Personal
Aside from linguistics and academia in general, I enjoy spending my time with my friends and partner. I love trying new food, watching movies (especially science fiction and horror), and until recently I was a member of the UCLA Georgian Choir. I spend my free time reading scientific non-fiction because I can't pull myself away from constant learning. My current interests are dynamical systems, chaos, and fractal geometry. Undying interests include evolutionary theory and the physics of big and small things. I'm currently giving a second stab at finishing GEB this summer.
I have a love for finding beauty in things that are completely unoriginal and normally play a banal part of day-to-day life. For example, one of my current personal uncreative art projects involves combining this passion with my background in linguistics in order to create a Twitter bot which generates ("shocking") newspaper headlines. It's designed to do so based on templates created from a corpus of headlines I'm carefully "hand-curating." It's also been an opportunity to improve my Python, NLP, and corpus linguistics skills!
My favorite genres of music are progressive rock and metal. I have a consuming fondness especially for Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson, but also Opeth, Between the Buried and Me, and some other things. I take my research very seriously, but outside of that I approach life with levity and appreciate good humor and good-humored people. I am from Minnesota but I lived in Wisconsin for six years before spending two years in Raleigh, North Carolina and one year in sunny Los Angeles, California. Oh, and I lived for seven months in the south of France! My next adventure has taken me to Pittsburgh, PA where I expect to stay put.
I have a love for finding beauty in things that are completely unoriginal and normally play a banal part of day-to-day life. For example, one of my current personal uncreative art projects involves combining this passion with my background in linguistics in order to create a Twitter bot which generates ("shocking") newspaper headlines. It's designed to do so based on templates created from a corpus of headlines I'm carefully "hand-curating." It's also been an opportunity to improve my Python, NLP, and corpus linguistics skills!
My favorite genres of music are progressive rock and metal. I have a consuming fondness especially for Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson, but also Opeth, Between the Buried and Me, and some other things. I take my research very seriously, but outside of that I approach life with levity and appreciate good humor and good-humored people. I am from Minnesota but I lived in Wisconsin for six years before spending two years in Raleigh, North Carolina and one year in sunny Los Angeles, California. Oh, and I lived for seven months in the south of France! My next adventure has taken me to Pittsburgh, PA where I expect to stay put.
