Video: Anne Sullivan demonstrates how she taught Helen Keller to speak out loud
Here’s a fascinating video, reportedly from a 1930 newsreel, in which Helen Keller’s teacher Anne Sullivan shows how she taught Keller to speak out loud. In the video, Keller places her hand in such a...
View ArticleWhy I can’t play piano
I just decided today that I can’t play piano because of my first-grade teacher’s southern accent. For my first few days in the first-grade classroom of Miss Margaret Mackintosh at Mount Vernon Goodwin...
View ArticleMichael Ventris, the Decipherment of Linear B, and the Value of...
Reading Andrew Robinson’s fascinating book Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World’s Undeciphered Scripts (2002, McGraw-Hill), I recently learned the amazing story of the decipherment of the Linear B...
View ArticleTonight’s Blue Moon in History and Song
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the expression “blue moon” usually has nothing to do with the moon’s color. Tonight’s full moon is a “blue moon,” meaning it’s the second full moon of December...
View ArticleHow the vocal tract combines tones into speech
Sound designer Meara O’Reilly has posted a fascinating entry on BoingBoing about how the various tones generated in the human voice tract generate recognizable speech — see “Whistling Speech.” O’Reilly...
View ArticleHollerin’ — one thing we know how to do in North Carolina
This year, Tony Peacock of Siler City, NC, won the contest with a rendition of Gershwin's "Summertime," hollered in just under four minutes.
View ArticleJohn the Baptist’s Bones and BBC’s Quotation Marks
A BBC article today (3 August 2010) highlights the discovery of a small box of bones reputed to be the remains of John the Baptizer, who announced Jesus’ appearance as Messiah and baptized him, and who...
View ArticleHow to Talk About Climate Change
The aspect of the climate change controversy (and other issues in public discourse) that intrigues me most of all is the ability of people on opposite sides to talk past each other. I say it intrigues...
View ArticleUsing Speech Recognition to Automatically Transcribe Interviews, Meetings,...
I’ve been looking for a way to use speech recognition to automate the transcription of interviews, meetings, speeches, conference presentations, and so on. I spend a lot of time on the phone...
View ArticleThe Way Things Are, the Way Things Were, and What Is True
I think a lot about assertions, things that people assert as true, very often without acknowledging their personal bias. To be fair, most of us are so immersed in our ideologies that we’re not aware of...
View Article
