, but for human expression)?

No one seriously needs on of these.