I was struck by a Mastodon post where classic game developer Ron Gilbert quoted film critic Roger Ebert as follows: And Gilbert commented: In a reply, Gretchen Anderson said her favourite version of this is: I couldn’t find the original source for this, but as I was trying to track it down I ran into this, attributed to Pablo Picasso: When I mentioned these observations to Matt, he sent me a longer-form exposition of the same phenomenon,

It’s not every day that you find out you have climbed the exalted heights of another discipline. My work is pretty interdisciplinary, but it shocked me, too, that I’m apparently holding forth on neoliberalism and the epistemic question in African universities (archive link): This, of course, came at some surprise to me, as I have never written anything on the topic.

Interjections are, in Felix Ameka’s memorable formulation, “the universal yet neglected part of speech” (1992). They are rarely the subject of historical, typological or comparative research in linguistics, and as Aimée Lahaussois has shown (2016), they are notably underrepresented in descriptive grammars. As grammars are the main source of data for typologists, this is of course a perfect example of a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the publishing landscape of academia is fast being homogenised, the thesis is one of the last places where we have a chance to see the unalloyed brilliance of up and coming researchers. Let me show you using three examples of remarkable theses I have come across in the past years.

Pandoc-flavored Markdown makes it really easy to cite and reference things. You can write something like this (assuming you use this references.bib BibTeX file): --- title: "Some title" bibliography: references.bib --- According to @Lovelace:1842, computers can calculate things.

My longstanding workflow for writing, citing, and PDF management When I started my first master’s degree program in 2008, I decided to stop using Word for all my academic writing and instead use plain text Markdown for everything. Markdown itself had been a thing for 4 years, and MultiMarkdown—a pandoc-like extension of Markdown that could handle BibTeX bibliographies—was brand new.

As someone who has been deeply interested by plants as long as I can remember, I have grown to appreciate all the different habitats I come across in Ireland. Each has its own unique set of species, but one that has always particularly caught my attention is our grasslands.

In the nineties, the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club extensively surveyed the urban flora of Belfast, resulting in a book, Urban Flora of Belfast . Many plants new to Down and Antrim were found, and most of these were new to Ireland as well. This was a three-year effort involving some thirty-one recorders.

Over two years ago I wrote about the unstoppable tide of uninformation that follows the rise of large language models. With ChatGPT and other models bringing large-scale text generation to the masses, I want to register a dystopian prediction.

The construction of gothic cathedrals like Chartres was governed not by blueprints but by “talk, tradition, and templates” — at least that is what Turnbull has compellingly argued. When you come across such a neatly alliterative triad, there are two ways you can go. You can adopt the terms in an unexamined way and rely on their alliterative power.