Black Friday / Buy Nothing Day

November 25th, 2005 | by jg3 |

I have failed to respect Buy Nothing Day. I am a bit disappointed, but I needed groceries. More specifically, I needed a turkey. That’s right, I paid for turkey today. In fact, it was the first time in my entire life that I have purchased an entire turkey. For four dollars. Wow. In fact, so much stuff was on sale at the grocery store tonight that I nearly came out ahead! Had I not given in to the impulse to make a lasagne, for which the ingredients were not on sale and had I left the regular-priced canned beverages behind, they might have given it all to me for free.

And here’s a quote that fortune(1) served up to me today. I wish I could take credit for it:

If I’d known computer science was going to be like this,
I’d never have given up being a rock ‘n’ roll star.
– G. Hirst

G. Hirst, it seems, is a leader at the place where semantics and artificial intelligence overlap. He has written such articles as “Semantic interpretation and ambiguity” and “Computational stylistics for natural language translation” and, my personal favorite, “Computational simulations of mediated face-to-face multimodal communication.” I bet if he had kept up the rock’n'roll dream we’d be listening to some fine lyrics about now.

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