minor building flood...

So Center Street South had some sort of plumbing leak last night...

Tim came and got me at about 3 to warn that, in other parts of the building, water was apparently streaming through the walls and coming out of the electrical sockets (due to a heating pipe busting, we think?). You could hear it coming down if you listened near the walls (it was fairly loud), and the halls had like a half-inch of water sloshing around.

A bit after seven, maintenance guys came in to vaccuum up the pool of water that had formed in the hallway 'tween my room and Corey's. Thankfully, none of our stuff got damaged, but supposedly it was worse in other people's apartments...

Conditions have been, uh, not excellent for both working and sleeping :) And if you were trying to use hackmode last night -- I unplugged it, which would explain the downtime.

blogging in the Baird lab

Sometimes, when you're working on writing a little RDP to parse a simple, formally-defined subset of English... you realize that there are all these small, unarticulated rules in the actual language-that-people-use... (this is one of those times)

Kurt said, "Make your parser handle adverbs!"

... but, like, where do adverbs go, relative to the verbs they describe? Before? After? Well, you see both...

"I jump quickly" or "I quickly jump" are both valid.

But what you don't see, I think... is an adverb-going-after-the-verb when there's an object involved. It's even weirder with two objects.

"I sadly kicked him the ball" works, sure, but how about "I kicked sadly him the ball"? (what you'd really say would be "I kicked him the ball sadly", and that doesn't feel like the sort of thing it'd be easy to parse with an RDP...)

How in the name of Turing are we going to teach this to a computer?