I got asked by an AMP attendee if I “watch sports” and when I said, “yes,” they replied, “I thought so.” Interpreting that in whatever way you want.

"There’s a widespread misunderstanding by which people think that their problems can be solved with bigger samples" Preach!

The problem is noise, not N: why increasing the sample size isn’t all that. statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/10/10/t...

For the Saturday morning crowd.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee.bsky.social · 2d ago

Talked about the relationship between BMRS and Search Copy/Change at AMP today. Previous work looks at expressivity, but we make that point that BMRS *intensionally* captures the target-centric and "search" aspect of those theories. Check out the slides here: www.scott-nelson.net/Presentation...

Solidarity with Emily Tucker and her open letter to students. Tucker writes, "But the great thing is, you don’t have to go along with this, and I urge you not to. You can refuse to use the chatbot. You can tell your professors that you don’t want them to use it or to require you to use it."

An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements about "Generative AI"

Image source: Bibliothèque nationale de France An Open Letter to Georgetown Students, In Response to Recent Announcements by the University about “Generative AI” Dear students, As you know, in …

medium.com

Talked about the relationship between BMRS and Search Copy/Change at AMP today. Previous work looks at expressivity, but we make that point that BMRS *intensionally* captures the target-centric and "search" aspect of those theories. Check out the slides here: www.scott-nelson.net/Presentation...

Stony Brook is hiring a *theoretical* phonologist: linguistlist.org/issues/37/32...

LINGUIST List 37.3250 Jobs: Phonology: Assistant Professor-Theoretical Phonology, Linguistics, Stony Brook University

The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

linguistlist.org

it's good to see this laid out clearly, but i'm once again going to point to Peter Naur's 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building"

Butlerian Jihadist of House Dornick@shimminykricket.blacksky.app · 3d ago

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

On my way to UMD for the Annual Meeting on Phonology this weekend. Will I use the pool???

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee.bsky.social · 2w ago

Planning my conference schedule for the fall. Anyone have any tips?

A banger from Pullum & Gazdar (1982): "...clearly, the mathematical properties of the object of study are of intrinsic interest regardless of whether or not it is currently fashionable to stress such properties.''

look, it's really simple: either you're a spooky dualist, or you accept that liberty biberty is conscious

HYPOTHESIS: repeat exposure to the LessWrong discussion boards is functionally indistinguishable from mercury poisoning.

Reading Myers (1997) and Shona high-tone spread is so cool. It's non-iterative in the sense that it only spreads from one TBU to an adjacent TBU and no further within a morpheme but iterative in the sense that it can spread across multiple morpheme boundaries if each morpheme only has one TBU. Cool.

Planning my conference schedule for the fall. Anyone have any tips?

if you believe the computational theory of mind, the artificial minds debate is like 'what if a *computer* could be.............. a computer'

Party Down not being on the list at all is embarrassing.

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 2w ago

Here’s The New York Times 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Today is the day. Feeling very lucky to be able to witness such beauty in person.

Scott Nelson@esseeohteetee.bsky.social · 5mo ago

A Winged Victory for the Sullen performing in Chicago this fall is beautiful news to come across today. Instantly bought tickets. youtu.be/8nJ71mbpjJo?...

Playing the Ken Stevens x-ray video in Phonetics class today which means I get to introduce a new set of students to the insane sentence, "I have put blood on her two clean yellow shoes." linguistics.berkeley.edu/acip/appendi...

Me showing up to the functional phonology talk: “wait, where are all the functions?”

noam@noamchompers.bsky.social · 3w ago

my personal annoyance in this domain is that 'function' refers both to bare input–output mappings and to what something is *for*

Back on my bullshit and I really love doing phonology.

Saw a guy at the gym the morning with a gigantic shin tattoo of Timmy from South Park and it has shook me to my core.

Saw a (shit)post that said Johnny Rzeznik from the Goo Goo Dolls was a Maoist and I've never wanted anything to be more true.

A student getting to 1 hert through backformation from hertz is the greatest thing that I’ve ever experienced in a classroom.

Last two minutes or so of “Secret of the Easy Yoke” by Pedro the Lion is the platonic ideal of electric guitar tone.

Oh, you think this phenomena must be accounted for by a specific theoretical construct? Here's an infinite number of different ways to account for it.

Reading in the UIUC Humanities Research Institute newsletter that musical acts such as "Ratboys" are performing in CU this fall. I can't find it, but there's a clip of Bernie Sanders saying, "I'd like to thank the Ratboys for their, uh, music," after they opened up one of his rallies back in the day

Looking forward to reading this (especially the discussion!). Kyle sent me an abstract version earlier in the summer and I’ve been thinking about it a lot since it relates to my 2022 SCiL paper. I also have my own response in something Eric Baković and I are currently working on!

Radical, A Journal of Phonology@radical-phonology.bsky.social · last mo.

🌟 #New spark! Gorman, Kyle. 2026. On the relationship between privative and equipollent feature specifications. A Spark in Radical: A Journal of Phonology, 18 pp. 🗣️ Incl. discussions with Ewan Dunbar and Giorgio Magri. #OpenAccess #Phonology radical.cnrs.fr/gorman-on-th...

My article with @wmgbennett.bsky.social is finally out! We show that Xhosa speakers generalize the alternation of certain noun class prefixes to novel words based on root length—suggesting a synchronic pattern, rather than the fossilized remnants of a historical process. #linguistics

On the productivity of length-based alternations in Xhosa noun class prefixes

Noun classes in isiXhosa are each associated with specific prefixes on the noun stem. Some of these noun class prefixes exhibit length-based allomorphy: they take one form before multisyllabic stem...

doi.org

At our beginning of semester department event yesterday, I overheard an undergrad who I have never met say, “A fact about Scott Nelson is…” before quickly scurrying away. Starting my third year here which I guess means I have reached “the undergrads have their own lore about you” status.

The ability to "react" to emails is a feature for babies and one of the reasons that I'm annoyed with Outlook today.

Starting off my computational phonology class today by asking the hard hitting questions: what is phonology? what is computation?