Just in case you were wondering…

The Boxscore Project. Needs work. Must present a beta version tomorrow afternoon, submit a final write-up a week from tomorrow.

The Pronoun Paper. Discovered the idea I had isn’t as crazy as I thought, and has been proposed for different reasons elsewhere by real linguists. Paper should be done Thursday night.

The Sports-Announcer-Talk Paper. Interviewed a real-life play-by-play man. Have read a bunch of books and articles. Have data recorded and partially transcribed. Am just about ready to write.

The Knowledge Representation final. Issued this morning, due two weeks from yesterday. Haven’t looked over it much, but part 2 is all about Barsalou’s paper that I presented, and so presumably know well.

The Grammaticalization Paper. Slow going.

Like I said, the stretch is gonna be tough. All this stuff is due by the 15th of December. Obviously, most will be turned in before then.

On top of that, there’s the bill-paying work. I had an interesting problem to work on this morning. An audio transfer, reel-to-reel tape to compact disc. Portions of the recording were set to some ultra-low speed, slower than my player can run. So it had to be slowed down digitally. Sounds real good now, and have it all cleaned up.

The client should be very pleased.

Afterthough: In other words, “poor widdle me.” Whining like this two days after one’s 27th birthday is downright shameful.

Versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the boxscore reader went online last night. I sent emails to all who had volunteered. The DSL keeps picking up a new IP address though, making it difficult to reliably serve http requests.

I fell ill on Sunday. Wasn’t feeling well on Saturday, but came down with a bad sore throat, extreme hunger but little appetite the next day. Managed to eat a very tasty Bootlegger Club with avocado and peppers from Jimmy John’s last night, then couldn’t get to sleep. Only worked for a few hours this morning, then had an eye doctor appointment. After that, I was pretty much falling apart. Head cloudy, throat very sore, congested with what might politely be called a highly productive cough. It’s pretty rare that I get sick, so I took the afternoon off and laid in bed with a box of kleenex and watched the Maury Povich show. At some point, that show took over for Jerry Springer in terms of guests and format. Although with more crying. The episode today was called “25 MEN TESTED…I KNOW THIS ONE HAS TO BE THE FATHER!” Truly horrifying. A few hours later, there was another episode on, a rerun about young girls whose mother’s fell in love with their boyfriends. Extremely disturbing.

The good news: it seems that the rest has done its work. The dizziness and clouded thinking is pretty much gone (or at least back to normal levels–the thinking, that is.) Sore throat is significantly improved. Sinuses draining rapidly. I’m getting to work on the Boxscore project for a few hours. Expect the Beta version to go public tonight.

He wrote this gem:

You know those pictures of Indians or Pakistanis crammed into, onto, and on the sides of a train? You know, with hundreds of them clinging to the roof? The above line is like the locomotive in one of those pictures, but instead of poor third-worlders, the train is festooned with B.S.

I wish I knew how to write competently, too. Context available (and worth reading) here. (A NY Times Mag article about College Conservatives.)

In the same paragraph, he uses the word “druthers.” I’ve never seen it in print, only having heard my mother speak it.

I’ve been avoiding the news so as not to become too distracted from the work at hand, but the (so-far) peaceful revolution in Ukraine has certainly gotten my attention. Good blog-coverage at Tulip Girl, The Periscope and Fistful of Euros, and Instapundit is rapidly gathering more local sources of information.

As far as I know, CNN and BBC are still reporting from Moscow.

Dignan has been following the Ukrainian elections, and also provided this related post from a few days ago about Russian perceptions of the current US administrations foreign policy priorities. It appears that the bold stance the White House is taking on Ukraine (some might call it audacious) might cause them to reconsider their beliefs, and that’s a good thing. It’s about time we stop playing so nice with Russia and rock the boat just a bit.

Instapundit is also starting a “Vaclav Havel for UN Secretary General” campaign. I praised Havel in this post. I’m certainly on board for that campaign. Bill Clinton can’t like the competition.

The past two days have been very productive. I’ve got my pronoun paper just about finished up, and put together the basic system for the boxscore project. Decided to format the pre-synthesized summaries in SABLE markup, which has turned out well. The boxscore webpages are nicely organized, which greatly reduces the complexity of mining the data from them. Right now, it just reads scores for any boxscore, like “The saint louis cardinals beat the New York Mets five to four.” After finishing and submitting the pronoun paper, I’ll turn back to that, and turn V1.0 loose onto the world hopefully tonight. I’ll be emailing volunteers links to the interface, but not posting one here since I won’t be home the next two days to monitor security on the server running the system. (Although I’m reasonably confident the interface is secure.)

I’ll be in St. Louis for Thanksgiving. My 27th birthday is on Saturday. Unfortunately, it looks like I might have to return home to get work done, unless paper writing at my mom’s goes better than expected.

The Green Side was recently updated with some great first-hand tales of valor by the Marines and Soldiers in Fallujah. The author, Dave, mentions a message some Marines left on the Bridge from which the Blackwater contractors remains were hanged by terrorists and gleeful children. (I mentioned the incident most recently in the comments to this post.) Dave is too gentlemanly a warrior to repeat the message in the format he writes, but fortunately the blogosphere is large and resourceful–a photograph is posted at the Oriental Redneck’s.

I’m heading down to St. Louis tonight. My dad’s hosting a large Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, I think 22 people are expected, and I’m one of them.

This means I’ll sadly have to miss tonight’s band at my favorite watering hole. The band’s named “Reasonable Doubt.” I can just imagine the band meeting/brainstorming session where they came up with that name. Let me set the scene: a tape recording of their jam sessions plays in the background. Marijuana smoke circles in the air, rising up to bare flourescent light bulbs. The lead guitarist, the brains of the group, deeply inhales on a joint before sneezing out the smoke in a sudden fit of inspiration. “Dudes, I got it! We’re Reasonable Doubt! Because we get the people off, man!”

I’ve never heard them before, I’m sure they’re very talented musicians and nice people. Just liked that story, unfortunately at the expense of others. Be back Sunday night.

Alexander the Great was NOT GAY!!! Not that there’d be anything wrong with that…

Oliver Stone really sucks though, my guess is this movie will be awful.

Just realized that today is National Ammo Day! The idea (started by Mr. and Mrs. Du Toit) is to have everyone who supports 2nd Amendment rights to go out and buy two boxes of ammunition, and also to write your congressmen to let them know your position on private weapon ownership. I participated last year, but don’t think I’ll have the time to go out and pick some up today. When I noticed it’s the nineteenth already, I checked my stock. Sure enough, I’m down to a box and a half of .40 and not even a short-mag’s worth of .223! It’s been a while since I’ve practiced my shot. Last time was great though. I was consistently nailing soda cans with my borrowed Mini-14. My girlfriend likes that rifle quite a bit. Also got to fire a .45 ball round black-powder pistol.

The debate I attended last night was about Human Rights, and the speaker whose views I preferred made a persuasive argument that I’ve heard in other contexts. The argument I’m familiar with explains one of the differences between the traditional American understanding of rights and that of Europeans. In the founding of the Republic, the premise was that all human beings, created in God’s image, are endowed by that creator with certain rights and liberties that are inseparable, necessary aspects of each and every human being by their nature. The rights themselves come from God, and the very foundation of government is that those rights cannot be infringed, lest the government become an oppressive perversion of man’s consensus, not to mention an affront to God himself. Make no mistake, this is a theologically rooted notion of human rights, and in my opinion, the one to be preferred–wishful thinking the first amendment be damned. Across the Atlantic, the idea is that humans ought to have certain rights, and it’s the role of government to grant them those rights and to protect those rights from being infringed upon by other people in society. The rights definitely do not come from God, because there is no God, or might not be God, or we might give thanks to the wrong god for these fabulous rights–better to come up with another excuse for how humans came to have rights. The moral of the story is that the state grants rights to people to protect them from each other–if the state has to, beg your pardon, violate those rights in order to ensure that some citizen doesn’t infringe them, then such is the beast. In Germany and other European countries, the Nazi swastika is an illegal image. Check out something as anti-Nazi as the webpage for the video game Castle Wolfenstein, a first-person shooter in which you are an allied soldier sent behind enemy lines to kill SS soldiers and eventually Adolf Hitler himself. (Although in the original, he was some kind of cyborg-Hitler.) The first page is a disclaimer to Germans that viewing the website is a violation of German law. Sure, there was a good purpose for suppressing the Nazi party after the allies defeated Germany, but now I suspect it’s part of the problem in Germany of people forgetting about why WWII was fought. A German friend of mine got his advanced degree in “American Studies,” where they “learned” that the Dresden and Tokyo bombings, and the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were just as bad, if not worse, than the Holocaust itself. And some people wonder why it’s so easy for me to dismiss European elitism.

Back to the debate, after that long aside. Ira Carmen was saying that an American ideal of Human Rights is the only possible kind of real Human Rights, since any rights conferred onto men by their more enlightened peers were illusory, like greasy clouds, I believe was the metaphor he used. They can be taken away just as easily, and off to the camps you go, for your skin to be made into lampshades. If you can confer rights onto another person, you can just as easily confer onto them human responsibilities–and from there slavery is just a stumble downhill. He didn’t explicitly make clear that last conclusion, that’s my own.

I got to thinking about all this after reading a portion of one of Dignan’s new posts, in which he wrote:

I tend to think that the United States should promote “freedom” over “democracy” – but both are very much related and it become much more of a theoretical discussion than I’m prepared to enter. I think that the Bush Administration’s brand of realistic Wilsonianism can work. Unfortunately some will read “moral” as “Judeo-Christian” and automatically see this as a “crusade” against Islam.

This relates to what I’m talking about here. Our best-among-much-worse brand of government is rooted in a Judeo-Christian tradition. We should be encouraging a similar sort of government in liberated lands, although naturally rooted in local relgious traditions. To foster a Tranzi European style government in Iraq, where “rights” are conferred on the citizenry by the state, and even worse, where the state owns all the oil riches in the country, and feeds, buys off, and lulls to sleep the masses will be a long-term failure. The TAL, although an admirable constitution, appears to be a road down just such a path. First off, there’s Chapter 1, Article 7A stating that Iraq is an Islamic nation–but no mention is made of the relationship between God and the status of a human being. The purpose of this article is to ensure that the Iraqi government passes no law deemed insulting to Islam, or whoever convinces enough people that he speaks for Islam. That’s no good. All of Chapter 2 of the TAL concerns human rights, but the language is agnostic as to where these rights come from. Some of them, CLEARLY, are not God-given rights. Especially the right to Health Care. And on the eighth day… God created Penicillin and made it so as to be ubiquitous and available to all but the lowliest of His creatures. That’s the basic point Ira was making. Once man confers on himself authority to grant Rights to other men, there is no stopping what he can call a right, since the rights granted are by definition, arbitrary.

Worth noting: The other debater replied to this argument (paraphrasing): “Sure there are Human Rights… We had a conference and…” [Insert smiley for shaking head morosely.]

To close: Iraq’s duly elected government will hopefully rewrite the constitution to elucidate God’s role in conferring legitimacy on the Government. In the current version, the government is subservient to God’s will, as whoever’s leading the most believers chooses to interpret His plan (bad). In the ideal version, the government would be restricted from imposing on God’s will, where God wants his flock to be free and unburdened by man’s oppressive yolk. And the oil shouldn’t become government property, but instead work on something akin to the Alaskan system.

But that’s just my opinion, it’s their decision.

Update: Haven’t gotten your fill of poorly articulated arguments peppered with non-sequitors? Head on over to the post that inspired this screed and revel in the disordered reasoning as I’ve hijacked his comments section! It’s a response to the comment: “But the founding Fathers were isolationist and non-interventionalist.” To summarize more clearly the slop I left there–that’s because they were trying their best to get the country off the ground without it tearing itself apart or getting destroyed by foreign powers. Softening their foreign policy ambitions was certainly not their most difficult compromise.

I think the greatness of the 2004 baseball season has warped my priorities. I’ve got baseball on the brain, when I should be concentrating on Blues hockey (or just more work). Can’t blame me for that. The best thing to do when you’re highly motivated about something orthogonal to your needs is to harness it and steer that motivation in a productive direction. So that’s why my ECE project is baseball-related.

The Pragmatics paper I’m writing is also about sports. There’s a respectable tradition in linguistics and philosophy of writing about sports, baseball especially. Of particular note is David Lewis’ 1979 paper “Scorekeeping in a Language Game.” I haven’t read it in a while, but I was so deeply into semantic models at the time that when he said something like, “Baseball is a sextuple…” that it made sense. My paper is looking at the talk of sports announcers from a theoretical approach that is new and to my knowledge, hasn’t been applied in any detail yet. I found out this morning that I’ll get to interview one of the local play-by-play pros for it.

See what I mean, you go with the flow and good things happen.

Say you’re making a report or a presentation or something, and you want to embed a graphic or a chart in the report. And suppose you see exactly the picture object you want, but it’s in a PDF or postscript file or somewhere otherwise not directly accessible. This happens a lot when you’re presenting someone else’s work. So what’s the best way to get the picture out of the PDF and into your Word application where you’re writing up the report?

Do you know how your computer monitor works? If you press a button on it to bring up the monitor settings, one of the numbers it gives you will be in Hz. Hz is a unit meaning “cycle per second.” But it’s also used in other contexts to loosely mean “events per second.” That’s the case here. Windows produces a bitmap (a sort of image format) many times per second and sends it to the monitor to display. The monitor I’m looking at is set to 60 Hz, so sixty times a second, the screen displays a new bitmap image. That’s nice and smooth. Typical digital video from a camera records 30 frames per second, so the display on your computer has essentially twice as fluid a picture as video. A fancy and trivial-to-implement feature of windows lets you save the current bitmap to the clipboard, a dedicated region of memory where things that you cut or copy goes.

How do you do it? Just hit Ctrl-PrintScreen, a key up above “Insert” and to the right of F12.

Now open up your MS Paint or whatever fancy picture editing application you like to use, and hit Ctrl-V or use the drop down menus to paste. Voila! The bitmap sent to the display when you hit Ctrl-PrintScreen is now in Paint, ready to be cropped and resized to your needs.

Another related key sequence, Alt-PrintScreen captures the bitmap representative of your current window. So if you have a bunch of programs running, whichever one is on top will be saved. I usually use this one, since there’s less to crop.

A colleague of mine claims that each active window + desktop has a bitmap drawn for it each cycle (not CPU clock cycle, but at each refresh of the monitor). This makes sense, given that you can caputre the bitmap for only the top window. As a result of this, you can marginally improve the speed of your computer by removing complex wallpaper, like big pictures of puppies or whatever. This is because the wallpaper has to be redrawn 60 times a second, and that can be an unreasonable amount of work if your computer is old and the operating system is new with lots of overhead.

Just some friendly, pedantic advice.

This man is a very bright and passionate fellow.

Were this one a dog, he would pee the rug when excited.

Trust me on this one.

Tonight, I watched a debate between Ira Carmen, the man linked first above, and James Ross, the top lawyer for Human Rights Watch. The second dude linked above was the moderator, but he was so agitated when some of the students in attendance failed to boo the first off the stage that he took to the debate himself, as well as tossing out some highly questionable “facts” during the interims between questions. It was, quite frankly, revolting.

(Ross, by the way, was also a thoughtful and sincere cat, although I disagreed with some of the things he had to say and have a hard time taking his organization terribly seriously.) I’d better leave it at that, before I say something that’ll get me fired.

Update: Just re-read this (I blog stream-of-conscious style–couldja guess?) and it’s pretty clear I underplayed how graciously the students in attendance took to Carmen’s performance. He gave an impassioned defense of Israel–brave on a large college campus to a “Global Studies” audience–and at one point even said something along the lines of, “When you go to war, you have to fight to victory.” That’s bold enough in these sour times, but he was saying it in reference to Vietnam. I thought I was the only troglodyte in the whole county who thinks that way. Aside from certain vets, of course. One of the questioners asked him how the Israeli fence could possibly be justified since it was annexing “Palestinian lands.” His answer was almost identical (although considerably more generous and thorough) to what I was muttering under my breath… “What Palestinian lands? Find me a map showing a Palestinian state that’s not hanging in an Arab schoolhouse.” The students around where I was stationed were laughing their guts out during portions of the Q-A session.

I might be mistaken, but I believe some “scholars” after the talk were discussing why the students took so well to his presentation. “The young rubes just picked up on the passion. Something to do with the neurons firing.” I wanted to shake Carmen’s hand after the thing was over, as many students were doing, but unlike the moderator, I knew my role and did my job in a professional manner.

[End Update]

BTW, my semester from hell seems to be going remarkably well. The pragmatics research project is coming together nicely. I volunteered to present my Boxscore reader project on the first day of final presentations–December 1st, so I’ll have to get V1.0 online by this weekend. I’ve got the basic structure put together, and a satisfactorily secure CG-Interface to the WWW scripted and working the way it needs to. The Historical research is woefully stuck in the mud, although I’m hoping to get some reading done over the first weekend of break and be in good shape to put some serious hours into it after demonstrating the Boxscore reader. A substantial break came in the Anaphora project when Kees van Deemter’s Forward Reference paper arrived via interlibrary loan the other day. An excellent paper, rich with good analysis. The home stretch is gonna get ugly. Off to study.

Here’s a harrowing report on Michael Moore’s Minutemen, mentioned a few posts down.

Background on the Minutemen reference, from the Horse’s Ass’s Mouth, available here.

Update: Glenn agrees exactly.

Bernie Micklasz did in yesterday’s column, which I just now got to reading. He thinks we have a good shot at picking up none other than Randy Johnson for next season’s Cardinal rotation. Also raises the possibility of a trade for Barry Zito. Either way, we just might have two left-handed pitchers in the starting rotation. The potential trade might include Marquis, who I expect to be dealt; or Suppan, who I’d very much like to hang onto. Unfortunately, Bernie also thinks that there’s no way that we can have our cake, the Big Unit, and eat it too with the same infield we had in the 2004 campaign. Renteria is lost to free agency. I have to agree with him that regardless of whether we sign Johnson or not, Edgar Renteria is going to get an offer that we just won’t be able to match. Filling the 6-spot is going to be a tall order. Bernie mentions Orlando Cabrera as a possibility, but I expect he too will get an offer we won’t match after his outstanding playoff performance. Craig Counsell had a pretty good postseason a few years back too. Unfortunate for him, it didn’t come as he was entering free agency as it is for Cabrera. And don’t forget that Tony Womack might be gone too, eliminating our middle infield. Ideally we could get Placido Polanco back to play on of those positions. Who do we have in our minor league system to play short and second? There’s Bo Hart, of course, who can play both MI positions competently. Scott Seabol, a Yankees’ farm prospect, plays short and had a good season at the plate in AAA. Javier Colina looks like a promising shortstop, showing speed and power with the Smokies. So if Renteria heads off and we don’t pick up much to shore up the middle infield, don’t sweat too bad. At least we’re very solid on the corners, and have some decent personnel options to tinker with until the in-season trade deadline.

Scroll down for a picture of a PUPPY!!!

I was just checking out the craziest of the lefties having vapors in the DU forum on the house-cleaning that’s going on at the CIA, long overdue. Here’s some of my favorites:

This is starting to sound more and more like a third world dictatorship (like Zimbabwe) where the President starves the members of the opposition party. If this continues in the same direction, the land will be given to the Bush cronies and the people will be beaten and thrown in jail if they are not Bush supporters. All reporters will have to register with and clear their stories through the ministry of information.

Dogs and cats, living together!

That’s the first time I’ve seen anyone compare George Bush with Bobby Mugabe. Man, Bush’s stock is on the rise!

Here’s another:

if all they want is intelligent people who agrees with Bush’s policies. No intelligent person would go along with his bullcrap, he’s taking the country right down the shitter. How could you pledge loyalty to a madman? This country is REALLY starting to suck more than anything has ever sucked before.

Oh yeah, for sure, nothing could suck worse! At least we can sleep safe knowing Michael Moore’s Minutemen are out there fighting the good fight.

To those partisan hacks who resigned from the CIA so as not to endure another four years of actual, hard fought defense of the country, I say “Good Riddance.” You are no longer part of the problem.

From JB’s Sanctuary, I found a link to a great bunch of loony lefties in a Veteran’s day post entitled “Honoring America’s Veterans. JB is having words with these sad sacks in their comments section. Here’s how they dismiss his arguments (to a paratrooper in a post called “Honoring America’s Veterans” just in case you’ve forgotten):

you can’t argue with most proffessional soldiers about whether a war is justified or not. it’s like agruing with a dentist about the importance of regular checkups. soldiers are trained very well not to question orders. they are taught analysis only when it concerns achieving an objective.

can you blame them? no one wants to hear that they are risking their lives and ended the lives of others for all the wrong reasons.

Awesome!!! I totally dig his far-out analogy: Dentists, experts on teeth, say regular tooth checkups are important:they’re wrong about that, but don’t bother arguing with them::Soldiers, experts on warfare, say this war is important and worth fighting:they’re wrong about that, but don’t bother arguing with them.

Someone with whom I likely share no political beliefs made that argument on Veteran’s day. This leads me to believe I’m doing something right.

Somewhat related: Indepundit’s most recent Protest Warrior counter-demonstration was attended by a platoon of Marines. It’s a short tale, with a great punchline, so do go and read.

I’ve given myself a deadline for 7:00pm tomorrow to finish up this paper I’m writing, so posting will be light. Slow progress being made on the Boxscore Reader project, time is scarce. I have the CGI interface working well, where I don’t have to expose any files unnecessarily to HTTP access. At this point, all it does is read the score, though. In other words, lots of work to do–posting will be light.

As promised, a picture of Sir Gordon Michael Lightfoot:

Ain’t he a cute fellow? He’s gotten quite a bit more comfortable in the past few days. Having a little trouble remembering to pee only outside, though.

The house across the street caught fire in a major way tonight. I got home from work at about 6:30 or so, and smelled a little bit of smoke. Figured it was my roommate cooking something. After working on some stuff, I hear a whole bunch of fire engines drive up. At the window, I see smoke pouring out of the place. The firemen smashed out the windows and tore the front door off. Lots of fire spilling out the front windows. My roommate videotaped a little of it.

The place is a rental property whose occupants moved out about two months ago. Nice couple. Nobody was in there, and all the firemen appear to be OK. WCIA was on the scene, filming from my side yard. She got there too late to see much, the fire appears to be well under control. There’s a column of smoke still going up in the air though.

I might be able to get a still from the roommates camera sometime later.

I also have some pictures of the puppy that should go up later tonight.

Just got back from viewing the new Pixar film, The Incredibles. I’m pleased to report that it was a great movie. I don’t have much more detailed to say than that, except that Jason Lee was a fantastic cast as the villain. Disney is going to be in a hard spot when Pixar spins off into its own corporate entity.