Candy Mountain
I wanted to try posting a YouTube video and see how it worked. So I’m going to try posting one I came across recently. This one is funny.
Meinen Family Photo
I ordered a book called Images of America, Chippewa Falls Wisconsin from Amazon.com the other day and was amazed to find a couple interesting photos in there. One of which being a new family photo of the Meinen clan during Nickolas and Magdalene (Mayer) Meinen’s 50th Wedding Anniversary as described in the Chippewa Falls Daily Independant Article. All the children and Grand Children appear to be in the photo. This should also include my Great-Grandmother Anna Stoffel (the future Mrs. Felix Yakesh) who should be about 10 years of age, but I have not been able to positively identify her in the photo. I believe John Stoffel is the man with the mustache standing behind his wife Theresa Stoffel (holding Elmer, age 3?). This isn’t a very good scan so I would like to get a hold of a better scan. If any of you are members of the CCHS, that would be something to get! Let me know if you know who some of these people are.
Roz Reading
Rosalind is doing such a great job in school. Since getting back to school from winter break, Rosalind was tested in reading, along with all the other children in her class, and was found to be ahead in her current reading group. She went from level 5 at the beginning of the year to level 20 in the beginning of the second semester. Rosalind was very proud of herself and we’re really proud of her too. She’s now in the highest reading group in her class. Here’s a sample of Rosalind’s homework.
This is much more advanced than what I remember reading at that age!
Sudoku Solver!
About a year ago I wrote a perl-cgi program that will solve Sudoku puzzles. In case you haven’t heard what a Sudoku is, I’ll explain. Sudoku are these recently popular number puzzles that have been showing up in various newspapers, handheld games, and on the internet. They challenge the player to fill in the remaining numbers of a 9 x 9 matrix, by selecting the numbers 1-9 that are unique to that row, column, and 3 x 3 group within the overall matrix. Well anyways, my program did not work for some of the harder Sudoku because at some point in these harder ones the best you can do is guess between two possible values for a single “square” and try to solve it from there. So that’s what I recently coded my script to do. First it narrows the possibilities down for each unknown value until it uncovers that certain squares can only be of a single value, and then it uses these values to find other unknown values. If after 20 iterations through the matrix and it still has not solved the Sudoku, it saves off what it has found thus far. Then it makes an educated guess on the first square it comes across with exactly two possibilities. From there it tries to solve the puzzle with this first guess. If after 40 iterations and it still can’t solve the Sudoku, the program goes back to the saved values and tries the second value in this same 2 possibility square, which of course will work, since the first value did not. This method has worked for every valid puzzle I’ve fed it so far. There are, I’m sure, more efficient ways of solving Sudoku but I thought this one was pretty neat.
Wikipedia has a good write up on some of those other methods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku
I guess the whole point is to solve your Sudoku by hand, but I got tired of this and decided that I could fee up a bunch of time by just scripting this. So if you like Sudoku and can’t solve one by hand, you can come here and get the answers!
Interview with Eyvind and Inga Ager
I just finished a transcript that I’ve been working on for the last 4 weeks. The transcript is of an interview with my Great-Grandparents Eyvind and Inga Ager conducted by Tim Hirsch on February 27, 1998. Their thoughts, experiences, and a little bit of their wisdom is preserved here. My Grandpa gives a glimpse of what it was like to grow up in Eau Claire Wisconsin during the early part of the 20th century, while my Grandma gives an excellent account of Waldemar Ager’s last days and how she met Eyvind. Tim’s foresight to conduct this interview is greatly appreciated. Thank You!
I really wanted to make the information buried inside 1 hour and 43 minutes of video dialogue more accessible and searchable for future reference. So I decided to create a comprehensive text of the dialogue taken directly from the video. I used two computer programs to assist in this task, primarily, Pinnacle Studio 10.7 for replaying the digital copy of the video so that I could slow down the speed of the video. I also used Dragon Speaking Naturally 9 to assist in typing the words I would voice from the recording. Even with these two tools it turned out to be a bigger task than I initially thought. In most cases I tried to edit out a number of natural pauses in conversion if they did not contribute to flow of the conversation, i.e. the “ahhas”, “umms”, “huhs”, we say all the time. In the end, it was well worth the experience to get to know my Great-Grand Parents a little bit better.
Beyond Belief 2006
I just finished watching a three day conference entitled “Beyond Belief 2006, Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival.” Hosted by The Science Network, the conference assembled an all-star cast of scientists, philosophers and authors such as Ann Druyan (CEO and co-founder of Cosmos Studios and Carl Sagan’s wife), Richard Dawkins (author and biologist at Oxford), Neil deGrasse Tyson (Host of PBS show “NOVA science NOW”, and director of the Hayden Planetarium), Steven Weinberg (Nobel Prize winner in physics) and many others. There was some really good discussion about the nature of religion and the issues that surrounds it from a scientific perspective. I would highly recommend watching this to anyone interested in this subject.