Young Eric had asked us to assist him to open his shutters, but some hurricane named Omar is menacing the situation a few hundred miles out in the ocean. When that goes north-east, Wallace can decide for himself how much to worry about local weather reports. The same quota of worry is better focused on all those “secure” stocks, you know, the ones like GM and Caterpillar that once seemed to go on forever. A lot of people have lost a third of their retirement money.
Bad news for me. It seems I don’t qualify for the $300 incentive. The notice says my income was not high enough. This strikes me as strange, because I know people who don’t work and people who earned nothing who have recently received checks. I’ll examine the criteria but the only time you can trust the government is when they say no.
Has anyone ever noticed the pattern to squared numbers? After one and two, there is a definite pattern to the differences between the squares, and the differences between the resulting differences. I had noticed this when I was in grade five, but never gave it any further thought. See if you understand the accompanying chart. (If you don’t, are you reading the right blog?) The first column in the original number, the second column is the square of the original. The third column is the difference between the square and the square of the previous number, and the last column is the difference between the difference between. Got that?I was thinking inside the box, dang it. I knew that computers can’t really multiply and divide, rather they add very rapidly. What? No, computers don’t subtract, they add negative numbers. But how on Earth they calculated squares and square roots was beyond me. Now I realize it is done by counting the number of “twos” in the last column. For the square root of 81 count the number of twos “ahead” of that row and add one, and so on. There are at least three other methods in the chart that would also work. See them? Computers can count very efficiently. Thus in grade five I had stumbled across the “Finite Differential Theory”. With that, my family, and a dime, I could have made a phone call.
Art, our resident programmer who comes into the shop every other month, advises me that most applications still use ordinary C language. If I recall correctly, I passed a college course in that language at one point. He says that C+ and C++ are used mainly for huge projects. Stick with C. The joke goes that C is the average mark of the people who use it. I do recall I did not like the language and found it not an improvement. Remember back then, nobody knew which of many languages would become standard, so we studied them all. I did like Pascal. C also used symbols that were not present on some keyboards (back then). It does contain functions that alter computer settings, sparking my interest that it may be a major language of viruses.
