Saturday, November 15, 2008

Urgent AAAS deadline: "Dance your PhD" contest

A reader writes in with this important announcement:

Dear Mr. Verb,

In the interest of continuing to have linguistics properly represented among the sciences, I thought some of your readers might be interested in submitting to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s “Dance your PhD” contest (http://gonzolabs.org/dance/). Note that I’m not volunteering.

AM

How did we not know about this until just before the November 16 deadline? As some of the images here suggest, this is an obvious one for our friends in the field of syntax. Seriously, dance people talk a lot about "dance syntax". Besides, have you heard of 'quantum dance', 'stochastic dance', or 'cortical dance'?* Linguists should be automatic for this prize. Just think, only a few years, we weren't even represented in AAAS, tomorrow, we could hold a coveted AAAS prize.

Well, at least you dissertation students aren't burdened with deadlines or pressing obligations, so get out those video recorders and step to it, folks!

*Me neither, but they all get g-hits.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You put your VP here,
you put your NP there,
...

Anonymous said...

Ack! Why why why did I not know about this until today? This is the Best Thing Ever, and I think interpretive dance would be a much better medium than tree diagrams to illustrate dynamic syntactic processes like Merge, Move, feature checking, and (ahem) probing (the last one might have to be saved for the unrated version of the video, though).

Mr. Verb said...

Next year!