Scott Nelson

I know Element Theory is mostly an ignored dark art in North America, but if anyone has recommendations, particularly about a specific ET paper on phonetic implementation, I would be happy to have somewhere specific to look.

I’m about 60% done with Phillip Backley’s “An Introduction to Element Theory”. I get the general gist and was hoping there would be a bit more technical/formalization discussion in the book. We’ll see if the back 40% delivers.

After spending the last 4-5 years thinking about Articulatory Phonology and it’s relation to symbolic theories of phonology, I am now setting my sights on Element Theory which is clearly acoustically motivated (necessarily different than being auditorally motivated for them from what I’ve read).

A search function for the Library of Babel is so funny to me. I guess it’s to
show each book has a “real” location. But showing a single result defeats the purpose. Anything you search should have infinite results! It should make me go insane having to wade through gibberish!

in some ways, the thing that is most annoying to me personally about this discourse is that a lot of people seem to be of the view that you can just play with LLMs *instead* of doing philosophy of mind. i'm pretty pessimistic about that approach

100/10

YouTube video by NEON NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE - Official Trailer - In Theaters February 13

Going to see maybe my most anticipated movie of all time in about a half hour. When that Ben Folds track hits at the end credits you can catch me crying happy tears.

youtu.be/y2K9ccMREOI?...

YouTube video by Tim Heidecker Tim from Michigan Calls In to Protest the Lockdown (Tim Robinson) (Best of Office Hours)

Whoops, forgot the link: youtu.be/_nhE0Crz1Ig?...

I had a roommate that pronounced “skeleton” as [skɛləʔn̩] and have heard it a few other times since (including Tim Heidecker at around 6:00 in this video). I’m happy to share that David Duchovny as Fox Mulder also pronounced it that way in episode 16 of Season 7 of the X-Files.

Also, I was just writing notes about context-sensitive languages and the clip of Charles Barkley calling Shaq "mr. sensitive" popped into my head. So now whenever I read/hear discussion of context-sensitive languages a little voice in the back of my head is gonna go, "ok, mr. sensitive."

The point of bringing this up is that every time I have to read/think/talk about regular languages a little voice in the back of my head goes, "I'm ready to talk regular rick."

There's a Longmont Potion Castle call where he's pretending to be a man called Steadman Slick and talking to a man named Rick. At one point, Rick says, "Steadman, if you want to talk normal we'll do it now," and he responds as Steadman, "I'm ready to talk regular, Rick."

Teaching a stats class this semester and a student today asked, “what really are regular expressions,” with no idea what they were getting themselves into.

This year's Mayfest at Maryland was just announced where the topic will be "Representation in Language Production". Looks to be an incredible weekend and I'm quite grateful to have been asked to speak, especially after finding out who the rest of the speakers are: linguistics.umd.edu/mayfest2026

View of the Empire State Building through a set of windows arranged in a grid.

View from my seat when I look up is the Empire State Building.

Threading the needle of the winter storm by flying between Chicago and NY today/tomorrow for the workshop on logical phonology. Two weeks of travel/conferences right before my semester started wasn’t chaotic enough so I had to include this trip to really feel something. wellformedness.com/wolp/

There also was something more recent because I remember some discussion on here about the independence of computational as a mathematical idea and physical computers. Let me see if I can find it and I’ll share!

Computationalism: New Directions A new computationalist view of the mind that takes into account real-world issues of embodiment, interaction, physical implementation, and semantics.Classi

You’ll probably find some stuff in the philosophy of mind literature. I seem to recall this exact type of discussion in stuff that pushes back against the computational theory of mind. I also seem to recall the first few chapters of this mentioning it: direct.mit.edu/books/edited...

Was nice getting to see him give this talk and speak with him a little more about it! I’ve long felt a similar way. Simplicity arguments are so often missing hidden complex assumptions in addition to everything else. Looking forward to seeing where Rory’s work goes!

Wonderful!

Delinking is more annoying and I can’t remember what I do for those but it’s significantly more annoying

connections you want. If you want multiple roots to go to (B) just also include the (C) - - (B) connection

I’m on my phone on an airplane right now so can’t share code, but multiple association lines with tikz is straightforward with no extra libraries other than maybe “positioning”. Use \node to make/position the nodes you want and give each a label like (A), (B). Then do \draw (A) - - (B) for all the

My flights to/from London have both played an instrumental Muzak version of “Clint Eastwood” by The Gorillaz that is extremely off putting.

Leaving for home tomorrow. Doing two conferences back to back is a lot, but it was really nice to see old friends and make new ones. Had too many interesting conversations to list and I’m looking forward to writing some of these papers up this semester.

(my brain is maybe a little mushy)

Really having a nice time in Cambridge for OCP. Tomorrow ends probably the most insane string of presentations I will do in my career: 12/10 (talk + poster); 12/11 (talk); 12/12 (international travel day); 12/13 (talk); 12/14 (talk); 12/15 (poster). The material covered 5 different projects/papers!

Forcing every linguist ever to write on the blackboard like Bart Simpson, “I will not confuse the object language with the meta language.”

Picture of a fancy room at Cambridge with a chandelier and ornate bookshelves and furniture. Picture shows linguists standing around drinking coffee and tea before a workshop.

40 people at the ocp pre-conference workshop in this tiny sitting room makes me yearn for the LSA Marriott.

Picture of me on stage playing a surf green Fender jaguar guitar while wearing a brown, khaki, and black winter jacket.

~One week ago I got to do my favorite thing (play music with friends). Today I get to do my other favorite thing (talk about phonological representations with my friends). Here's a pic of me deciding to wear a winter jacket doing the former during an hour long set of scream-singing (a stupid choice)