June 27 - So you’ve probably noticed from my periodic “revelations” about blogging that I’m a bit slow to figure out how this whole thing works (see: adding comments, getting photos to work, etc.). BUT, I just figured out how to imbed photos! This is sad, because I’ve done it before in some of my older posts (homebrew ones from January), I guess I just forgot. Now I can do it again. Of course today I don’t have any photos…
But today, I did give a talk in Australia, marking my 3rd continent talked on! In fact, 3 in the past year (Toulouse, France in August, Rochester, NY in October, and now Sydney Australia in June…there were some in the US before that too - and 1 in Canada!). I thought it went pretty well, a few people asked me for my slides and asked if my work was published (it’s not yet…sigh), so that’s always a good sign! AND I got a free beer at the end. Seriously, Rochester needs to up its game with the department seminars (although the cog sci dinners are pretty good on this front).
After that I just hung around the lab until about 8PM (yikes!), but didn’t actually do any work. We discussed that Americans cannot properly pronounce the names of Australian cities (among other things, probably, like “tomato”) - my mistake, it seems, is that I (foolishly) pronounce all the letters. It should be, for example, that Cairnes = “Cans”, Brisbane = “Brisbin”, Melbourne = “Melbun” (p.s. I knew that these were the right pronunciations, but if I didn’t that’s not how I would have said them!). There was some debate over the word “schedule” as well, and a definite disagreement on “simultaneous”. This reminds me of when I arrived in London, needing to get to an address on “Worchestershire” street. I pronounced that thing out to the bitter end. The cab driver had no idea what I was talking about. Naturally it’s pronounced “Wooster,” so that totally makes sense. Not that we don’t have our own share of bizarro pronunciations…
