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Sunday, January 15th, 2006
It snowed last night -- there is not a lot on the ground but Ellen thought Sylvia and I should take the opportunity to head down to the park and go sledding. I was a little skeptical, whether there would be enough snow to bear the sled; but we set off. A good thing right off the bat -- I had forgotten that we got Sylvia a new sled last year, a very lightweight orange thing to replace the ponderous red sled we had two years ago. The red one would not have stood a chance; this one floated along under Sylvia. Good thing two -- when we got to the park there was a lot of ice in the grass under the snow. As it turned out the lightweight sled could move quite a distance on that thin layer of snow and ice. Sylvia was hesitant but once she took the leap, she was loving it. And no-one else had come out to go sledding -- I guess it did not seem worth-while with so little snow; so we had the big hill all to ourselves. This afternoon we will go ice-skating.
posted morning of January 15th, 2006: Respond
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Friday, January 13th, 2006
Over at Unfogged, Frederick suggests that 325 is the smallest number which can be expressed as a sum of two perfect squares three different ways. I just wrote a program to check this which confirms Frederick's suspicion; here it is if you want to check my logic. #include
int perfect[] = {
1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100,
11 * 11, 12 * 12, 13 * 13,
14 * 14, 15 * 15, 16 * 16, 17 * 17,
18 * 18, 19 * 19, 20 * 20
};
bool IsSumOfSq(int s, int &a, int &b, int x1, int x2)
{
for (int i = a + 1; i < 20; ++i)
{
if (s < perfect[i])
return false;
int diff = s - perfect[i];
for (int j = 0; j < 20; ++j)
if (j == x1 || j == x2)
continue;
else if (perfect[j] == diff)
{
a = i;
b = j;
return true;
}
}
}
int main()
{
int i;
for (i = 0; i < 400; ++i)
{
int a = -1, b;
if (IsSumOfSq(i, a, b, -1, -1))
{
int c = a, d;
if (IsSumOfSq(i, c, d, a, -1))
{
int e = c, f;
if (IsSumOfSq(i, e, f, a, c))
{
printf("%d = %d^2 + %d^2\n"
" = %d^2 + %d^2\n"
" = %d^2 + %d^2",
i, a + 1, b + 1, c + 1,
d + 1, e + 1, f + 1);
break;
}
}
}
}
return 0;
}
Output:
325 = 1^2 + 18^2
= 6^2 + 17^2
= 10^2 + 15^2
posted evening of January 13th, 2006: Respond
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Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
At the beginning of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the narrator introduces Lucy and says that she had already gotten to visit her magical country twice (referring to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian). Sylvia thinks about this for a while and points out that it was actually three times, referring to the three separate visits in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
posted evening of January 11th, 2006: Respond
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My Proulx jag continues: last night I finished Postcards (loved it), this morning I started The Accordion Crimes -- I was thinking after Postcards almost anything would have to be a letdown, but it looks like I was wrong based on the beginning of The Accordion Crimes. Update: Er, just now I looked at the book and noticed the title is actually Accordion Crimes.
posted evening of January 11th, 2006: Respond
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Monday, January 9th, 2006
Something else about Annie Proulx -- it is amazing to me the way time passes in her stories. I am 3/4 of the way through Postcards and the story has spanned about 30 or 40 years so far; but I have no sense that I have missed parts of the story skipped over, or that I have been rushed along. Instead I feel like I have been listening to the story for 30 or 40 years. (Which is not to say the story is dragging -- it's not, it's gripping -- it seems to me like a huge accomplishment for her to be able to hold my attention for virtual decades.)
posted afternoon of January 9th, 2006: Respond
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Saturday, January 7th, 2006
We went ice-skating again today -- Sylvia now a little more hip to the idea that she does not know how to do it, so more resistant to learning. But after sitting on the sidelines for about half an hour, she had a change of heart and tried it out. With Ellen in hand she made it around the rink (next to the wall, usually holding it) 3 times!
posted evening of January 7th, 2006: Respond
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Tuesday, January third, 2006
Today I started reading another Annie Proulx book, Postcards -- this one is grabbing me right away, pulling me into the story. I'm really liking the way she leaves key bits of the story for you to fill in -- something I have found annoying elsewhere. Something I have been thinking ever since reading Bad Dirt -- Proulx is incredibly versatile! In each story and each book, there is a new stylistic attribute.
posted evening of January third, 2006: Respond
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Monday, January second, 2006
Yay, recipe blogging! I came up with a new idea for dinner tonight and it tastes very good. I am not sure what to call it yet. - 3 strips of bacon. (more if it is lean)
- 2 chicken breasts.
- 1 small red onion.
- 1 red bell pepper.
- some broccoli.
- 1 can of white beans.
Cut the bacon into bite-size pieces and fry it over a moderate flame until the fat starts coming out. Slice the chicken breasts into strips and add them to the pot with some salt, and fry until they are done, about 5 minutes, turning as necessary. While it is cooking cut up the onion, the pepper and the broccoli. Spoon the chicken and bacon out of the pot and add the onion to the grease, with a little salt. Sauté it for a few seconds and then add the pepper, a few more seconds and add the broccoli. After about a minute, add the beans. Stir it around so the vegetables are not at the bottom of the pot, then add the meat back in and cover the pot. When it starts bubbling up, reduce the flame to a simmer. After about five minutes it will be ready to serve. I served this over couscous tonight; I think it would also be good with rice or most any grain.
posted evening of January second, 2006: Respond
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Weird dream last night that I think was vaguely related to having read John Quiggin's post on terrorism and cancer* last night. Somebody I did not know except through blogs had ordered a prescription of epinephrine pseudoephedrine from an online prescription counter, and mistakenly had it delivered to my address. Then they realized the whole thing was a mistake since that combination of drugs is illegal. (I don't know if it actually is -- I remember a scandal about that drug combination a year or two ago but not the upshot of it -- in the dream it was definitely illegal.) So they contacted me and asked me to return the drugs, with complicated instructions I was to give to the online pharmacy about modifying the prescription and resending it to their address. I packaged it up and addressed it, but then left it by the front door and forgot about it until a few weeks later, when the other party contacted me with a very urgent message wondering what was going on. Woke up singing "Ep,inEPHrine, pseudo,ephEDrine" to a square-dancy tune**, and thinking I should go to Crooked Timber and leave a tongue-in-cheek comment to John's post, to the effect that "If we ever needed a regulatory state apparatus like the FDA, that day is certainly past -- with the advent of the internet and world-wide web, the only tool the consumer really needs to find out whether a particular drug is safe and effective, is Google!" but decided against it.
*Just realized the connection may not be immediately clear: propertarians in the comments thread are putting down on the FDA, is why I thought there might be a connection. And for some cognitive dissonance, see this Making Light post, in which Teresa is angry at the FDA, or, well, at Public Citizen for its lobbying of the FDA. **Aha! the tune was Roly Poly by Fred Rose. "Square-dancy" is probably a poor choice of adjectives, picked it in a hurry and it does not communicate much of relevance here.
posted morning of January second, 2006: Respond
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Saturday, December 31st, 2005
Sylvia has been taking violin lessons for a couple of months now. She seems to be really enjoying the playing part of lessons and practices, but it is hampering her, that she hates making mistakes and not being able to do things. (No diagnosis here -- I think this will give her trouble and need to be overcome at some point, and I think she picks this mode of being up in part from me -- just saying how it is.) Most of what she does in lessons and practices is of course stuff she is not able to do yet, so it gets frustrating for her. My current approach is not to push at all, just let her approach it from a place she feels comfortable, and this seems to be working out pretty well for the time being. Today she came up with a new strategy which I think may be very useful to her, which is to transfer her frustration with not being able to do things onto her bow. We are learning to play "I Have a Little Dreydl", for the seasonal tie-in, and she has got the sequence of notes correct but was not getting the meter. So: I tried explaining to her that the notes were played in pairs, and played it through exaggerating the pairs; and she said, "I know that -- but my bow makes mistakes." A little light went on for me and we talked back and forth for a few minutes about helping the bow to get better by practicing. And I realized, we should really be doing "I Have a Little Dreydl" in the same way we play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Litle Star", repeating a set rhythm for each note, that will be a lot easier for Sylvia's bow to remember. So we tried it with the "Elephants-and-mon,keys" rhythm and she was able to do it straight through, very smoothly. A note on the Suzuki method: I learned Suzuki violin from when I was approximately 5 years old until 13 or so (IIRC) and hated much of it. It took me until I was 18 or so to start getting back into music and until this year to pick up the violin again; in between then and now I think there are a lot of lost opportunities. I have thought all along that whatever I did, I would not subject a child of mine to Suzuki music instruction. But I had a bit of a change of heart last year or so. Whatever the faults of Suzuki, it does seem to have left me and my siblings, all of whom were in the program, with an abiding ear for music. So my new idea is to start Sylvia in Suzuki, but (a) keep a very close eye on whether she is enjoying it and having a good time, and make it clear it is her option whether to stay with it or not; and (b) encourage her to learn to read music early on. (Her teacher seems to be pretty good about not viewing Suzuki as a doctrine, just as a teaching tool, which is encouraging -- my memory of my own childhood experience suggests that this attitude is not universal.)
posted evening of December 31st, 2005: Respond
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