people, goals, funding, projects

At the checkout counter at the pet supplies store, I'm given the option: would you like to donate to animal cancer research? I would! Here's a dollar for cancer research!

I wonder out loud: "Huh! Maybe I could get people to donate a dollar to fund my research..."

This leads to a discussion about "well, what's your research?" with the girl at the pet store. She told me about how she's just now finished up her biology degree, and how she really loves animals, is considering vet school, and volunteers at the wild animal rescue center, and about how they take care of baby wild animals (and rehabilitate injured ones) and then re-introduce them into the wild, and the funding problems that they face at that organization. She'd tried to get the pet store to do a fundraiser for the wild animal rescue center, but it hasn't worked out yet.

People are neat: I need more opportunities for them to tell me about their interests and goals and projects.

Would you donate a dollar to machine translation research, during your next purchase at the store? What if you could pick from a few different projects? Say, every month, there was one from the humanities, something art-flavored, and some science (or something)? ...

How to get businesses on board with this?

ok, so work faster and stop wasting time on the internets

Maaaan, here I am, at a liberal arts university where they teach languages, and I want to learn another one, and I could sign up for Chinese, or Arabic, or Yiddish, or a pretty large number of other ones. Those three are in decreasing order for usefulness, and also difficulty-in-learning, I expect. I've studied a little bit of German, so the primary difficulties for Yiddish would be getting up to speed with the Hebrew character set and the fact that there's basically nobody to speak it with. Arabic seems like a sweet spot here: quite a few people speak it, and I feel like I could plausibly make progress learning it due to the writing system with a finite number of characters, and how it's not tonal. Also I'm unreasonably excited about the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions.

Although: I want to stop taking classes so I can get actual work done, and even if I was of a mind to take more classes than I need to, there are a bunch of them that are interesting and relevant to my actual work, eg Markus's class on parsers and Larry's class on semantics.

There are worse problems to have!