Wisconsin hosts Illinois at 6:00 tonight. Here’re the game notes.

I watched the Illinois @ Wisconsin game at Mike n’ Molly’s last year. Since that went so well, I think I’ll head up there to see if it helps again this year.

Time to cook up some Badger stew.

I just did a site search for a post I’d written in 2002 and discovered that my archives prior to April 20, 2002 were all erased since google’s most recent snapshot. Wowie. I requested they do that a long time ago, and all it did was cost me control over the content. It wasn’t deleted from the server, but I couldn’t edit it anymore. Now it’s gone. Sayonara, archives!

Harumph. Looks like a spamblog took over my old, old archives too. That’s annoying.

I’ll have to delink myself when I get a chance.

I think this violates fair use, but there’s not much there:

Police in Urbana are looking for a driver who they say hit and killed a person walking down the street and drove off. It happened near the corner of Airport Road and Landis Farm Drive in northeastern Urbana. Police say they’re looking for a Toyota SUV or pickup with passenger side damage that’s missing a side mirror. Someone driving by the area found the body around six o’clock Monday evening. Police found a side mirror from a car on the road nearby. The victim was a black woman in her 40s, but police can`t release her name until family members are notified.

Airport road is on the northern edge of the Farm and Fleet property, and just south of the Frasca airport. Landis Farm Drive must be a private road, as it doesn’t show up on any maps I’ve got.

Update: “He was alone in his car. He knew he had hit something,” [Police Sgt.] Seraphin said. “He goes about his business and then gets home later in the evening.”

Unfortunately, I regularly eat both of these foods mentioned:

“[T]he ingredient that gives Dannon Boysenberry yogurt and Tropicana Ruby Red Grapefruit juice their distinctive colors comes from crushed female cochineal beetles.
…
[T]he Food and Drug Administration is expected to publish a food-labeling proposal online today that would require companies to disclose when a food contains beetle-derived colorings.“

Quit being such a bunch of wusses! Crushed beetle carapace made me grow big n’ strong, am I not right?

I really am a big fan of unconcentrated grapefruit juice and boysenberry in both its yogurt flavoring and pancake syrup forms.

The Year of the Cock ended on Sunday, leaving us in the Year of the Dog.

For lunch today, I bought carry-out from Basil Thai in Urbana, a new restaurant in the building that recently shot up in between Oregon and Nevada streets south of Krannert. While I was waiting for them to cook up the grub, I admired the impressive plants they had growing in pots near the entrance. I’m certain that the two on the counter were fake plants, as they were too perfect looking. The rest were real, and some were thriving. Something else I noticed was that bowls of rice and glasses of water or tea were set on shelves in front of small statues of what I presume to be gods or bodhisattvas or whatever.

I suspect it has something to do with the Chinese New Year… Pretty interesting. I’ll have to remember to check if the statues have their own food the next time I pop in there, or whether this is something that only happens around the New Year.

In class today, I pulled up Peter Ladefoged’s webpage to get some formant values for cardinal vowels for comparison purposes and was unpleasantly surprised to find out that he passed away last Tuesday. Peter Ladefoged was a truly great man, and I urge you to check out the page UCLA set up for him and read some of the stories there.

I never met him, of course, and only know him from his textbooks and stories that are told about his life and his work. Enough to know that I would have greatly enjoyed meeting him.

Somehow I missed all three posts at Language Log about it.

David Gassko offers some clarifications on his pitching runs created measure.

The Fighting Illini have lost only one game at home since seniors Dee Brown and James Augustine came to the University of Illinois–that was on January 10th, 2004. In fourteen minutes, we’ll take on Purdue at home in a game that everyone expects Illinois to win easily. There’s a grave risk that ‘everyone’ will include the players themselves, who could understandably be looking ahead to the big game Tuesday in Wisconsin.

So this should be an interesting game. I’ll be looking for more of the balanced offensive play we’ve been seeing lately. Hopefully we blow it wide open early and get to work in some of the younger players.

If that doesn’t interest you, here’s a story about a giant octopus who tried to either eat or mate a mini-submersible.

After the game: No need to have worried there. A fantastic game, with offense from all over the floor and aggressive defense to force turnovers. We’ve got quite an arsenal of weapons now, with Dee and Smith slashing and nailing threes; McBride mastering the mid-range jumper; and Auggie, Pruitt, and Marcus Arnold scoring down low and drawing fouls. We even managed to work in a walk-on in the closing seconds of the game. Chris Hicks, you’ve earned yourself a permanent place in U of I basketball history. Congratulations! This team is truly starting to gel. The passing looked very good today. Tuesday’s game should be a blast.

In the recent past, I spent a lot of time reading, thinking, and writing about anaphora, but unfortunately not in that order. One of the classical problems in anaphora theory are the Donkey sentences. If you want to translate a natural language like English compositionally into a formal language like first order predicate logic, you’ve got a problem with sentences like, “every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.” Without doing something uncomfortably unprincipled, you’ll end up with either a free variable getting beaten or one arbitrary donkey getting beaten by all donkey-owning farmers. Terrible, violent stuff, right?

Taking it up a notch, one of the seemingly popular sentences to work on in my thesis problem involves a man beating his wife, as in: “It surprised Mary that Fred hesitated to stop beating his wife.” Another crucial example from a paper I read tonight involves a fellow peeping through a window to see what kind of underwear a Mormon woman is wearing.

How strange must have been 1973.

David Gassko has an article in Hardball Times about his Pitching Runs Created metric. It takes the intuition that a run saved is not equal to a run scored and runs with it to create a way of measuring the absolute contribution to a club from each pitcher. I urge you to read the whole article, and download the data that he provides, but to cartoonishly summarize: having very good pitching allows your team to win games having scored fewer runs than another team with worse pitching would have had to score against the same opponent. His technique attempts to quantify this value that a pitcher contributes. Via Fungoes added these PRC figures for Cardinals pitchers to their offensive contributions, and finds that Chris Carpenter is the second most valuable Cardinal, between Pujols and Edmonds. The method is reasonable, and the results match my intuitions.

In the latest edition of Derrick Goold’s Postcards on his blog, he says that he’ll be doing daily updates there during Spring Training.

I only mention this because I suggested he do it that way last year. It’s tough being so far ahead of the pack, baby.

I debated posting links to these pages, but what the hell… It’s their responsibility to manage their public images. Apparently, many of the younger Cardinals have “myspace” pages. It’s difficult to describe how awful these pages are in words, but fortunately a hyperlink potentially speaks billions of them.

A poster at the P-D Cards Talk forum posted a link to John Rodriguez’ profile. I suspect that the true cause of Carlos Zambrano’s “tennis elbow” might have come from trolling around in the links to Johnny Rocket’s “friends.” I’m guessing JR spends quite a bit of time over the river in Sauget.

Then there’s one of the few bullpen candidates without an obvious righty-lefty splits problem, Ty Johnson. He appears to be dating Al Hrabosky’s daughter, so we’ll have to keep a close eye on the Mad Hungarian’s commentary when Johnson’s in the game. She seems awfully young. And he can get awfully mad.

And of course, there’s our top prospect. Future of the organization, folks. I guess the Cardinals’ recent shift in philosophy on the farm system, shifting from high school kids to college players has brought a bit of the frat-boy mentality into the system.

As long as they take the game seriously and play hard, it’s all fine with me. But these fellows oughta think about protecting their privacy a bit better. There’re some real freaks out there on the intrawebs.

Update: More uncharacteristic raising of eyebrows by Alex Fritz.

My pal Hansenelli asked me to explain how this toy works. The object is to select a two digit number, add the two digits together, and subtract the sum from the original number. The toy will magically guess the answer you come up with.

So how does it work?

Given your two numbers, x and y, (for example, if you pick 69 like I know you did, x = 6 and y = 9) the answer will be 10*x+y-x-y, which simplifies to 9*x. The digit in the ones column, y, doesn’t influence the outcome of the game, and so the system only has to guess what you picked for x, and there are only nine possible values for x in (1,9). The only outcomes for the game, then, are 1*9 = 9, 2*9 = 18, 3*9 = 27, and so on through the multiples of 9 up to 81. If you look at the table of symbols, you’ll see that all of these numbers are the same symbol, so the toy can’t possibly guess wrong.

Cute trick, I guess.

In Illini Wonk’s recap of Illinois’ win over Northwestern last Saturday, he points out a salacious headline for the game in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Illini Survive Sloppy Second.” It could have been worse… “Sloppy Second No Problem for Illini,” “Illini Prove Too Big in Sloppy Second,” or even “Illini Pull It Out in Sloppy Second.”

And now I’ll go wash my brain.

Warren Carter was benched for last night’s game against Minnesota for fail[ing] to take care of things in a timely manner,” which is the same reason that Chester Frazier was benched in the Michigan game. I wonder what that’s code for. Dee Brown had a great game last night. Jim Turpin on the radio this morning described it as his best game yet. He was making some dazzling passes on the floor to the paint, and was slashing and stealing like he’d been at his best last season. I was impressed all around, especially with Jamar Smith and Chester Frazier’s play. If those two guys can step it up against Purdue on Saturday, we’ll have a nice little three-guard option against Wisconsin. Not to take anything away from Rich McBride, who’s showing a reliable mid-range jumpshot lately.

I didn’t get to see any of the Michigan win over MSU aside from the highlights they showed in the post-game show. Big Ten Wonk’s mighty pleased of the depth and quality that outcome demonstrates for the Big Ten conference this season.

Here are two outfielders’ batting stats from a sample of roughly the same number of games:

Larry Bigbie
BA   OBA  Slug% OPS  SB%   AB/HR 
.323 .380 .495  .876 83.33 27.50

John Rodriguez
BA   OBA  Slug% OPS  SB%    AB/HR 
.295 .382 .436  .818 100.00 29.80

Both players put up very nice numbers, and both players are competing for the “big hole in left” that Rob Neyer believes the Cardinals to have.

The first one is Larry Bigbie after he returned from the DL in 2003, and the second is John Rodriguez after coming up to the Cards last July. From Bigbie’s hit chart from that season, you’ll see that he’s a solid line-drive hitter with some power to opposite field. His defense and baserunning skills are better than John Rodriguez’ too, so you gotta figure on him winning the job in left come March. I’m excited about Larry, and think he could turn in a memorable season for about a million and a half less than what Arizona’s paying Eric Byrnes.

And, unlike the non-Pujols and Molina players on the past few Cardinals teams, Bigbie has tended to get hot at the end of the season.

This is shamelessly copy/pasted from the Braden Files.

A U.S. Marine squad was marching north of Basra when they came upon an Iraqi terrorist, badly injured and unconscious. On the opposite side of the road was an American Marine in similar but less serious state.

The Marine was conscious and alert and as first aid was given to both men, the squad leader asked the injured Marine what had happened.

The Marine reported, “I was heavily armed and moving north along the highway here, and coming south was a heavily armed insurgent. We saw each other and both took cover in the ditches along the road. “I yelled to him that Saddam Hussein is a miserable, lowlife scumbag, and he yelled back that Senator Ted Kennedy is a good-for-nothing, fat, left wing liberal drunk. So I said that Osama Bin Ladin dresses and acts like a frigid, mean spirited woman!” He retaliated by yelling, “Oh yeah? Well so does Hillary Clinton!”

“And, there we were, standing in the middle of the road, shaking hands, when a truck hit us.”

Ha!

I’m a Chevrolet Corvette!

You’re a classic – powerful, athletic, and competitive. You’re all about winning the race and getting the job done. While you have a practical everyday side, you get wild when anyone pushes your pedal. You hate to lose, but you hardly ever do.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

Here’s a nifty little applet that displays the distribution of your family name on a state-by-state basis. Watch as your family takes over the nation!

Or in Chris’s case, watch as your family loses Iowa.

Tip of the cap to Baseball Crank

Here’s a pointer to a poorly rendered video file of the famous More Cowbell Blue Oyster Cult skit on SNL, hosted by Christopher Walken.

Apparently there’s a movement underfoot to have Roberto Clemente’s #21 retired by all MLB clubs, much like Jackie Robinson’s #42 is. Roberto Clemente was a great player–and his death in an airplane crash was tragic–but no player will ever be in the same class as Robinson. I’m solidly with his daughter here: conferring the honor that Jackie Robinson earned (and died for, in his wife’s opinion) on any other player would tarnish his achievement and struggle, and minimize what it meant to the game and society at large. It’s insulting to suggest anyone not named Jackie Robinson is worthy of that honor.

In my opinion, there’s nothing more foolish that one can do but compare himself to Jackie Robinson.

Somwhat related: Talking about Jackie Robinson reminded me of one of my favorite SNL skits, in the episode hosted by Michael Jordan when he played Sweet River Baines, the first black Harlem Globe Trotter. It was hilarious, casting Phil Hartman in the Branch Rickey role: “They’re gonna call you names, Sweet Rivah! Horrible names! They’ll say things like, ‘Don’t pass the ball to Blackie’ and ‘Blackie can’t play!’” Unfortunately, the usual place doesn’t have a transcript for that skit. In searching around, I did find this Wikipedia entry on SNL commercial spoofs. Brought back memories. The Yard-a-Pult, Old Glory Life Insurance (scroll down), Love Toilet, Lung Brush, and Colon Blow were some of my favorites. And of course, the Steve Martin Penis Cream.

I’m no fan of Dilbert, or of any funny page comic that’s not Far Side or Calvin and Hobbes. Mark Trail was pretty funny, I guess. Tell you the truth, I don’t believe I’ve looked at a newspaper comics page in a long time. Day by Day is an obvious exception, of course.

But Scott Adams’ blog-writin’ makes me laugh, even laughing out loud at his latest post.