A shout-out to HRSFAN Aaron J. Dinkin, linguist of the dialectological variety, who appeared as a Major Quoted Someone for Slate last month in an article on the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS aka NCS). The article is raising awareness of some recent (~our lifetime) re-jiggering of “linguistic turf” for short vowels (cat, cot, caught,
The other month, a to-be-commended HRSFalum asked through HRSFANS-discuss for good books to bring on a long vacation, imposing only constraints that they be in-print (reasonably available) mass-market PBs. As one might expect, this generated an excellent recommendations list (which someone really ought to collate for the HRSFANS wiki—shoot, I volunteered again, didn’t I?), if
I just ran across this description of the Daniel Bartlett Memorial Mathematics Lectures. Hosted at the University of Arizona, they honor Dan Bartlett ’03, a HRSFAlum who passed away in 2006. This isn’t particularly timely, I realize, but I thought others might be interested to know about it regardless. While news of Dan’s death did
The following post was written by Tony, and is posted here at his behest: In anticipation of vericon TWELVE, in 2012, which is TWELVE months from now, I wrote a song: The Twelve Days of VeriCon: On the twelfth day of Vericon my hrsfa gave to me… Twelve Friends a greeting Eleven Creatures Tapping Ten
Dennis Clark has made a new social networking tool. At his request, I reproduce his introduction to it, below: Hey all, I’ve just finished making something I really want to show you all. Since leaving college, I’ve missed HRSFA-Social pretty hard. It was just totally great when you were feeling bored to be able to
Kevin Gold has got two very thought-provoking articles on the jeopardy match-up between human jeopardy champions and IBM’s AI “Watson”, up on Tor’s website. Check them out here and here.
Vericon is this weekend! Vericon is a science-fiction, fantasy, gaming, and anime convention featuring many events and distinguished guest speakers. It has been held annually at Harvard University since 2001. The tenth Vericon will take place on Friday-Sunday, March 19-21, 2010. The convention is sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association (HRSFA), an undergraduate student
HRSFANS member Neil S. has just returned from a trip to visit his family in rural India, and has a really interesting blog post with photos from and thoughts about his adventures. I particularly enjoyed hearing Neil’s perspective on life there because he’s simultaneously part of the family, and an observer from modern urban America.
Jessica Hammer ’99 and her research team recently won a grant to design iPhone games that will help people stop smoking. The grant speaks for itself: The game is intended to be an alternative to smoking with the goal of reducing or eliminating tobacco use in players’ lives. The game involves breathing into a microphone