C-Rae emailed me a link to the Babelizer, a simple perl CGI written and hosted by Carl Tashian. The script sends a form string to babelfish, where it is translated to French and back to English, then that string is translated to German and back, and so on with Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, until the string is finally returned in an unrecognizable form. Sort of like a game of telephone.

I used to be very interested in Machine Translation, the art of building babelfish type systems, but linguistics and computer science just isn’t quite there yet. My intro computational linguistics class had an assignment where we’d have to see what sorts of sentences would break different machine translation systems.

Just for giggles, the first sentence I tried out was one from a funny, although untrue, story. The DoD was spending enormous amounts of money on MT in the fifties, trying to build systems for automatically translating intercepted Russian communications. The general in charge of the program was a devoutly religious man, and he went to see his system demonstrated, proposing that they translate an English sentence to Russian and back again. The sentence he chose was a passage from the bible, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” In the story, the sentence came back, “The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten.” He saw that the translation system was destined for failure and funding was withdrawn.

So I tried out that sentence and got back: “The alcohol becomes ausgebritten, but the meat is weak person.” Pretty doggone close!

Trying another sentence of a sort good at breaking machine translators, “Grandpa Gums flew the coop,” I get back: “The rubbers of grandpapa had robbed the structures.”

Snicker. That was waaaay better than I expected.

Update (6/1): I was just teasing Pete about how Greeks are keen on soccer and know little about baseball, and tossed “foot ball” into babelizer, expecting “pedtesticle,” but got the more creative “Initial end of the foot.”

I’ve got a silly amount of errands that need running today so posting will be light until the evening. I think I’ll just be writing code and listening to the ballgame on the radio this evening, unless something interesting comes up.
In the meantime, check out Scott at Cardnilly’s liveblog of last night’s game. Games at Coors aren’t too bad when the air’s thick with rain. He doesn’t quite do justice to Reggie Sanders amazing play on Hawpe’s near homer in the bottom of the eighth. He made a barehanded catch off the wall and pivoted gracefully into his throw to second. It was pretty amazing. Scott does do an excellent job of highlighting what a sad sack Roger “the Spittin’ Cardinal” Cedeno is. There will be great rejoicing in Redbird Nation when he is no longer on the 25 man roster. Tonight sees Mulder facing Jennings at 8:05. Hopefully the air will be heavy again. Mulder got rocked in his last game in Denver.

My wee sister’s bridal shower and bachelorette party was this past weekend, bringing my family flying in from the East coast. I wasn’t going to attend either chick event, but I made the drive to the Lou to see everybody. I turns out that I blew the surprise last week when I made a post mentioning that I’d be in St. Louis for my sister’s bridal shower. I didn’t know these things were supposed to be secretive. My older sister shot me an email to alter the post (since deleted), but the damage was already done.

It was a great weekend. I got to see my brothers and sisters and their spouses, and my niece and nephew. The dads and I took the wee ‘uns to the Zoo on Saturday. Colin had a great time in the kiddie swing that was masterfully installed from my mom’s deck by Uncle Liam the last time I was in town. That momentarily made me feel like I had accomplished something in life.

On Sunday, I saw the new Star Wars movie, and was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t as godawful as the last two. In fact, I enjoyed parts of it. I thought Anakin’s disfiguration scene was very well done, and the sword fight between Mace Windu and Darth Sidious was very good–lots of closer shots on the faces to capture the essential difference between natural and dark side channeling of the force. Yoda’s fighting style still annoys me to no end, as he’s aggressive and constantly on the attack. In Empire, Obi-Wan remarks to Yoda that Luke is their last hope, and Yoda says something like, “No, another Skywalker there is,” which would indicate that Obi-Wan doesn’t know about Leia even though he was present for her birth. It makes for a better story that he’s there though, so I’m glad for that discontinuity. This prequel trilogy is deeply, deeply flawed, but the last movie was enjoyable enough to have made it worthwhile.

All my collared greens have been eaten by rabbits or a swarm of squirrels or perhaps a woodchuck. Maybe a stray cat. If they don’t look like they’ll come back, I’ll replace ‘em with more peppers. Still pisses me off, though. Damned rabbit/squirrel/woodchuck. Cards host the gNats this weekend.

At the end of my post last night, I mentioned that I’d be spending today playing Zelda and working on the Phonetics system.

I ended up playing Zelda last night until after 5 am. It’s quite a fun game, although there are a few parts where it obnoxiously wants you to do something with a GameBoy, otherwise the game gets a bit harder. You get four Links in the game, and can set them up in formations to mow down swarms of enemies or else operate them independently to solve certain puzzles. I imagine the game was meant for people a big younger than me, since it’s ridiculously easy. You can only carry one item at a time, too. Boomerangs and fire rods are scattered all over the countryside though, so it isn’t that big a problem.

Today saw satisfying progress on the perception study making geegaw. Phase one of the master plan was achieved: to write the prototype cgi files that would represent one run of the experiment. Phase two is to automate the creation of randomized experimental runs from a simple input file, and to log responses. Phase three is to write background scripts to process the data and remove temporary files. Phase four is to make it portable and platform independent. Phase one, clearly, was the easiest of the four, but getting it started and being satisfied with the basic design is a fairly important step forward.

A wascally wabbit came by my vegetable garden at some point this morning and ate the leaves off one of my collared greens. If this happens again, I’m installing Indiana Jones-quality booby traps.

Slightly off-topic, but… Arthur Chrenkoff responds to a Boston Globe news story about how 70 terrorist sympathizers logged on to the al-Qaida message board to post their get-well wishes to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by opening up his comments to anyone who feels like offering their best wishes for him to die and go to hell. I left the 101st comment, which was supposed to read: “Get caught soon, Sheikh! Hang in there!” Unfortunately, the commenting system only publishes a subset of html tags, so the strikethrough wasn’t published on the “in there.”

Haven’t been posting much lately because I’m (mostly) on vacation, and it’s rather boring, so I don’t feel like I have anything interesting to say. I did go in to work today to record a speaker of Spanish from Argentina for a textbook on Spanish phonetics, so I say mostly. But that was a half hour of work. I also found out that a friend of mine included me in the acknowledgements section of her dissertation for some audio work I did for her. That should be two acknowledgements for yours truly from this year alone, as I wrote some scripts for another fellow to manage his data. And a few years ago, I think I was acknowledged from another guy for some help I did with formatting his dissertation. Now I just have to write my own, and I’ll really have accomplished something.

There has been academic progress of late. I’m writing a script that’ll build a dynamic cgi suite for doing perception studies online. Every once in a while, I’ll run across a paper that makes a claim about how people hear things that doesn’t ring true, so I wanted to make a system that would allow linguists to test these things easily and for free. I finished the design today, and mapped out a plan of attack for building the thing. Ideally, it’ll be ready in another week, and I’ll have it up on my server then. I’ll collect data from that for a while, and do some controlled experiments in the lab later in the summer for comparison to see how reliable the internet-acquired data is.

The Cardinals have just swept the Pirates. I went out to watch last night’s (Tuesday’s) 12 inning nailbiter. There’s a lot to say about that game, but I’ll stick to Marquis: he nibbled for his five innings, and threw 112 pitches. In the bottom of the fifth, he was left in to bat with Flores ready to come in to pitch the top of the sixth. The exact same situation for which he was roundly condemned by Philadelphia sportswriters. Although this time Jason doubled to shallow left. He was left on base, but still, it’s nice vindication. Also mentionable is that Yadier Molina hit the game winning RBI, and ugly swat that somehow made it out of the infield. In tonight’s (Wednesday’s) series finale, he went 4-4, and the Cards won 11-5.

I changed the oil in my lawnmower again, and it’s running like a dream now. I trimmed up some of the trees around my crib and weeded. Also fed the garden plants with some emulsified fish. They seem fat and happy. The flowers out front are going nuts, and that bed looks awesome. If I can coax my camera into operation again, I’ll post some pictures. The pitchback in my backyard doesn’t seem as lively as it used to be, or else my arm is weaker than last year. To get a ball to come back to me, I have to chuck it full power. My circle change comes back on the ground every time, and fastballs that would have bounced back and across the street behind me now land just over the fence. That’s what I get for leaving it out all winter.

At the batting cages tonight, I regained my right-handed swing, or what I have for a swing. I changed stances to a lower crouch (following in Yadier’s steps) and found that I could kill that ball reliably like that. From the left side, I stand up more or less straight. Weird. But I’m happy to have back what I barely had last year.

I rented the Zelda: Four Swords game. I’m gonna go check it out, and code up some components to my system on the laptop. I plan to work on those two things all day tomorrow while you dear readers are toiling away at your sinecures.

Tim Blair has a bit of fun with the lyrics to some of the entries into the 2005 Eurovision Song Contest. I have no idea what the contest is supposed to be, seeing as I’m an American bumpkin, but it’s clearly a very lame event. For example, I count four heart-shaped images on their webpage, one of which is in the logo itself. The favicon is a heart shape, as well, which would make five. They may have outsourced their page design to a team of fourteen-year-old Japanese girls.

Robb at Random Redbird Reasoning finally got off his ass after a two week hiatus to post the 1998 edition of Cardinals’ trades under Walt Jocketty. Put simply, he’s evaluating Jocketty’s success by looking at the value of players traded away versus the value of players brought in, where value is measured by total win shares created for the remainder of the players’ careers, post-trade.

Arthur Chrenkoff has posted Good News from Iraq: Part 28, his excellent round-up of underreported news from the Sandbox.

Hamid Karzai wanted to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at Fenway, but the Red Sox couldn’t make it happen. They are so not my favorite AL team anymore. Jumping on the White Sox bandwagon would be a natural extension of my Cubs-loathing, and they have some incredible pitching all the sudden. I think I’ll go back to rooting for the A’s, who have two 2004 Cardinals pitching in key roles for them. In any case, Karzai picked the wrong town. He ought to swing by San Diego before leaving. He’d get a nice reception there, I’m sure.

I got that last link from Second Breakfast, as well as this little questionnaire:

1. Total Number of Books I’ve Owned:

I have no way of estimating. Right now, I’ve got about 200 on the bookshelves in my room. Most of them are textbooks and sci-fi books my pop handed down to me. I don’t buy many books, since I have access to the eighth largest library in the US.

2. Last Book I Bought:

Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee. They didn’t have it in the library.

3. Last Book I Read:

If it can be called a book, The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams. Before that, October 1964 by David Halberstam, and finished up a manuscript of Foundations of Intensional Semantics at about the same time. Both were great books. Right now, I’m reading For Us, the Living by Robert Heinlein. It was written by Heinlein when he had a bigger heart than a brain, a little late as he would have been 30 or 31 when he wrote it. In it, he sets out an isolationist, utopian vision for the future. It’s quite a ways from the TANSTAAFL economic systems of his later books, but I’m only a bit into it, so I withhold judgment for now.

4. Five Six Books That Mean A Lot To Me:

Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien (plus Silmarillion)
Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
Death of Common Sense by Philip K. Howard
Double Helix by James Watson
Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawkings
Blind Man’s Bluff by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew

(Added in Blind Man’s Bluff a few minutes after posting this.)

5. Tag five people and have them do this on their blog:

No. That idea is lamer than Bulgaria’s entry into the Euro♥ision contest:

You’ve got to know that harder the rain, sweeter the pain
I can still remember, Lorraine, in the rain.
Calling you, again and again, I’ll wait for your name,
I can still remember Lorraine in the rain.

Maybe not quite that lame.

I was landscaping again today, so didn’t have to watch the Cardinals lose to the Royals today. Ecky-poo had two errors in the first, and six runs were scored against us in that inning. I did tape the game though, and undoubtedly will be drawn to it later this evening. Can’t miss a good carwreck, ya know. The landscaping went well. Some Easter lillies I’d moved last weekend appear to have survived the transplantation and look healthy. Job’s done.

Time to BBQ a fat steak and some asparagus.

The Major League Baseball first-year player draft will take place June 7 & 8, less than three weeks away. The Cardinals get four picks in the first round + supplemental, two from the Red Sox for Renteria and one from the Giants for Matheny (plus a second round pick for Matheny). That’s some good stuff. John Sickels is highlighting some of the players you’ll likely see drafted, pitchers and hitters. He lists three college outfielders in that “hitters” link.

That’s pretty good considering what we’re seeing out of a young 15th rounder and a fellow picked up in the 13th round a few years back.

While speaking of 15th round pick Anthony Reyes and minor league baseball writer John Sickels, it’s worth linking to this impression of Reyes from Sickels’ website.

A colleague emailed me this hilarious picture today. What makes it even funnier is that the picture isn’t photoshopped. This ship registry published by the Hong Kong government’s marine department lists that ship as a genuine oil tanker.

Appropriate is this audio link from the I’m with Cupid Simpson’s episode.

More funny: Everyone’s no doubt seen the picture by now of the road crew that misspelled “school” while painting a crossing warning on the street. If not, here it is:

Pretty funny, huh? That sort of thing happens to me sometimes. When you’re drawing a word instead of writing it, sometimes you get to thinking a bit too hard and mess up something basic. We had new signs installed today for our office doors. The room I work in had its name changed from G14 to G66, so I got a new sign. The main office used to have a sign which called us the Language Learning Laboratory, but over the past few years, we’ve merged with ATLAS, Applied Technology for Learning in the Arts & Sciences, so we provide services to all of LAS instead of just the foreign language departments. The main office got a new sign, too. It was supposed to read ATLAS, naturally. Alas (alsa?):

It’s generally a bad idea to blog about work, but I’m on vacation now–and it’ll be fixed by the time I’m back anyways.

More funny: Peoria Pundit is blogging spelling mistakes as well.

More yet: Technically 1am Monday, but Keith reminded me of this cartoon that my cousin Christian had alerted me to years ago. Still very funny. Weeeee!

I picked up MVP 2005 from Family Video tonight. Apparently you get to control your minor leagues as well, if you play a whole season. Insane! The last baseball videogame I’ve played was Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball for the Nintendo 64, which was for the 1997 rosters. My roommates in college played the whole season. I’m pretty sure the Cardinals won the series, played by Brian. I chose not to get in on that one. Too big of an obligation to get your games in so everyone else can continue. While looking for the MVP05 webpage, I noticed EA released a NHL 2005. I’d been joking all non-season that NHL05 would be a cross between a golf game and a slightly watered down Grand Theft Auto. EA totally ruined that joke.

Bill Whittle has a new essay up, Sanctuary. I haven’t read it yet, but know from experience that it’ll be worth the hour or so to read, and thought I’d pass the info along immediately.

A few days ago, when I boldly predicted that the Cardinals would have a winning percentage above .666 after Saturday’s game, I anticipated the Cards would drop one against the Phillies. I was wrong, as we lost again today. So move the date back to Tuesday the 24th. Unless Lima, whose wife has big boobies, schools us again on Sunday.

I had a nice trip up to Chicago last night. I went to see my old friend Nick perform in the Unhinged series at Second City. Two teams did sketch comedy and were funny indeed. The other group worked a lot of fart jokes, so their brand of comedy was right up my alley. Afterwards, we drank plenty of beer then walked to Nick’s place to crash, discussing their bits on the way, and Nick told me of how some of the jokes evolved. He’s got some very talented performers on his team, all very funny people. I was tempted to stick around another night to watch the final show of his team at Improv Olympic, but I’d only planned to be up there for the night so didn’t bring enough clean undershorts. Also tempting was the amazing parking spot I found and fought for right on Clark street behind his apartment building. I was loathe to give up that sweet parking spot.

I floated a few inventions to Nick. One was the “french toaster,” a countertop appliance that, naturally, makes French toast. Drop in two slices of bread, and pour some kind of proprietary egg, milk, and cinnamon batter into a hopper on the unit, and a few minutes later some delicious french toast pops out. French toast is awesome. There was some sort of charity footrace being organized outside of 2nd City, and so I’ve gotten to thinking about building an array of human-sized hamster wheels clutched to a flywheel engaging a generator. I figure you get a few hundred people running in them, you could get the flywheel going and sell a few megawatts back into the electric grid, and donate the proceeds to your charity of choice. I think Nick got a kick out of that plan. We’ll be seeking out investors this summer.

It finally rained in Champaign while I was away. My vegetable garden appears to be extremely happy about it. I put in a new batch of peppers last week. One of them is a hot lemon pepper plant, which I’m very excited about putting into salsas and guacs. The plant was extremly immature to put in the ground, it was barely coming out of the dirt in its production pot. I was worried that it wouldn’t make it, but when I checked it upon my arrival from Chi-town, I was happy to see that it is thriving. In just a few days, it’s grown a centimeter and put out a new leaf.

Internet Explorer 7 will feature tabbed browsing. WOWIE F’N ZOWIE!!! I love the finger-knitting, eyebrow-furrowing musing going on in that post. I especially love how the idea of elegantly loading more than one file in the same program is credited back to Microsoft:

In general, I think tabs are a great idea. I liked them a lot in Office dialogs and in Excel in the early 90′s. (I used to work on Office, and I admit we almost added tabs to Word at one point.) I like them in Visual Studio. I think, as an industry, we have a ways to go in refining the experience, consistency, and value of tabs.

Opera puts the address bar inside the tab, Firefox puts it outside the tab. Aside from that, what is there to work out? And does it really need to be worked out? There are, at time of writing, 175 comments on that post. This one gave me a kick:

BTW, I can’t wait for the Slashbots to descend on this one. I’m sure they’ll claim Firefox invented tabbed browsing (as if) and make funny farting sounds while they tell you that “M$ is TEH SUxx0rz”.

I don’t know how the kids make funny farting noises these days, but if I did, I’d key it in here.

Feel free to make me look like an ass, “M$,” but I don’t see much room for improvement in current web-browser technology.

I picked up my first batch of non-academic summer reading from the library today. I’ve got Ted Williams’ “The Science of Hitting,” which is absolutely necessary reading for me. I was at the batting cages with the Bot the other day and was actually missing slow pitch softballs in a cage. He diagnosed that I wasn’t watching the ball in. I’ll learn from Ted and see if it gets me any better in there. Also picked up two books by Robert Anson Heinlein: “For Us, The Living” written from 1938-1939 and published posthumously in 2004, which Dave O. recommended; and “The Rolling Stones” published in 1952. I can’t read the shitmag, but I’ll read this book, which appears to be about a colony on Mars.

I also found and returned the Foundation trilogy, which I’d been charged $125 for losing at the end of the Fall ’04 semester. Now the fine is reduced to $10, which means I have $115 coming my way. On top of a small landscaping job I helped out with yesterday, I’ll soon be $155 wealthier. That’s enough to refinish my floors, if I can sand fast enough for a one-day rental.

Update: Ted’s book sure was easy reading. I finished it over a few brews tonight, then went to try out the techniques in the cages. I hit a hell of a lot better tonight than I did last time. I also found Keith’s comment helpful. Lining up my knuckles kept my elbows open, and those balls got cranked real good. For some reason, I’m still hitting way better from the left side. I stride better into the ball, and I get my hips turned better. From the right side, it feels forced and clunky. It’s a serious kink, yet to be worked out. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to hit the cages some more. Vacations sure do blow.

I will go out on a limb and predict that the St. Louis Cardinals will be double over .500 after Saturday’s game in *spit* Kansas City. The Phillies are playing some good baseball lately, so I figure they’ll manage to steal one of three. Then it’s the rudderless Royals, and then the Pirates at home. We should be lining a nest high above the NL central by the end of May.

Is it sore?

And what’s up with Mabry and Grudzy putting up all our runs lately?

For the second Saturday in a row, the day game isn’t on the WB, nor is WDWS radio carrying the game. This would be a great day to work in the yard, listening to the game on the radio. It really sucks, because the matchup is Pedro Martinez and Mark Mulder–a game that’ll give us a little bit of an answer to whether we addressed the starting pitching weaknesses that got us swept in the world series last season.

So, I’m following the GameCast. Grudzielanek hit a two run homer, and Mulder just struck out Floyd with runners on the corners and two outs in the bottom of the third. Cards lead it 2-0.

Last night’s game was pretty rough. Glavine pitched very well. So did Marquis, but he took a 2-0 loss.

Update: Ugly. Mulder gave up four runs in the bottom of the sixth, and was pulled for Brad Thompson aka Thumpson aka AJ Soprano. In the bottom of the seventh, Scott Seabol pinch hit for Thompson and got his FIRST CAREER BASE HIT off of Heath Bell.