I’ve got this audio that’s got some high frequency hiss in it, but otherwise sounds quite good. Soundsoap usually gives me excellent results, but in this case, it makes the audio sound much worse. On top of that, my older version of Peak has a serious glitch in that it won’t load CoreAudio anymore, and so I can’t use any of the VST plug-ins. (Fortunately, SoundSoap versions 1.1 and up all operate as a stand-alone app as well as a plug-in.) All I want to do is run it through a low-pass filter, but I can’t. Then I get the brilliant idea to move the audio over to the video machine, where I can use Adobe Premeiere‘s low-pass filter to pick out the hiss. Alas, the files were too big to fit onto a CD. So I figure I’ll do some lossless data compression to fit them onto a CD, but I don’t know how that goofy stuff-it expander goes about making compressed archives. Apparently it doesn’t. That’s when I realize that Mac OS X+ is a degenerate Linux distribution, and it’s got command-line tar and gzip utilities. Voila! The compressed archive fits on the CD-ROM! And the excellent windows program 7-Zip supports gzipped and bzipped tars. Life is good, when you’re wicked smaht.

We’ve reached the end of the season. There’s one final regular season homestand for the St. Louis Cardinals in Busch Stadium II, and thanks to my pop, I’ve got some seats in section 307 for the middle game. As of today, ESPN is listing Suppan as the starter, and I’m hoping that’s what happens, since another win for him will be the one that puts him over .500 for his career. Either that or they start Marquis and replace him with Soup before the fifth inning is over. In any case, I’d like to see Soup get a win. Another sweet thing would be a sweep this weekend. That’s looking fairly unlikely as the Cards have been playing like shit, slightly warmed over, lately. Belly Scratcher points out today that SI thinks the Cardinals aren’t going anywhere in the postseason on the grounds that Carpenter hasn’t pitched well since we clinched, speculating that he’s gassed. We’ll see about that next week.

So anyways, the plan is to head to STL around 5 and have some supper at P.F. Chang’s. Hopefully we’ll be able to meet up with some of my friends. Jeff‘s got tickets for tonight’s game, so ideally he’ll be whipped up for afterwards. It’s been forever since I’ve been to the Lou, I don’t even know what the fellers are up to these days. On Saturday, we’ll be heading to the game pretty early. My pop says the festivities down there are starting at 10am, and I’m hoping to get plenty of pictures. Stan Musial should be there, and Cass is hoping she can get him to autograph her copy of a book about some kid who grew up idolizing Stan Musial in the Ozarks. If I can get a picture of me and Stan, that’s getting blown up and framed right above the empty spot on the wall of my study where my next (and final) lambskin will eventually go. Sunday, if the weather’s nice, we’ll stop in Vandalia on our way home to leap out of an airplane a few times. My next jump will be a ten-second freefall, and the first one where I achieve terminal velocity, which should be pretty exciting.

And I’m doing my best to borrow a 2.5″ hdd so I can get some work done. If not, I’m pretty confident I can get one on Monday to tide me over until I somehow throttle someone into replacing the defective one that ruined about forty hours of work yesterday. If not, I’ll just have to enjoy myself this weekend.

Things had been going so well for me lately. Getting piles of work done, feeling very inspired. Naturally, something terrible had to happen to spoil all my fun. It appears that the hard disk on my laptop has irrecoverably failed, destroying two perfectly tuned operating systems, hundreds of hours worth of programming, and a whole lot of pictures and music.

To point out that I’m absolutely irate at this point would be an understatement.

I’m getting an error at boot saying, “Enter Disk Lock Password,” although I’ve never put on one. Checking the HP support website, it appears that the only way to get rid of this is to replace the disk with a brand new one. My data is lost. I’m trying my best to get around this. I’m not happy.

When I was an undergraduate taking a speech course, one of the speeches we had to give was an “informative speech.” For my topic, I chose to inform my class on a magnificent animal, the Giant Squid. So I learned just about all there is to know about the giant squid, which isn’t much, since these are elusive creatures that live far below the sea. None had every been seen before alive in its natural habitat. One of the foremost students of the Giant Squid, Clyde Roper, thought a good way to see them and find out how they behave would be to equip a sperm whale’s head with a lighting/camera truss, since it is known that sperm whales eat giant squid. But some researchers off the Japanese coast succeeded in capturing a Giant Squid on camera, eating bait off of one of their lines. Amazing pictures. The article mentions that the Giant Squid is a considerably more active predator than they’d expected. This is because the Giant Squid’s body has a high concentration of ammonia in it, and so it’s lighter than the water around it. It was assumed that the giant squid would just float around in the deep ocean, waiting for snacks to swim by. (I believe Roper himself discovered the ammonia concentration. If I recall correctly, another marine biologist asked him if he’d ever eaten one, and they cooked a speciment up only to be disappointed by the nasty ammonia flavor.) Another interesting thing about these animals is their mating habits. Apparently they meet each other fairly rarely, and so there’s no guarantee that the female will be in heat when she meets a male squid. So she’s able to store packets of his sperm in her body, keeping them viable until she has an egg ready to fertilize.

Excellent work by the Japanese team. Their patience certainly paid off.

Hat tip to Cassandra for reminding me.

Cosine Measure is used to make a similarity measurement of two vectors by comparing their angle. The formula for calculating CM is: (d * d’)/(|d|d’|)

Suppose I have two vectors:

d = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
d’ = [4,5,6,7,8,9]

The cosine measure of these two vectors is:

(1*4)+(2*5)+(3*6)+(4*7)+(5*8)+(6*9) = 154
sqrt(1²+2²+3²+4²+5²+6²)*sqrt(4²+5²+6²+7²+8²+9²) = 157.038…
154/157.038 = 0.980…

I’m using this for a context similarity module that I’m building. We want to find the different morphological forms of a verb, so we want to find that the past tense of sing is sang, for example. So I check a corpus of newswire text and extract the five words that precede or succeed any instance of sing and any of sang. Then I count the words that aren’t in a stoplist of words that appear frequently around all words, like the or he, and sort that list by frequency. That sorted list of frequencies is one of the vectors I want to compare. I build the other one by looking for the frequencies of the words that are in the first vector. So if song is the most frequent word in the sorted list of context words around sing, then I expect it to have high frequency for sang too. And importantly, I don’t expect song to occur frequently around words like singed, like this:

Vector for sing:songs   |XXXXXXXXXXtune    |XXXXXXXXsoprano |XXXXtenor   |XXXXBeatles |XX

Vector for sang:songs   |XXXXXXXXXXXtune    |XXXXXXXsoprano |XXXtenor   |XXBeatles |XXX

Vector for singed:songs   |tune    |soprano |tenor   |Beatles |X

That’s the sort of thing I expect, and cosine measure gives me a formal way of describing that sang‘s histogram is more similar to sing‘s than singed‘s is.

I learned this from these slides.

John Buccigross Ranked the fifteen NHL Western Conference teams, and guess who’s last?

The Blues.

I haven’t got a clue what this team is going to look like, but it ain’t gonna be pretty. I’ll still be one of their fans, though. Anybody want to be the other one? Seriously, though. I can’t imagine we’ll be that bad. Although we could be bad enough to blow that playoff streak.

On the other hand, he ranks the Calgary Flames #1 in the West. That pleases me.

Watching them play two years ago was a thing of beauty, a joy to behold. Real gritty, blue collar hockey.

Wheeeee!

I worked 9-7 yesterday, came home and wrote code for a few hours, then got to work on my powerpoint presentation for tomorrow. I’m pulling my first all-nighter in a long while. So far, so good–feeling real good. I’ve got five hours to go before the presentation’s due. I’m thinking I might head in to work at around 5 and stop for some breakfast on the way.

7:11am — Feeling good. The presentation was finished about an hour ago. Heading in to work. Had to skip breakfast, though.

11:00am — I feel remarkably good. I’m thinking about playing another 18 holes, if you know what I mean.

The Redbirds are 97-60 with five regular-season games left to play–two against the Houston Astros and three against the Cincinnati Reds. It appears that the playoff rotation is set, as Matt Morris is scheduled to pitch tomorrow and with Chris Carpenter pitching on five days rest, he’ll be facing off against Brandon Backe on Wednesday. If Tony sticks to the rotation he’s set up recently, that would mean Mulder pitches after Carpenter on Friday; the Soup takes the mound on Saturday; and Marquis closes out the season on Sunday. (That orders your rotation: [Carp,Mulder,Suppan,Marquis/Morris], which is what Cardinal Fandom expects our four-man playoff rotation to look like.) Assuming all these things, Morris’ last start of the regular season–and possibly his last start as a Cardinal–will be tomorrow night. So make sure to give him a big hand if you’re at the game.

I’ll be at the 3:15 game on Saturday, which will be awesome. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the starters go when I expect them to, since it would mean Suppan would be pitching. And even better, he’ll be pitching for a career winning record, as yesterday’s beaut put him at 94-94. And also, although he’s not doing it with these guys, the Soup’s donating $100 bucks to an organization dedicated to the rehabiliatation of disabled veterans for every strikeout he throws this year. He puts up fifty out of pocket, and Cardinals Care matches the donation:

Pitcher Jeff Suppan is donating $50 per strikeout to Cardinals Care, the team’s charitable arm, which is matching the gift. The money will be donated to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, which supports families of military personnel who have been killed.

Googling around for an article about that particular charity the Soup’s involved with, I came across this article about the philanthropic activities of Dan Glass, the president of the Kansas City Royals, where he is quoted as saying this:

The biggest charity guy around since I’ve been here was probably Jeff Suppan. He supported arthritis in a big way. He was a guy who could never say no to anybody asking him to do something charitable and he never asked anything in return[.]

What a swell cat, that Soup is! Unfortunately, I also came across this page, in which a Red Sox blogger praises Curt Schilling for participating in Zito’s Strikeouts for Troops benefit. Then along comes a Cardinals fan who trolls this guys comments and says some stupid and ignorant stuff. Way to make us look bad, asshole.

Hilarious.

The Cardinals starters sure are relaxed lately. Very relaxed. That’s fine with me, although I’d like to see us get to 100 wins on the year. We’ll need to win 4 of our last six to get there. Hopefully we can bring that down to 3/5 after tomorrow’s day game.

So I was reading today’s Notes and spotted that little item about the playoff shares meeting, something I’d never heard of. Here’s an explanation from Todd Jones.

I enjoyed Simon Singh’s Codebook so much that I picked up his earlier book, Fermat’s Enigma about a week and a half ago at the library. It’s been a busy week and a half, so I didn’t get to crack it open until today. Man, is it a great book. I read through 255 of the 285 pages over the last four hours or so. I’m only now reluctantly putting it down so I can meet up with my woman. (And I’m forty five minutes late for that!)

As much as I mock science writers and journalists of all sorts, this guy really knows how to write about difficult material. I’ll have to check out his new book on the Big Bang once I get on top of the next week’s academic reading.

My dad sent me this biography of Albert Pujols today. There’s a few things in there that I didn’t know. For example, Albert used a wooden bat in college ball instead of aluminum.

Mighty cool. I’ll be watching tonight’s game, pooling my insignificant telekinetic powers with the rest of Cardinal fandom to help Matt Morris’ pitches move to break his career-high four game losing streak.

I haven’t been a big supporter of the hydrogen-fuel idea for various reasons (“Oh, the humanity!”), but this article about a Winnepeg company that’s producing small gadgets for electrolyzing hydrogen from an inexpensive solution, then mixing the h2 with the air/fuel mixture to greatly improve combustion efficiency.

Sounds promising.

Link via One Hand Clapping, who’s got a lot of other very good stuff up, too.

Lt. Gen. Honore, the “John Wayne dude” that is leading the national guard presence in the Gulf Coast took over a press conference that Nagin was bumbling through. The audio and transcript are here. I love that he tossed two hoo-ahs to the assembled dipshits reporters.

I just installed the Festival Speech Synthesizer on my laptop. Just in time for the end of the baseball season, if you know what I’m talking about.

Speaking of Speech Synthesis, Scansoft still hasn’t put up an online interactive demo for Rhetorical’s old rVoice synthesizer. However, they do have a set of preselected passages for the voices to read, including my nephew’s favorite, F012–the Valley Girl.

You can play with the other voices here, though.

Just in case anyone wondered:

tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' < bigcorpus | tr -sc "a-z\'" '\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr > corpfreqs

Again, just in case.

is an announcment for…

A teach-in: “Katrina and Other Human Disasters”

Sponsored by Teachers for Peace and Justice

Amazingly, there’s an atmospheric sciences professor involved, which isn’t a good indicator of that department’s seriousness.

And yes, I get it. Their point will be that the hurricane was a human disaster–not a natural disaster–because they’re ready to demonstrate their evidence that “global warming” is what causes hurricanes. Researchers in the departments of english, sociology, and journalism have been the tip of the spear in new discoveries in this area. It’s sure to be a real hoot.

Unfortunately, I’ll be very busy watching baseball, and unable to attend.

Cass’s cable internet was out for the past few days. The dog she used to have around had chewed through the coaxial cable running into the wall from outside, and the connection died. I checked it out and saw that the outer braided shield was completely severed, although the inner insulator was still sound, although a bit mangled. (The shield serves as the signal return path, so without an intact shield, the cable’s not going to work.) So I figured this was a fixable job, and there was no need to pay the cable guy $50 to come and fix it.

I first stripped away a centimeter or so of insulation from each end of the wounded cable to expose some untouched shield. Then I got about an ell of speaker wire, split a single wire off it, and stripped all the insulation off. Then I wrapped that around the coaxial cable’s inner insulator, creating a new shield, and connecting the old one across the gap the dog had chewed away. Like the stupid animal he is. I wrapped it up in electrician’s tape, and voila! The cable internet works again.

Yee. Haw.

Cardinals Diaspora landed quite a scoop: they found out who La Russa picked to back-up Molina on the postseason roster.

It does seem like quite a shame that our 14 positional player/11 pitcher playoff roster will feature either Mike Mahoney or Scott Seabol on the bench while leaving off either Cal Eldred or Brad Thompson, assuming Brian Walton’s speculation on that point is reasonable–which I believe it to be. The idea of Einar Diaz or Mike Mahoney pinch-hitting in the late innings of a playoff game displeases me.

I’d meant to put out a link to this post some time ago. Donald Sensing is among my favorite reads. His eldest son (first hand on deck?) is now in Kuwait, deploying to an undisclosed location in Iraq with the USMC.