stuff

Why I hate e-mail

“Trust him not with your secrets, who, when left alone in your room, turns over your papers.” – Johann Kaspar Lavater

Oatmeal Pancakes

These are good. They’re not as good as Smitten Kitchen’s tall, fluffy, but my kids like them for dinner or cold as morning commute snacks.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’ve won awards with these cookies.

Open Source OCR on MacOS

MacOS Catalina (10.15) broke many things on my computer, but the one that has wasted the most of my time so far while I try to make old PDFs available to vision-impaired…

Our souls refracted through a mesh

Typishly has published my latest poem: Our souls refracted through a mesh. I’m thrilled to have it published and by the beautiful job they did with the presentation.

A child demonstrates the McGurk effect

speech perception

A few years ago I made this video of my daughter demonstrating the McGurk Effect (McGurk and MacDonald 197). This effect is a demonstration of the importance of visual…

Generate publishable spectrograms with Praat

Publishers love this one wild trick!

Preprocess R data with python

(for archival purposes only, probably don’t use this.)

match_tg_times.praat

This script fixes a weird problem when concatenating TextGrids and sound objects. Often a TextGrid and its associated sound object will differ by anywhere from fraction of a…

New Order’s Blue Monday synthesized in Praat (sorta)

Let’s say that you, like me, love New Order’s song Blue Monday. For some reason, let’s imagine that you have a computer and Praat but no access to your music collection…

repeatedFFT.praat

This Praat editor script will draw a series of 6 FFT spectra starting from a cursor in the edit window. Use Add to dynamic menu… from the File menu to add to, say, the Spectr…

Arbitrary sinewave diagrams in LaTeX

I needed to be able to generate a number of figures for a phonetics homework assignment showing an arbitrary number of component sine waves and the complex wave you get if…

Useless

(A poem that is not about computers)

in a nutshell

My dissertation prospectus in a nutshell

What’s 1000 words worth?

Let’s randomly select 1,000 lines from the dictionary and appends the number of bytes in that sample to a file.

Forced-alignment and segmentation of airflow data

An airflow system like the SQLab EVA2 used in our lab creates separate wav-like files for audio, oral airflow, and nasal airflow. Usually we use a program like wavesurfer or …

Tuna safe tuna salad

Dolphins are great and all, but have you ever seen a living, swimming tuna? They’re bloody amazing.

Easy, readable css interlinear glosses

(surely there is a better way to do this now?)

2^15

In case anyone is wondering, the maximum number of files that MacOS X (v10.5.6) will allow you to drag and drop at once is 32,768.

Vegetarian french onion soup

Bring olive oil in dutch oven to medium heat. Add onions and salt, sweat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

immoderate improvement

I needed to calculate the number of consonant bigrams in English monomorphemic words from CELEX. The hash ‘bigrams’ contains the 30^2 possible consonant clusters given the…