The Daily Schnoz

I included some kitties in this photo for those that are sick of looking at my nose (that would be you, everyone).



Today I had my big nose appointment. Read on for the exciting and disgusting story!

The last time I broke my nose bad enough to need a nose appointment, I met with the nose doc and set up a time for a surgery. I figured today would be the same. Instead, the doctor poked around a little bit then shouted down the hall, "come in here, Sue, I've got a nose to break." Amazingly, this may have only been his third best quote.

So I'm sitting there, thinking about getting my nose re-broken. I was pretty nervous. My hands were getting all clammy, and I was asking a bunch of questions. Doc wasn't saying much. "Yep", "nope", "eh, doesn't really matter." Sue, on the other hand, was telling me how her son freaked out when his nose was reset, and then telling me how brave I was. Thanks, Sue. Can I take this Highlights with me when I leave? I already did the maze...

Sue's in the supply cubby getting the anesthesia ready and the doctor closes the door to the office. Here come the money quotes. Patrick, you're going to want to write these down. First, the doctor says, "better make it four mL, this is a big nose."

Seriously. This guy looks at noses all day for a living and he's commenting on the size of mine. Despite all the jibes over all the years I can truly say that I had never considered it particularly large until now. That must put my dad in the running nationally. I wonder if they have a father-son bracket...

Not 15 seconds later, he busts out, "Oh, and lets get that operation gown we've been saving. It'll probably be a bleeder." That's right, no standard, flimsy nose-breaking bib for me. I get the full frontal gown with knit cuffs and a panic handle.

With doc's hilarity out of the way, we can finally move on to the actual procedure. He said the worst part would be the anesthesia, and he was right. Basically he stuck the syringe up my nostril, halfway to my brain and blood starts squirting everywhere. Then I feel the anesthesia and blood dripping down my throat. Mmm, one nostril down... one to go!

With both nostrils sedated, it's time to do the breaking. I was really expecting this to be terrible, but it wasn't too bad at all. Basically he pushed on one side and there was some crunching. Then he stuck a big metal thing up my nose and did some kajiggering for a bit more crunching. Kind of gross sounding, but it didn't hurt at all and there was barely any blood.

After that, he put on the little nose cast you see above and sent me on my way. Nose cast stays on for six days. No basketball for three weeks. LeBron mask optional upon my return.

Send me pity presents!

Facial Asymmetry

Merging an infinite list of infinite lists

A paper I was reading today for class contained a problem that I thought was interesting: How do you merge an infinite list of infinite lists such that every element in the list is indexable? The paper introduced a monadic solution using faux-concurrency that was pretty cute, but it got me thinking about a simpler solution.

In an effort to maintain my nerd credentials after my spate of sports posts, I figured I'd throw my code up here and call it content. This is the sort of stuff I procrastinate with all the time, so if anyone's interested in mostly useless snippets of Haskell code, maybe I'll do this more regularly.

merge :: [[a]] -> [a]
merge ls = [ls !! x !! y | (x,y) <- p 0 0]
  where p 0 y = (0,y) : p (y+1) 0
        p x y = (x,y) : p (x-1) (y+1)

Pretty simple. p generates all pairs (x,y) in the order of the Cantor pairing function. x and y indicate which list, and which value in that list to return next.

An example application of this function in GHCi:

> take 10 $ merge [[i..] | i <- [100,200..]]
[100,200,101,300,201,102,400,301,202,103]

Super Sports Mega Post

Alright, so it's only two subtopics, but at my current pace, anything more than zero should qualify for "mega post" status.


MLB 2009 Standings Predictions

First up, my final standings predictions for this year's major league baseball season. I've done this in email form many times in the past, but with my fan blog practically pounding down my door, demanding content, I figured I'd throw it on my blog instead. Make sure to bookmark it and come back in nine months so you can ridicule me for failing to predict the Pittsburgh Pirates' breakthrough season.

Proceeding through the leagues alphabetically and across the country from left to right:

AL West
Los Angeles
Oakland
Seattle
Texas

I went into this division trying to justify a ranking that went something like: Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, Texas, but just couldn't make it work. Even with the injuries to their starting rotation, and even without Teixeira, the Angels are still the best team in the AL West. This is the worst division in baseball, however, and with a few breaks any team could win it--the standings after the Angels give the relative likelihood of each team catching those breaks. Fortunately, the division is on the upswing. The A's and Rangers are loaded with young talent, and the M's finally have someone in charge who can make the most of their significant resources.

AL Central
Cleveland
Detroit
Minnesota
Chicago
Kansas City

The defending division champion White Sox pretty consistently outperform my expectations, but I just look at that roster and don't see any way they're better than the three teams I put ahead of them. If the Tigers once-promising young starters finally put it together, they could pull out an upset, but otherwise Grady Sizemore and Cleveland's impressive depth are the clear favorites.

AL East
Boston
Tampa Bay (wild card winner)
New York
Toronto
Baltimore

This division is absolutely stacked. The top three teams here would win any other division in baseball without much of a contest, and one of them won't make the playoffs... The Yankees look the best on paper, but with A-Rod out to start the season and enough aging veterans elsewhere, I feel justified in placing them third. Perhaps it's just wishful thinking. It's got to be a real bummer to be a fan of the solid Blue Jays or up-and-coming Orioles right now, because despite being perfectly respectable teams, they have no chance for the foreseeable future.

NL West
Arizona
Los Angeles
San Francisco
Colorado
San Diego

Both the Dodgers and Diamondbacks have excellent young cores and look like they should finish first and second in this division for the next few years. I like the D-Backs a bit better since they seem to have just a little more upside and a little less risk. The Giants seem to have gone from terrible to respectable very quickly, mostly thanks to their outstanding starting pitching; unfortunately for them this is balanced by a thoroughly anemic offense.

NL Central
Milwaukee
Chicago (wild card winner)
St. Louis
Cincinnati
Houston
Pittsburgh

By all accounts, the Cubs are the team to beat in the Central. So why do I pick the Brewers? Because I always pick the Brewers, and I sure don't plan on being wrong when they finally do win the division. The Brewers and Cubs are both great teams and whoever doesn't win the division is going to be competing with two teams in the NL East for the wildcard. The Cardinals are almost entirely the Albert Pujols show at this point (but what a show!), but if the Chris Carpenter come back goes as planned, they could be in the mix as well. The Pirates, on the other hand, are the early favorites for worst team in baseball.

NL East
New York
Philadelphia
Atlanta
Florida
Washington

I think I might be the biggest Jeff Francoeur believer left on the planet, but try as I might, I just couldn't figure out a way to get the Braves into the playoffs. Their pitching staff is outstanding and Chipper Jones is a Hall of Famer who's still raking in his late 30's, but there are just too many weak spots on this roster, and especially so when Chipper's out for an extended stretch, as he is every year. The Mets and Phillies both have their flaws, of course, but they've both got enough star power to make up for them. The Marlins have a lot of upside and the Nationals are bad (hurray!).


Ranking the Blazers

During halftime of the Blazers-Jazz game the other day, I cajoled Chris and Tim into ranking the Blazers with me. These rankings are based simply on how much we like each player, and we only included the 11 players who get semi-regular playing time or more. The Blazers are currently just about the most likeable sports team, top-to-bottom in the history of the world, so this was no easy task.

I suppose I'll spare you the actual lists, but here's an awesome graph Chris made from which they can be derived. The x-axis is the players, obviously, sorted by their average ranking. The y-axis is their ranking on each of our lists, 1 being our most favorite players, 11 being our least favorite.

USS Mariner Five Days After Griffey Signing

Generated at wordle.net.

Goals for 2009

Call them resolutions or what you will; these are the things I'm going to try to do this year.

1. Learn Esperanto. I am fascinated by languages, for humans and computers. Although wrapping my head around strange programming languages has always come easily for me, I've fallen short in each of my numerous forays into human languages. I think this is more through a lack of self-discipline than any fundamental hang-up however. Learning a language is hard, and without an immediate need of its use, I just eventually lose the motivation. I chose Esperanto since it is easier to learn (since it is highly regular), has a community of people anxious to teach it, and it supposedly improves the speed with which you can pick up other languages. I just signed up for a "personal tutor", so lessons by email should commence shortly.

2. Memorize more poems. I had an instructor who preached about the lost art of memorization. Lacking writing, the poets of ancient times memorized thousands of lines of poetry to pass on their oral traditions to the next generations. When composing new poems, they had their civilization's entire history in their brain to draw upon. Paper and ink have made our memories' lazy; computers, lazier still. I like memorizing poems, but haven't memorized a new one in a few years. I've even found that I can't quite recall all of those that I once knew. I hope to begin by re-memorizing a few of my favorites, then memorizing a new poem every one or two weeks.

3. Waste less time. Ah, this is the most difficult of the three, but essential to finding the time for the other two. I am a natural list-maker (see this post), but for some reason do not use this as a tool to stay on task. I am going to try a few different things to help me stay focused, starting with a list of goals for each day. As an additional help, if you are a fellow resident of KEC 2130 and see me wasting time, do feel free to give me a sharp slap or electric shock--nothing works better than classical conditioning.

A less formal goal is to write to this here blog a bit more, though I don't want to pose too much work for my adoring fan blog. Nobody but me is interested in Jack Zduriencik updates, but since he's been the topic of two of my last three posts I feel I should mention that he is doing an incredible job, and I'm sorry I ever doubted him.

Department of Baseball Research (!!!)

Apparently, at the M's season ticket holder luncheon today, Jack Z. announced that he is forming the Mariners' "Department of Baseball Research", a collection of sabermetricians to oversee decisions at every level of the organization. This is absolutely outstanding news. As I mentioned in my previous post, analysis is the M's glaring weakness, and this is the best indicator so far that Zduriencik gets it, and that he can be the man to turn us around.

Lookout Landing has a more general report on the luncheon that also seems very positive.

After the firing of former scouting director Bob Fontaine, I was all but resolved to three more years of Bavasi-style head-banging. Since then Big Z. has retained Bob Engle, our excellent international scouting director; fired Benny Looper, who oversaw a player development program that recklessly rushed its players, and turned every player into a hacktastic ground ball machine; and promised to bring our evaluation department into the 21st century. The weather's getting drearier, but the Mariners' outlook is getting brighter.

When was the last time it felt good to be an M's fan? (Oh yeah, Felix's grand slam. That was awesome!)

Halloween Costumes

For the uninitiated, we are Hellga and Hulk Hogan, fan-favorite and host (respectively) of American Gladiators!

Thanks to Todd for the picture. More pictures of our rockin' Halloween party can be found on Todd's site here, where you can see Link, Sarah Palin, Cory Doctorow, some guy from Fraggle Rock, and more!

The Z-Factor

It's been less than a week since the Mariners announced Jack Zduriencik (zur-EN-sik) as their new GM and I'm already back against the dike, plugging holes with my little rationalizing fingers. On the other side is that vast sea of Mariners pessimism filled with the tears of the last five years.

Jack Zduriencik was a disappointing selection.

That's not to say that he's not qualified for the job. As scouting director for the Brewers, he rebuilt a tattered farm system, providing the solid core of young players that (with a healthy dose of Sabathia) put Milwaukee in the playoffs for the first time in my life. He's also famous for being the first non-GM to win Baseball America's Executive of the Year award.

But what the Mariners desperately needed was an analyst. The Mariners are a backwards, 20th-century organization, with weak technological infrastructure and little understanding of the advances in baseball research in the last 20 years. We just got rid of our Dan Duquette, our Chuck LaMar, but we didn't replace him with a Theo Epstein or Andrew Friedman. Instead, the Mariners tried to find the next John Schuerholz or Terry Ryan. If they found him, it's going to be a great decade of Mariners baseball, but it's a risk that just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Bill Bavasi was a terrible general manager at the major league level, but he oversaw huge increases and improvements in our amateur and international scouting programs. Scouting director Bob Fontaine and international scouting director Bob Engle are outstanding, by all accounts. And, although the Mariners player development program has been dubious at best, the amount of talent flowing into the system increased dramatically under Bavasi.

Though Bavasi's gone, all of those people and improvements are still in place. Scouting is a Mariner strength. Analysis is our glaring weakness. We consistently overpaid for the wrong skills, gave away far too much in trade, and assembled an expensive team of hacktastic lead gloves who slapped and bobbled their way to 101 losses. Given the budget the Mariners have run the last few years and our scouting success, there is absolutely no reason we shouldn't be contending for the division every year. And with a GM who really understands modern player valuation, we could.

Instead, the Mariners went out and got another top-notch scouting guy, making our current front-office talent redundant, and not addressing our major weaknesses at all.

But, here's the thing: I'm an optimist at heart, much to the chagrin of my biggest fan. I want to like Zduriencik and I want to be excited about the M's again. So, I convince myself that an old scout like Jack-Z must've learned a thing or two about modern statistical analysis from Doug Melvin in Milwaukee. He must notice the sustained success of the Red Sox, and the rapid improvement of the Rays. Or maybe he doesn't, but maybe it doesn't matter because the three-headed super-scouting team of Zduriencik, Fontaine, and Engle actually will turn us into the next Minnesota or Atlanta. Maybe Howie and Chuck knew what they were doing after all...

Jack Zduriencik's first move as general manager? Bob Fontaine was fired yesterday. And that dike just sprung another leak.

Bizarro Bathroom

One of the stranger features of our new apartment is the bathroom, in which nearly everything that is wired or plumbed is done so backwards.

The sink's hot and cold water plumbing is backwards. The hot knob is on the left and the cold knob is on the right, as expected, but the hot knob controls the cold water and the cold knob controls the hot water.

Similarly, the shower hot and cold water plumbing is backwards. Again, the knob is correct, showing hot water to counterclockwise, cold water to clockwise, but the actual water temperature is controlled opposite of that.

Finally, there are two light switches which control two lights, one over the toilet/shower area, and one over the sink. Amazingly, the light switches actually control the lights closest to them. However, the fan, which should come on when the shower/toilet light is on (it is part of the same ceiling unit) actually turns on only when sink light is on.

Maybe our apartment's construction crew was Australian?