I stayed up all last night working on a project that I though was due today at noon, but turns out to be required tomorrow by noon. Then I fell asleep reading a paper at 4 and woke up at 9. Now I’m so discombobulated that I can’t tell whether I’m tired because it’s late at night or whether it’s because I haven’t had my morning shower yet.

Either way, I’ve got twelve hours to finish up this project, write up two more short reports, and be done with this, my last semester of full-time classroom work.

Next semester, I’m taking one non-independent research class, and it’s going to be very good. The class is Field Methods, and in it we learn how to classify and characterize a language that we encounter out in the great wide world. The professor is a phonologist next semester, so I imagine we’ll be working on the sound system of the language more than the syntax, which pleases me. To practice what we learn in the class, the University hires a student who’s a native speaker of a language that isn’t commonly encountered around here. The candidate languages, from what I remember from a conversation with the department head, are Uzbek, a Russian-influenced language in the Turkic family; Logooli, a Bantu language spoken in Western Kenya; and Berber, an afro-asiatic language spoken in Morocco and Algeria. A colleague of mine put in her vote for Uzbek. Any of the three would work great for me, although I do have a set of Uzbek tapes in the ATLAS audio archive vault at work.

I had a brief meeting with my advisor yesterday and she told me to get some rest over the break because she wants me to submit some papers to major conferences by the end of February. So life’s good.

Time to take that morning shower. Conan O’Brien’s over.

The Cards signed their 1996 first-round draft pick, Braden Looper for a base of 13.5 mega dollars over the next three seasons. He’ll be owed $3.5 next season, which isn’t unreasonable in the current market, and 4.5 and 5.5 M$ the next two summers, which seems high unless you consider the additional revenue streams the new stadium should bring. I like the deal–Looper’s a sure thing to earn the money with his durability. How about this for a bad ‘joke’: Will his jersey number be 127.0.0.1? The kids in the PD forums like Octavio Dotel or Felix Hernandez for the last spot. Either one of those arms would make a very formidable right handed side to the BP.

Speaking of, a commenter at VeB made what must be the Cardinal Sin of Rule 5 drafts: ye shall not speak of Johan Santana. Johan, of course, was plucked from the Astros A-ball league in a bold move after he’d put up an outstanding line in 1999. He toughed it out on Minnesota’s 25-man roster all year in 2000 with a 6.49 ERA over 86 innings, and is now widely recognized as one of the best starting pitchers in the game. The comparison to Juan Mateo is premature, yes, but Mateo’s been a professional pitcher for as long as Santana had when they he was drafted over to the Twins; and they’ve both put up comparably eye-popping numbers at the same stage of development. And Mateo’s two years older when Santana was when he joined the Twins. I’m excited about Mateo’s possibilities of contributing to the club this year and hope Cardinals fans are willing to cut him some slack if he struggles at times.

I learned of some bad news from my referral logs. The recent breach of the Taum Sauk dam in Missouri caused the Johnson’s Shut-Ins state park to badly flood, washing away structures and covering the campsites in mud. Even worse, the children of the park’s superintendent are still hospitalized according to the story. Their house was destroyed when the water came.

I had an adventurous weekend at JSI this summer. Hippies bitched at me for listening to a baseball game (“The commercials are disturbing nate-chur”) and racoons insolently attacked my campsite.

Update: I expect the anti-corporation types are going to throw a hissy-fit once they find out the purpose of the Taum Sauk dam. It’s somewhat unintuitive role: during the nighttime, when the electrical grid draws less power than the power plants are trying to put out, it pumps water up a hill; during the daytime it lets water flow downhill to release some of the power stored the previous night to add more power to the grid than the power plants want to supply. I’ve heard people try to make these sorts of operations sound like a greedy ploy by the power companies to buy low and sell high. That’s not the case.

We’re in the middle of a week long stretch with no Illini basketball. The last game was Saturday against Oregon and the next one isn’t until Sunday, against Coppin State.

The Daily Illini did recently print a column by Dee Brown about his career at the University of Illinois. It’s no 30-point thrashing over a quality opponent, but it’ll tide us over.

HT to IlliniAmy in the stltoday forums.

My last project is due at noon today, in about six and a half hours. I’ve been working on the write-up all night and should have it done in time. After that, I’m done with classes for the semester. I’m a little bit disappointed with the way this project turned out. An important component to the system is a demo version, and so doesn’t give me as robust output as is really needed, so the whole thing is fairly badly hobbled by that bottleneck. It makes it difficult to run reasonable experiments to evaluate its performance.

I’m turning the system in to my advisor, too. It’s a shame that the first major project that I’m handing her is well below my own standards of quality.

But you go to final project write-up with the system you’ve got, not the system that you would like to have in an ideal world with full versions of tools at your disposal.

Update: Make that 22 hours and 26 minutes… The project isn’t due until tomorrow at noon.

Yes, I’m very stupid.

Yes, this is going to help me deliver a product of much higher quality. Think I’ll nap for a coupla hours before jumping back on the horse.

These kids are some truly fantastic athletes.

Via Dave Barry.

Jeff sent me a link to this story about a gal who’s tenth skydiving (and first solo) jump went very badly. There’s video included with the story, but by the time the camera gets on her, she’s already cut her main and is descending under her reserve canopy. She says, “I didn’t know what to do to fix it. I didn’t know how to make it stop.”

I call that poor training, if she wasn’t instructed how to get out of that. I’ve only made six or seven jumps, and I’d know how to get out of that situation. It looks like her left toggle is in half brake, and her right toggle is in the full up position, causing her to spiral to her left. Probably, all that happened was that the right toggle on her reserve canopy broke free of its velcro. Even if she couldn’t get a hold of it to bring the right side of her canopy into half brake to even out the aerodynamic characteristic of the ‘chute, thus leveling out the flight path, she could have steered using the back risers. Or she could have released the left toggle from half brake. Either way, she should have known how to get her canopy under control. Better training should have kept her from even considering resigning herself to certain death.

The spooky thing is that she looked a lot like my little sister before the fall.

My ML4NLP team presented our project tonight, so that’s one more project out of the way. This was a textual entailment system: given a text and a hypothesis, the task is to determine whether the hypothesis is true of the text is. My contribution was a module that tried to do some theorem proving using a semantic role tool and prolog. It didn’t work so good, but has potential. The task is a very difficult one. The week before, my computation morphology team submitted our final project. We’d built a system for aligning inflected forms with their stems. Ours performed very well on English; for the final project we made the system more robust and tested it on Hindi. It worked very well, but Hindi past tense morphology is very, very regular so that is not a great accomplishment.

On Thursday, my last project is due. It’s an answer verification system, somewhat similar to the textual entailment module and using many of the same tools. It’s a component of a question-answering system, something like an advanced search engine that returns sentences that answer the natural language question you give it instead of documents that contain the keywords you searched for in a standard search engine. The answer verification module ranks the answer passages returned by how likely they answer the question you’d asked. Interesting stuff, and a difficult problem.

And after that, I’m free for a little while. I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on over break. My office has turned into a train wreck, and needs some organizing very badly. And I need to backup and wipe my harddrives that are starting to fill up with data, slowing down processing times.

And of course, some recreation is in order. Bobovski lent me some excellent books recently. The first was Clifford Simak’s, Waystation. My dad had given me a few boxes of his old SF books a few years ago, and one of them is Simak’s City. I liked Waystation a whole lot, so figure I’ll finally get around to reading the one that’s been gathering dust on my shelf. The other book Bobo’d lent me is Jack McGevitt’s Omega, one of the best books I’ve read in a few years. Here’s a review from someone who liked it, here’s one from someone who didn’t. (I think the second reviewer is overreacting.) The book’s full of nifty details that are a treat to catch. So I figure I’ll go pick up another of his books. And of course, I liked it because many of the story’s heroes are linguists. Next up, I think I’ll go with his first book, The Hercules Text.

Check out the end of the first paragraph in this woman’s obituary.

Wow.

Via Cardsrul at VEB.

This movie is very, very funny.

It fulfills at least 3 of the six necessary elements for humor, as described by Scott Adams. It’s bizarre, clever, and cruel.

So I’ve been musing senselessly that a good, plausible trade for the Cardinals would be a three team deal in which the Cards send Jason Marquis and Stu Pomeranz to Arizona, the Diamondbacks send Javier Vazquez to the Mets and Carlos Quentin to the Cardinals, and the Mets send Kris Benson to the D’Backs and Kaz Matsui and $2 million towards his salary to the Redbirds.

Alas, MLBTradeRumors says in a post about Corey Patterson to AZ that the D’Backs “will not part with” Carlos Quentin. Not sure if that means they consider Quentin to be untouchable or whether they’re not interested in making him part of any Patterson-related offers from the Cubs.

Also at MLBTR, speculation as to which starter the Cards might sign now that Matty Mo has moved on. They recommend former Tiger Jason Johnson for 2 years at $11 million. I pulled up a comparison of four “available” pitchers: Jason Marquis, Javier Vazquez, Jason Johnson, and my pick as a FA signing for the Cards, Jamey Wright (at one year $850,000 or so). Wright leads the four in ground-out to fly-out ratio (1.93), and is second behind Vazquez in K/9 (5.31). He’s second of the four in HR/9 (Wright-1.15, Vazquez-1.46, Marquis-1.26, Johnson-0.99), and that’s pitching at Coors, the #1 hitters’ park. Comerica in Detroit is #21 by ESPN’s reckoning, which makes up for the difference. Wright’s biggest problem is walks. Last season, he walked 4.26 batters per nine innings, compared to [V-1.92, M-3.0, J-2.1] for the other three pitchers. He pitched fifteen innings for Dave Duncan with the Cardinals in 2002.

He was refused arbitration from the Colorado Rockies last week and made $550,000 last season and $300,000 in 2004. He’d be cheap, he fits in with our pitching philosophy of keeping the ball on the ground, and he’d allow us to trade a starter and open up salary for an outfielder or two sacker.

One last unrelated point. If the Cards sign Jaque “No S for You!” Jones, we’ll have an all lefty OF to go with our almost-all lefty bullpen.

Pass.

Matty Mo ain’t coming back.

From the same article, the Cards are about to sign Ricardo Rincon, an Oakland loogy. Over the past three years, he’s blown 9 saves in as many opportunities. He was also offered arbitration by Oaktown, so we send BB some draft picks.

Illinois played an outstanding game tonight, blowing the Ducks out of the water 89-59. Illinois defended and passed about as well as they did in the first half of the Georgetown game, but shot far, far better (.507 vs. .323 shooting).

Having some trouble with a project tonight. My team presents it on Monday, and we’ve got a meeting Sunday afternoon. Ideally, I’d like to have it done before that meeting. Tough problem though. Lots of moving parts that need to be fit together.

Not talking is no way to communicate. So don’t sit, and cry, for expectations. Haul your eyes to screen with Falipornia Speech Therapy Institute. Who did is me, and super-professional. Yup!

(The rest of their videos are hilarious too. Naturally, I liked the Kung-Fu one a whole lot.)

The Cards picked up Juan Mateo from the Cubs as a Rule 5 draft pick. From memory, that means we need to keep him on the 25 man roster all season (or the DL, I think) or else we have to send him back to the Cubs and pay them some amount of money–I think $50,000 or up one order of magnitude.

Mateo’s statline is outstanding. But his outstanding statline was earned in A-ball. This means the Cards, should they keep him for the season, will have to carefully protect him. He’ll only go out against batters we think he can handle, and in non-crucial situations. Hopefully word gets around that if you face Mateo, we think you’re an easy out… Might get the batters over-anxious, especially since we’d only be sending him against batters that are easy outs. I could see it working out, and hopefully better than the successfully managed rule five draft of Hector Luna did. Scott points out that Hector’s not showing much in the Dominican League this winter.

Let me make an insane prediction… In the next two weeks, the Cards, Mets, and Diamondbacks will engage in a mega-deal that sends Jason Marquis, Chris Lambert, and Kris Benson to AZ, Javier Vazquez to the Mets, and Carlos Quentin and Kazuo Matsui to the Cardinals. (And ideally some cash from the Mets for taking Matsui’s $8 million contract off their hands.)

That trade would make me happy. We’d pick up a potentially incredible corner outfielder and a potentially excellent second baseman. I think Matsui could learn quickly how to field from Jose Oquendo and how to bat from Hal, So, Jimmy, and Albert. I expect the Mets and Diamondbacks would be happy with those two deals as well.

We’d need a fifth starter. I’d be content with a second-time project like Jamey Wright. He badly needs a change of scenery, was one of the losingest starting pitchers in baseball last year, when he made only $550,000. We could probably sign him for that much on a one year deal. Check this out: Wright’s ground-out:fly-out ratio was 2.06! That ranks him 7th in Major League Baseball, just after A.J. Burnett and ahead of Chris Carpenter. He also collects 5.31 strikeouts per nine innings, which ranks him 61st in MLB, right ahead of the Soup.

Let’s look at it financially: the Cards shed the 5 or 6 million Marquis will make next year in arbitration, pick up (at worst) $8 million dollars in Matsui, while adding a pitcher and star-quality outfielder for a million combined. And bingo! There’s your friggin’ lineup! For an extra 3-4 million tops.

Update: I suppose the Mets are going to have to stew for a bit before they realize the market for Matsui is rather dry. Ideally, Matt Morris will decline arbitration when it becomes clear that we’ll not offer him the three year deal that he wants and that happens soon enough that we can pick up Jamey Wright on the cheap. That way we could at least be in a position to trade a more expensive starter for an outfielder, should a decent one exist.

Update2: Pip at Fungoes says the Mets would be willing to pick up half of Matsui’s salary next season. Assuming the D’Backs are truly willing to part with Carlos Quentin, how could we not trade Marquis and Wainwright or Pomeranz for Quentin, Matsui, and four million bucks?

The low temperature today was two below zero and we’re slated to get 3-5 inches of snow tomorrow. I felt sick all day, and so took it off to rest and eat 2000 mgs of vitamin C. With a 9am presentation tomorrow, however, I’m unlikely to sleep much tonight, so who knows how much good it will have done. At least I’ll be awake when the snow begins to fall. Should be beautiful.

Cards started to make some moves today. Reggie Sanders and Julian Tavarez weren’t offered arbitration today, so they won’t be on the team next year. Mark Grudzielanek had a clause in his contract that we wouldn’t offer him arbitration, so he’s gone. Likely to the Mets, who should have a killer infield next season. I think we should have taken a shot on Reggie. He’s a hell of a guy and was cheated out of his 2005 season by unfortunate injuries. The Cards did offer arbitration to Matt Morris, so we can either sign him for another season or get a compensatory draft pick when he signs elsewhere (likely the Giants.) In a way I’d prefer, for Matt’s sake, that he signs a long term contract with another team. If we end up signing him, that’s fine with me… he’s better than any FA pitchers left on the market.

Unfortunately, Ray King was traded to the pitcher’s purgatory in Colorado. We get back a poor hitting 28 year-old two bagger, Aaron Miles, and a decent 28 year-old outfielder, Larry Bigbie. This trade and the players we got back are discussed at Viva el Birdos. lboros expects Miles to join Bodhi Hart in Memphis, but I could see him platooning at 2nd with Luna, seeing as he’s a switch hitter. (Then again, he hits RHPs considerably better than southpaws.) But a David Eckstein-Aaron Miles DP tandem would lead the league in scrappiness. Cue Beavis. Also in the same post at VeB is a tantalizing rumor/bit-o’-speculation/load-o’-horse-manure:

The Cards are trying to work out the details on a trade that would send Jeff Supan[sic], Jason Marquis, and two pitching prospects (Wainright[sic]/Lambert)to the D-Backs for Javier Vasquez and two prospects. One of the prospects is believed to be one of[sic] the D-Backs[sic] top OF prospects, Carlos Quentin.

Wow! It remains to be seen whether St. Louis would be an acceptable place for the unhappy Javier Vazquez to land, but he’d be a fantastic addition to the rotation if he would sign on to the deal. Carlos Quentin was ranked by John Sickels as the number one prospect in the Diamondbacks’ farm system. Giving up both Jason Marquis, Jeff Suppan and the crown jewel of the Drew & Marerro trade, Adam Wainwright, is a lot to give up. Too much, especially if AZ doesn’t chip in some cash to even out Vazquez’ bloated salary. If this trade went through as described, we’d have only four starting pitchers, assuming Anthony Reyes makes the team. So we’d need to either sign Morris quickly or rush along one of the minor-leaguers, either Pomeranz or Gissell.

Joe Strauss is all over things at the Post-Dispatch. An excellent article covering all that’s been discussed above, and adding this:

Also, trade talks with the Arizona Diamondbacks regarding pitcher Javier Vasquez have stalled and apparently crashed when the Diamondbacks refused to assume any portion of his salary.

In Walt I Trust.

They may be doing an outstanding job tearing down Busch Stadium II, but the Ahrens Contracting company can’t make a website for shite.

They’re way ahead of schedule. Parts of the Ballpark Village very well might be in place for opening day.

Well that wasn’t fun while it lasted… Maybe I’ll wake up to an early Christmas.

I got an email from Prairie Biker this morning, the gentleman who writes the Lone Tree on the Prairie blog, saying that his blog had mysteriously been deleted on Friday evening. Since then the url has been picked up by someone else. He’s trying to get it restored by blogger, which will be complicated by the fact that someone else is squatting on his spot. So I’m delinking the site until this gets sorted out.

I wonder if the Birds on the Bat Girl site was similarly booted off the intrawebs as it mysteriously disappeared without warning last week, too.

Update: Wow. All of the blogger and blogspot servers were down for the past five hours. Between that and deleting hilarious or Cardinals-related blogs, it’s a wonder they’ve got any paying customers left.

I’m not sure which makes me want to vomit more: the first comment to this post at Hawspipe, or this Busch Stadium Tribute song linked from Birdbrain.

In any event, I have some cleaning up to do around here. Half digested pizza sauce is bound to leave a stain.

Well, I was expecting to find out whether or not AJ Burnett would be signing with the Cardinals by today. No news. The winter meetings of general managers will take place Monday through Thursday this week, and it would have been better for the Cards to know whether that $10 million bucks per year is locked up in Burnett or not.

Well now, with Rafael Furcal signing with the Dodgers for a huge amount of cash, the Cubs have reportedly turned some interest towards Burnett. If Arkansas native, self-described Cardinals fans were to take more money to play for the Cubs, then I guess we’d know that the team would be better off without him.

I have a scenario playing out in my head that granted me a few fleeting moments of amusement:

The Cubs sign Burnett to the 5 year, $65 million contract his agent is demanding. He’s uneasy about the deal and deep down knows that he’s betrayed everything that he’s ever loved in life. Then on the day of his first start of the 2006 season, April 7th at Wrigley against the Cardinals, Walt Jocketty is sitting in the front row behind home plate. And sitting beside Walt, Vincenzo Pentangeli-like, is A.J.’s older brother P.W. Burnett, wearing a look of horror, shame, and disgust.

A.J.’s first uncertain pitch to David Eckstein is well outside the strikezone. He gets the ball back, shakily looks up into the sky. Looks at his brother. Looks at the Cubs emblem on his uniform. Looks at the dirt.

His second pitch is a meatball that Eck jacks onto Waveland. He’s sprinting to third when Baker emerges from the dugout enraged. He barks at Burnett, who plays dumb. He sees Jocketty and directs his fury at him. “I’m going to find out what the hell happened here,” he says. “Who is that gentleman sitting to your left, Jocketty.”

And so did A.J. Burnett’s career end–a disaster but with his honor intact. And the Cubs were out $65 million clams.

And glasses were raised from that day forth to A.J. Burnett throughout Cardinal nation.