Balta1701

QUOTE (Soxbadger @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 01:52 PM) I cant own a human as a pet. "Bring out the gimp"

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 11:22 AM) He doesn't like contact, run horrible routes, and you want him in the slot? Sorry, but he is just a short fast guy who hasn't really done much in his career to warrant me caring if he is on the team next season. I don't know that I'd necessarily translate "3rd WR" to "Slot Receiver" any more. My meaning is more like "3rd option". If you put say, Jackson and Bennett on the other side of the field, with Forte in the backfield, the safeties have to either bite on the run or bite on the other 2 WR's, leaving Knox effectively single-covered.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 10:54 AM) Really? Urlacher is a lock at this point, IMO, and Peppers is getting darn close. I'd say that "Should" be the case, but this is the NFL hall of fame we're talking about, and that 6-7 person limit is really stringent. Those 2 might darn well wind up in that realm of "Guys who should be in the hall of fame but just can't top the list"

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 10:33 AM) UE weekly claims number falls yet again, to 358,000, lowest since April 2008. 4 week moving average falls to 366,250, also the lowest since April '08. Here is an interesting scenario to consider. Let's say the economy continues to heal at a good pace during the next 6-8 months, hiring continues to do well, etc. One thing this will likely cause is for more of the people who have "dropped out" of the workforce to start looking for work again. If enough of them do that in a short period, the UE rates may actually stay the same or even go up again, even though the ecomony is actually more sound than it was. That may make it difficult on Obama, because that UE6 number is what the public is fed all the time. I would think that, but when you look at employment to population statistics, we never even got close to the 2000 peak during the housing-boom expansion. What you propose may happen at some level, but I think that there's a legitimate and ongoing dropoff in employment to population, driven partly by the loss of good jobs and partly by the fact that these last 2 downturns happened as the baby boom generation was approaching retirement.

Was oldsox the one who called him an NL-only hitter?

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 10:17 AM) Im not going to be sad if Knox is gone. So what if he led the team in receptions, he was the tallest midget. And most of those receptions and yards came from Hanie because Cutler could not find Knox consistently. I hope he regains full mobility and strength, and employment elsewhere. Knox would be a reasonable fit in that 3rd WR spot if the Bears had 2 WR's ahead of him, where he could stretch the field and face single coverage regularly. He's at least an asset, if put in the right role then he's effective on the field, so losing him does hurt.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 10:09 AM) All of the main characters from First Class are signed on for a 3 picture deal IIRC. Wolverine I am very skeptical about, that is a tentpole franchise that has been totally ham-handed the entire way. I watch that Wolverine movie and still wonder if the director ever read a Wolverine comic or if they just watched the 90s XMen cartoon. Fox has this intensely brutal, animalistic character that they are turning into a love-lost sappy action hero. Yeah, I wouldn't pay to see a "Wolverine" sequel, and I didn't pay to see the last one, so I totally get where you're coming from on that one, I just really enjoyed the Fassbender/McAvoy version and thought that was really well done.

QUOTE (ScottyDo @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 09:36 AM) Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what do those numbers represent? Eduardo Escobar is clearly not the #38 overall prospect, and Molina is definitely not the #63 player in our system. Are these ratings on a 100 point scale or something? "The number that the person wears on the back of their jersey".

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 09:00 AM) I plead the 5th.... I called him a former all star who we picked up for nothing.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 09:03 AM) I had to work that day and have still not even seen the injury. Was it gruesome? Yes. The human body does not bend like that.

QUOTE (pittshoganerkoff @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 07:19 AM) The Rios deal...well that stunk. Even at the time it happened there were plenty of perplexed folks. Taking on his swollen salary and ego, coupled with his tendency to be a shlub...and it worked out about as well as could be expected. I've bumped/linked to the Rios claim thread several times here, almost everyone was excited about that deal when it happened

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 08:43 AM) AFAIK dogs wouldn't exist without humans. They were domesticated wolves that slowly diverged. And they're a very good compliment to human's weaknesses. We're not very good with sense of smell, but they are, while we help give them the ability to bring down larger prey through tool usage.

The Zeller family has too many kids.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Feb 8, 2012 -> 11:33 PM) Sorry, if he won't extend then f*** that. Honestly, it's all about extension. I guarantee the Magic would take Noah, Taj, and that pick and we could still keep Deng. No doubt in my mind. But if Dwight refuses to re-sign, we are f***ed. Dwight is a huge p****. I keep asking this and not really getting an answer...the old BYC rules had Noah only counting for 1/2 of his salary in a BYC year deal. Is that still the case this year? I'm aware Noah can't be traded at all until March so being annoyed as a previous poster is about how the Bulls haven't gotten a deal done is silly, but I'm trying to figure out if Noah's salary can be used as a match or not.

QUOTE (mumbles3k @ Feb 8, 2012 -> 10:16 PM) I rewatched X-MEN: FIRST CLASS last night. It holds up pretty well. I'd say it's easily the best X-Men movie aside from X2. Matthew Vaughn has signed on to direct a sequel, which makes me happy. THE WOLVERINE seems to be shaping up nicely too. I like that they are willing continue multiple franchises in the same continuity but different time periods simultaneously. So a Sequel to Xo is likely to happen? I would pay to see that.

Great asset to be holding in a couple years to try to put a star next to Rose after Boozer is gone/amnestied.

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Feb 8, 2012 -> 06:52 PM) Like he is trying to curry favor with the public. "Someone thinks I'm worthy of my job . . ." Or he knew that there was a large number of people who thought he should go, so he made it clear he offered.

QUOTE (SoxFan1 @ Feb 8, 2012 -> 06:42 PM) Last 5 seasons: only 5 players have averaged 35+ MPG, 15+ PPG, 6+ RPG, 35% from 3... Durant, Anthony, Nowitzki, Gay, and Luol Deng For awesome stats on Chicago sports, follow @ckamka. I refuse to believe Lu has averaged 35 mpg over the last 5 full seasons if you count total games in the season.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Feb 8, 2012 -> 05:37 PM) Of course, were it not for Peavy/Dunn/Rios, we'd still be able to easily afford Carlos for this season. But frankly, I'm not sure we'd want him.

You could put the dog in a crate on top of the car...

QUOTE (YASNY @ Feb 8, 2012 -> 04:03 PM) Show me. I have only seen that KW offered his resignation. If you prove otherwise, I'll acknowledge and shut up. Here's Kenny's words.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 8, 2012 -> 03:33 PM) As I previously stated, the only time I have a problem with the Sox and draft spending is when they don't pick the obvious guys who drop because of signability and/or draft lesser players because of it. Take the best player available unless there are obvious injury or character concerns. I was never a fan of J Danks. He wasn't a huge overslot signing. He got $500k. As a 7th round pick, he was clearly one of, if not hte best possible players available at the time, who dropped because of signability concerns. So he's exactly what you're saying the Sox should do.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Feb 8, 2012 -> 09:28 AM) You are being intentionally obtuse here. You know damn well that global climate is a system so huge, and effecte by so many things, that you can really only look at the few biggest influences, and study for a general effect. This was bugging me, and now the person I'm supposed to help is unavailable, so why not an essay on this. Yes, there are effectively an infinite number of variables that can alter the global climate system. However, there is 1 big thing we can do...and that is evaluate what the current trends are in the global climate system. The main way this is done is by something called a "Principle component analysis". Basically, looking for patterns in complicated data and trying to see which variables actually matter and how much. When you perform one of these on the temperature records we have, you get a set of components representing: 1. an average global temperature, 2. The El-Nino Southern Oscillation, 3., a long term exponential temperature increase, and 4. A nothern/southern hemisphere pattern of variable intensity. Those components cover a huge fraction of the variance in the system. Beyond that, you can then test via a set of statistical techniques whether adding another variable actually improves the predictive capacity of any model you've come up with. To this point, the answer is no. There may be local phenomena (things like the slowing down of the gulf stream and cooling in Europe/Russia), but if they are directly correlated to 1 of those previous variables, then you're not improving the calculation by adding anything. So yes, you can hypothesize any number of variables that impact the global climate. However, at present, there is no significant evidence that any of them matter. They are either strongly correlated with those for PC's, or they are effectively negligible. Thus, to first order, we can test whether there are things effecting our temperature record that would require us to understand another variable. Right now the answer is no. That leaves the 2nd question...what are the causes of those 4 components? Well, the first is the existence of an atmosphere, which is nice so that the earth isn't a block of ice. The 2nd, the ENSO, that's related to wind driven patterns of ocean circulation. The third, a long term temperature increase, that's the "Global climate change" signal. The 4th, which is weaker, strongly correlates to pollution emissions in the industrialized nations in the northern hemisphere. So, if you want to hypothesize a variable that is impacting climate on a large scale, you need that variable to correlate strongly with one of those components. Effectively, you need something that has skyrocketed the last 50 years on an exponential trend, exactly like CO2 has done (except with a 20 year delay), and a mechanism by which that impacts the climate. Without those 2 things, a proposed climatic variable can't be considered significant. So yes, we can only look at the biggest influences, but that's not because of the complexity...that's because we can actively test whether there are other influences that need to be understood. If there aren't, then we start looking for things that correlate with the measurements we do have. One doesn't just get to assert that things are too complicated to understand when we have fairly standard tests for how complicated things are, and standards by which we can evaluate correlations. Thus, if someone is going to assert that there are other influences in the climate system that aren't well understood, the immediate challenge is what those influences are and how they would improve our understanding of the dominant trends in the system (which is what I keep asking for here when it is asserted that the climate system is too complicated to understand). If a variable can be presented that is correlated with changes that we do observe, and we can perform tests to try to understand the mechanisms, then everyone will start listening, but there is no such other variable/influence out there. Many, things like cloud formation, cosmic rays, magnetic field variations have been tested already. We've got a very large fraction of the variation understood, and every other proposed variable so far either damps itself out when considered over a few years or is strongly coupled to one of the other actual causes.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Feb 8, 2012 -> 02:32 PM) He was and is a waste of money. Then you forfeit the right to ever complain about the Sox not spending in the draft.

The phrase is undead! NOOOOOO!