iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 11h

Just finished Babel by R. F. Kuang (a book with the premise of "scifi if the science were #linguistics"). Highly recommend!

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ʤan~ʤɑn~ʤɔn @languagedoodad.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I made a Phonology Feature & Segment engine app. You can query a given segment inventory by features or query features by segments. It uses set computations to determine natural classes, minimal feature specifications, segments needed to form a natural class, etc. jhnwnstd.github.io/phono-feature/

jhnwnstd.github.io

Phonology Segment & Feature Engine

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Matt (Tired) @mattfrith.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Please observe my madness... I'll finish this eventually ;') #pixelart

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Canaan Breiss @canaan.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Hi language science bluesky! If you have 20 minutes, PhD student Dhanya Charan (dhanya.humspace.ucla.edu) and I are recruiting volunteer participants for a 20-minute speech production study! Link here: www.labvanced.com/player.html?... Please re-skeet / share widely! Thank you!

dhanya.humspace.ucla.edu

DHANYA CHARAN – [d̪an.jaː t͡ʃa.ɾan]

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

Oh look! A plot of what I do when someone is walking the opposite direction down a hallway and neither of us can choose to go right or left. 🐦🐦

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Saw a lot of people say McDonald's fries for this and I think that's probably right. But I want to name Arby's curly fries, KFC coleslaw, and Jack-in-the-box tiny tacos as honorable mentions.

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Tom McCoy @rtommccoy.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

🤖🧠 New commentary 🧠🤖 What role should large language models (LLMs) play in linguistics? I reflect on this question in a commentary now on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2605.10061 To appear in BBS as a commentary on @futrell.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social's excellent piece on LLMs & Linguistics!

Screenshot of the title and abstract of a paper.
Title: "Not-So-Strange Love: Language Models and Generative
Linguistic Theories are More Compatible than They Appear"
Further information: "Open Peer Commentary on “How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and
Love the Language Models” by Richard Futrell and Kyle Mahowald"
Author: R. Thomas McCoy
Abstract: Futrell and Mahowald (2025) frame the success of neural language models (LMs) as supporting gradient, usage-based linguistic theories. I argue that LMs can also instantiate theories based on formal structures - the types of theories seen in the generative tradition. This argument expands the space of theories that can be tested with LMs, potentially enabling reconciliations between usage-based and generative accounts.

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lcon @lgconstable.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

MA: About 15.5 DDs per 100,000 people and about 1 DD per 10 square miles. NY: About 7.4 DDs per 100,000 people and about 1 DD per 32 square miles.

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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 30/03/2026

"Each time you sign in, you'll need to learn a new bell or whistle of our new system. You might think there aren't enough bells and whistles for us to teach you a new one every time you log on, but there are." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

mcsweeneys.net

The New Ten-Factor Authentication Processes for University Faculty

“Each time you sign in, you’ll need to learn a new bell or whistle of our new system. You might think there aren’t enough bells and whistles for us to teach ...

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Retro Tech Dreams @retrotechdreams.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999)

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Very weird that the answer to "which #scifi author predicted 21st century technology best" might be Shel Silverstein...

Page from "A Light in the Attic" by Shel Silverstein. At the bottom is a drawing of a kind put a piece of paper into a machine with gears and buttons. Above that is the following poem:

The Homework Machine, oh the Homework Machine,
Most perfect contraption that’s ever been seen.
Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime,
Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds time,
You homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is – “nine plus four?” and the answer is “three”.
Three?
Oh me …
I guess it’s not as perfect
As I thought it would be.

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Peter Gray @pgdataviz.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

Me? I'm just happy to be here #rstats

Everyone fighing over TIbble versus DF

>| vs %>%

Me: googling what mean means

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

This is great and also feels like the kind of thing that's destined to show up in the slides for an Intro #Linguistics course

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Robert "The Bobby Yaga" McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

[Searching through the fanfold printouts of my parents' ELIZA chats, trying to figure out what it told them that made me this way]

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Jerry Chen @jcsalterego.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

they should invent a tamale printer

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Dr Erika’s (Too) Online, PhD @erikas.online · 15/09/2025

Do you like comic books and want to think more seriously about the linguistics of them? Are you a social scientist or a linguist who wants to know more about nation-building or language planning in fiction? HAVE I GOT EXACTLY THE ARTICLE YOU NEVER ASKED FOR, on CAMP Anthropology. 🐦🐦

campanthropology.org

X-Men, Krakoa, and Linguistic Sovereignty

by Erika Alpert Krakoan national co-founder Magneto explains to diplomats at the new Krakoan Embassy in Jerusalem why mutants have decided to create their own language, from House of X #1 (Hickman …

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

Artificial language learning experiments often explain typology by showing that more common patterns are easier to learn. But this isn’t always the case. In work I recently presented at SCiL, I present a possible explanation for one such mismatch between the lab and typology. 🐦🐦 #linguistics 1/6

An academic poster with images and text that goes through roughly the same points as this thread. To download a PDF of the poster, see https://brandon-prickett.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/SCiL_Poster.pdf .

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Lots of great computational #linguistics in this year's SCiL proceedings! (Including an extended abstract from me that I'll probably post more about closer to the conference.) 🐦🐦 openpublishing.library.umass.edu/scil/

openpublishing.library.umass.edu

Society for Computation in Linguistics

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Heidi Harley @heidiharley.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

Linguists! Abstracts for the LSA annual meeting in NOLA in January 2026 are due on July 7! Please submit! It’s going to be a great conference, and a chance to confer and strategize. Would love love love to see you there! #linguistics @lingsocam.bsky.social www.lsadc.org/abstracts

lsadc.org

LSA Annual Meeting - Call for Abstracts

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Really nice example to bring up in a data science or corpus #linguistics class about dealing with weirdness in your data!

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

Look who I found outside my front door! 10/10, no room for improvement.

A snail so perfect looking, it's like what you'd find in the dictionary if you looked up "snail". It's sliding slowly across a sidewalk.

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Jerry Chen @jcsalterego.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

(reading the specs of a clown car) wow 32 cupholders

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Humans do representation learning all the time and one of the most tangible aspects of representation learning (from a continuous physical space to mental representations) is human phonology. Submit to the Special Session at this year's AMP on modeling phonology with deep neural networks!

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Canaan Breiss @canaan.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

New article out on how infants learn to find affixes in early infancy! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

One thing that needs to get repeated until it sinks in is that “AI” does not simply function as a tool that people in power are using; it’s even more powerful as a permission structure for the destructive & extractive things they wanted to do in the first place.

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Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium @ptdefiancezoo.bsky.social · 22/02/2025

Baby tapir Ume had her first encounter with the water dish and it’s adorable! 🥰

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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

It's one of the unwritten rules of civilization: if a child pours air into a cup and offers you tea, you will sip it and say "thank you, it's delicious."

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Jack Saint @lackingsaint.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

wikipedia honestly gotta be top 5 human creations in the past thousand years

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weird medieval guys @weirdmedieval.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

maybe my favourite etymology: the phrase “curry favour” originates from a medieval french morality poem about a conniving horse named fauvel who amasses a following of sycophantic humans to groom and tend to him. over time, “currying fauvel” eventually became “currying favour.”

version.

As the horse Fauvel is about to join Vainglory in the bridal bed, the people form a charivari in protest. From the Roman de Fauvel.
The romance features Fauvel, a fallow-colored horse who rises to prominence in the French royal court, and through him satirizes the self-serving hedonism and hypocrisy of men, and the excesses of the ruling estates, both secular and ecclesiastical. The antihero's name can be broken down to mean "false veil", and also forms an acrostic F-A-V-V-E-L with the letters standing for the human vices: Flattery, Avarice, Vileness, Variability (Fickleness), Envy, and Laxity. The romance also gave birth to the English expression "curry fauvel", the obsolete original form of "curry favor".

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Fernando Carvente @carvente.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

The most epic and dangerous nursery Isisaurus from Prehistoric planet, study by me #paleoart #dinosaurs #sciart #procreate 🐡

A digital painting depicts a herd of big long necked dinosaurs, the walked across a black and ashen volcanic landscape, lava erupting on the background, they use their long neck to avoid breathing the toxic fumes

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haha yeah @freshfleisch.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

bok choy is the perfect vegetable. easy to cook, delicious and easy to make more delicious. a perfect side! a perfect side.

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

She knows I'm taking a picture and she's NOT happy about it.

A fawn bulldog sitting in a hallway, seemingly frowning.

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 10/11/2024

Hard to explain why, but there's something very cute about popcorn in a pickle jar.

A glass pickle jar with a green lid, full of popped popcorn.

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 31/10/2024

Check out this cool paper! It's about patterns of phonological stress, but also (and more importantly) the complex relationship between representation and learning in theories of #linguistics when you're trying to explain typology.

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 16/10/2024

This is true for my posts as well as my linguistics papers.

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Tom Flood @tomflood.bsky.social · 11/10/2024

Label that should come with every stroller.

WARNING in red Text

White text
Pushing this device through a city will radicalize you.
The total imbalance that we have normalized on our streets prioritizing the automobile will become crystal clear.
You will never be the same again after this experience.

Stroller graphic in white

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 06/09/2024

Just landed in Boston. Making sure to immerse myself in the local culture.

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 27/08/2024

Three Kinds of Research xkcd.com/2977

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 26/08/2024

Just googled "despicable me yellow guy" to remember the word "minion", if you're wondering where my brain is at.

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Gretchen McCulloch @gretchenmcculloch.com · 04/07/2024

Hey. The fragmentation of the social media landscape has been hard on indie #scicomm 🧪 projects So if you'd like to follow a podcast that's enthusiastic about #linguistics, could you check out @lingthusiasm.bsky.social? And if you think your followers might like to, could you give this a repost?

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 03/07/2024

Don't have anything productive to post, so here's my dog 🐶

A bulldog sleeping on a couch, cuddled up to a stuffed animal.

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 24/06/2024

Genuinely unhealthy how many answers to this flooded into my mind 🐦🐦

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 06/06/2024

Reposting this in case anyone needs stimuli for a #linguistics experiment...

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Brandon Prickett @bprickett.bsky.social · 28/05/2024

I'll be teaching a fun new online course at UMass this fall! Data Science for #Linguistics will dive into how tools like statistics, machine learning, and data visualization can be used in language research. Anyone can enroll and you can sign up starting next week! www.umass.edu/universitypl...

UMass Amherst
Fall 2024
Data Science for Linguistics
Linguist 190D
3 Credits
Instructor: Brandon Prickett
Email: bprickett@umass.edu

This course presents an overview of the field of data science,
with specific attention given to how data science can be
applied to language. Participants will learn how to use identify
and visualize patterns in data, use statistics to draw reliable
conclusions, and make predictions about unobserved data.
Emphasis throughout the course will be on students
performing hands-on assignments that allow them to practice
and demonstrate mastery of the skills covered in class.
Lessons and assignments are adapted from the “Data 8”
course taught at the University of California, Berkeley.

Register today!
https://www.umass.edu/universityplus/class/fall-2024/37020/data-science-for-linguistics

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