Christian Brickhouse
I am a 5th year PhD candidate at Stanford University studying sociophonetics. You can learn more about my research or my hobbies from the links in the header. I also maintain a blog with the latest entry below.
Blog posts
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Mastodon and the history of Computer People
With many users looking for alternatives to Twitter, Mastodon has grown in popularity, but for many people the decentralized social network can be confusing, lonely, and unattractive. This has led to a growing sense that Mastodon is only for Computer People™ or that these federated social networks have flaws which proponents refuse to acknowledge or fix. While Mastodon and other federated social networks like PeerTube and Pixelfed certainly have their issues, I argue that the underlying complaint is one of ideology and culture.
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A deep dive into a Decemberists song
I’ve always enjoyed The Decemberists and one of my favorite songs is “Everything I Try to do Nothing Seems to Turn Out Right” from their EP Billy Liar. It’s a haunting song where the narrator recounts a past relationship which started and ended poorly. Like any song by The Decemberists the lyricism is worth its own analysis, but this post looks instead at the musicality. What makes the music so haunting, and why does it pair well with the lyrics at all? I decided to try my hand at music theory and dive into a song I enjoy to see what makes it tick.
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The Language Lab channel
A short post, but exciting still! I’m excited to start on a new outreach project, The Language Lab, a YouTube channel which will cover cutting-edge linguistics research for general audiences. Using creative non-fiction, multi-media demonstrations, and expert interviews, The Language Lab will invite viewers to explore the frontiers of linguistic science and learn about the ideas and passions which go into knowledge creation.
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Regular expressions tutorial
I like regular expressions. Constructing a regular expression is like solving a puzzle, and they are a powerful tool for lots of situations. In my work on Chess software for MediaWiki, we use regular expressions to validate chess game files before commiting to the full parser in order to save resources. These game files are complex, but as a file format highly regular and well defined. I thought it would be useful to write up some similar advice I gave to another graduate student. -
Now with more links!
Now that my proposal has been sent off to the committee, I finally had time to finish the bits I talked about in my last post. Have a look! You can see my CV as an embedded PDF and read a list of my software contributions. I also fixed some links in the previous post that gave 404 errors.
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Website redone-er
Astute readers will notice the solid year gap between this and the last post. Turns out that with the pandemic and multiple moves I forgot that I had set this up. Well, wait no more: I’ve updated most every part of the site. As of writing, I’m still working on embedding PDFs for my cv page, cataloging my software contributions at my software page, adding some long-form citations to various pages, and in the long term I need some new headshots so that I can decorate the site with pictures of my face. I’ll try to update the blog more often, probably with content that’s too long for twitter. We’ll see how that goes.
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Website redone
After a number of years of my old website, I’ve revamped it to not only be easier for visitors, but easier for me to maintain. It uses Jekyll on Github and was created using a guide by Jonathan McGlone. If you’re looking for a way to update your website easily, I recommend reading through it as it’s geared towards people who may not be familiar with continuous integration practices.
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