Author Archives: Xophmeister

Just Married

Posted on 22nd April, 2012 by Xophmeister
Posted in Personal | 5 Comments

The Xophmeister Distance

Posted on 10th April, 2012 by Xophmeister

A couple of posts back, we briefly touched upon the Levenshtein Distance: an orthographic metric which measures the number of edit operations (inserts, deletes and modifications) needed to turn one string into another. In computer science and information theory, this … Continue reading →

Posted in Computational, Human-Computer Interaction, NLP, Phonetics and Phonology, Theory | 2 Comments

Life with a Smart Phone

Posted on 27th March, 2012 by Xophmeister
Posted in Rants | Leave a comment

Shame

Posted on 9th March, 2012 by Xophmeister

Suffer through green, Gradient and light; Sun and shadow Fuelling the fight. I exchange blood To taste limitless sky. Sweat, metal and rubber. Three weeks in July. An eruption of grey And cacophonous noise: A circuitous route Without nature or … Continue reading →

Posted in Cycling, Personal, Writing | Leave a comment

Lazy Duplication of Records in Oracle

Posted on 8th March, 2012 by Xophmeister

Occasionally, one needs to duplicate a table record; either in the same table, or into another table (e.g., a history or audit table). Of course, when copying data into the same table, you will need to modify a few fields … Continue reading →

Posted in Oracle, PL/SQL | Leave a comment

你好

Posted on 16th February, 2012 by Xophmeister

My other half is Chinese, so naturally I am learning Mandarin — and some Shanghainese — from her. (What can I say: I’m the scholarly type and she’s a good teacher!) Anyway, like, I’m sure, many a Westerner embarking on … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal, Phonetics and Phonology, Random, 中文 | 2 Comments

My Friend Lily

Posted on 8th February, 2012 by Xophmeister

Here’s a curious bit of syntax.

Posted in Linguistics, Syntax | 2 Comments

The World’s Prose Mix

Posted on 23rd January, 2012 by Xophmeister

According to Wikipedia, at the time of writing there are a total of 205 sovereign states; including those that are disputed. That’s at least 205 different cultures, so the question is: Are there any concentrations of peoples in the world … Continue reading →

Posted in Ethnography, Random | Leave a comment

Apostrophe’s War

Posted on 16th January, 2012 by Xophmeister

With a title like “Apostrophe’s War”, you’ll be forgiven in thinking that this is yet another trite rant on the supposed abuse of the apostrophe in contemporary written English. However, those who know me as a linguist may think I … Continue reading →

Posted in Linguistics, Orthography and Grammatology, Rants | Leave a comment

Endianness

Posted on 10th January, 2012 by Xophmeister

In computer science, there’s a concept known as “endianness”. It refers to the order in which data is stored: “big endian” means that we start with the most significant bit and move to the least; “little endian” is the other … Continue reading →

Posted in Computer Science, Orthography and Grammatology, Random | Leave a comment