Here’s a leaflet distributed by the VVAW, the group of which John Kerry was a vocal leader.

Here’s a link to a comment made by a veteran of the Indochina theater explaining the motivations of the SWVFT to a youthful Kerry-fan/Bush-hater.

Here’s a story about wartime courage and heroism from the same author. It’s unlikely that the subject of praise regards her actions that day as having been heroic, but were just an example of a woman in a combat zone doing her job.

Rick Ankiel finished his rehab assignment today with a 6IP, 1 H, 0BB, 5K performance in Memphis, giving up one unearned run, which suggests that that one hit was some wild play. Next stop: St. Louis. And he couldn’t have come up at a better time, with left-handed reliever Steve Kline on the 15-day DL. I’ve got high hopes. He should join the Cardinals on either Tuesday or Wednesday, at home against San Diego. It’ll be good to see him back with his team.

A real linguist at Language Log takes on the technology of Nemesysco’s speech-driven-lie-detection-spectacles. And quite a bit less sympathetically than I did, it’s worth adding. But far gentler than scoffily linking thusly.

This is the third time I’ve posted over the weekend. The first two were eaten by blogger. Fingers crossed, commencing publishing…

Some of my friends were arguing the other day about what constitutes a “save” in baseball. So I found the official rule for it here. What’s up with rule 10.10, condition 3, disjunct C? It says that a save can be officially awarded in the following event: The pitcher in question will not be credited with a win in a game his team wins, he is the last pitcher used by his team, and he pitched effectively for at least three innings. That’s weird. So a save could be awarded in a game where the starter goes six innings in which the offense goes nuts and scores a lot of runs, then a reliever is called in and pitches the last three innings. So the score could be 20-0 and you could still get a save out of the game. I did not know that and have never heard of such a situation.

Since we’ve been friends long enough to exhaust all other topics of conversation, Jeff and I were talking about how to drum up more comments today. I’ve tried everything today. I wrote something bad about JF’nK (Jeff thinks that won’t work), I changed my comments counter text to something more plaintive and inviting, and I reacted to reader email. The comments should be rolling in now, baby. Of course, sometimes you should watch what you wish for… some commenters are real assholes.

Plans for the weekend: The sweetcorn festival starts tonight. A friend of mine in the Spanish department invited me over to his crib for some brews followed by corn and whatever bands they have over there. C-Bot’s got a new golf game for the PS2. I’m sitting here rebuilding my girlfriend’s computer with a nice version of Linux called Libranet. I tried to install it on my mom’s old box, but the POS video card wouldn’t run X-Windows, and the wimpy 266mhz processor couldn’t run even Linux gracefully. Libranet is upgraded to version 2.8.1 now, and judging by the install screens, it’s a major improvement. And X-Windows works perfectly.

And YO, Jeff Suppan broke his 0-2004 streak with a 2-3 night against the Pirates today. He’s poised for the win, the game’s 7-5 in the eighth with Jimmy WooWoo on 2nd and one out. Way to go Jeff. Too bad it didn’t happen at home, he would have gotten a standing O.

I’ve held back from piling on with criticism of John Kerry’s campaign decision to play up his service in Vietnam, primarily because his service to the Navy was far more than I’ve ever done for my country. I have no right to criticize his performance during his deployment. I’d never criticize a veteran who, in the course of his military career, performed admirably and got his job done. I would and have said bad things of soldiers who badly comprimised an entire war effort through their unbelievably poor, unprofessional behavior in uniform. I’m talking about Graner, England, and Co., naturally. Even if the worst claims of the SwiftVets are God’s honest truth, his conduct in Vietnam didn’t damage the war effort a lick.

But when he got home, he saw political opportunity and turned on the men he’d left behind, accusing them of atrocities one and all, as a matter of policy. Those accusations went unquestioned in the press and the ugly fallout of Vietnam swelled sickly in the clouds. And perhaps the greatest victims of his false testimony are about to speak out, the POWs who endured his testimony turned into an apparatus for psychological torture. Check out their webpage and watch some of the video clips. These men are heroes and patriots, and any attempts to smear them, or conjure rumors of Rove-led conspiracies will not go down with any sensible person.

But Kerry’s got a secret weapon, a new spokesman. Punchline aside, make sure to scroll down to the bottom of that post, it includes a letter from one of Kerry’s comrades in the VVAW that is well worth reading.

And if you’re ever looking for a video, check out Hanoi Hilton sometime. It’s a pretty good movie.

I used to drink beer at a bar called Crane Alley quite often. A decent joint, has Paulaner on tap. I played Foosball against one of the owners a few times and he told me of a video he’d seen of a really cool foosball trick that he’d been practicing, but couldn’t do. Thanks to Jaboobie, I found it. Check this out.

Lawrence Haws emailed me an article today about a device built by the Israelis that is supposed to detect when a person is telling a lie. It’s a pair of eyeglasses with a directional microphone and a microchip, and a light turns on in the corner of your eye when someone you are talking to tells a lie. Pretty cool stuff! I remember hearing about this back in the late nineties (during the Clinton testimony), a fellow named Amir Liberman developed an algorithm that was said to identify emotional states using speech as data, and he reported a very high success rate. I don’t know what his technique was, or how it works. He went on to form the Nemesysco corporation to put the technology out on the market, along with other products that are supposed to confirm whether someone loves you based on the way they speak. Apparently they’ve done very well if they’re building custom hardware that could fit in a pair of eyeglasses. The article says that the algorithm uses “18 parameters of speech” to identify the emotional state of the speaker. If I were asked to replicate the technology, I’d try using a decision tree algorithm, branching on low-level phonetic features like vowel duration, length of pauses, dynamic range of F0 (the vibration rate of the vocal folds), and just about anything else I could measure with simple signal processing techniques, probably many more than 18 (although pruning might very well eliminate most of them). It would be too training-intensive and computationally expensive to work with higher level analysis like word choice or syntactic features, so I’m guessing his algorithm decides whether the subject is lying based on these sorts of measures. The biggest problem would be collecting reliable data to build the tree from. Preferably domain specific data, meaning you’d be able to record the speech of a large number of people being interviewed by a security officer at an airport, and then be able to somehow verify which portions of their speech were truthful and which were lies. And you’d want the speakers to try to conceal their lies, since those are the sorts of lies you’d want to be able to uncover. I don’t expect that I could get approval form the ethics board for data collection of that sort, nor would I want to handle the paperwork involved. I’d do data collection in a laboratory environment, probably having someone study pictures and then read a script describing the scenes in ways that are false. They would thus be saying things that would conflict with their beliefs. I expect that I could get very high accuracy rates with such a setup, but I would be amazed if they would extend to other domains, especially real-life ones where the subjects would put a high value on concealing their lies.

In other words, I’m still pretty skeptical about this technology, but I’d have a great time studying it. Maybe that’ll be my dissertation… hmmmmm…

I’m always a bit over-skeptical when I hear about applications for linguistic theory like this. Lying is not a well-understood topic in Linguistics, although there might very well be people building careers on it. Ahem. It reminds me of Neuro-linguistic Programming, an alleged Sith branch of linguistics. I first heard of it on an infomercial, where the host claimed to have a technique for easily picking up chicks. Supposedly, NLP (not to be confused with Natural Language Processing, which I am interested in) is a way of brainwashing people by controlling the way you speak. So to get a girl at a bar to go home with you, you speak using metaphors that would make a woman think about sex. Utter snakeoil. Not to mention creepy as sin. I know because I tried it. My cheek still hurts.

There’s a few notes about Rick from the StlCardinals.com website today. Encouraging ones at that. He had two starts with the Smokies. I was out of town (and at a Cardinals game) for the first one, but my bro left me a voicemail letting me know what his numbers were. The second game was on Tuesday, a short outing, but effective. He’s going to be promoted to AAA Memphis, probably tomorrow. He’ll get one start there, either Sunday or Monday. Then it’s up to the big leagues. The article linked above says that the option is open to put him in the starting rotation to give a starter or two some rest down the stretch. That would be something. I’ll keep an eye out for an article from the Memphis Redbirds site when he pitches. And that’ll be it, the rehab assignment is over.

Dude, this is so true. That’s got my shower protocol down to a T. Except that after I’ve exhausted my share of natural toots, I start making more with my armpits. My girlfriend doesn’t think it’s nearly as funny as I do. But I’m sure she laughingly practices her own armpit choir technique when I’m not around.

Since school is starting up, I’m obliged to write a nerdy post talking about the courses I’m taking this semester. My first class was yesterday, Speech Synthesis, and it’s something I’m going to greatly enjoy. We’ll be learning about all the major components of a text-to-speech system, like a screen-reader for the blind or a system that reads your email to you over the phone. Last semester I took a course on a component of it that does text-normalization, so I have a decent enough background on what’s involved. And I know that it’s going to be fun and useful. The class I attended earlier today was in the psychology department on Knowledge Representation, a topic that I’ve long held an interest in but have never had any formal schooling. For good reason, since not many universities offer courses on the topic across-the-board. I just found out about it yesterday and was unable to register since the course was already filled. I think the professor seemed to do a good job of convincing the class that it would be difficult work, and so hopefully some students will drop and open up a seat for me. If you check out his website, you can see his “academic family tree,” graphing his mentors and their mentors. His education is in direct linneage with the great William James. I first became interested in how thoughts and memories and personality are stored in the brain or soul or whatever back in High School. My older sister took a philosophy course at Rockhurst University and I inherited all her textbooks, one of which was the excellent compilation of essays: Immortality which included an article by William James that greatly influenced me in my youthful thinking. Later today, I’ll go to “Programming Languages and Compilers.” Compilers are computer programs that translate programming language code into machine assembly code. They are extraordinarily complex, amazing, and vital pieces of software. I’m assuming that this class won’t require us to write our own compilers of any great complexity. I don’t know any X86 machine code, but I’ve taken all the prerequisites for the class in Computer Science. I know MIPS assembly–assembly code for an imaginary computer that was designed to teach all the major concepts that different pieces of hardware use. This is going to be a very good semester for me, since I expect these last two classes to contribute significantly to my quest to learn something or other about machine translation. Because that’s what I want to work on when I grow up.

So the vacations were good. Saw the Cards lose on Thursday, a great game that saw a lot of rain and a delay, Reggie Sanders tie it in the ninth, but Scott Rolen lose it in the tenth. Our seats were about six rows behind third, so had a great view of it. He dropped a foul ball that he ordinarily would have caught, it wasn’t that big of a deal. He gave it to a kid across the aisle from us. That little dude was the happiest kid I’ve seen in a long time. His pops was pretty happy too. High fives all around. I don’t know what the deal was with the ball that went through his legs later in the inning, but it was lousy. Chris surmises that he was drunk. I sure wasn’t, since the rain delay came right when they cut off beer sales. Checked out Paddy O’s after game, which sucked. Lots of old yuppies with very young girlfriends. Lousy music played too loud. Four bucks for a can of beer. Hit the Casino Queen and spent about fifteen bucks on beer and slots. One of our crew won $85 on the roullette table. Gambling isn’t my cup of tea. Off to the Rocket Bar (dig that l33t title tag), which was it’s usual excellent self. Galaga, cold beer, reasonably priced. Open until 3. Galaga. There’s a new 3 o’clock next door that seems to be sucking customers out of the Rocket Bar. Looked like your typical Washington Street Cool-Kid hangout. There goes the neighborhood.

That was my Thursday. Friday is not to be spoken of, by tradition. Saturday I came home, then hit the highway again for Southern Illinois. My woman’s roommate’s sister has a spare crib across route 146 from Dixon Springs State Park and I went down there to vacate for the last few days of the summer. Very fun. I tried to catch some catfish, but didn’t have any appropriate bait. I got something or other of large size to take the hook with a grasshopper I’d captured, but the line snapped. Wimpy line. The other grasshoppers caught on to my plan and laid low from then on. Left there at nine this morning and drove home in three hours to put in a decent day’s work. I changed around my course registration. I found out that one class I had signed up for would be highly redundant given my skill set. But the class I wanted to replace it with conflicted with my other class. So today I dropped both of them and added two new ones. So no more Corpse Linguistics. Instead a class on compilers and programming languages and another on text-to-speech systems like this one. Follow that last link if you have speakers and play around with it. The “Valley Girl” voice is awesome. I had her sing some Who lyrics to me. When she says “silver ball,” well–I just lose it.

I better finish catching up to the work that kept running whilest I allowed catfish to taunt me.

I’m splitting town, heading to the Lou to watch some baseball and celebrate the end of my bud Caleb’s life as a single man. I’ll be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

Read this article: How the Right Name Makes You Sexier. The researcher conducted a hot-or-not survey and found a correlation between F2 in name and hotness.

Men with “front vowels” in their names, which are sounds that are formed at the front of the mouth like the “a” in Matt, are considered sexier than men who are stuck with “back vowel” sounds like the “au” in Paul, reports New Scientist of research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

The vowel in Matt is coded as [æ] in IPA, and is the backest of the front vowels in English. It’s almost in the middle. “Frontness” in vowels is a measure of where your tongue is making a restriction in your mouth. This affects the shape of your oral cavity and how the air moving out of your lungs, set vibrating by your Larry Nix, will harmonize and what the noise you make will sound like. You can do measure frontness in at least two ways. One is to put a subject in front of a video camera that records X-rays, like these guys did. The results are spectacular, and a bit freaky. But it also is bad for the subject’s health, since DNA doesn’t like exposure to such high frequency radiation. Another way you can measure frontness is with a microphone. This is probably better since it doesn’t hurt the subject at all, aside from some possible humiliation at hearing their recorded voice. “I don’t sound like that! Do I?” After you record someone saying something, you can have a program compute a fast fourier transform on the waveform and get a spectrogram. A waveform is a graph of intensity against time, and it looks like this, for me saying Matt:

The FFT algorithm takes a waveform and converts it to a format that can be graphed as frequency against time, like this:

That’s called a spectrogram. The graph shows which frequency regions contribute the most to the sound, so the dark areas are where there is the loudest sound. There are some dark bands on the spectrogram, and these are called formants. Formants are strong harmonics in the sound–harmonics of your laryngeal rate of vibration made louder by the way your tongue and lips and other soft tissues in your oral cavity are shaped for different sounds. The intensity peaks of the formants are approximated with red lines. The second red line represents the second formant, F2. F2 varies reliably with the frontness of your tongue position, and measuring it doesn’t damage the subject’s ability to procreate. To illustrate, the word “mate” has a good front vowel in it, and I just calculated my pronunciation of the vowel in that word to have an F2 value of 1994.67 Hertz. The word “moat” has a very back vowel, and my pronunciation of that vowel gives an F2 of 962.50 Hertz. High numbers indicate frontness and low numbers indicate backness. The F2 for Matt is 1736.74 Hertz, in the pronunciation of made. Now compare this with my name: the [i] in Liam has an F2 of 2078.22 Hz.

In conclusion, I now have scientific evidence to support the long-standing hypothesis that I couldn’t be any sexier. Snarf.

Update: Language Log is all over the case, and as far as I know, we have naught but confirmation that I am sexy as can be. But they have graphs to lend said conclusion yet more weight. Bask in the graphiness of it evidence, ye proles.

Last night, I watched the extended version of “The Exorcist.” It’s extended because at one point it has a really freaky scene of Linda Blair walking down the stairs sort of crab style and then bleeding from her mouth. Eek! I’d heard stories back in my days in the Lou that the exorcism the movie is based on had taken place at St. Louis University. After seeing the movie, I got interested and wanted to learn more about the actual case that the movie is based on.

Here’s an article very carefully uncovering the identities of the participants in the actual events. Very interesting and well researched read.

The new and improved blogger ad-bar at the top of the page includes a button for “next blog” that will randomly send you to a blog hosted on blogspot. It’s similar to the BlogSnob feature that a lot of people use. It’s brought me a few interesting referrals (and one blog that appears to consist entirely of the author posting her received spam email), and through it I’ve found one worthwhile blog, Inklings from the Intern, the writings of a pastoral intern at a Presbyterian church. My minor in college was in religion and philosophy, and one of my favorite professors was himself a former pastor. And a former colleague and friend’s husband is a local pastor, although I suspect it is a non-denominational church catering to the spiritual needs of college students for the most part. As part of his internship, he asked me a series of formal questions about spirituality to get an insight into the atheist point of view. I hope I helped him help others. The writer of this blog has only written two posts so far, but I like the idea of fleshing out your understanding of theological issues in blog-form, with enabled comments and all the trappings and nonsensical trolling that will come with it.

My only advice would be to select a different template. His is identitical to the scandalous Washingtonienne’s. Scandal, background, and aftermath profiled here. (That last link is due to Mr. Mustard.)

In other words, I much prefer the features of the new blogger-bar to the old one. So those of you who haven’t gotten one by posting in the last few days oughta get off yer duffs.

For some reason, I get a lot of google hits from searches that end up like this. Is that one of those googlisms or whatever you nerds call ‘em? And the majority of these hits are from IPs allocated to the Belgian top-domain. What’s up with that? For what it’s worth, I posted a picture of my badly scraped and bruised leg/butt to illustrate the agony of having fallen off a presumably stolen bike while riding it to work one day in this post.

I suspect someone might be hotlinking that picture for purposes that are undoubtedly nefarious. The elaborate mysterious-bike-of-pain campaign against me continues undaunted.

The Cards win tonight should provide conclusive evidence that Larry Walker has overcome his jitters about playing in the Lou. Wish I could have seen that on TV. At least I heard it on the radio. Mighty fine, Larry-My-Man.

The win puts us at 78-40, and with Woody Williams facing Josh Hancock tomorrow, there’s a good chance that I’ll be there for the game that we play for the mythical 2x+.500, the mark of the beast, the .666 winning percentage… I’ve been fortunate enough to get some freaking great tickets (view something like this) for Thursday’s game against Pittsburgh. Pitchers will be Jason Marquis against Oliver Perez. I saw Marquis beat Josh Beckett and the Marlins early in the season. I’ve never seen Perez, but reading his profile, he sounds nasty. Should be a most excellent game. Also both Woody and Jason need to give the bullpen some opportunity for rest, seeing as we have a double header on Friday in this five game series with the hot Pirates.

Poor Jeff Suppan. He’s 0-2004, as they say–hitless for the season after leading the BA category among pitchers last year. The starters have a pool going for offensive numbers, so far Jason Marquis is running away with it all. Jason’s .321 batting mark would improve the cleanup role Sosa and his .258 average is clogging up for our archrivals. (Cheap shot, sorry!) Mike Shannon (MmM mm mM Mm MM MM mm)on the KMOX broadcasts was giving Soup some harsh ribbing on the air Monday, begging him not to get his first hit. I sure hope he gets it at home, so he can get a big standing O, and come out to jokingly tip his hat, hopefully take a bow for all the fans. Might get the opportunity on Saturday.

If I were a farker, I’d link to this article with nothing but a picture of Admiral Ackbar.

As it stands, I think John Kerry stepped into the second big bear trap of the campaign season (first here). Which would leave him with two bloody stumps to stand on once the RNC takes place and the campaign actually begins. That is, were metaphors magical.