Balta1701

QUOTE (Vance Law @ Oct 2, 2015 -> 07:58 PM) Tony LaRussa sure didn't. Once he was let go by the White Sox, Tony LaRussa never went more than 3 straight seasons without a playoff appearance.

QUOTE (Baron @ Oct 2, 2015 -> 06:02 PM) I wouldnt be surprised if that happens anyway. Heck losing apparently equals a good job here. Might as well give him more security. I've been saying to expect it all year. The last time Robin was 1 year from a contract being up was before 2014 - coming off the terrible 2013 season they extended his contract anyway because they weren't going to let him go into his final contract year unsigned. I see no reason to expect anything different.

QUOTE (shipps @ Oct 2, 2015 -> 05:52 PM) I almost think it would have been better for them to not announce this at the very end of a completely horrid underachieving season and just of waited a couple months to announce it after the anger and frustration subsided a bit. At least then a fresh season would be in sight and the fan base might have accepted this a little a better. They'll have to announce the extension then.

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 2, 2015 -> 03:43 PM) Sixth. They gave up their 6th already for Suisham, I'm genuinely surprised you woudln't want something higher.

So just hypothetically, if the Steelers were to ask about Robbie Gould, what would be the draft pick it would take?

So, I used TMobile for 6 months last year and as a consequence my social security number was leaked and I'm now booked for 2 years of free credit monitoring. Anyone else who used TMobile should at least sign up, if you're not already receiving that benefit from someone like Target.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 2, 2015 -> 11:02 AM) X1? I got it a couple of months ago, and have no idea how I survived as long as I did with the old one. It is so much easier to use, plus it is nice having remote access to DVR shows, for the most part. I like it in general I just wish someone could build a DVR that didn't freeze as often.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 2, 2015 -> 02:06 PM) The new system actually has an HD preference feature where when enabled, if you select an SD channel, it automatically takes you to the HD channel instead (if it has one). So if you hit 2 for Chicago CBS, it takes to automatically to CBS Chicago HD's channel. Mine does this as well for any channel that is present in HD.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Sep 30, 2015 -> 10:11 PM) If Cutler is hurt I just want to see Fales play every snap. The guy can sling it a bit and he definitely has more upside than Clausen. woo hoo 3rd string qb syndrome!!

QUOTE (shipps @ Sep 30, 2015 -> 06:29 PM) Balta, with all that being said it seems like it is pretty senseless to think there is going to be true advances from all that has been learned about Mars in recent years. There is not enough knowledge or funding that will actually change the way we live here or there from what we've learned. Its all been for s***s and giggles. In the 1960s, we went to the moon for s***s and Giggles - it was basically to beat the Russians there. Out of that effort, the amount of benefit this nation got was huge. Pull out your phone. Do you have the ability to access a GPS instrument? Those satellites grew out of the development of satellite launch and engineering facilities developed in the effort to go to the moon. Early next week I'm likely to be hit by a tropical storm. We know that in part because we are able to launch satellites into high, stationary orbits around the Earth and they're capable of multi-spectral imaging at high resolutions - so you can see water vapor contents through the atmosphere. Those satellites last for years, one of them even survived an impact with a bit of space rock a few years ago & we managed to recover from it. Meanwhile, I'm watching television that was broadcast to me via satellites. If you tried to predict any of that after the Moon landing, you'd never have come close to guessing where it would go. Today, the main company that launches satellites from the US is the United Launch Alliance, a combination between Boeing and Lockheed. They aren't exactly companies that get into business in order to contribute to charity. They're now being competed with by other companies, including SpaceX and soon to be Jeff Bezos's company, because this is to them an obvious growth industry - spurred by original development from NASA. You want some crazy ones? Have you or a family member ever had an MRI or an ultrasound? The imaging software that today allows us to do those was originally software developed 25 years ago when the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror was misground. The amount of economic benefit developed from this work long-term is extraordinary. I'm an asthmatic - i have vacuums and air filters built using NASA filtration technology. It makes my life better. That's the thing with basic research - if you try to predict where it's going to go, you'll be wrong. In the 1970s, geoscientists and biologists studied "extreme" organisms that live above 50 degrees C. Why on Earth would anyone care about a bacterium that lives in a hot spring pool in Yellowstone? In the late 1980s, a research group realized that one of these bacteria had an enzyme that survived high temperatures and could be used to process DNA at higher temperatures than anyone else could. They extracted that enzyme and published their work - leading to the development of a technique called Polymerase Chain Reaction - PCR - for rapid DNA sequencing. The cost of sequencing DNA went down by a factor of several thousand and the time taken went down from years to days. Because people investigated bacteria in a pool in Yellowstone in the 1970s, today we're talking about the fact that a rape kit came back showing Patrick Kane's DNA was not present within a few days after it is collected. That skill can save people's lives - we can sequence parts of genomes rapidly and determine "hey this person is at risk of breast cancer and should take aggressive action". Because of a bacterium living in a hot spring. I can't tell you where a Mars program could lead. Heavy lift rockets like those needed to get to Mars could also reach the asteroid belt which has objects loaded with the elements we pay large amounts of money for today - gold, rare earth elements, silver, etc. Materials developed for those missions could be better building materials. We built an ion thruster engine to visit an asteroid. We developed imaging technology for Mars that can be adapted to Earth and weather forecasting. We might develop a type of fusion and realize we need a way to bring back lots of helium-3 and the Moon's surface is a good resource. But really, if I try to guess I'm going to fail. If you found a martian organism, it could be like that bacterium in a hot spring - who knows what it is adapted to. But beyond that still, I would argue there is a point just to the search. Quite simply "is there other life in this universe" remains a fundamental question. That's one of those things that shapes the way we look at ourselves - how unique are we? If life evolved 5 times in our solar system, how do we view ourselves? It's even possible life evolved once on a place like Mars and then fed other sites in the solar system through meteorites - we could actually even be martians. But even beyond that, there's one other level - NASA is quite simply the single most well respected brand the United States has in the world. People who have barely ever had internet access know about NASA. They imaged Pluto this year. They dropped a nuclear powered laser firing robot onto the surface of another planet (using thruster and parachute technology now being licensed elsewhere btw). They landed on the moon. They practically own social media - I got 500,000+ readers earlier this year for a story I wrote using one of their Pluto images. I've pointed out the ISS traveling overhead to about a dozen different students this year including a couple below 10. This very weekend a story about NASA is going to open as the likely number 1 movie in the world. The people who built many of the companies we see today grew up watching humans walk on the moon. I can picture the Sojourner rover accidentally kicking up one of its wheels on a rock in 1996 - its just locked in my head. The people who built the internet grew up watching shuttle launches. We can put a price on how much money is earned from NASA developed technologies and its generally huge. We can't put a price on the best brand the country has. We can't put a price on a 10 year old dreaming about being an astronaut and what they do with their life. And that's what we're really losing when we don't explore.

QUOTE (Lip Man 1 @ Sep 30, 2015 -> 06:46 PM) Just the start of little to no change with an organization that has had three straight losing years, six out of nine and are becoming more and more irrelevant each day. Mark While it will annoy me as much as you when they make no organizational changes, I have no problem with the radio and TV teams not changing as they have presumably little effect on the quality of product on the field. Unless the front office really is listening to Hawk's ideas on how to build a team.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Sep 29, 2015 -> 04:01 PM) I don't use bWAR for pitchers so I am not all that concerned with it. You are ignoring opportunity cost when using WAR. Phegley had no standing in this organization and would have never been given a chance. In fact, he may have been released if the A's didn't have a liking for him. Bassit would have never started on our team either and I'll bet can't do what he does in Oakland outside of there. If we keep Bassit, there's probably no Albers. The only part that hurts is Semien but you have to give to get. Since you brought up opportunity/cost: part of the cost of Samardzija is that we never gave Bassit an opportunity because we had to compete right now. And "Phegley woudln't have played for this organization" is only a defense of the move if it's also an indictment of the organization at the same time. But anyway, i can go on with this for hours and so I'm going to drop it, last word is yours if you want it.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Sep 29, 2015 -> 03:37 PM) Samardzija was not a mediocre acquisition. He underperformed, but he still has surplus value on his cost. Plus, we have a very valuable draft pick coming from his dismissal. I liked this move then and I like it now. This was a well thought out, perfectly positioned move. The fact that Samardzija has performed the way he has and the Sox are in the position they are in shows how well-coordinated this move was. For what it's worth - I disliked the move then and disliked it even in June when Samardzija was pitching well. He produced some surplus value if you go strictly by Fangraphs, but he has produced less surplus value than what was traded for, was paid more, and the value of the draft pick is almost certain to be less than what was traded away for him in the long term by a large amount without even taking into account the fact that it'll be 3-4 years before we even have a chance to get anything from it. Plus, if you go by the baseball-reference numbers, he has 0 surplus value - in fact he's dramatically overpaid by their numbers. It was a poorly thought out, "all-in" sort of move that was MUCH higher risk than anyone wanted to admit given where our organization was at the time, not even counting the larger degradation in performance than expected. I know you won't agree with my case and I'm ok with that, just highlighting the fact that there was disagreement with the concept at the time.

QUOTE (Jose Abreu @ Sep 29, 2015 -> 01:12 PM) Not specifically about the water, but 1. Does this change beliefs on whether or not there is life of any kind on Mars? 2. Do you think a human being will walk on Mars in the next 20 years? 1. I think this was long suspected, so the likely answer is no. The Phoenix lander in 2007 observed water ice just below the surface of Mars at its landing site and we flew an instrument called a Gamma Ray spectrometer around Mars that was able to detect that there is significant water in some form within the upper 10s of centimeters across much of the planet. That water could be locked up in minerals or frozen as actual water ice, but it's not unexpected that there is water ice frozen near Mars's surface. After the undergrad discovered these RSL features in 2011, I think most Mars scientists suspected their likelist cause was water. In fact, Mars researchers have been putting out papers for years analyzing the change in freezing point of water associated with expected common salts on Mars to try to understand which salts might be present in those flows if they were brine water. This paper verifies that it is. However, this specific find doesn't change the full calculus for me - we thought there was water near the surface frozen as ice, we knew there were locations where it could become liquid, that's what needs to be present for there to be life, but this is so short-lived that it might not even be a habitable environment this year - it could freeze completely in the winter. Furthermore, the type of salts likely present are caustic to life as we know it, making it an extremely rough environment. There remains a better chance of melted water at depth, warmed by the heat of the planet, representing a habitable environment, but I'm still skeptical of that because there's so little evidence of the kinds of ecological changes caused by life that we see on Earth today. Can't rule it out, but this doesn't change that assessment, at least to me. Good science, but not unexpected is my short summary. 2. No I don't. I think we could but I don't think the money is there. We've spent 7-8 years now basically with the entire exploration program locked in a budget crisis and I don't see that changing any time soon. Unless that changes, we're still building a giant rocket with no where to go because the costs are so daunting. It will require a decade+ of substantial, sustained money committed well beyond what is being spent on NASA right now, and we can barely get robotic missions funded in this environment - we're launching at about 1/2 the pace we were a decade ago. I also don't see any private organization being able to come up with that level of funding either because it is so high and the potential return is so low.

QUOTE (flavum @ Sep 29, 2015 -> 02:28 PM) Looking at the radar in the east, there could be a handful of doubleheaders tomorrow. This weekend is shaping up to be messy as well.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 29, 2015 -> 01:32 PM) This is exactly why the evaluation of Erik Johnson is so important right now. Montas and Fulmer are realistically not ready for the big time, because of their lack of innings. If a deal is made, Johnson is the leader to take that spot in the rotation. The insistence on getting Montas big league starts this season makes me wonder if they're not thinking of him as the 5th starter.

Even I didn't notice this...the Yankees officially eliminated the White Sox over the weekend.

QUOTE (Jose Abreu @ Sep 29, 2015 -> 09:35 AM) So, water on mars... You want to chat about it, you've got someone pretty close to an official expert right here. Any Q's?

QUOTE (Alexeihyeess @ Sep 28, 2015 -> 08:37 PM) As of 9/2 the Bears had all 7 of their picks, now they have 9. http://www.prosportstransactions.com/footb...uture/Bears.htm I say get a couple more. Willie Young gets a 5th or 6th. The corpse of McClellin maybe gets a conditional 6th, or a 7th. If you can somehow procure a 3rd rounder or better without dealing Long, McPhee or Alshon I'm all about that too. The missing name from your list is Forte.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Sep 28, 2015 -> 06:21 PM) 4. Greg Oden was never the youngest MVP in league history, so while he had massive hype, Rose actual realized that hype early in his career and was a transcending star and one of the faces of the league (not to mention Adidas). You could also throw in the $18 mil per year Rose is being paid if you wanted. And the fact that he's been a starter on a competitive team before.

QUOTE (bmags @ Sep 28, 2015 -> 05:36 PM) I'm worried about trading quintana. I feel like the entire league and media and world has been colluding to convince everyone this clearly top level pitcher is actually a back of the rotation starter. That's what worries me also. Them treating Quintana like a weak starter when he's one of the most valuable trade assets in baseball. I won't be mad if he has to go, but it needs to be a franchise-changer. It shouldn't fill "one position". But "filling one position" is what they might try to do with a "win now" deal.

QUOTE (Swingandalongonetoleft @ Sep 28, 2015 -> 04:31 PM) I get that some athletes need to have the underdog/under-appreciated mindset, but this guy has been a frigging court-side chinaware display case for a few seasons now- yet anytime he opens his mouth there is a good chance you're about to hear (in some form) about some perceived slight/imagined grievance (of which the perpetrator is faceless). He tries to be cryptic or indirect about it, but fails, because it's one of the only things he ever talks about. Greg Oden had awful luck too, and he similarly had huge expectations, albeit out of college- did he spend 1/100th of the time Rose does crying about his numerous insecurities to the media anytime his mouth opened? 1. Greg Oden first had to deal with Portland media, not exactly Chicago. 2. Greg Oden probably very much had to deal with those sorts of questions his first 2 years, but no one heard them outside of Portland other than seeing "another injury for Oden". 3. By his 3rd year Greg Oden was no longer getting those questions because there was no chance of him playing any time soon.

Play like you want to get paid then.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 28, 2015 -> 03:00 PM) Realistically, I can see one of those three things happening and that is Niko stepping up in his second year. Rose and Noah both have some big mileage on their odometers. At their ages and the condition of their bodies, it is pretty unrealistic to think they both can go back to being their old selves. Since it's "Best shape of their lives" time of year, I can even give myself reason to think that. "Noah had basically no offseason last year to recover from his surgery, with a full offseason he's certain to come back a lot stronger!". "Rose finally got a nearly-full season in last year including a taste of the playoffs, he's also not rehabbing for the first time in years, so he'll come back stronger too!" "Hoiberg will do a better job of figuring out matchups and won't force things like Noah and Gasol onto the court together when they're not working". I know, it's not exactly likely, but it's the season where you're allowed to think things like that.

QUOTE (whitesoxfan99 @ Sep 28, 2015 -> 02:49 PM) Removing injuries from the equation because the Bulls have just as many potential issues on that front as the other contenders, what makes you think the Bulls could beat the Cavs, Spurs or Warriors in a series? If somehow they all were healthy, there's 4 guys on that roster who have been all stars and all-NBA level players within recent seasons and then throw in Mirotic on top of that. If I could somehow pretend they all were somewhat healthy and injuries didn't sap their performance, that's pretty darn loaded. Rose and Noah not being those players any more, Gasol not being able to be near peak level for 100 games, those are the kind of things where injuries have hit this roster worse than other teams and there's nothing I can do about that. I can, however, dream about 2013 Noah and 2011 Rose reappearing at least until the season starts.