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nathanielbdemiller.bsky.social
/nəˈθænjəl/
@nathanielbdemiller.bsky.social
Arabophone guinea pig in Colorado with a PhD who works on automatic speech recognition. Currently learning Old English.
The word "choice" as in a choice (fine) wine and "choice" as an act of choosing have different etymologies.

Choice (choose) is from French chois, choisir.

Choice (fine) is from Old English ċīes /t͡ʃi͜yːs/ (fastidious, choosy).

The two merged in spelling and pronunciation evidently in the 14th c.
November 26, 2025 at 7:10 AM
I ran into Darth Vader on the way home
November 26, 2025 at 1:05 AM
Well I'm done with work, far stupider than I was just eight hours earlier.
November 25, 2025 at 11:54 PM
Reposted by /nəˈθænjəl/
I like the 2018 November 25 6.0 Mw Providencia Earthquake.

Aside from today being the 7th Anniversary of this earthquake, it's an excellent example of the moderately sized earthquakes that are often overlooked despite having the potential to tell us a lot about how the Earth works.
Do you have a favorite earthquake?
November 25, 2025 at 10:37 PM
Apparently cucumbers are actually a fruit, not a vegetable, because they have seeds in them. Same with bell peppers. So I basically don't eat any vegetables.
November 25, 2025 at 3:49 AM
I made a little app to help myself remember German vocabulary. In the interest of efficiency and correct pronunciation, it uses the Google speech-to-text API.

It asks you for an English word and you respond with the German in the format

article + noun + pl or just the verb or uninflected adj.
November 25, 2025 at 1:19 AM
Random fact, Leila Murad was born in Cairo in 1918 to Egyptian Jewish parents with the given name ليليان (Lilian I guess), but converted to Islam after she married Anwar Wagdi.
November 24, 2025 at 10:40 PM
Everyone knows you say in shāʾ Allāh for something you hope will happen, but what if you don't want it to happen?

Egyptian Arabic elides the hamza and their typical post positional negation -/ʃ/

إن شَٱلله ما يحصل

in shallāh ma-yiḥṣal
November 24, 2025 at 7:36 PM
I don't have the bandwidth for this unfortunately.

I can't context-switch right now.

I need to prioritize my core deliverables.
what's a professional way to say "i don't feel like it"
November 24, 2025 at 4:12 PM
No matter how many times my guinea pigs, who are not poorly fed, are equitably granted treats, such as a cucumber slice (or three) apiece, they still grab said treat as if it's the only one they'll ever get in their entire life and defensively dash into a corner with their back to the other pig.
November 24, 2025 at 1:47 AM
From today's run.
November 23, 2025 at 11:53 PM
My son was just trying to name the King's Guard at Buckingham Palace and he called them "the Nutcracker-looking dudes that hang out in castles."
November 23, 2025 at 4:14 AM
My son spelled disguise as "descise" in a school project, which made me realize we often devoice the g:
[dɪˈskaɪz].

Also of course metal is "medel" to represent the N. American tapped t
November 22, 2025 at 10:58 PM
I got an awesome new book
November 22, 2025 at 9:25 PM
People blame the time they live in;
there's nothing wrong with our time but us.

We blame the time, the fault's in us;
if the time could speak to us it'd cuss.

We're wolves dressed as people;
God made us like this, glory be!

Wolves disdain each other's flesh;
we eat each other for all to see.
November 22, 2025 at 6:33 AM
16th St, Denver
November 21, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Reposted by /nəˈθænjəl/
We recently received this punishment book from Dorney School from 1901 and it's an amazing little window into school life in the early 20th century! Here's one page with several students, including Jane Hubbard and Dolly Tullman who were writing obscenities on their slates.
November 21, 2025 at 9:01 AM
Good morning
November 21, 2025 at 2:35 PM
This shows the words that most distinguished each set of resumes using a log-odds ratio with an informative Dirichlet prior.

Top 3 words distinguishing human resumes: "using," "html," and "css." For the AI resumes: "science," "solutions," and "ensuring."
November 21, 2025 at 6:01 AM
More on my comparison of AI-generated vs. human resumes (2k each). I've been running them through BERTopic today and as you can see, the human-generated resumes show more dispersion over a wider area, while the AI-generated resumes are more uniform, tightly clustered in discrete groups.
November 21, 2025 at 12:21 AM
Coloradans in the news: my representative Jason Crowe is one of the six Democrats who made this video. The president called for them to be executed for sedition.
November 20, 2025 at 5:33 PM
I wanted to try to tell AI from real writing so I generated 2k resumes with Gemini 2.5 and sampled 2k from a 5-year-old dataset on Kaggle and trained a Naive Bayesian algorithm to distinguish them. It was quite accurate and my conclusion is: that is because the real resumes are very poorly written.
November 20, 2025 at 7:46 AM
The word pig appears to come from Old English *picga /'pig.ga/ but it's only attested in compounds like picgbrēad /ˈpiɡɡˌbræ͜ɑːd/ ("pigfood" ie acorns and such). However OE swīn was the word for pig, when pigge appears on its own in Middle English it means piglet.
November 20, 2025 at 2:58 AM
I'm thinking again about writing a History of Guinea Pigs for my second book.
November 20, 2025 at 1:25 AM
A hump day treat
November 20, 2025 at 1:05 AM