Band practice, the big band that is, was cancelled. I tried to convince JZ to take in the art show today but Sunday is always crowded. So, tomorrow it is, as planned. Instead of walking up to Dunkin, I e-biked to Starbuck’s. Right beside the Panera, where I no longer go because of the crowd. I don’t mind working class, but when that becomes synonymous with idiot-class, I’m moving on. There is something about the Panera that attracts the dumb bunnies.
What is happening with silver? You are watching the green line. It has climbed steadily. A little too steadily, as if somebody is trying to start a bid war. But should it continue so for another twenty days, we’ll be moving to West Palm in style. And how about my fancy lady doctor from the dating site? Well, the polish has worn off and she is just not a writer or much of a communicator. Of the e-mails received, most were one or two sentences. Um, the topic was mostly centered around her recent bout with the flu. Maybe she’s holding back, but even so, it’s not the height nor depth of conversation I’d expect from someone with a doctorate. I’m just saying, because she really seems so nice.
That’s another downside of e-dating. Most profiles we all know are exaggerated, but not yet has one of the ladies who expressed interest in academic topics ever written a word about it. Tell you what, let me check what the seven women I’ve contacted have said they were interested in. Be right back. Okay, cell biology, acoustics, astronomy, history, physics, genetics, geology, statistics, economics, and neuroscience. Yet, not one of them has even touched on any of those topics whatsoever. And some of these women and I have corresponded with for many months.
My profile specifies natural history, science in general, mathematics/statistics, physics, astronomy, geology, economics, and technology. It is practically impossible to have a conversation with me without one of these topics arising at an advanced theoretical level. So what is it with these women who seem to treat their stated interests as the last bloody thing on Earth they’d want to talk about? Well, I mean, either that or all of them are lying. What do you think?
On the other hand, the 60 men on the site have and average height of 5’10-1/4” making them very average on that count. I still have my doubts, you see, as I’ve spent at least part of the year in school, college, or university for 28 years of my life. The curve of the 55 men who state they are taller than me is wildly skewed. It would be strange indeed to walk into any room, much less a scholarly group to find that 92% of the men were over six feet tall. Towering more than a half-foot over me. Giants, and 96.7% of them are whites. There is only so much one can believe at face value.
Have you seen the latest attempts to slander Snowden? It’s so blatant the way the Americans try to belittle fugitives when they can’t catch them. So now, Snowden stole the password that gave him access to state secrets. Bull donkey and it wouldn’t really matter anyway, guys. Or how about that British custom agent that targeting Snowden’s lawyer? That’s one thing about Brits, their imbeciles are about as mainstream as they come. I mean, how do you tip off a lawyer that she’s being illegally profiled? Send her to England.
More on Frankencorn. I’m still examining sources. I realize the only party that has much good to say about GMO corn is Monsanto, the people who brought you DDT and Agent Orange. All my life I ate what I pleased with little concern except for calories—but I was never a big eater. The more I read, the less I am blaming myself for that heart attack. As the BBC puts it, Americans get sick twice as often as the rest of the world beginning around the time GMOs were introduced. This is NOT my situation as far as I know, but here is how the theory works.
The most common type of genetic modification is to make a crop herbicide resistant. (The spray kills the weeds, but not the grain.) Then next most common mutation is the culprit for me. It laces the food product with a compound that kills insects when they eat it. This is accomplished by causing the insect’s stomach to rupture. It is asserted by Monsanto that the compound, Bt, is harmless to humans.
However, research indicates trace amounts of Bt do, in fact, cause small holes to open in the human intestine. As a result, particles of food that are not yet completely digested can enter the bloodstream. The result? The human immune system sees something that isn’t supposed to be there and you get a huge upswing in food allergies, diabetes, and among other things, triglyceride accumulation.
Something sounds familiar here. Without any of my medical people outright stating it, I’ve had many reasons and suggestions in the past to believe my system was manufacturing triglycerides to excess.
Music. I need another 12 to 15 tunes. Where I am to find these is unknown. It took years to get the 20+ that I know today. And some of those are shaky. The stage on Friday revealed shortcomings that can only be addressed by hours of practice. I forgot lyrics and Jag reverted to comping. We are stuck playing B rooms until this hurdle is overcome. As luck would have it, that is the only kind of room in this part of the planet.
ADDENDUM
How about a peek into the mind of a programmer? It starts with a concept. I’ve decided to document the process that real programmers undergo before a computer gets involved. I need to test if my skills are rejuvenated by creating a program that uses all the common commands, and which would be onerous to perform without a computer. I will program a simulation.
The Concept: to roll a dice 1,000,000 times and see if the results are “honest”.
The Language: QBASIC
Estimated planning time: 2 hours
Estimated coding time: 3 hours
Estimated debugging time: 1 hour
First things to consider are memory size. Always opt for the smallest units that will function, as double-precision chunks will visibly slow down your computer. I will need at least the following variables
Die1: short integer. Digits 1 to 6
Value1: immaterial. We are not counting the die reading
Counter: long integer. Counts the number of throws (maximum 1 million)
Tally1: long integer. Potential highest number of times one value could appear
My logic is as follows: the smallest memory unit, the short integer can deal with positive numbers up to 32,767, I will need seven of those. Thus, in my trial, there will actually be only 1 million results. This is the point where non-programmers may have difficulty wrapping their heads around the numbers. I am not “reading” the dice to get a total. Rather, counting the number of times each value turns up. Sound easy? Good, then try programming it.
The counter, which I intend to display on screen, will serve two roles: to stop the count at 1 million and to give the operator a sense of progress. I expect the counter will ripple too fast to be read, so I may embellish the final display. A long integer can hold numbers up to 2,147,483,647, but since the number 1 million is one digit too large, I have to leap to this next available memory size.
Here is where the logic gets sticky. The number of dots from each throw should appear equally 1/6th of the time. Each individual number should theoretically show up 166,667-ish times. Even though I can’t throw a fractional die, I should allow for a decimal. That’s in case I later want to perform any statistics. Single precision allows up to 7 digits, one of which must be a decimal point. So let me count on my fingers 1-6-6-6-6-7 is six numbers. Here is a potential logic error. However small, there is a chance one die could roll a single number 1 million times and crash my program. But I’ll take that chance. (A single line of code will prevent a stack overflow but like many programs, I have to live with the limitation of that potential error. My plan to get to the million, which overflows by one digit, is to begin counting at zero instead of one.)
Now, pencil and pad, and up to the coffee place for the flowcharting stage. It is also important to design the program so that there is a pleasing, if not entertaining display. For those thinking ahead, yes, I have already thought of an interface with the Arduino.
Two hours later, I finished the pseudo code. All my programming experience came back to me as I doodled away at Starbuck’s. Where I began with forty lines of code, my old habits held firm and I got it down to two lines. I’ve told the tale before, but long enough ago I can repeat myself. In my day, computers were expensive and labor was cheap. Thus, we learned to code as efficiently as possible or got failed. It was not good enough just to produce code that worked, as is done today. You had to think of the costs. Here are the two lines of code that do the job.
vDieThrow% = INT(RND * 6) +1
aTally%(vDieThrow) = aTally%(vDieThrow%) +1
Next, aTally% is an array. Think of it as six mailboxes that each can contain a single number. If the die throw result is a 3, it goes to mail box number 3, and adds one to whatever was there before. It does this a million times, incrementing each respective total by 1 whenever that die value turns up. I know I could have “spelled out” the steps, but old habits don’t give in easily. The tradeoff is loss of readability, and I’m sorry about that. I can read it just fine, Patsie.
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