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Blog Archaeology!

johnbaskerville — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:47:33 -0800

Would anyone be able to help me uncover remnants of a 1999 era blog called Evol Star or something to that effect? Details inside. The blog was before the height of LiveJournal and MySpace, and it was run by two girls who may or may not have lived in Texas. I always assumed they were roommates. There interests seemed to drift between the Gorillaz, Noam Chomsky, design, and, again, maybe Texas. The girls were hip and featured quite a few photos of themselves and their flat on the website.

There were quite a few introspective, twentysomething styled posts about adult life and that sort of thing, and I, much younger at the that, always thought their blog was the coolest thing out there. Any chance anyone knows what happened to these women?

Google, the Wayback Machine, and MySpace have failed me. My Google-Fu is decent enough, and I would think, given the content that I remember, that these two would have kept on with their internet lives.

Hey, I could be wrong

Marla Singer — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 14:27:27 -0800

An acquaintance of mine said, "Noam Chomsky never went to college." After I confronted him with the details of Chomsky's formal education as presented on Wikipedia, my acquaintance maintained that Chomsky never really did all the things normal students do, like attending classes (he was too smart for his teachers), doing assignments, taking tests -- he was basically an independent student throughout his career.

When I was unable to verify this, and asked my acquaintance where he got this information, he claimed to have actually corresponded with Chomsky a number of times, and Chomsky had told him. (My acquaintance, by the way, has no academic credentials or affiliation. He used to follow the Grateful Dead around, and now basically lives off of a small unearned income while claiming to be a writer.)

At this point I really figured my acquaintance was full of shit, but I didn't have any way to prove it. He brought it up a number of times subsequently, and I just bit my tongue. I think it serves a psychological purpose for him: he never went to college himself, although he's fairly intelligent. It seems to be his way of saying that college doesn't make people smart -- or that some people are too smart for college.

I understand that Chomsky has been known to answer email from "ordinary" people surprisingly often, but I can't bring myself to waste his time asking about something that reeks of BS the way this does. Can anyone here shed light on the details of Chomsky's undergraduate studies?

Linguophiles: Help me settle this debate on the Chompskyian model of linguistics.

Lockeownzj00 — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 16:35:50 -0800

Linguophiles: Help me settle this debate on the Chompskyian model of linguistics. I was talking to a friend recently about "The Language Instinct," by Steven Pinker, which I've been reading recently. He presents many arguments which are fairly thorough as to why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong and why the systems of language and grammar tap into something innate in our brains which children especially find malleable.

Essentially, my friend's claim was that modern linguists reject the Chompskyian model and it's been largely disproven. One of his major points was that without physical neurological proof, positing any model is useless, but I think this is basically antithetical to the progress of all sciences.

After a bit of hubbub, we concluded that neither of us knows enough about the other's perspective and the arguments already in the public discourse for each.

Basically--is this true? Say what you want about Chompsky's politics, but I find it hard to believe that this model was simply "discarded." It is a lot more logical and thorough, and accounts for a lot more than a Sapir-Whorfian POV.

If there are large bodies of work opposed to this model, which are the most well-known and thorough?

Noam Chomsky: A good introduction?

cbushko — Mon, 01 May 2006 12:53:26 -0800

I am interested in reading some Noam Chomsky but I have no idea where to start. I hear that his writing/thought process can be rather academic and I worry that it will melt my brain. Any suggestions on his writing?