Stuff we're reading / watching / listening to

[Giovanni Schwartz]

Best Firefly anything: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... mU-Bmk4Wrk

I love Nathan Fillion.

[Portia]

This is very inspiring to me, and is exactly the kind of thing I have in mind when I say I want to be old and childless.

[Digit]

Interesting. Judge blocks Cracker Barrel from grocery shelf.

But food giant Kraft Foods (KRFT) is suing to block the move, saying it would infringe on Kraft's trademarked Cracker Barrel brand cheese and confuse consumers.

I've seen the restaurant's signage and the Cracker Barrel cheese in the grocery store and they're so similar in font and design, I assumed there was a connection between Kraft and the restaurant chain. If there's not, I wonder how whichever one came first (Kraft, I assume) didn't sue the other one for that similarity already). I know they're in different sectors, but you can imagine the lawyers packing in if I started Coke Drycleaning with a very similar font (and that's not even as close as grocery store cheese and restaurants).

[Cindy]

This series on Gettysburg, in commemoration of the 150 year anniversary.

[Katya]

Yesterday I went to see Iron Man 3, which was really fun.

[Emiliana]

I am reading the Game of Thrones series. It's good summer reading -- long, fast-paced, lots of intrigue. The writing is weak in places, but the characters are engaging enough to make up for it. Also it has dragons and zombies. BUT, it's very violent and has some moderately explicit sexuality, so it's not for the faint of heart.

[Digit]

Very neat site where you can interactively explore the content of the Golden Record which is on the Voyager spacecraft. I like the audio track 29, Jaat Kahan Ho.

[C is for]

I read The Rithmatist yesterday and it was really, really good. Last time I was at home I struggled through Mistborn for a while before I decided that rereading it was just not for me, but I am glad to know that I'm still a Sanderson fan.

(Seriously. I was lying in bed, trying to sleep, and knew that I only had like 3 more chapters and that I would totally finish by 10. I didn't reckon on not being able to sleep after finishing because of the intricacies of the story line.)

[Katya]

I just started reading the first Harry Potter book in French.

In the past, I would have been adamantly opposed to doing such a thing (unless you were a native French speaker), because my mindset was that you should read literature either (1) in the original language, so that you are reading the work as the author originally wrote it or (2) in your native language, to maximize your own understanding of the text. Anything other option was, in my opinion, pointless.

However, I've been wanting to work on my French reading comprehension this year, and I decided that it would be fun to read Harry Potter because it would be relatively light reading and I could focus on the vocabulary and grammatical constructions instead of trying to follow the story line (because I already know the story). And thus far I am really enjoying it, plus I'm learning a lot of random vocabulary words, such as "bonfire" ("feu de joie"). (Although I have to watch out for Rowling's invented vocabulary, especially when they've translated it differently from the English version. E.g., "Muggle" is now "Mordu" and I think Hogwarts has a completely different name, although I haven't yet gotten that far.)

And maybe after I finish this, I can work in some more "serious" reading, again.

[Whistler]

I watched The King's Speech. It was pretty good! I'm not super into royal family stuff though, so I don't think I appreciated it as much as some other people did.

[Katya]

I watched The King's Speech. It was pretty good! I'm not super into royal family stuff though, so I don't think I appreciated it as much as some other people did.

I knew a bit about Edward VIII's abdication before seeing the movie, but I thought they did a good job of bringing people up to speed even if they weren't familiar with that period of history.

[Digit]

Teaching myself statistics from an old textbook and enjoying learning the R programming language and software environment.

[mic0]

DIGIT OHMYGOSH I AM LITERALLY IN A CLASS RIGHT NOW CALLED "Statistics for Linguists with R." What are the chances?! How do you like R?

[Digit]

Ha, what a coincidence I like it. I find that I learn best by doing every problem in the exercises section of a textbook. The repetition helps when it comes to internalizing the function parameters of, say, hist. The textbook I have has all its examples that show any code in MINITAB, and when I found out that wasn't free, I found R.

[Imogen]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvr-1fPI ... bMwOm5UtSw

oh yeah

[Imogen]

BETTER!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV3ns_sc ... bMwOm5UtSw

[C is for]

I finished Code Name Verity last night. Liked it about as much as I thought I would, which is very much.

And this morning I started Ruby Redfort Take Your Last Breath. Haven't gotten too far into it (and basically the only character I vaguely remember from the first book hasn't even shown up yet) but imagine I will like it just fine.

[Whistler]

BETTER!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV3ns_sc ... bMwOm5UtSw

lol

[mic0]

Those videos were hilarious!

I'm about to listen to Noam Chomsky. Should be pretty great!

[Digit]

Interesting. WolframAlpha has a filter to suppose what things would look like to a dog. Entering "apply dog vision to image of X" and substituting X with what you want works for quite a few X. For instance, a ladybug.