I finished up this programming assignment that’s been kicking my ass the past week. It’s here, if you’re interested. Sure was a lot of work. Cards got swept this past series in Houston. We start a four game set with the Brewers to close out the season tonight. Should be a blast.

The first presidential debate is tonight. Vodkapundit’s Debate Prep links to this article going into some pretty serious detail about the backgrounds of the two men who will square off for our votes tonight. It has a great deal of quotations from George Lakoff, who has a new book out about how pinkos can win arguments with right-wing gunnuts. I’m hoping it has something about getting your facts straight and not falling back on the whole, “You fascist nazi pig!” when asked to consider looking at something in a new way. I’ve got a bit of a beef with Lakoff. He’s by all accounts a nice and interesting fellow, but his writing almost derailed my academic career. During Fall of 2001, I was taking a course in Minimalism, Chomsky’s current syntactic theory, and another in a type of non-formal semantics that Lakoff laid the foundation for. These were poor times to try to take Chomsky’s thoughts seriously, to say the least. Lakoff wrote a paper about 9/11 that really boiled my blood, and we read a draft of it, I’m not sure if it’s the one he eventually published (available here, but I’m not reading it again). He’s done an enormous amount of work with metaphors, and the gist of what I read of it explained that 9/11 hurt your typical American because 19 terrorists hijacking airplanes and piloting them into buildings was a metaphor for castration and rape. See, skyscrapers look like weiners and the pentagon looks like a vagina, ‘cuz it has a hole in the middle. He then went on to warn readers not to get behind the evil republican overlords who would no doubt lead them off to war.

I found this paper mortifying, and craven that someone would use mass murder to build support for their linguistic theory. Not to mention that this interpretation of the event is sophomoric nonsense. So between the uncertainty of the new post-9/11 world and the asininity of the revered masters of the art I was trying to learn, I had a whole lot of trouble focusing on my studies. Did I really want to turn out to be such an asshole?

Obviously I’ve stuck it out, and I’m still the same asshole I was when I started. And things are going well now. Don’t recall where I was going with this story.

The paper, incidentally, I kept in the trunk of my car, and would use to check my oil level until it was all gone away.

And there’s only six games left in the regular season. Tonight is Danny Haren v. Brandon Backe, and we have little excuse to lose, aside from the fact that the Astros are a very good baseball team. If we can win five more games down the stretch, we’ll finish the season with a record of 108-54, breaking the single season record for most wins by any team and ending up with a record double over five hundred, twice as many wins as losses, and the demonic winning percentage of .666 (unless you round up, so don’t). Making that extra tough is the possibility that we’ll have two bullpen games in the last series versus Milwaukee, who’ll be out to prove something, no doubt. But the good news is that the team MVP, Scott Rolen, is ready to return to the lineup tonight. This will significantly stabilize our infield defense, which has been less than spectacular with him out for so long.

Update 9/29 11:19am: In the comments, Jeff points out a serious error in what I wrote up above. I said 106 would be the most wins for any team, but I should have written any Cardinals team. And even if we make it to 106, the 1942 Cards (106-48) played a shorter season, so their winning percentage was a whopping .688, and far out of the reach of this team. My apoligies if I lost anyone any bets. No refunds will be given. Source: Cardinals History Dot Com.

My cousin has made his big splash on the triple-double-yoo. Behold, Marcus has a webpage dedicated to him! He’s playing roller hockey for Ball State and will be competing against my school’s team next month. I’m gonna have a good time heckling him. And he’s a goaltender! The Fighting Illini ice hockey fans have a pretty good reputation for cruelty to visiting teams (and referees). Let’s hope the roller hockey fans are cut from the same cloth.

Victor Davis Hansen has a fine column in the Wall Street Journal today, The UN? Who Cares?. It’s pretty short, so there’s no reason to excerpt a section here, just go read the whole thing. His conclusion, obviously, is that Americans don’t hold the United Nations in very high regard anymore. This conclusion is supported by this poll, mentioned in this article about the multi-billion dollar UNSCAM oil-for-palaces/arms/UNSC-protection racket.

If the story pans out, Sean Penn is due for some befuddlement. The second in command under Tommy Franks during major combat operations to remove the Ba’ath party from power in Iraq says Iraq’s WMD programs and scientists were smuggled to Syria, Lebanon, and Iran during “the hasty rush to war.”

See also the report that Syrian specialists tested chemical weapons on dozens of Furs in Sudan.

Update: This story is peripherally related.

This election will be the first one where HDTV may play a role. The picture on HDTV is incredibly sharp. The first experience I had with HDTV was the super bowl last year, and was blown away. You can practically call the coin flip from your easy chair. The ugly side of the Hi-Def Super Bowl experience was the cheerleaders. Ordinarily, the cheerleaders look like goddesses, but on a high definition set, they’re all zits and clumps of make-up.

Make-up artists to the candidates, beware! Your careers could be on the line, as much as your customer’s.

Update (7:31): It appears that the debates won’t be in HD, so never mind. But watching a standard television feed on an HD set changes the perspective on the screen, stretching things horizontally and crunching things vertically. That just might be enough to make John Kerry’s head look like that of a normal person’s.

Arthur Chrenkoff’s eleventh installment of Good News from Iraq is posted to the Wall Street Journal online, and also to his blog, permalinked on the right sidebar. Check the blog to read previous editions.

The weekend was great. We had a bachelor party for our dear friend Pete. It was a great time, we met up at one of our houses and played poker. Later on, we got a little crazy, and broke out some of the smuttier pages from this weekend’s Wal*Mart newspaper advertisements and some old department store catalogs. Boys will be boys, y’know? By this point, we were really worked up into a frenzy. Sure enough, someone threw gasoline on the fire by whipping out the DVD remasters of Golden Girls. Unfortunately, all we had was the first three seasons. We started to watch the first one over again after we’d gone through the lot, but it just wasn’t the same. After that, we played a game of Yahtzee. (I never could get my Yahtzees or Large Straights, dammit! And only one out of twelve games did I get my bonus. Usually I’d end up with like 62 in the top of the scoring sheet. One shy! One!) Following that, it was time for the honesty session. I think we all learned a lot about ourselves.

Unfortunately, between the four-packs of wine coolers we each put away (mine were Key Lime Pie, YUM!) and the Old-Fashioneds that Jeff was whipping up (with fresh cherries, YUM!), we all got tuckered out early. I don’t know about the rest of those crazy guys, but sleeping with all those sweet drinks in the stomach left me with a bad tummyache, which still hasn’t gone away.

And that’s how it went down. If anyone tells you differently, they were at the wrong party!

Jeff contributed to this recreation of events.

In the write-up to today’s 102nd win by the Cardinals is this:

It was win No. 102 against 52 losses this year for the Redbirds. That’s the fourth-highest victory total in franchise history, and the highest in any non-war season.

Huh? The next sentence makes it clear the writer is referring to WWII.

If we win tomorrow and the first of the Houston series, we’re back to 2x+500.

Bloody Romans.

And check out the new header in my commenting windows.

I found the link at Language Log.

Now’s the part of the campaign when we question his patriotism. Joe Lockhart is quite an asshole, too.

At least the Kerry campaign’s wisdom and vision should be questioned for these asinine comments that will no doubt be used to undermine the Iraqi interim government and bolster the insurgency’s hopes that democratic institutions can be driven from the Mideast.

Way to go, rookies.

That’s a recipe for getting a whole lot of work done. I didn’t like the way my program was going, it was messy and unreadable. And really, really ugly. I started out not really knowing what I wantd to do, and started building components in-line and then dumping their outputs to file, so each component had its own data structures that I hacked out of the files. So the thing had to do a whole lot of unnecessary disk access, and the code was completely unreadable. At about 10 or 11, I decided to start over from scratch, now that I know what I’m doing. Debugging that mess was more frustrating than working with a blank slate. It looks like it’s going really nice, with a unified data representation. And about 1/5th the amount of code, to boot! I’m gonna have to get some sleep at some point though…

I’m running the program on the full dataset now, instead of the toy one I made for testing, didn’t comment out all the output to screen, so it’s taking forever. Think I’ll hop over to Drudge and see what’s what.

How about that? The NorKs are threatening to shoot a missile over Japan again. Apparently Kim Jong Il doesn’t like the way we won’t have bilateral talks with his insane, isolated weapons exporting country. The gist of the threat comes from a Commie Korean newspaper, justifying the sabre rattling to largely pacifist Japan for their cooperation with the US. “The North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun warned Japan that its military cooperation with the United States ‘would serve as a detonating fuse to turn Japan into a nuclear sea of fire,’ the official Korean Central News Agency reported.”

Sounds somewhat familiar. Theresa Heinz-Kerry. She so crazy.

I’m delirious already. Can’t wait to see how I’m feeling in a few hours.

I got some comments far, far below that are worth replying to where they can be seen. The first was on this post, about pit bulls. Meghan says that no creatures are predisposed towards aggression, an extreme stance in the Nature vs. Nurture debate. The debate is over whether creatures (usually people) are destined (or doomed) by their genetics to grow into a certain type of thing (that’s a strong Nature position) or whether environmental factors will determine entirely what someone grows into. Extreme positions in this debate are hard to maintain, since there is plenty of counterevidence for either. The example I gave against an extreme Nurture position was the Sand Tiger Shark. It’s a fascinating animal. It gives birth to live young, but only two per year. The young are born particularly aggressive, independent, and large. It turns out that they get to be that way by eating all their brothers and sisters. The sand tiger shark has two uteruses, and the biggest and strongest fetus in each one eats all the other occupants. I’ve actually seen video of the inside of a pregnant STS’s uterus. It is really, really strange. This animal clearly has a predisposition towards aggressive behavior, and has never had any environmental exposure outside the womb–quod erat demonstratum, extreme Nurture is an untenable position.

The second comment was on this post, in the comments of which I embarassingly confused Salvador Dali and Picasso. But I was reminded of my favorite Picasso painting. I’m pretty sure it was Chris who had that in our dorm room or apartment. It’s a painting of a blue guy playing his guitar, and we’d always turn it on its side. It looks kinda like our friend Jess that way.

I’m having a lot of trouble getting my program to work right. It’s rather frustrating. Back to the grind.

Your father smelt of elderberries.

Which OS are You?

Got the quiz from Local Chris this time.

Here’s a picture of my sister, our nephew Colin, and myself, listed in arbitrary order with respect to cuteness. It was taken at my niece Caitlin’s baptism party on Saturday.

Colin just turned 0-1/2 last week.

I just booted up the slack machine to get my source code from it. As I mentioned, the .bashrc randomly gives me a message at the startup of the shell. Usually it’s a quotation or some snarky comment on life. This morning it was a math joke. I searched the web for it, and voila!, here it is:

There was a mad scientist ( a mad …social… scientist ) who

kidnapped three colleagues, an engineer, a physicist, and a

mathematician, and locked each of them in seperate cells with plenty

of canned food and water but no can opener.

A month later, returning, the mad scientist went to the engineer’s

cell and found it long empty. The engineer had constructed a can

opener from pocket trash, used aluminum shavings and dried sugar to

make an explosive, and escaped.

The physicist had worked out the angle necessary to knock the lids off

the tin cans by throwing them against the wall. She was developing a

good pitching arm and a new quantum theory.

The mathematician had stacked the unopened cans into a surprising

solution to the kissing problem; his desiccated corpse was propped

calmly against a wall, and this was inscribed on the floor in blood:

Theorem: If I can’t open these cans, I’ll die.

Proof: assume the opposite…

That page above also has another good joke, that I believe Bobovski might enjoy (edited here for clarity):

A fourth room locked up a topologist and a can of food. When the mad social scientist came to unlock his cell, he found it empty aside from the can of food, still closed and seemingly untouched. Suddenly, a knocking comes from inside the can. The can is opened, the topologist comes out blinking and says: “Oh shit, sign error.”

Beats that train of functions joke, methinks.

I need to get away from this for a little while:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

I wrote code from 8-1:30 yesterday, and more from 5-7. I woke up at 4:30 this morning and wrote from 5:30 until 12:30 and again from 4:30 to 8:00. And I’m still not done with this project. Making very good progress though, and I expect to finish this in the next few hours. And then I have another project to work on, but at least it’s not programming.

I’m having a lot more fun than what it probably sounds like. Semi-regular life should resume tomorrow evening.

Link from Bill