Author Archives: vrba1983

So, to take a short holiday from my sabbatical, I’m back at work.  Maybe not for long – the doctor is on speed-dial – but I thought I should take the opportunity to try to find out what’s going on … Continue reading →

I’m taking a little time off.  In fact, thanks to the efforts of some friends – coopting the services of an agreeable local psychiatrist – I’ve been signed off work with stress.  There’s a curious inversion here: reverse paranoia.  I’m … Continue reading →

Working too hard lately has given me a disconcerting new perspective on a lot of things.  In a brief moment of downtime I was staring out to sea, looking at the waves forming up and breaking, and I thought: that’s … Continue reading →

So then I moved onto Milan Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, also not exactly a laugh a minute.  Something about the combination of the choice of reading matter and the workload has made me feel curiously dissociated, as though … Continue reading →

I’m a little confused today.  Possibly because I’ve been spending leisure time reading a novel by Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude, on the recommendation of a friend.  Effective novels always make me confused (maybe I use the wrong criteria…)  But … Continue reading →

I remember when I first took a course in linguistics, everyone assumed that I’d be getting involved in the computational side, or at least the sophisticated formal details of syntactic theories.  I had to explain that I was trying to … Continue reading →

There’s a lot of internal conflict in this organisation, from all I can gather, which might account for why their recruitment process is so cloak-and-dagger.  If I had freedom to ask a lot of questions, I might not take the … Continue reading →

Rather a curious experience on what I thought would be my first day at work – they interviewed me.  Maybe this was just some kind of mix-up, or it’s their policy, but I was told I’d definitely got the job … Continue reading →

So I really shouldn’t complain.  All this time hanging around conferences and getting buttonholed by increasingly weird people – I must have a curiously inviting countenance, or a sense of personal magnetism that’s just lined up a bit wrong – … Continue reading →

The thing that strikes me about cognitive science, every time I go to a conference, is how many people are doing it, and how little progress we all seem to be making.  Take MRI scanning.  We spend tens of thousands … Continue reading →