Things like this:

“Why does France get a pass in its postcolonial interventions? Simply because there are no French to criticize them.

Illinois basketball has its first non-exhibition game a week from tomorrow against Delaware State. I discovered a blog devoted to Big Ten hoops analysis just now at Big Ten Wonk. I’m impressed with his writing. He’s now listed in the “Local Strangers” category on the right sidebar for easy access throughout the season. I read in the paper last night that Brian Randle injured himself pulling a KevinBrown/JulianTavarez move. He’d been showing some serious promise with greatly improved confidence shooting from the field. Out 6-10 weeks according to that article.

Here’s some crap I’ve been thinking about:

Earth’s moon is too big to be there. The Earth isn’t big enough to have captured something of that size into a stable orbit. It’s great that it’s there though, since it gives us reliable tides and holds the planet stable on it’s axis. Without the moon, it’s very doubtful there’d be life here. The best theory (and one that I buy into) is that something really big (close to Earth sized) collided with our planet in her infancy, the two iron cores fused, and a crapload of light dirt was blown off the other side of the planet, some of which aggregated and formed the moon. Another interesting thing that might be related is the whole Pangea thing, where all the landmass on the planet was at one time clumped up in one spot (and will return to such an arrangement in another 250 million years). I don’t know whether pangea was always one big landmass and then broke up for the first time 250 million years ago, or whether it’s a cyclical thing, but what’s so special about that spot where the continents all gather every 500 million years? I’m guessing it has something to do with the lunar-creating impact. So without it, we’d have no moon, no tides, a wild axial attitude, and the planet would be a waterworld. No continents. And I guess less iron, so a less dense planet with a weaker magnetic field, so more solar radiation. Thank God for that devastating impact, eh? I’m probably wrong though, we’re talking three billion years or so between the impact and the presumable first breakup of Pangea.

Here’s something else: There’s this giant five story or so parking garage that was recently built by my house. Whenever I’d walk by it during its construction, I’d feel this very cold wind blow out of the building. That doesn’t make much sense. The thing is a giant concrete structure, so when they were pouring the thing, you’d expect warm air to blow out. Concrete drying is an exothermic chemical process. A well-known example of this is when Hoover Dam was built–if they’d poured the thing all at once, it still wouldn’t be dry and would have generated so much heat that if it wouldn’t have cracked from the intensity, it would still be radiating heat today. (Maybe less well-known is that the problem was solved by those evil-doers at Bechtel. So why would a structure with some heavy duty exothermic processes going on have cold air blowing out of it? Seriously, what? The shade? That heat had to go somewhere.

There’s some other crap I was thinking about on my way home just now, but I plumb forgot. Time for supper. But enjoy these links: Mars experiencing Global Warming, Speculist speculates sun to blame. Linked from that post is this article about the sun’s intensity being at its cyclical peak right now, based on samples taken from ancient trees. Sun also suspected culprit.

Here’s some things to check out:

Powerline Blog’s Obituary to Yassir Arafat

A Michael Moore photomosaic

Donald Sensing’s tribute to the Marine Corps on its 229th Birthday (yesterday).

The 2005 Cardinals Schedule (tentative) has been released. This is the last season that baseball will be played in Busch Stadium. I plan to attend several games, at least as many as this past year, to thank the building for 40 years of service.

I’ve got a notoriously bad problem with giving presentations. I’m really awful at it. The conclusion is that I’m just not smart enough to give presentations without a little help. I used to think, “hell’s bells, I know my stuff–I can just walk in there and talk about it for a while and it’ll be great.” But it wouldn’t work out that way, and I’d end up giving presentations that can accurately be described as half-assed. And the rest of the day I’d kick myself for all the good stuff that I should have talked about, but didn’t.

Yesterday I had to give a short presentation, and knowing that I’m not very smart, I prepared some decent notes and gave what I thought was a pretty good little talk. That was the dry run for today, when I was charged with giving an hour and a half talk about Lawrence Barsalou’s paper, Perceptual Symbol Systems, described by my prof as one of the most difficult papers we’ll read this semester. I spent a considerable amount of time working on it, and it really paid off. The prof was clearly pleased, and told me that I did a great job of focusing on the issues relevant for our class and more or less ignoring the side issues. And on my way out, a fellow asked for an extra copy of the handout to give to another student who was absent, so he must have thought it useful and informative. And in the elevator, another colleague said it was a good presentation and he understood the paper a whole lot better after hearing it.

I assure you, this is not me bragging. I’m awful at giving presentations, but having accepted my stupidity and substituting preparation for smarts, I was able to do a competent job. That pleases me greatly and gives me quite a bit of confidence going down the very difficult stretch of the rest of the semester. My goal is to have a pragmatics paper written and turned in by next Monday, and an outline of sorts for a historical paper.

It’s worth mentioning what the presentation I gave yesterday was all about. It was a preliminary presentation of my research plans for this semester in that class, Speech Synthesis. I’m building a concept-to-speech system that takes as input a URL of an ESPN.com boxscore, and returns an mp3 file that’s a synthesized speech summary of what happened in the game, sort of like “The Cardinals walloped the Cubs 13-2 on this sunny day in St. Louis. Suppan pitched 7 shutout innings for the Cardinals, who chased the Cubs’ starter, Wood, in the fifth. Renteria drove in the go-ahead RBI in the eighth, and Pujols went 3-4 in the game.” That would be an ideal output for such a boxscore. I’m going to need some help getting there. I’ve got a CGI ready for when the system is in prototype stage, and I’ll need people with good baseball smarts to query it and listen to the summmaries to let me know whether they are “reasonable” in the sense that the summary adequately captures the most important information from the game and doesn’t make any big content-type mistakes, and send me feedback on what it did wrong with which boxscore. If anyone interested would let me know in the comments, I’ll email you when I get the protype online, probably not for at least two weeks or so.

Update: If anyone’s interested, here’s the handout I used for the preliminary presentation.

Went on a bit of a bender last night to celebrate Chris‘s girlie’s birthday. Woke up at 10:30 feeling unwell physically, and then unhappy mentally. My very own girly ran a 5k this morn at 8:00 and I’d wanted to be there for motivation and to hand out cups of water. Even picked up some paper cups last night with pictures of monkeys on them. Rats. She wasn’t upset I was sleeping and sobering up when I should have been cheering on runners. What a gal. It was a pretty fun night, though.

Today saw me putting together a presentation I will deliver tomorrow, as well as building some subcomponents for my semester project in Speech Synthesis. On Tuesday, I’m presenting a long, difficult paper by Lawrence Barsalou to my Knowledge Representation class. And solid progress is being made on a Pragmatics paper I need to write. This should be a productive week. Short road trip tomorrow night. We’re driving to Indianapolis to pick up a puppy.

Which Homestar Runner character are you?

this quiz was made by jurjyfrort

Found it at Tulip Girl’s.

I’m going to the Illinois v. Indiana game today. Illinois’ football program has lost every conference game for the past two seasons. Today’s game gives us a shot to break that unfortunate streak. Indiana is coming off a huge win over Minnesota (their only conference game of the season), so there’s a chance to hand them a let-down. I haven’t been following the football team too closely the last two seasons, but I hear they tend to play well until the third quarter or so when the wheels just fall off the cart. Maybe they just need my presence in the stadium. My girl got free tickets, much better than where I used to sit.

The thing I’m most excited about: there’s going to be a B2 flyover prior to the game. Cass was impressed with the airshow at Fair St. Louis this summer, but hasn’t ever seen a B2 in flight. They’re amazing machines. Probably not as impressive as a harrier close-up though.

I also found out that Python has a library for manipulating wave files. I was looking into the wave file format this morning, trying to figure out whether I’d be able to write a script to concatenate wav files for a speech synthesizer I’m building. It should be very easy with the Python module in hand. I’m going to try to do it real quick before the game.

Update: Illinois won their first conference game in over two seasons! I was thinking some pretty awful things about Kelvin Hayden for most of the game. He’s got great field vision, he reads the offenses will, but his tackling is pitiful and he missed a lot of opportunities for INTs. But he redeemed himself big-time by seizing one of those opportunities and returning the ball 30 yards to set up the short, clock-eating, game-winning scoring drive. Quite an impressive game.

In other news, I succeeded in writing a simple script for concatenating wave files.

There’s a chance that M. Scott Speicher’s remains were found in Iraq recently, pending DNA confirmation.

For those who don’t know, he was the first pilot shot down during the war to expel Saddam’s army from Kuwait. At first the pentagon assumed he’d been killed in a midair explosion, but the wreckage indicated that he’d ejected and likely survived, although Hussein’s government publicly denied every keeping him prisoner. Rumors would come out from Iraqi prisoners who claimed they’d seen him in jail, his official status was changed from KIA to MIA, and many hoped that he’d be found alive when we captured Baghdad. Some soldiers found his initials carved into the wall of a prison, raising hopes that he might indeed be found. This is the first I’d heard of it since.

More on his story here, and a summary of facts here.

So you’d think the political nastiness would have died out by now. Alas, no. I forgot about the spin cycle.

How about a break from political blogging?

My girlfriend’s lovely twin sister forgot her keys last night, and so I took them to her this morning. She works in the Plant Sciences Laboratory, a sprawling complex of greenhouses and labs. I wandered around back there for a while until running into someone who knew where she was. So grateful was she for having her keys back that she gave me a tour of the Conservatory, a show greenhouse full of tropical plants, something like a greatly scaled down version of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Climatron. It’s free, so folks on campus ought to go. And sign their guestbook, because it helps them get funding.

Seymour Hersh, a famous journalist who broke My Lai and was one of the people who “broke” the Abu Ghraib story after the military investigation had been underway for half a year, was involved with a post-election chat with sycophants over at the Washington Post website. Here’s an awesome excerpt:

Germantown, Md.: Do you believe the president will strive for unity? Or will he skew more hard right?

Seymour Hersh: in my view, he’s got his mandate and he’s going to carry on with his mantra — bringing democracy to the middle east. pretty scary.

What a beautiful “Liberal” worldview. Can’t find his ass with both hands, or the shift key with either pinky. What a loser.

Update: Later on, in responding to a question about “poor black neighborhoods,” he uses the term “ghettos.” What an asshole.

Analysis of the military situation in Iraq offered at Adventures of Chester, written by a recently retired officer of the USMC.

Thanks to Wretchard for pointing it out.

Haven’t had a chance to read through it much, but I did learn that the forces carrying out the upcoming assault of Fallujah will include embedded Iraqi journalists. Very smart.

That makes me one of the 59,054,087 dumb people.

Michele Catalano did too, and has something to say to all those who think that makes her and me such dumb people.

Here’s an excerpt, interspersed with claims I’d make about myself:

I voted for George Bush.

I am not a redneck.

    I might be. I live in a small city and like to shoot guns.

I do not spend my days watching cars race around a track, drinking cheap beer and slapping my woman on the ass.

    I wish I could spend thirty or so days a year doing that, but baseball, football, or college basketball. In any other year, a few hockey games.

I am not a bible thumper. In fact, I am an atheist.

    I read a coloring book bible with my grandpop when I was wee. There’s an online version of the bible and Qu’ran that I reference from time to time. In general, I’m an athiest who sees insurmountable philosophical problems for a completely atheistic framework to explain.

I am not a homophobe.

    Me neither. Couldn’t care less.

I am educated beyond the fifth grade. In fact, I am college educated.

    I’ve been to school quite a bit

I am not stupid. Not by any stretch of facts.

    I doubt I’m any smarter than most people. I’m sure those who’ve convinced themselves otherwise are missing something obvious.

I do not bomb abortion clinics.

    Most abortion clinics provide other useful health services to the community. Bombing an abortion clinic is a terrorist act, and I’m against terrorism for any political purpose. Therefore I do not, and never would, bomb abortion clinics.

I promise to have some real content up sometime soon. Still mighty busy, although progress is being made. I’m putting together some post-election thoughts. For now, it’s just this cut n’ paste, link here and link there BS.

And gone to hell to be tormented by the thousands of child suicide bombers who he sent to their evil, murderous deaths.

Well, he’s probably pushing up daisies, or will be soon.

Indepundit has a round-up.

Update: Jeff sends this article from CNN, with the line:

[T]he 75-year-old leader had been moved to another department within the hospital for treatment more appropriate for his condition.

You can’t trust a French gov’t official though. Don’t forget about their mastery of “nuance.” This could be a nuanced way of saying that Arafat was moved to a department in the basement, full of refrigerated, metal drawers, where his complex condition will be stabilized.

I don’t know whether Arafat is alive or dead, in all honesty. My guess is that he won’t survive another week. When he dies, there’s a good chance of civil war in Palestine and parts of Lebanon, as well as riots in certain neighborhoods of certain European cities. The French have an interest in prolonging his death, or concealing it, for as long as they can.

Another Update: An email-discussion to the corner gets the last word: Read it here

Beautiful irony.

It’s difficult for me to describe the contempt I feel for Dan Rather. He’s a small grouchy man. I heard him say this last night, shook my head in contempt, then flipped back to NBC (which will be a whole lot better when Brian Williams finally takes over.

DAN RATHER: One would expect that the blogging machine which the White House and the Bush-Cheney campaign has used for any number of purposes over their four years will start now, if it hasn’t started already, to say, listen, Kerry-Edwards, for the good of the country, need to concede.

ED BRADLEY: I’m sure it’s started already. If we could tune into the Internet, we’d see that people are already saying that now. That’s certainly the drum the White House is beating.

And I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those snooping kids… And their blog, too!

Yes, that was a Scooby-doo reference.

NBC reluctantly called Ohio for Bush with 90% of Cuyahoga county reporting. The coverage is morose and palpably downbeat.

But I’m very pleased. I don’t expect Kerry to give a concession speech until he gets 1) some poll results back on whether he should give one to the Chimp-in-Chief and 2) adequate advice from his lawyers.

Blackfive was purged from the voter rolls in Chicago. He was turned away from his polling place, even though he had two forms of ID, proof of address, and his voter card. No provisional ballots were on-hand. On his way out, he asked ten other people who were unexpectedly unlisted in the precinct. All of them were Republicans.

I’m sure he’ll get his hands on a ballot and make sure it gets counted, but how many other people in the same situation might just give up.

I was worried something like that would happen to me, that’s why I went to vote so early, just in case I’d have to spend the day fighting bureaucrats.

One of the servers I use for hosting pictures on this here blog was taken offline over the weekend, that’s why the pictures weren’t showing up. It’s fixed now, although there’s a few dead picture links off in the right sidebar that have yet to be fixed. Also changed the text color in the sidebar from yellow to black, noticed it was hard to read on some laptop displays. Had to put my Links back up, since I think the joke is funny and it’s the last reference (aside from the name) this blog has to its origins as a Zelda-themed sports, language, right-wing, and current-affairs blog. Don’t ask why I chose such a theme, I was drinking pretty heavily back then.

And I already know who the next president will be. This is truly breaking news, but I know for certain that our next president will be:

He’ll be replacing retiring James Stukel to become the 16th president of the University of Illinois.