Read this interesting article from MEMRI, pointed out by American Realpolitik. The last paragraph is swell.

In spite of a horrific start by Jason Simontacci, allowing 7 runs in 1 2/3 innings, I predict the Cardinals will come back and win the game currently in progress. I mentioned to Pete the other day that the Cards need to have a bullpen game to get the guys some confidence and much more work. This is a great opportunity. Down 7-0, the relievers won’t have too much pressure on them and they can get their games together. This is just too good of a night for the Cardinals not to win.

10:00pm Ok, maybe I was wrong… But the bullpen work was outstanding and should prove valuable. If you have to lose a game, at least come away with something good. Beats the 3-2 walk off homer losses. Ergh.

Which OS are You?

Found that at Venomous Kate’s Place via IMAO.

It’s really a surprising result considering that I threatened someone’s life if I got Windows Millenium Edition. I guess the quiz writer has used it before.

I bought myself a pitch-back on Friday. I played soccer when I was a little kid, and hockey when I was a big kid. So I never learned to throw or catch, an embarassing lapse that must absolutely be repaired before I breed. No way am I gonna be that dad what throws like a girl. So I set up the pitch-back on Saturday and started to practice. I watch a lot of baseball, so I know sort of what the motion is supposed to look like. At first, I was terrible and missed the whole thing about half the time. After a half hour or so, I found a comfortable and somewhat funny-looking delivery and was able to consistently hit the target, and after an hour, I could hit the strike zone just about every time and field the return. So I taught myself to do a basic throw in an hour. Now I’m trying to learn some more about mechanics, since my arm is pretty damned sore today. This page has some pretty detailed animations that walks you through the motions, and even how to use different grips. I figure I should make the Cardinals farm system by the time I finish grad school.

Salam Pax updated his blog, my picture gets posted yesterday, and then today my Iraqi Most Wanted cards were delivered. And it’s 85 outside and the Cardinals play the Cubs in less than an hour. Horror-show that we were swept by the Reds in the four game series this week. Ideally, the Cards will take out their rage on the Scrubs this weekend.

Hey lookie there! That’s me jumping out of an airplane for the first time. In case you’re wondering, I’m not screaming an expletive there, but instead my cry is “DOT!!!” There is a dot painted onto the wing of the plane that you should look at while you are training. If you keep looking at the plane as you fall against the wind, your back will arch and so your body will most rapidly gain stability in the air, so it’s a good training technique. You can also see the folks from my class in ground school taking their first jumps here: Bunker, Katrina, and Chelsea. Chelsea’s picture isn’t too hot, but she slipped off the strut on her first jump, and did what she was supposed to do. When you lose your grip, just let go, and don’t pull yourself into the plane! I have some video that I hope to digitize soon and make available here of our first jumps.

I read Gregory Benford’s Foundation’s Fear over the weekend, spending at least four hours on Saturday reading it on my patio, indulging my suntan fantasies far too long for my fair Irish complexion. I am now covered with first degree burns over much of my body. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is masterful, by far the best SF books I’ve read. The story, spread over 15 or so novels, is a historical novel of the distant future, when man has colonized the galaxy and created a centralized government uniting it. In the story, a mathematician named Hari Seldon develops a theory of modeling human history called psychohistory, and running the equations into future time shows him that the galactic empire is in decline and faces immediate collapse followed by a period of 20,000 years of human misery and isolation until a new government will rise up and bring order again. He then runs a sort of decision tree on possible variations of psychohistory’s predicted future states to find the best possible one, that would allow for the shortest period of galactic anarchy, and finds that he can set up a colony world in a spiral arm, full of the best physical scientists in the galaxy, a foundation, that will within a 1000 year time develop a vibrant society capable of replacing the empire entirely, and thus avoiding the 20 millenia anarchy. Isaac Asimov died in the ’90s with the series unfinished. Three hard SF writers, Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Greg Bear agreed to finish the series, each contributing a book of their own. All three books focus on the life of Hari Seldon, fleshing out his character and clarifying what psychohistory might look like. The first of the new trilogy is Foundation’s Fear. It is a fine book, and mostly entertaining, but I don’t understand why they chose to write about Hari Seldon and the end of the Empire. It’s a shame that the rest of the series is focusing on that time period as well. It would be far more interesting to read about the story’s progression after Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth, the resistance put up to Gaia’s spread, and so forth. And the Sims were wierd! Tedious at times. I think Benford wanted to have a simulacrum of Hari and Dors, who were trying to figure out human nature from the outside in, and employed the sims Voltaire and Joan of Arc thusly, trying to figure out human nature from the inside out. It would have been more interesting if he wouldn’t have used historical personalities, but instead some future persons who would exist when the technology to simulate an entire human mind were around. I’d say the worst thing about the book is Seldon’s use of violence. In the other books, he’s a Heliconian twister, a form of martial art that seems a lot like aikido. When thugs try to attack him, he breaks their wrists and tosses them around. In this book, he seems like Michael Corleone, killing off all his enemies at the same time through surrogates. There’s a point at the end of the book where it would seem not at all out of place for him to say to Daneel Olivaw, “Never go against the family.”

Dynamic Montague Grammar is a semantic theory that translates English directly into an artificial language called Dynamic Intensional Logic, for which interpretation is straightforward. The major difference between the Dynamic and Static or Classic versions of Montague grammar is that in the dynamic variety, existential quantification can occur cross sententially, or more generally can draw otherwise free variables into its scope through functional application with the tool of lambda abstraction. It was invented to handle donkey and discourse anaphora while retaining compositionality, which previous theories to treat these types of anaphora did not retain. Donkey anaphora comes from Geach’s example sentence, Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it. In this sentence, the pronoun it is not in the scope of the existential quantification licensed by the indefinite noun phrase a donkey, since that NP is embedded in a relative clause. Discourse anaphora comes up in cases like this: John has a donkey. He feeds it corn. In semantic analysis, it is widely held that quantificational scope should in general be restricted to the sentence in which it occurs, so neither pronoun is within the scope of its antecedent. Dynamic Montague Grammar works for both types of anaphora, and gets the right results for the sentences that make that widely held belief so widely held.

In DMG, negation is defined to be “internally static” so that any dynamic existential quantifiers within the scope of the negation operator can not bind pronouns outside of the scope of the negation. This rules out sentences like the following, from Groenendijk and Stokhof’s paper that introduced the theory: No man walked in the park. He whistled. There are cases suggested in the end of the same paper where it seems like some cases of negation ought to allow dynamic quantification from within to without their scope, some involving double negation, which does not hold as an identity operation in DMG. While working on my sunburn today, I realized another example where negation seems to allow dynamic extension.

There are no American infidels in Baghdad! Never! They are all driving about aimlessly in the desert!

In this sentence, They refers to American infidels in Baghdad, and the sentence is equivalent truth-conditionally to It is not the case that there are American infidels in Baghdad.. Thus, the antecedent for they is within the scope of a negation operator, and in DMG cannot bind it, so the discourse should be rejected as semantically incoherent.

I really think I ought to be asleep by now.

Man, VDH has a fantastic column up today. He hits all the bases, pointing to the upper deck. And he mentions my two favorite famous people from when I was in High School: Elie Wiesel and Vaclav Havel.

I presented my paper “Cataphora and Dynamic Montague Grammar” today in class. I got plenty of feedback and am pretty excited about writing the full paper. After class, my friend whose cello recital I’d videotaped repayed me with a roll of Kim Bap, which is sort of like Korean sushi. Good stuff. I’m getting very tired.

I’m pulling an all-nighter, working on my anaphora paper. I forgot the Latin prefix that is the opposite of ante- meaning before. I looked around at dictionary.com and the bartleby.com American Heritage websites and they didn’t give antonyms, so I tried google. I entered in the search query [ Latin behind ]. I give up.

Illinois has a coach for the next five years, and his name is Bruce Weber. He’s been at SIU-Carbondale for the past five years, and made the NCAA tournament the past two. In last year’s tournament, I drew SIU in the NCAA tournament pool I was in, and was sure I’d be out of contention in the first round. They made it pretty far though. He’s coming into Illinois with a strong, young nucleus, hungry to make it back to the tourny next year. He should be a pretty popular guy around here by the halfway point of next season.

It’s nice when good things happen to good people.