So, a few months back I started going to the gym semi-regularly for the first time ever, in part because I'm ridiculously unfit to the point where if I'm not careful when I'm playing sport or whatever I end up desperately hyperventilating. And around the same time I went back to ballet, where I discovered exactly the same problem there - I'm ok for ( Read more... )

So there's this idea, backed up by fairly solid studies, that a very large part of what most people think is 'talent' or 'genius' or whatever your preferred term for innate skill is, is actually just the result of a very long time spent practicing those skills. Around ten thousand hours or so, to be more specific - that's the amount of time most ( Read more... )

So as part of phonetics class we watched a documentary about deafness (no, I'm not entirely sure why this was in phonetics class either) called Sound and Fury, following two related families with deaf children and their discussions about whether or not to get the kids cochlear implants ( Read more... )

In case you still had the misconception that you're able to perceive reality as it really is, try taking a phonetics course. Specifically, try to learn how to transcribe speech ( Read more... )

Inspired by a question my friend asked: if you were in Jaime Lannister's position, would you have killed Aerys? It spiralled out from a discussion of personal honour vs utilitarianism to a discussion of whether Jaime killed Aerys for the right reasons and then onto Jaime's personality in general ( Read more... )

ok, so this isn't actually liveblogging, I read the first third of the book a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, on to the interesting bits, in no particular order ( Read more... )

ok, semester is over and obviously the humour series sort of got away from me. So instead of trying to continue it in detail, I'll offer a summary of the key points ( Read more... )

Some background on Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL):
NSL is about 30 years old now. It began when a special school for the education of deaf children was established in Managua, allowing deaf children starting from age 4, who'd previously only had very ad hoc systems of home sign with their family, interact with 25-30 other deaf kids, each of whom ( Read more... )

I'm currently running a mini experiment on how native speakers of various dialects of English pronounce 'a' in some nonsense words. It only takes a few minutes and would help me out greatly. Results can be either left as a comment below this post or emailed to evil dot jen at gmail dot com. Thanks!

PS: If anyone's interested in the results or ( Read more... )

There's been some interesting talks lately, but today was the first one in a while that made me think "I should blog about that". But since I also would like records of the other talks, I'm going to start trying to summarise the ones I found interesting ( Read more... )