John

She seems like she was born to make people laugh, play the hostess, and be cute.

He is a better actor than most show business people who have gone into politics.

The former Cisco Kid star was another really good actor who went into California state politics long ago.

He was interviewed on a late night talk show on US PBS TV in early June 2006. I happened to have the TV set on and there he was. Suddenly, he keeps popping up everywhere!

He did not say anything about grammars, unfortunately.

He talked about politics and he also talked about cognition. That has to do with thinking.

His work on formal grammars and linguistic theory is amazing.

Since high school, I have been interested in languages, human and computer, and he is the closest thing to an authority on both that I know of.

I first heard his name way back in the 1990s, I think, when I mentioned to another programmer I was interested in lots of computer languages. I have skimmed some of his books on formal grammars at the bookstore.

I didn’t realize he had any interest in politics until a few months ago. A paper he wrote was in the new, after reading it I read his bibliography and Wikipedia entry, just to make sure it was the same guy.

He seems very passionate and knowledgeable. He seems to like to put disparate pieces of a huge, complex, abstract puzzle together. I guess that is why he was so successful as a formal linguistics scientist.

I just read half of a huge article he wrote last night, and then I was surprised to see his name again this evening. This time, it was on 43people’s top-ranked “interesting people” list by its users. Googling his name to find his home page and Wikipedia entry, I found out he had been blogged about just hours earlier at the Washington Post website.

Oddly, I haven’t read much about his politics. I gather that his POV spans several generations and covers several eras of American industrialization. Probably the latest phase, in some ways, he helped make possible. We sure are not just punching variables and numbers into computers anymore. There are a lot of language skills involved too.

I would love to hear how he developed his theories on language and where his big breakthroughs came from.

She seems like a cool blogger. That means she has a number of skills.

She reads stuff that is a lot more interesting than the common fare. She seems pretty intelligent. I have a hunch she is a sharp thinker.

Her eyes are kind of cool looking too.

Seems interested in wanting to live a healthy, interesting life and likes thinking about things.

She reads good stuff.

There are few that would admit to knowing that Mumps is not just a childhood disease…. anyone who is so passionate about taking ideas from one concept space and using them in another is someone who must be able to jump across the universe in a conversation as easily as skipping stones on a quiet pond while in deep reflection…. I look forward to discussing the meaning of life, the universe and everything with John.