{"id":1767,"date":"2013-02-10T11:53:30","date_gmt":"2013-02-10T11:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1767"},"modified":"2013-05-26T14:53:38","modified_gmt":"2013-05-26T18:53:38","slug":"snow-day-serendipity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1767","title":{"rendered":"snow day serendipity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A posting by Mark Liberman at LanguageLog about the <a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=4469\">Psychoacoustics Lab at Harvard<\/a> nudged the memory cells and set off a train of associations. The PAL was located in the basement of Memorial Hall (arguably Harvard&#8217;s ghastliest building, though there are many claimants to that title), right across Quincy Street from the house where I spent the first 10 years of my life. A bit of googling produced Harvard Crimson stories from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecrimson.com\/article\/1946\/11\/16\/new-psychology-lab-stirs-aging-mem\/\">1946<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecrimson.com\/article\/1947\/2\/10\/psychologists-to-lecture-in-cellar-of\/\">1947<\/a>, and photographs of the PAL <a href=\"http:\/\/dssmhi1.fas.harvard.edu\/emuseumdev\/code\/emuseum.asp?emu_action=searchrequest&#038;newsearch=1&#038;moduleid=1&#038;profile=objects&#038;currentrecord=1&#038;searchdesc=photograph%20of%20Psycho-Acoustic%20Laboratory%20faculty%20and%20staff&#038;style=single&#038;rawsearch=id\/,\/is\/,\/12097\/,\/false\/,\/true\">faculty and staff<\/a>, replete with the lab&#8217;s cat&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Well, so what? An engaging biographical memoir by George A. Miller [he of &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.musanim.com\/miller1956\/\">The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two<\/a>&#8220;] sketches the career and character of the lab&#8217;s director <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nasonline.org\/publications\/biographical-memoirs\/memoir-pdfs\/Stevens_Stanley.pdf\">Stanley Smith Stevens<\/a>.  I went to the first meeting of a George Miller class in the Memorial Hall basement when I was an undergraduate, but it was primarily for graduate students and I realized that I&#8217;d never survive it. Other bits of co-incidence with my own experiences include my brother David&#8217;s discovery of the psychoacoustical work of Georg von B&eacute;k&eacute;sy (done in that very basement) and a link to precursors of the Internet via Licklider and Beranek. And the list of NAS memoirs led me to Eugene Hammel&#8217;s for my own mentor <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nasonline.org\/publications\/biographical-memoirs\/memoir-pdfs\/skinner-g-william.pdf\">G. William Skinner<\/a>, and to Richard Shweder&#8217;s for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nasonline.org\/publications\/biographical-memoirs\/memoir-pdfs\/geertz-clifford.pdf\">Clifford Geertz<\/a>. And the Geertz memoir led me to his 1967 NYRB review of Malinowski&#8217;s <b>A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term<\/b>, which provoked me to lay out $20 for a year&#8217;s access to full text of the NYRB&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Quite a lot for a snowy morning, which also included a couple of hours of shoveling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A posting by Mark Liberman at LanguageLog about the Psychoacoustics Lab at Harvard nudged the memory cells and set off a train of associations. The PAL was located in the basement of Memorial Hall (arguably Harvard&#8217;s ghastliest building, though there are many claimants to that title), right across Quincy Street from the house where I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entanglement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1767"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1889,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1767\/revisions\/1889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}