While I’m sitting here annotating, I was sorta watching a show on the tv called “Bachelor Paris.” And last Monday I had a whole bunch of work to do so I was, sitting on the couch again workin’ on the wireless. Watching the same ridiculous show. The dude on that show sure seems like a knucklehead for being a doctor, although he a did a good job picking chicks tonight. You’d think that with a whole crew of people editing the tape of the ‘dates’ (ignore the cameras, baby, and let’s suck face!) they could do a better job making these people look like enjoyable people to hang out with. Yeah so anyways, I went to the Bachelor website to see what that was like and landed on a goldmine. You think the ESPN or Post-Dispatch Cardinals forums are bad? (They are. Very, very bad.) Check out the Bachelor Paris forum. It’s hilarious, especially if you read a lot of baseball forums. You’ve got chicks in there talking about how they reviewed tape in slow-motion to gain insight on what the bachelor REALLY thinks about such-and-such chicky. It gave me a laugh that I thought I’d spread around, although at Jeff’s-armpit-dog-confession-esque risk.

Now that this nonsense is out of the way, I popped in some DVDs that a friend at work gave me. One’s got Mark Mulder’s 10-inning shutout over Roger Clemens and the other’s got the Millions of Busch Memories and other clips, like the top ten plays of Ozzie Smith from SportsCenter when he went into the HoF. I’ve seen the “Go Crazy, Folks!” homerun play at least three or four times so far. This is some sweet stuff!

Here’s the report on the incident in which the VP shot his friend on accident a few days ago while hunting quail. Something I’d wondered about and had answered by the report was the range of the shot. Turns out Mr. Whittington was 30 yards away. I’ve never fired a shotgun smaller than a 20 gauge. Glad to hear Whittington is recovering well.

Crappy weapon handling.

I like (and agree with) the bumper sticker in this post, though. (Relevant background on Ted Kennedy here.)

Since this could possibly be called a political post, I’ll toss out a link to this essay. Al Gore has completely flown off the handle at this point. Although I think that point came a long time ago…

Good to get that out of the system…

The results of these quizzes are all so complimentary, I thought I’d do something different. The object of this quiz is to pick the pattern that you find most appealing and it’ll say something nice about you. So I picked the one I found to be most unappealing, and then I’ll play Scotty and reverse the polarity on the output:

Your Brain’s Pattern

Your mind is a multi dimensional wonderland, with many layers. You’re the type that always has multiple streams of though going. And you can keep these thoughts going at any time. You’re very likely to be engaged in deep thought – and deep conversation.

Reversing polarity, Cap’n!

Your mind is a one-dimensional doldrum, with few layers. You’re the type that rarely has even a few streams of thought going. And you can’t ever keep these thoughts going. You’re very likely to be engaged in shallow thought–and shallow conversation

That’s me to a T! Deep conversation is pretentious and boring. Much better to talk about baseball and tell dirty jokes, I say!

Since I’ve run out of time to procrastinate, I’ll be annotating my tail off tonight. I’m planning on working on it long enough to dream about annotating. Those dreams will be boring enough to let me sleep only four hours or so, and then I can get back on it. Hopefully I’ll have made enough progress by 7:45 or so to run over to my barber before my 9am meeting. I looked like a damned hippy today.

I could go a whole week blogging nothing but quizzes. The only other thing I’d have to write about would be boring anecdotes about annotating. Or how all my equipment at work seems to be misbehaving all the sudden. Quizzes are better either way.

Got the quiz from the artist formerly known as Juan, who’s my natural enemy instead of an old friend according to the quiz.

You scored as Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix). You can change the world around you. You have a strong will and a high technical aptitude. Is it possible you are the one? Now if only Agent Smith would quit beating up your friends. Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 94% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 88% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 81% Serenity (Firefly) 81% SG-1 (Stargate) 75% Moya (Farscape) 69% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 63% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 63% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 63% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 56% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 56% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 38% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

That’s a surprise…

Illini vs. Buckeyes tomorrow at noon!

Yellows are motivated by fun. They are inviting and embrace life as a party which they’re hosting. They love playful interaction and can be extremely sociable and persuasive.

They seek instant gratification. YELLOWS need to be adored and praised. While YELLOWS are carefree, they are quite sensitive and highly alert to others motives to control them. YELLOWS carry within themselves the gift of a good heart.

YELLOWS need to look good socially, and friendships command a high priority in their lives.YELLOWS are happy, highly verbal, easily bored, and crave adventure. They can never sit still for long. They choose friends who, like themselves, refuse to allow lifes boring details stifle their curiosity. They embrace each day in the present tense. YELLOWS are charismatic, spontaneous, positive, and can be irresponsible, obnoxious, and forgetful.

When you deal with a YELLOW praise and adore them, take a positive, upbeat approach, and promote creative and fun activities for and with them.

What Color Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Ain’t that kyoot?

(Tip o’ the cap to Juan, or whatever he’s calling himself today.)

After the second mildest Illinois January on record, I was poised for a horrifically cold and icy February. So far, this hasn’t borne itself out as the sun shines for longer and longer each day. I’m starting to think we’ve got this winter licked. According to the almanac, the average daily temperature here hits 40 on February 26th, 50 on March 22nd, and 60 on April 9th.

Can’t wait to hit those batting cages!

Those wacky Germans… Always up to something.

Norwegians, too…

The Brits are odd, as well. (Make sure to follow the link at the bottom of that page!)

–All those links stolen from Dave Barry–

Hilarious re-cut trailer of Sleepless in Seattle as a crazed-stalker-lady thriller. I had to open it in Internet Exploder to get the dumbassed QuickTime plugin to work.

The identity of the creepy dancing old guy in the Six Flags commercials is finally revealed. I’ll be damned if I wasn’t certain there was a woman in that costume.

And the part in this story where the author has to write his own lines as an awards presenter at the Adult Video Awards show is guaranteed to draw a chuckle or chortle.

–Those links from Jim Treacher–

More later, gotta catch up on annotating for a few hours.

This caricature chicanery has GOT to come to an end.

Via Dimly Lit, by way of a comment at Fungoes.

If only I had a more nuanced perspective, I could see the obvious parallel. And by “a more nuanced perspective,” or course, I mean a perspective on a fantasy world with deep enough foundations that not even, say, a fully-fueled jetliner could rattle it in the least.

I haven’t bored anyone with talk about my real work lately, so how’s about we get that out of the way now before Spring Training starts? Pitchers and catchers report a week from today, you know? Next Friday, we’ll all have our 25-guage needles firmly plunged into the internet backbone waiting for reports on how the pitchers look when they’re throwing long toss. Will Ponson be a hairless fat-body? Will Adam Wainwright and Mark Mulder skip out on workouts to hit the links? I know that’s what I’ll be doing.

So anyways, the problem I’m working on now has to do with modals in textual entailment. Textual entailment, put simply, is the problem of knowing whether a text supports a hypothesis. If you assume that what a text–a sentence or a paragraph–says is true, does it entail the truth of some hypothesis sentence? For an “easy” example:

Text
Since John is employed by Anheuser-Busch, he gets a free case of beer every two weeks that no employees are injured on the job.

Hypothesis
John works for Anheuser-Busch.

That example is easy in the sense that it’s pretty clear what needs to be done in order to determine whether that text entails that hypothesis. It’s not clear whether modal auxiliaries behave predictably with respect to this sort of problem. Modals are verbs like ‘should’ or ‘must.’ Take this pair of examples:

Text
Unfortunately, John couldn’t make it to the meeting, since he sat in some chewing gum on a park bench earlier in the day.”

Hypothesis
John was not at the meeting.

— But —

Text
John couldn’t have murdered Bill, since he’s such a sissy he’d go home after sitting in chewing gum.

Hypothesis
John didn’t murder Bill.

My intutions tell me that the text in the first example works in that its text entails its hypothesis, but that the second example does not.

So right now, I’m annotating a corpus of sentences containing modal auxiliaries with labels for semantic class, and keeping an eye on what sorts of features I might need to use to train a supervised classifier on the modals. It’s very boring work, but I wrote a nifty program that lets me zip through the corpus pretty quick. It even allows me to add classes if I need to, as well as a single-keystroke shortcut to use that new class later on. And it keeps track of how far I’ve gotten in the annotation process, so when I start to work again, it picks up where I’d left off.

The hour and a half I spent working on that program will pay for themselves well before I go to sleep tonight.

That’s all the shop-talk I think we need for now. Hope you enjoyed it.

Although I live just a few blocks away from the local PBS station, there’s a mammoth glass and concrete parking garage directly in between that interferes with the signal. (And I haven’t had cable re-installed yet for the baseball season now that Fox Sports Midwest is carried).

Last night it was coming in very clear for some reason and I fell asleep with that channel on. I woke up a little before 3am and watched the end of a show on the Irish bogmen. When I was a kid, I somehow came into possession of a stack of National Geographics. My two favorite issues were one that had pictures from a robotic submersible expedition to the Titanic and the other had a story about the bogmen, so that was an interesting episode of Nova.

After that, I couldn’t fall back asleep because of the next show, an alarming episode of Frontline about the bustling sex slave from the Ukraine to Turkey and then on to Western Europe or North America. It was truly heart-wrenching and filled me with a cold urge to do great violence to Apo and the other slavers. I suspect that the pornography investigations being pursued by Alberto Gonzales and others in the US government, which are being nearly universally mocked by pundits across the political spectrum, have more to do with disrupting this modern slave trade than some kind of cartoonish Puritanical instinct.

A new yeti-sports game…

Via JG@tC

(For those who haven’t played the older games, they’re all here, wrapped up into one big olympian contest.)

Here’s a video tribute to Busch Stadium II.

Thanks be to Daniel for putting it together.

A photographic montage.

That second picture. Wow.

Via Donald Sensing, who appropriately refers to these idiots as “Islamic supremacists.”

A related story is here. And this is pathetic. An interesting observation here.

That’s what my day was… Shit. Sandwich.

But I’m happy to see two things in the news:

Derrick Goold has a post on Mark McCormick’s warmup pitching in a Baylor alumni exhibition game. Sure was a nice draft last season. Thanks Edgar!

Also, Bengie Molina won’t be sitting out next season, as he’s signed a $5 megabuck, one-year contract with the Toronto Blue Jays including a $7.5 mb mutual option for 2007. Good for him. I was under the impression that the BJ’s only intended to raise their payroll by $20 million bucks this offseason.

I whole-heartedly recommend the free software, CrapCleaner, for regular maintenance of your windows machines.

It’s everything Norton WinDoctor is supposed to be, but isn’t.

I tend to think I keep my ‘puter at home sparkling clean, and this thing found over 150MB of junk hidden away in corners. It’s also sped the thing up noticeably.

It runs on all versions of Windows from 95 on up.

I’ve got about 120 pages to read by 3:00 tomorrow, with a 2:00 meeting and a recording session tomorrow morning in between. I sat down to take a break and checked out the CardsTalk forum and found that someone was looking to buy some Cardinals panties. That forum is very slow in early February. Pitchers and catchers report in two weeks, thankfully. Anyways, someone dug up a link to this amazon page selling some. I like the terms at the bottom of the page:

• Please Note: All underwear sales are final.
• We do not offer exchanges or accept returns on this product, under any circumstances.

Sound policy, if you ask me! I froogled up this page, too. Notice that they only sell that garment in size XL. What’re they trying to say about Cardinal fans, huh?

I also popped over to Illinigirl, who posted THREE TIMES the other day, including a link to this SNL rap video. That’s some funny stuff right there. I’m gonna have to drop that “I’m ghost like Swayze” line in the next few days. Someone in her comments pointed out, “You can call us Aaron Burr/from the way we’re droppin’ Hamiltons.” Hot damn, that’s funny.

Back to the mines.

Venezuela is playing Mexico in the Caribbean Series RIGHT NOW, which you can follow on gamecast if you’re at a ‘puter.

There are games through next Tuesday (schedule and links here). The Puerto Rican team is managed by our very own Jose Oquendo, and Yadier is one of his catchers. Currently it’s the top of the fourth with two outs. Venezuela took a lead off of Alex Cabrera‘s two run homer this half inning.

I had begun regretting posting this comment at VeB even before I’d finished it, as can be seen by the last line there. To summarize, the beloved TOLAXOR pointed out there yesterday that sg in atl had run 100 simulated seasons using the 2006 ZiPS projections in the sophisticated Diamond Mind computerized baseball game. Diamond Mind’s projections have been remarkably accurate, at least with respect to the Cardinals, the past few seasons and so I thought I’d try to do an evaluation of how well their model describes the real game. So I took their projections from before last season and plugged the wins column into a spreadsheet, along with the real-life 2005 wins column and the 2004 wins column, all sorted properly so that each team’s win totals were in the correct row. Then I added another column of all 81′s. So what I’ve got in the spreadsheet is the actual number of games that each team in 2005, the average number of wins DM’s 100 season simulated each team getting to represent that model, and two baseline models: one that says that each team will win the same number of games as the season prior, and another that says each team wins half its games.

I’m not sure which statistic is best for comparing these models. I tried relative root mean square error first, and that gave me these figures:

Diamond Mind: 0.861719
2004-2005:     1.099431
Half-Wins:       0.997433

So it looks like using the DM simulations is an actual improvement over doing something completely mindless. However, taking the average of the absolute values of the differences from each teams predicted performance to their actual performance gives these figures:

Diamond Mind: 6.46666-
2004-2005:     6.2
Half-Wins:       6.9333333-

Each team is, on average, less wrong, if you use the 2004 season over the average of the 100 simulated seasons in DM. I’m told that the rrmse measure tends to dislike outliers, like DM’s 20 win underestimation of the White Sox and the 19 win overestimate of the injury plagued Dodgers. Since it’s easy, I also had excel calculate the correlation coefficients for each model vs. reality:

Diamond Mind: 0.647629
2004-2005:     0.816447
Half-Wins:       Div by zero error

So, by two measures, the baseline that teams will perform as well as they did the previous season appears to be more reliable than the Diamond Mind simulations.

It also appears that I need to read up on how to evaluate prediction models.

PS: DM ranked 114th in this prediction contest last season. For their evaluation measure, it looks like they give you a point for each game out of first place that you are wrong for each team, with the player ending up with the fewest points winning.

The post below this one, in which the failings and general sissification of “Generation Y” had me bummed out a bit yesterday. Something that really annoys me is the fact that dudes a few years younger than me don’t see anything wrong with leaving the house in their pajamas. Girls had been doing that when I was an undergrad, but that’s pretty understandable. It takes a gal a while to put herself together and all, and there’s no point in going through all that effort for a 7:30am class knowing that you’ll take a nap afterwards before truly starting the day. But for a dude to not take the five minutes to change out of his PJs is mindboggling. It takes maybe three minutes to rinse off the lint and dry yourself down, then another minute to pick your pants up and put them on and drag on a clean shirt. Then another minute brushing the teeth, and you’re done.

So, call me old-fashioned, but I don’t get it. Men shouldn’t go to work in their pajamas under any circumstances.

But I swear to Christ Almighty that I just saw a dude carrying around an armpit dog. Bows in the ear fur and everything. Bile filled the back of my throat. I suspect that this will take care of itself. The yappy, shivering little pooch’ll probably bite his nuts off while he’s sleeping (in the pajamas that he wore to class today–and his mom won’t be able to guilt the dog into coughing them back up).