Wow. Illinois football has been outscored 77-5 over the past two games. Next week, we’re playing Northwestern, ranked 25 in the country this past week, although might sink after losing badly to the Buckeyes today. Not only that, but if this guy’s numbers are to be trusted, the Illini defense broke their previous record of 398 points in a season allowed, set in 2003. With the 37 points we gave up today, we’ve allowed 421 points so far, with another game against a quality opponent yet to play.

How did it get this bad? Seriously, man. We’ve won only one conference game in the past three seasons. (I was there! Saw it with my own eyes!)

More recent news is that the NCAA had rejected Illinois’ appeal against that august body’s claims that Chief Illiniwek is “hostile and offensive.” On the “Chief Issue,” most people fall into one of four camps: some people hate the Chief and want him to go away, some people love the Chief and want him to stay, some people couldn’t care less about the Chief but hate listening to the anti-Chief crowd’s noisemaking enough to want the Chief to go away, and some people couldn’t care less about the Chief but don’t want to see anyone give in to the bully tactics of the anti-Chief crowd (and now the NCAA). I fall into the last category, and most of the people I regularly associate with fall into either the hate-the-Chief or shut-up-the-protesters crowds. Much like the Graduate student unionization, I look at it as a resume-padding operation. The union of grad students will end up doing the school more harm than good, but it gives the class of agitators something neat to put on their resumes: was instrumental in unionizing 13,000 graduate students or however many of us there are. Same thing with the chief. The agitators want to be the ones to accomplish this great thing: contributed to sanitization of cultural landscape/showed some down-state yahoos the error of their ways. I’m not sure how significant the loss of revenue from alumni contributions would be if the administration caved, but it would be something. And the agitators won’t be writing out checks, the University to them will always be racist and patriarchal (or whatever the current dirty words are in the post-modern literature… Imperialist? Colonial?). [Updated: Something else I object to are the chief-critics simultaneous accusations of the Chief being some kind of racist symbol while using expressions like "some white guy." Another one that gets me is when people counter claims that all aboriginals are hostile to schools naming their teams things like "Fighting Illini" or "Fighting Sioux" with polls showing that the opposite is the case, and then the anti-Chief folks will say things like, those people polled weren't adequately educated on the issue. Meaning: they haven't been properly indoctrinated into the victim cult. I suppose that it's inevitable that the Chief is retired for reasons lain out in this paragraph. But retirement is not death, so encourages David Yeagley. (A side note: I tend to be a bit more sympathetic to campaigns to change the names of teams called things like "redskins" or "savages" than Yeagley seems to be.)]

But like I said, it’s not all bad. I did get my lawn mowed today. Had to learn how to tune the carburator, but now the little sucker’s purring fairly nicely.

That and basketball starts in less than a week.

Then again, the Blues really, really suck! There’s always the chance we’ll pull out of this skid tonight against the Nashville Predators, for our first road win and third overall. But I’m not counting on it anymore than a win against Northwestern next weekend.

The Cardinals radio play-by-play man for the past three years, Wayne Hagin, was not re-signed to a contract, and the 2006 season will have the plays called by John Rooney.

I kinda liked Wayne, and looking at who Rooney is, I think the Cards weren’t punishing Hagin for a foolish comment he made to ESPN Radio early in the season, but merely upgrading at the position. Just business, Wayne.

Rooney was apparently quite popular with the White Sox fans.

The hot-stove season is still mighty cold. Icy cold, even.

Update: Jim in the comments reminds me of how much a fan of Mike Shannon I am. And so I present you with these links to Shannonisms and other great things Shannonesque:

Brian Gunn’s tribute to Moon Man

KHITS List

Rockin Redbirds’ The Glory that is Shannon

And in a slightly different vein:

Scott’s Mike Shannon Appreciation Days

Today is the 230th birthday of the Marine Corps. Last night, my cousin was telling me about the traditions in celebration of the USMC birthday: every Marine will eat steak and lobster tonight to celebrate, and a cake will be presented jointly by the youngest and oldest Marine present. This post is collecting messages for wounded Marines at Landstuhl hospital, although it’s probably too late by now to add anything, their time. (Not to discourage that.)

I reckon I’ll have to tip back a few cold ones in thanks.

Struggling with a cranky lawnmower will make a fellow thirsty.

Chris Carpenter was awarded the 2005 NL Cy Young just now. He’s only the second Cardinal to win the award, following the great Bob Gibson.

And we’ve got him signed for a below-market contract for three more years. W00T!

I got my lawnmower to start with the help of some Seafoam added to the crankcase and gas tank. Runs pretty good now. I mowed a little section of my yard. Killed a garter snake that was hiding in the grass. I replaced the bolt that holds the blade on with one that’s got a smaller head than the old one I broke off, and it looks like it’s slipping through the washer it’s sitting on. So I decided to call it quits for the day and get a new bolt. Gotta head to class and work first though. The weather’s supposed to be nice again tomorrow, so I suppose I’ll head home between my last class and a five o’ clock meeting to finish cutting the grass.

There was an episode of King of the Hill when Hank catches Bobby doing something weird-assed and he sends him to his room. Later he goes up there and hands Bobby a carburetor and says, “This is a carburetor. Take it apart, put it back together; repeat until you’re normal.”

When my grandpa was a kid in Kearny, NJ, less than 100 years ago, there weren’t many cars on the road. He told me stories about tabogganing down the streets of Kearny in the wintertime and driving a horse-cart full of bricks to build St. Cecilia’s church. Don’t hit that last link, hit this one. I’ll have to go there this Christmastime and check things out. It looks like I should pick up some Portuguese first.

What exactly is nuclear waste? Gasoline is nothing but waste components of crude oil that bright folks have over the years figured out how to harness energy from. If this nucular waste shit is emitting enough energy to be dangerous to bystanders, oughtn’t we be figuring out a way to capture it and return it to the grid? A steady energy emitter is more reliable than wind, eh?

This city has big buildings. I like food. Bye.

Not so Bye yet: I was pokin’ around and found this very fine post about KOH. The syndicated episode of King of the Hill that’ll be on FOX here tomorrow at 5:30 is the one where Hank shakes then Texas Gov Bush’s hand and finds it less than firm. They seem to play that one a lot around here.

It may not be so interesting to some people, but this post was for me a fairly exciting mystery, with a shocking conclusion. (The sequels end up as a case study in Finagle’s Law.)

In any event, you should avoid allowing your Sony music CDs to install software on your ‘puter, at least until they cut ties with the First 4 Internet outfit.

Or you could stop buying the shit record labels shovel and just check out your local music scene. The future is live, baby.

With the regular-season portion of Illinois Basketball starting up a week from Friday, and exhibition games going on now, I decided it was time to dust off the old Illini Basketball list o’ links. Blogging is more widespread each year than the one before, and after an incredible 2004 basketball season, there figure to be some rookie Illini fan-bloggers joining the list before the next few weeks are out.

The greatest of them all, Big Ten Wonk, has already shaken off the mothballs and hit the court running with pre-season capsules–here’s the one for Illinois.

Thank God. Life without baseball has left my days hollow and incomplete. At least free agents can start moving around on Thursday. That’ll give us something to talk about.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Found at Jaboobie.

I just realized that I need to present a paper at 9am tomorrow.

At least I’ve got a good football game to watch while I’m preparing it.

Update, 11am: It went oll korrect.

It dawned on me today why I’d wanted so badly to shave my beard off. I received in the mail a notice from the city that I’m a Class I public nuisance because I haven’t mowed my lawn in a while. Long enough, at least so that the grass is more than 8″ high according to measurements apparently made by the city’s Public Works officers. Something inside me was saying, nay–screaming, “L-Train,” for L-Train is what I am called in my internal monologue, “L-Train, mow the lawn… Mow the lawn!!!”

But I wasn’t hearing properly, and thought it said, “Mow the maw.” And so I shaved my beard off.

You may recall that I’m really stupid and forgot what counter-clockwise means. Couple my stupidity with my unnatural strength and what have you got? A broken lawn mower. That’s what you’ve got. Fortunately, I know someone who’s not really stupid and he’s agreed to back the broken piece of bolt out for me.

You might be saying, Operation Blight Abate II is a real downer compared to the last one. That one rocked!

Fear not! My roommate recently “got bored” and hacked down all the undesireably plants in the yard and pruned the trees, and so I’ve got a pile of brush in the backyard that’s ready to be used as fuel in a fire to be used for cooking and recreation, as per Section 11-19(2)(3) from the City Code.

And isn’t it quaint that they use the word “drunkard” in Section 3-4? I like how you can’t sell booze to people in need of mental treatment. I’d say that’d rule out half the customers in the watering holes at which I tend to be found.

Check out the latest comment to this post. It seems that Hey… Listen! is finally generating the 14-year-old-girl traffic that it’s long been needing:

OMG SPECIALLY ANDY PETTITTE ,HES SUCH A HOTTIE,, OH AND BRANDON BACKE ,, WHAT A BABY FACE,, OH DONT FORGET BRAD AUSMUS,, OHHH BABY WHO CAN FORGET THAT GORGEOUS FACE OF YOURS,, CRAIG BIGGIO ,, YEAH HES IN MY HOTTIE LIST ,, YEA AND SO IS ENSBERG,, I LOVE ALL THE PLAYERS!!

What about Ezequiel Astacio? Who can forget that mug?

Finally, FINALLY, I can start cashing in on the lucrative My Little Pony blog-ad market!

I’ll be living the dream!

She also makes an interesting observation regarding the relative poverty of the English language’s pronoun inventory, in that it lacks an obvious way to distinguish between inclusive and exclusive 1st-person-plurals.

THE WAY WE WERE PALYING (WELL NOT WE INCLUDING ME , BUT YOU KNOW THE ASTROS !! )…

Many languages do have different words like we, where one includes the speaker and the other excludes him. A friend of mine works on Aboriginal American languages that have fairly elaborate pronoun inventories. Some Humanities people make outlandish claims about languages with large pronoun inventories, drawing on a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

One of the more useful services out there on the intrawebs, Bugmenot, has allowed their domain name registration to lapse.

I’m surprised it hasn’t already been snatched up by one of the papers.

Update: Never mind that. It’s back up now.

Obviously, I can’t sleep.

Today was one of the most beautiful days I’ve seen in a long time. I slept in until 10, then sat around drinking coffee and reading for a couple of hours. Then I paid some bills and drove through some of the more lovely tree-lined neighborhoods in Urbana. Trees were gorgeous, air was in the mid sixties, bossa nova played on my car stereo. Interesting discussion in my 2:00 seminar. Then I worked until 10:30 and wrote that LSM during downtime. Ate some kebabs at Embassy, thought about prepositional phrase attachment, and socialized with some of the good people of CU. Met a retired ironworker who’s moving to Sarasota tomorrow morning to live by his daughter and get to know his grandkids. Then I went home to tweak some code that’d been itching me all night.

It’s going to be getting up into the seventies the next two days.

I’ve been thinking about crossword puzzles a lot lately. Sometimes I think that the computational linguistics we do is analogous to filling in crossword puzzles based on the frequency of three, four, five,… letter words and backtracking until the puzzle is full. There’re clues out there to make solving the problem easier, but exploiting them is hard work, and takes a lot of real-world knowledge. As you acquire knowledge on the fly, the problem gets progressively better known, and your heuristics and tricks work all the better for it. That’s what makes the Brill tagger work, even though it’s operating on a very simple problem.

I’m shaving my beard off before I go to sleep.

I have to wake up in three hours.

The Soup will be back. We picked up his $4 mil option for next season. Marquis should be in arbitration now. One of them will be traded away. We’re too expensive at the back end of the rotation, so say the wizened pundits, and I agree. It might be Soup. Picking up his option just means we can trade him, instead of paying him the million dollar buy-out and picking up a draft pick from whoever would have signed him in free agency.

Also, Jim Edmonds was awarded his eighth gold glove for his outstanding play in center field. Next year, we pick up four gold gloves. Edmonds, Pujols, Rolen, and Molina. And at least two silver sluggers from that same group. (I’m thinking Molina bags one.)

Is to write a weighted Levenshtein distance similarity model. It is to take as input an inflected word and a list of candidate stems and return the candidates in a list ranked by minimum edit distance.

Minimum edit distance is the fewest cost in insertions, deletions, and replacements to transform one string into another. In the simple case, all operations have the same cost; in this model, operations will have variable costs, so swapping vowel for vowel has a lower cost than swapping a vowel for a consonant. I’ll also have a special low-cost operation for consonant doubling and make it possible to add additional such ad-hoc costs as needed to tune the model to some language’s morphological rules (English in this case, for now… later on, Hindi).

Update: Success! Accuracy of 86%; mean reciprocal rank of 0.897.

I started reading a new book the other day called Ringworld by Larry Niven. I’m about a third through it and am unimpressed. The writing is nonsensical at times, and it’s hard to visualize what’s being described. I blame the author, and not myself for this.

The last good sci-fi book I read was Spinneret by Timothy Zahn. One of the more intriguing aspects of the book, in which advanced technology from a lost, alien civilization is discovered out there in space, was the work to decode the alien language in order to use the equipment. A review said that this was not the best example of this sort of storyline in Science Fiction out there. I’d like to read those books that the reviewer neglected to name. Anyone know of any such books?

Another source of entertainment of late has been the Lost television show on ABC. That’s a truly impressive program. I’ve only watched the first two, and the last episode of season one, but I’m intrigued. Great storytelling.

The presentation went decently. I neglected to mention a few key points until the Q&A.

Here’s an excellent tip if you’re a Mac user on a network and get sick and tired of creating those ghastly .ds_store files all over the place.

I’ve got a presentation to give tomorrow. I have fifteen minutes to present a pretty important paper, so it’s gotta be dense and well-prepared. I’m one of those things.

Here’s a couple of stories I noticed while wasting time procrastinating:

From the St. Louis Post Dispatch: All three of the girls who murdered an old friend’s mother will be tried as adults. It’s hard for me to accept, it’s so terrible. I hadn’t seen her in close to ten years and she’d been working hard to improve the lives of people in her community.

In the NYT, of all places, is a nice profile on Samuel Alito. (Linked by Instapundit)

Here’s a nice story about a creative orthodontist, and a good man, in Ohio. (Via April)

A thorough (-ly amusing) end-of-season report card on the Cardinal infielders from Scott.