Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 38

More conversations and emails.I say the wrong thing.Life ...

More conversations and emails.

I say the wrong thing.








Life is unfair.

People who work very hard and do the right thing sometimes go under: the systems that are in place don't always ensure that people who have done the right thing will survive. We can then decide to try to do something about it or look the other way. If we do something about it we may ourselves end up in the position of going under: the cost to an individual of rectifying an injustice is often prohibitive.

Life is unfair.

Back in ...

What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frighte...

What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect someone, that you can't see where they're coming from and can change tack at any moment.

Tilda Swinton on the White Witch of Narnia

I've remarked before that, once I became a practicing sci...

I've remarked before that, once I became a practicing scientist, I realized I had taken all of the wrong courses as a student. Although I started out as a classical literature major, because I was interested in science, I took math, physics, chemistry, biology, biochemistry, biophysics and so on. I should have taken business administration, elocution, basic accounting, creative writing, speed-reading, politics, sociology and abnormal psychology. Now that I'm chair of a department, I really...

kill fee

Sheila Heti is editing Kill Fee for Incongruous Quarterly.

I sent her this. (A piece first accepted, then rejected by The Believer.)

It has its irony. I tried to set up a clean, secluded life and write; I couldn't. Too many casually incompetent, casually dishonest people. So unfinished books. So I needed an agent. So I hired Bill Clegg. Who is, on the one hand, as casually incompetent and dishonest as all the people from whom I needed protection, but has, on the other hand, unquestionabl...

Andrew Gelman on statistical fallacies in baseball report...

Andrew Gelman on statistical fallacies in baseball reportage.

My landlady has gone on holiday to Italy.I'm here with th...

My landlady has gone on holiday to Italy.

I'm here with the cats.

One of which likes to spend the day out in the street.

As it turns out, the cat needs to be lured home again at night: one must go out into the street and meow loudly: MEOW. MEOOOOW. MEOOOOW.

The cat doesn't seem to be very discriminating. It doesn't need its mistress's voice. It just needs a human meowing loudly at midnight to call it home.

The two cats are now chowing down on a tin of petnatur 100% Bio (HERZRAGOUT).

I recognize that "language exams" can be (and sometimes a...

I recognize that "language exams" can be (and sometimes are) designed to test something other than language proficiency. When I was a graduate student, we needed to demonstrate proficiency in two languages other than English. In principle, all that was required was the ability to translate a linguistics article, with access to a dictionary. Having achieved roughly that level of competence in German, I was planned to take the German exam. Then one of my fellow grad students, a native speaker ...

The first rule is an "internal" one: it has nothing to ...

The first rule is an "internal" one: it has nothing to do with your relation with others, it concerns you yourself in isolation. It is as follows:

"Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward."

This rule tells us that the obviously possible should be...

Burkett & Griffiths (2010) go a long way to applying ...

Burkett & Griffiths (2010) go a long way to applying populaitonal thinking to language evolution. They describe a Bayesian model of language acquisition that takes into consideration multiple teachers and multiple languages. They point out that a learner who is trying to settle on a single grammar which fits data from multiple speakers violates the principle of Bayesian rational analysis. Burkett & Griffiths rectify this problem by defining a model in which a learner takes into account...

HDW MEETS AGENT