I missed this when it was first published.

The Most Metal Deaths in Middle-earth, Ranked

Christmas gifts outside tent on Deansgate, Manchester

Here I am giving a talk on translation, transclusion and linked data at the XML London conference earlier this year. Please enjoy, because I haven't dared to watch it ;-)

Interesting, especially when you get past the bumf at the start of the report and start browsing the maps. New Chinatown! I did not know.

The spatial construction of civic identities: A study of Manchester’s linguistic landscapes

First acts revealed for Shrewsbury Folk Festival 2017

Two years on (6,000 miles or so?) and this chainring is still going strong.

I seem to need to replace the whole drive train every 2000 miles or so

Methera: Album Release Concert in Lancaster at The Gregson Centre.

I'm doing #Movember again! Please donate and help me change the face of men's health.

Photo updates to follow...

http://mobro.co/simondew

Should I do Movember again? Need to decide today I guess. Here's a scary photo of the appalling bumfluff I grew in 2013. Happy Halloween.

 

A happy find. The field names are a poem in themselves. Blue Cap, Marled Field, Dobs Hole, Near Far Field, Iron and Keddle Dock.

Remnants of medieval strip farming at the top right.

Happy birthday, Ursula K Le Guin!

Oof.

Two hurt in Manchester Victoria Station roof collapse

Information display in Manchester Piccadilly.

RIP Angus Grant from Shooglenifty.

Angus

Boldwood in Manchester. Sublime.

RIP Prof Katharine Perera. Taught me sociolinguistics.

Saddened by the passing of Prof Katharine Perera, an inspiration to generations of students and staff @OfficialUoM @UoMSALC @UoMLEL pic.twitter.com/Admg7yX3rH

— Multilingual Manchester (@mlmanchester) October 2, 2016

Chorlton graffiti

Didsbury under the Martians.

Machine Translation

This is interesting, although it skips over some of the details.

Kind of raises the question though, why is machine translation still so rubbish?

Okay, so much more training data is needed. But maybe also machine translations enter an uncanny valley as they get better.

Machine Learning is Fun Part 5: Language Translation with Deep Learning and the Magic of Sequences

Oof. D-lock around the wheel, cable lock was on the frame, I guess....

Sorry, reading that again it looks a bit victim-blamey, that was not my intent.

Interesting article on shift in T/V usage, i.e. informal and formal 2nd person pronouns.

Across the western world the formal "you" is losing ground. From the archive: https://t.co/ffYqpA1keh pic.twitter.com/Mu6f4APLJj

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) August 23, 2016

In tech translations I noticed a slight shift towards T forms in Spanish over the years. I usually had to change it back to the V form for consistency. In German I noticed a shift from a clipped, telegraphic style towards a more conversational style, but still Sie not du.

Vigenère

The Vigenère cypher. It turns up in Lauren Child's Ruby Redfort books, which daughter #2 is reading, and in Red Shift by Alan Garner, which I've just read. So I wrote this little library to help me encrypt and decrypt it. Probably won't be of much interest to anyone: the Vigenère cypher is almost useless for modern cryptography, and I've written it in XSLT, which most programmers seem to hate, but as a linguist I have a perverse liking for it.

janiveer/Vigenere

Interesting. Twitter as a tool for linguistic analysis, again.

Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half

Edinburgh Bike Co-op Manchester Closing

Ah well.

Edinburgh Bike Co-op Manchester Closing

I haven't shopped there for ages to be honest. For parts and gear I go online. For expertise and fixes I'd go to the Bicycle Doctor or Harry Hall.

I think EBC occupied an interesting position. They sell goodish, mid-range off-the-peg bikes: not pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap, but not custom titanium frame either. There always seem to be plenty of places in Manchester selling overpriced road bikes. I guess the local market didn't support their approach.

Green Man, Hare Hill.

Stopped off to say hi to Alan.

1912-1954. Younger than me.

He told me to take care cutting across Whitworth St, so I did.

Friends of Manchester Peace Garden

Manchester Peace Garden. Okay so it was a bit daggy, just a few scrubby bushes outside the town hall extension, but also included a statue called the Messenger of Peace. (Mancunians also called it the Pigeon Feeder.) All removed to make way for the redevelopment of St Peter's Square.

This group is campaigning to get the Peace Gardens and the Messenger reinstated in the medieval quarter — the space between the cathedral and Chet's. (Manchester must have more quarters than a 4-dimensional hypercube now.)

I don't call myself a pacifist, but I think it's a shame when quirky green spaces and public art disappear from our cities, so I hope this group succeeds.

Friends of Manchester Peace Garden

Mancky

Music, art, architecture of Manchester, mostly concentrating on the 1980s / 1990s.

I couldn't find an overall navigation page, you just have to follow the links and see where you end up, like a psychogeographical dérive.

See if you can find the bit about the rooftop housing estate on top of the Arndale Centre, abandoned after the bomb.

Mancky

I love it, it's fantastic. I felt quite nostalgic for the Precinct Centre.

Interesting to see the page about Antwerp Mansion. Manchester Ceilidh considered this for a venue. We were genuinely concerned that the building would collapse on us.

A colleague of mine picked up this info at a public meeting in Leeds. May be useful / of interest.

Brexit: What EU citizens living in the UK need to know — Kingsley Napley

This year's Tour has been absolutely bonkers. I think they're trying to compete with our politics.

Tour de France: Chris Froome forced to run up Mont Ventoux after crash

Tour Highlights

Yesterday evening catching up on the weekend's Tour highlights. Chris Froome's new descending style reminded me of my friend L bombing down the hill from Brinnington into Reddish Vale. I don't remember that she ever punched a guy wearing a chicken suit though.

Watching Froomey's aero tuck reminded me that by getting off the saddle and hunching over in the cockpit, she somehow managed to get under the barrier at the bottom of that slope without slowing down :-)

Flippin 'eck, van Avermaet grabs a 5 minute lead in the GC in a single stage!?

There were dozens of young men in WW1 uniform standing and sitting silently in the morning rush at Manchester Piccadilly this morning. Spooky and very moving.

Somme marked by uniformed men across UK with #wearehere

Only done 581 miles since then. :-(

I must have clocked 20,000 miles this morning without noticing

Nice little film and good to see what Mr. Keates is up to these days ;-)

Danças de lado nenhum

Didsbury Festival

Just paraded through the village in the pouring rain dressed as a Jedi knight, accompanied by daughter №2 (an Ewok).

Most of daughter №2's classmates were Rey. There was much fan theorising over Rey's parentage.

Daughter №2's friends summarised the theories for me. There was a big division between camp 1: Rey is Leia's daughter, and camp 2: Rey is Luke's daughter. (They can't both be true, because eww.)

Rebuttal to camp 2: Jedi (i.e. Luke) had to remain celibate.

Rebuttal to the rebuttal: Luke changed the rules (... or broke them?) when he founded the new Jedi order!

Alternative rebuttal to the rebuttal: Luke gave up being a Jedi to become a father!

I think I've got that right. I don't know. When I say summarised you have to imagine half a dozen 8-year-olds all talking at once.

I love this kind of thing. A glimpse into a parallel time stream. Hope I get a chance to drop in and see it.

Making post-war Manchester: visions of an unmade city

RIP Dave Swarbrick. Fond memories of seeing Carthy and Swarb at a folk club in Hednesford back in the day. Sad news.

Satnav

I have joked that the emergency services wouldn't be able to find you these days without their satnavs. Doesn't seem so funny now.

Cyclist died after three ambulances could not find Olympic velodrome

I once dutifully phoned the fire brigade about a fire on the transpennine trail. Similarly, they couldn't find me. Glad I'm not phoning for an ambulance, I thought :-|

Location accessible by road, and I described how to get there as clearly as I could, I just had no clue what the postcode was.

Cotton grass on Shutlingsloe. Deer in Macclesfield Forest. Lovely Bank Holiday weather.

Pop

A long time ago, I had the idea for using pop tunes for ceilidh dances. This file on my PC was dated 2004. Don't judge me for my music.

Jigs

• Sweet Dreams My L.A. Ex (Rachel Stevens)
• Practically anything by Mark Bolan
• Panic (The Smiths)

Hornpipes

• Lost Weekend (Lloyd Cole)
• Sheila Take a Bow (The Smiths)
• Spirit in the Sky (Doctor and the Medics)

Rants

• The Safety Dance (Men Without Hats) ^[1]

Schottisches

• The Chauffeur / Blue Silver (Duran Duran)

Reels

• You Spin Me Round (Dead or Alive)
• Don't You Want Me Baby (Thomson Twins)
• Love Will Tear Us Apart (Joy Division)
• Lay All Your Love On Me (Abba)
• L'Amour (Erasure)
• Road to Nowhere (Talking Heads)

Polkas

• Half a Person (The Smiths)
• Torn (Ednaswap, covered by Natalie Imbruglia) ^[2]

Mazurka

• Asleep (The Smiths)

Some of those rhythms have to be squished or stretched a bit to fit the beat properly. Also I haven't considered tune lengths at all. So for English dances you'd have to pick the dance carefully, or alter the arrangement.

---

[1] Credit where it's due: doing a rant to Safety Dance was Rhodri's idea. If memory serves, he claims to have taught himself to dance a rant step on the platform of Piccadilly station while listening to that song on his Walkman — a kind of primitive personal music player, kids.

[2] Torn is perhaps more of a 2-time bourrée I think?

Scenes from the Commute II

What's going up where the Beeb used to be?

"Circle Square". Student accommodation, apparently: Vita Student | Circle Square

Demolition of the Precinct Centre.

There is a corner of Fallowfield that is forever 2002.

Googacle verdict!

🚨 GOOGLE'S USE OF THE DECLARING CODE AND SSO OF APIS IS FAIR USE 🚨

— sarah jeong (@sarahjeong) May 26, 2016

Snuck

I remember Simon and I getting very excited some years back about the rise of non-standard strong verbs in English. Here's an old blog post with a recent update.

“Snuck” sneaked in — Stan Carey

It doesn't mention drag-drug! One of my favourites.

I wonder about the influence of German, Dutch, and Yiddish speakers in America, learning English, but being influenced by similar words in their native languages. So tragen-trug giving drag-drug? I don't know about sneak-snuck, but there is a Norwegian verb snike (to sneak) whose past tense is sneik or snek. Wasn't there a lot of Scandinavian influence in the upper Midwest?

On the other hand, Wiktionary says sneak possibly comes from the Old English snīcan (with a long ī), a class I strong verb: snīcan / snāc / snicon / snicen.

Flyer on my bike for World Naked Bike Ride. What do you reckon, should I do it? Ha ha.

Seriously though, fair play to anyone who's brave enough to do it. You can see the flyer has basically disintegrated in the rain.

Following Sarah Jeong's coverage of this on Twitter.

In Oracle v. Google, a Nerd Subculture Is on Trial

Although I don't like the way this article divides the world into nerds and normals.

It's noticeable how news breaks much more quickly over on Twitter, including this case.

XML London 2016

I'm presenting a paper at XML London on June 4th / 5th: "Dynamic Translation of Modular XML Documentation Using Linked Data"

This is my second (and probably last) conference paper on the tools and techniques I developed at Stanley. It'll be almost exactly a year since I left!

XML London 2016

The bike next to mine was gone.

It was a rather nice Bianci Semplice, if I remember right :-( Should be on cctv.

Ponyo

Cooking a stir fry for tea and singing a little nonsense song to myself.

Daughter №2 looks up from her Raspberry Pi: Congratulations, Dad! (sarcastic voice) the Americans have ruined date formatting, and now you've ruined the theme tune to Ponyo!

Footnote

Ponyo, Ponyo, you're an edamame bean
You're a little girl and you're small and green

I said it was nonsense.

In total across the distances, the jet dryer spread 20 times more viruses than the warm dryer and more than 190 times more than the paper towels.

Using a Dyson hand dryer is like setting off a viral bomb in a bathroom

Sweary maps. Possibly not safe for work.

Content warning for discussion of racist terminology and blasphemy.

Sweary maps 2: Swear harder

Statistical Learning vs Memorisation

Fascinating stuff. People who don't understand Arabic, but have memorised the Qur'an by rote, are better at spotting grammatical errors in Arabic than Arabic language learners who have studied the grammatical rules and inflections in question.

Statistical Learning and the Qur’an — The Ling Space

Thoughts:

1. To me this implies that our brains have built-in pattern-matching and rule-inferring mechanisms that perform better than our conscious minds.

2. The abstract doesn't say anything about individual learning styles. I hope this isn't used as the basis of one-size-fits-all teaching in the future.

3. Maybe 48 isn't a big enough sample?

Flecty

New project! I'm mining Wiktionary to create machine-readable, morphosyntactic dictionaries.

janiveer/Flecty

mFiL 2015 Slides without Notes

The slides without speaker’s notes are here:

http://www.slideshare.net/SimonDew/linguistic-markup-and-transclusion-processing-in-xml-documents

Linguistic markup and transclusion processing in XML documents

mFiL 2015 Slides with Notes

The slides from my talk at the Manchester Forum in Linguistics conference last year are available here:

http://www.slideshare.net/SimonDew/linguistic-markup-and-processing-of-transclusion-in-xml-documents-notes

Linguistic markup and processing of transclusion in XML documents (Notes)

NPM will now restrict unpublishing (in some cases).

kik, left-pad, and npm

Interesting that both Google and Facebook are so certain that today is the start of spring. Other definitions are available ;-)

Spring (season) — Wikipedia

Re: privatising the Land Registry.

Budget 2016: The UK must take every opportunity to strengthen data infrastructure — The Open Data Institute

Google My Tracks

Google My Tracks is deprecated. Looking for alternatives.

I guess the obvious one is Strava, but I'm not particularly interested in uploading my ride data or comparing my times with others... :-|

I like to save ride data (occasionally), mainly to see if I'm getting any faster or slower over the years. Also Google My Tracks worked out stuff like gradients and elevation, which my bike computer doesn't do.

Map stuff. The article doesn't make it clear if afford means have any money left after rent.

Mapping the Hourly Wage Needed to Rent a 2-Bedroom Apartment in Every U.S. State

A sunny day, and a reduced service on the Styal line. This morning the universe told me to get back on my bike.

Also it's half term, which means fewer cars. Which is good because my urban bike-fu is very rusty.

Inevitable, but still sad news to me. The Independent was the newspaper where I felt most at home, even when I disagreed with it.

The online version is, well, not quite the same in tone and quality.

Independent to cease as print edition

Getting started on another paper proposal. Drinking coffee at The Spoon Inn.

Wulf is on iege, ic on oþerre

This may be interesting re: people trying to ban stuff. Compare and contrast.

How We Won the War on Dungeons & Dragons

Up-Goer Five

Here's a description of my PACBook project written on the Up-Goer Five website, which only allows you to use (what it says are) the 1,000 most common words in English.

Sometimes a computer needs to put a new word into a story, like maybe the name of a group of people, or a type of thing that you have made. But when the computer does this, it needs to use the right form of the word. Also, the computer may need to change the form of some of the other words in the story to fit in with the new word. This can be a hard problem if the story is written in a different way of speaking, like they use in other lands. I have written a computer thing which knows how to put the right form of the word into a story. Also, I have told my computer how to change the form of other words in the story, if it needs to. You need to mark up the story first, and mark up all the forms of the words that the computer will put into the story. I can show you how to do this.

I'm slightly cheating, using mark up as a single lexical item.

Club Tales

Reading The Notion Club Papers 📚 on the train, which leads me to think about the club tales genre. You know, Tales from the White Hart (Clarke), Tales of the Black Widowers (Asimov), and so on... usually short stories, a bunch of blokes get together and talk, which forms a common framing device for the actual tales.

Is it always just men? Are there any examples featuring mixed groups, or all women? Is anyone writing a c21st version?

Trying to work out the rules / conventions of the genre. They're club tales; the framing characters all know each other and meet regularly. Guests are permitted. No one in the club actually tells the story, at least not uninterruptedly; it emerges through conversation. The stories may be something that (allegedly) happened to one of the characters or maybe happened to a friend of a friend. They're tall tales or mysteries or have a twist.

Nothing happens to the members of the club in the context of the framing story. They just talk. But they're strongly drawn characters.

Outside the new south entrance to Leeds station this morning.