Sudoku and Wikipedia

Watching Dara struggling with a difficult Sudoku, I was speculating that it would probably only take a few hours for a decent programmer to write a program to solve the damned thing. She did not seem to see the same appeal in this approach as I did. To me it seemed like one of those "teach a man to fish" kind of things. See why we get along so well?

As a result of this conversation, I looked around for computer programs to solve Sudoku puzzles. You will be happy to know that I am not going to bore you with any of that stuff, though. Instead, I thought I would point you at the absolutely fascinating Wikipedia entry on Sudoku. Aside from puzzle solving techniques (and computer programs for solving them!), it covers the history of the puzzle, the mathematics of it, and the ways puzzles are put together by various vendors. Check it out! Skip past the parts you're not interested in, because there is a lot there. And always remember: 字は独身に限る. If you read far enough, you will find out what that means.

Ankle Biters

Making the rounds of the local news shows tonight was a story of an east bay cop who was attacked by a pack of angry Chihuahuas when he returned a kid home after a traffic incident. I see the AP got right on it. The cop seemed a bit embarrassed. I wonder why.

Even Further Than Ottawa

I thought this story of a 16 year old running off to Baghdad to work on an "immersion journalism" project was great.

Maybe it was the time the taxi dumped him at the
Iraq-Kuwait border, leaving him alone in the middle of the desert. Or when he drew a crowd at a Baghdad food stand after using an Arabic phrase book to order. Or the moment a Kuwaiti cab driver almost punched him in the face when he balked at the $100 fare.

But at some point, Farris Hassan, a 16-year-old from Florida, realized that traveling to Iraq by himself was not the safest thing he could have done with his Christmas vacation.

And he didn't even tell his parents.

Mother's reaction was predictable, though:

"I don't think I will ever leave him in the house alone again," she said. "He showed a lack of judgment."

End of Year Reading List

I had a hard time locating the last reading list and mini reviews I made, but I thought I'd do another and maybe it will overlap.

• A Question of Loyalty, by Douglas C. Waller. The story of Billy Mitchell, popularly known as the father of the modern air force. The centerpiece of the story is his court martial, where he was tried for making disloyal statements when he wrote an over-the-top public critique of the state of the air corps. It was interesting to read about something I had never heard of before, but the book was a bit dry.


• Persistence of Memory, by Tony Eprile. Want to know what it's like to be a Jewish kid growing up in South Africa around the time when apartheid was coming down? Probably not, and neither did I by the time I was done with this book. In fact, I couldn't even remember why I was interested in the first place.


• An Unfinished Life, by Mark Spragg. Great story with engaging characters. I always hesitate to pick up a book that says "Now a movie from..." but I really enjoyed this story of a young, single widow and her kid who ends up going back to live with her crusty father-in-law. Takes place roughly in Wyoming, so it's a kind of modern western type of theme.


• Ellen Foster, by Kaye Gibbons. This seems to be a re-release of an older book about a tough young girl whose mother dies and father tries to abuse her, but who knows what she wants in life and makes it happen. I liked this one quite a bit. It reminded me a bit of A Complicated Kindness that I got in Canada and which I now see in stores here.


• The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri. A story of what it's like for children of parents from India to be born and raised in the US. I work with many people from India, so to me this was interesting. Well written, fun to read. The main character ends up going to Yale, so it had that hook for me too.


• Harbor, by Lorraine Adams. The story of Arab immigrants in the US. Puts the human touch on the situation, with people escaping from really lousy and dangerous conditions to come to the US, as with many immigrants. Mixes it up with some terrorism-by-association and some real terrorism to paint a murky picture that is probably reflective of the difficult tradeoffs we all face between security and civil liberties. This book is a lot more enjoyable than I made it sound!


• Codex, by Lev Grossman. Lightweight mystery mixing computer games and rare books. I was glad it was over when I finished, but I did finish.


• The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. I've read a few Philip Roth books over time, but this was by far the best. Chillingly realistic story that postulates that well known anti-semite Charles Lindbergh wins the election against Roosevelt ("It's war with Roosevelt or peace with Lindbergh!"). Off the country goes into its isolationist mode, figuring out clever ways to assimilate Jews into mainstream America for their own good. Great story, followed by details of what the real people in the story really said and did, because it's hard to tell reality from fiction at certain points.


• Blood Done Sign My Name, by Timothy B. Tyson. This non-fiction book centers around the killing of a young black man in Oxford, North Carolina in the early 70's. The author is about my age, and the book starts with his friend telling him that the friend's father "killed 'em a nigger last night." The book is told too much from the author's personal point of view perhaps, but the personal angle is also what gives the book much of its appeal, especially since I was about his age while a lot of the racial violence of the late 60's and early 70's was going on.


• Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford. Dara still doesn't believe me, but Ghengis Khan has really gotten a bad rap in history. Turns out he was a self-made man from lowly beginnings who overcame the tribalism of Mongolia and founded an empire based on free trade, meritocracy, and religious freedom. Of course, if you were not his faithful servant, you were a dead man, but hey, life was more difficult back in the 13th century. A bit dry as biographies go, but how often do you get to read about Ghengis Khan?


• Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. I think this is one of those books that book reviewers love, but that nobody else does. The theme really is about the pull of being a "transient" in the lives of two sisters being raised by their wacky, wandering aunt. Takes place in the middle of nowhere in the west. I'm sure there was lots of symbolism and deep meaning I missed, so fill me in if you get it all sorted out.


• The Dogs of Bedlam Farm, by Jon Katz. Overly introspective middle aged white guy buys a farm in the middle of upstate New York for the express purpose of raising his three sheepdogs and contemplating the meaning of such a meaningless life and the role of dogs in it. Since I am a middle aged white guy who likes dogs, and I didn't like this book, I guess it is targeted at more introspective types.


• Arc of Justice : A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, by Kevin Boyle. Non-fiction story of a black doctor who buys a house in a white neighborhood in Detroit in the late 1920's. The "neighborhood improvement association" gathers people on the street in front to drive them out, one of the 11 people inside shoots into the crowd, killing one person and wounding another. All 11 are arrested and charged with 1st degree murder. Clarence Darrow, a few months off of the Scopes monkey trial, takes on the defense. Great story, well-paced, about a period of time I didn't know much about.

Enjoy!

Day Tripping

Since Kyla won't be back for Spring break, and she doesn't have time for frivolous activities like snowboarding while at school(!), we've been trying to find the right day to go to the snow while she's here. Yesterday she and I left the house at 4:45AM to go to Kirkwood. It has been so warm here that we were afraid if we didn't go now, it would only get worse. We've had maybe 4 inches of rain in the last week or two, which normally would be 4-5 feet of snow where we go, but the snow levels have been at least 8,000 feet. The base of Kirkwood is 8,000 feet. Snowboarding in the pouring rain is just a bad idea, and that's what we would have gotten the day before. Turns out it was beautiful. It was right around freezing when we got there, which made all the runs pretty much a sheet of ice. Still, as the sun got higher, it softened up like it does in the spring. It wasn't crowded, and while we kept an eye out for snowboarding Santa, we didn't see him.

Here's what "the backside" looks like on the way up. They opened it around 10:30. See the kind of rivulet formations running down the mountainside? This was a byproduct of the rain the day before, and if it's frozen, you want to stay the hell off of it. However, by the time things opened, it was soft on top, so off we headed to the ungroomed parts before too many people chopped them up.

And here is Kyla after a calf-burning traverse over to the wide open ungroomed spaces. If you look at the picture above, I took this picture on the slope at the upper left corner.

Sudoku Craze

In the unlikely event that anyone missed it, Sudoku puzzles have been popping up everywhere. Kyla and Dara are pretty much obsessed. I suppose all it takes is a relatively trivial computer program to crank them out. No need to employ those high paid crossword designers. What do you suppose is next from the Japanese?

Breathtaking Inanity

I was going to call this posting "Harrisburg Is Safe For The Harrises," but I loved this catchy phrase from the judge's decision (pdf) that came out today. Just to close Chapter 1 (as I'm sure there will be many more) of the legal attempts to shove Intelligent Design down our collective throats, I thought I'd share some pieces of the decision that are conveniently floating around the blogosphere:

To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

In addition to this readable conclusion, there are 139 more pages of supporting legalese and cross reference to things like the Wedge Document and St. Thomas Aquinas' views on the great designer.

Fire Dance With Me

The same guy at the office who did the fire eating class went to Burning Man a few months back. Burning Man is an annual new age art festival in the middle of the desert. Thirty five thousand people show up and camp, with no supplies provided. The festival features every crazy kind of art display you can imagine, with much of it centering on the general fire theme. He brought back pictures. The thing that was most interesting to me was the video game Dance, Dance, Immolation. It is a takeoff on Dance, Dance, Revolution (more fondly known as DDR by those in the know, like Garrett). DDR is that video game where you follow dance steps on a special mat or platform as a song plays on a screen in front of you. You rack up points for hitting them correctly, and you lose points when you miss the beat or the proper step. The variation here is that the dancer dons a full protective suit including forced air breathing apparatus, and when he or she misses a beat, a flame thrower blasts a propane torch. This was funny enough, but apparently when they asked for volunteers, my colleague at the office nearly got knocked over as people jockeyed for a chance to do it!

DSL Under the Weather

Literally. Since the last big storm came through over the weekend -- finally some snow in the Sierras -- we have not had phone service, and our DSL connection has been mostly off. It happens once every couple of years, but the phone company seems to be confused this time on the cause being on the pole across the street. Interestingly enough, though, it was more upsetting to the Harris family to be without Internet connectivity than a land line phone. The times dey is a changin'.

D'Or Bells

I didn't want to miss out on what I hope will become a Christmas blogging tradition.

Update: From Dave Barry's Holiday Gift Guide, you dog lovers out there (or those of you thinking of getting a dog) might want to consider a tasteful pair of pajamas to complement the Christmas hat modeled by D'Or.

there is no more thoughtful gift that we can think of this holiday season than a pair of these quality dog pajamas, which come in a variety of "fun" prints. We guarantee that when you put these pj's on your dog, it's going to give you a very special look -- a look that says, "Some night, when you least expect it, I will rip out your throat."

Garrett's Jury Duty

Now that Garrett is of age, so to speak, he gets to enjoy all the benefits -- like being called for jury duty. He managed to squeak out, but only after spending four full days sitting through jury selection for a civil trial that was supposed to last for two months! They had a pool of something like 60 people, and I think he ended up being in the last dozen who didn't eventually make it before the bar to be quizzed by the lawyers. Next up, Dara in a few weeks.

Wikipedia Again

In the wake of the last note about Wikipedia, I thought I'd point out:

1. The guy who libeled the Siegenthaler was identified and has since lost his job. However, the fact that someone could identify this guy relatively easily was a byproduct of him working in a small company and doing the work from there. To identify, say, me as the culprit would have taken a court order to Pacbell.
2. Via BoingBoing again, a scientific study sponsored by Nature has shown that Wikipedia has about four errors for every three in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Oatmeal -- Steel Cut vs. Quaker

Having learned a while back that my good cholesterol was looking bad, or my bad cholesterol was looking good, or whatever translates to "Here, take these statins," I have been pretty religiously eating oats. Sure, I'd been reading those little blurbs on the Cheerios box, but who believes that stuff. Kyla told me it really worked, though, so I gave up my longtime yogurt for breakfast and switched to oats. It seems to have done the job. I'm still on statins, but not as much as I would be otherwise.

Now that I am an oat afficiando, I wondered if anyone else has tried steel cut as opposed to the standard Quaker Oats route? Oprah seems to like steel cut oats, so how could you go wrong. On the other hand, she can afford them. And she must have someone to cook them for her, too, because they take about 20-30 minutes to cook as opposed to 5 with Quaker (or 1 minute if you can stand those 1 minute kind, which I draw the line at). Anyway, steel cut oats (or sometimes labeled Irish oatmeal) are pretty good! Dara can't stand to be in the same room as cooking oatmeal. Oh well, give it a try anyway. It's Cheerios for me most mornings, though, as I'm too lazy for much else.

People Making Asses of Themselves

Isn't making a xerox of your ass kinda like putting a lampshade on your head in terms of party flair? If so, that doesn't seem to be stopping people from doing it.

Photocopier supplier Canon is warning customers to take better care of their office equipment during the Christmas period, claiming that the festive season traditionally leads to a 25 percent hike in service calls due to incidents such as the classic backside copying prank.

Partly in response to this trend--or perhaps because of the "supersizing" of the western physique--Canon has now increased the thickness of its glass by an extra millimeter.

It seems the cracks are causing cracks.

A Park By Any Other Name

I could not understand why Australians suddenly thought it was a good idea to have your baby sleep with a dummy. It even seemed mildly perverted to me, but hey, who am I to judge.

Parents who give their sleeping babies dummies during their first year of life cut the risk of cot death by more than 90 per cent.

The findings suggest dummies provide a much bigger protective effect than previously thought. However, dummies remain controversial.

Having read the article, I suppose the British and Australians are just as mystified why we would call a dummy a pacifier.

Terrorist Golf

Putt the ball through the windmill and into Osama's mouth. It seems that a local miniature golf course made it on to the double super secret list of likely terrorist targets. They were surprised. Their congressional rep could not even get confirmation one way or another because the list is so secret. Referring to another local tourist attraction, someone from the golf course said:

I just hope nobody was upset or scared away by us being on the list. I heard we were 17 on a list of 18 sites, in order of the terrorists' favorite targets. We're small potatoes. They'd probably rather go for the Winchester Mystery House.

Be careful out there.

Frozen North

I am on my last east coast tour for a bit. I tried to get it in before it really got cold up here in Ottawa. Still, it's snowing right now. I did manage to get here under the wire of the storm that was dropping snow on Keith a bit earlier. Aside from the more civilized approach to elections they have here, I thought it would be worthwhile reporting that the Canadian national curling trials are underway, with what seems like continuous reporting on cable.

Don't blink

I havn't been monitoring the blog or my E-Mails since thanksgiving I knew I was missing some things but I was surprised the way the posts and mail piled up. I would like to comment on some of the posts but ther is just to much there to get started on. This time of year for me is about as good as it gets with hunting season, football, and keeping up with Dan's activities I don't have much down time. I recently took an interest in running and have been increasing my distance a little each week, this new hobby has come at the expense of mountain-biking which I enjoy but is starting to seem a little risky for an old-timer like me. I attended the annual Grousland dinner again this year and it was just as good as years past. It started with a lively debate between the former mayor of FR, and a guy many consider to be the town drunk. The subject was the best way to prepare and serve a snapping turtle. It all ended up with a reenactment of the 1959 performance of the Strausburg Drum and Bugle Corps, complete with marching and some pretty pittifull sound effects. If these guys arn't the good ole boys I don't know who is. I laughed till tears came out I guess you had to be there. We enjoyed a great family event at Sue and Moussa's over thanksgiving Its always fun to get together with everyone. Ken and Sharon's grandchildren are beautifull and getting bigger evry year. Sue's dogs were of great interest to Dan, after dinner he tried his hand at herding sheep with their help he only managed to corner them long enough to breifly touch each one. I continue to be impressed with their home brew wine and hope to get a bottle next time over. It is snowing here now with about an inch on the ground and another 4 inches in the forcast, it is beautifull but makes for quite a mess at work.

Polo and Missy's Visit

Since Dad requested that one of us report back on this weekend (and I haven't posted in awhile anyways), I thought I'd oblige him :) The weekend went really well. Missy got in Satuday afternoon, but because it gets dark so early we didn't have time to see any of campus before heading out to dinner. Sunday morning we awoke to find that it was snowing! Despite the snow we walked around campus and I got to tell Missy some of the stories about the campus while admiring the architecture. After that I had to go join my team for our team brunch and organize the tacking and game prep.
The game itself was amazing! We played the University of Connecticut women who are the current reigning national champs (and did not graduate a single player from that team). These girls are the team to beat this year and we came incredibly close, eventually losing by only 2 points. Despite having lost, we feel really good about our performance and are now super optimistic about the rest of our season. The only downer to the game was that one of my favorite ponies went lame halfway through the game and I had to play another horse instead with an unfortunate lack of brakes or steering.
All in all it was a great weekend. It was so nice to see Missy and to have her there cheering me on for such an awesome game. There are a lot more home games next semester to come watch and we should also be heading down to UVa at some point to play them. When I get a date for that game I'll let everyone know.

Politicalization of Narnia

Along with Little House on the Prairie, the Chronicles of Narnia were one of the staples of the Harris children growing up, but particularly of Kyla. I must admit that with all the good intentions of my parents, I have not a religious bone or inclination in me. Still, does that mean you're not allowed to enjoy a great CS Lewis story unless you're a card carrying member of the religious right? It seems the answer is: yes. Hold on, everyone, we're in for yet another manufactured news event, much like the current fiction that somehow Christmas is under attack. It's not because you evil secular humanists are objecting to the CS Lewis, it's because we're telling you that you can't enjoy it without embracing the religious underpinnings of it. This isn't politics, it's just absurdity. It's just creating a strawman controversy so talking heads on television and online have something to pontificate over, while the rest of us just go to the movies and eat popcorn. My advice is to enjoy the popcorn, or better yet, eat popcorn while reading the books. Hell, you can even stay home from church to do it.

Manufacturing News

I was very busy for the last few weeks getting the news out about some collaboration between various competitor companies, ours being one. I've done this quite a few times now in various forms, and it's interesting to see how successful the companies are in getting their messages across. So, I found this article from BoingBoing to be fascinating, instructive, and somewhat depressing. It's one thing to push for visibility and play of a corporate message, but it's another to see the same thing done with more general "news," scare quotes intended.

Freakonomics Revisited

I picked up the hardcopy of Freakonomics from Mom while in Naples, after Keith's recommendation. She said she thought Levitt was "just wrong" about some things. My main reaction is that the whole thing was just too glib, a problem with a lot of the science-for-the-layman books as a category. You're not an economist, and you have to trust someone, and since I have a popular book out and great credentials you're in no position to question, trust me!!! Same goes for political crap -- caveat emptor. Just as a reminder of how you shouldn't necessarily trust what you read, and that -- we can always hope, in spite of the last five years -- science is an open process of continued questioning and review, I noticed this article in the Economist (you may have to put up with an annoying advertisement before getting to it). A couple of economists looking into the claim that abortion is the root cause of crime reduction inspected

the authors' computer code and found the controls missing. In other words, Messrs Donohue and Levitt did not run the test they thought they had—an "inadvertent but serious computer programming error"

Ah, the old garbage-in-garbage-out problem. That wasn't all that was wrong, either.

The New Oxford English Dictionary

Did anyone read The Professor and the Madman, the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary? It was a bit tedious, but the way they actually produced the thing was fascinating. The guy running the project got a bunch of people to read a bunch of books and locate words to put in the dictionary, and then they spent something like 75 years collecting and defining the things. The modern equivalent is Wikipedia. It's a collaborative effort where people enter information into an online encyclopedia. I have found it to be very useful. It's the place I turn to first when I want an answer to "what is... something", rather than Google. Via my favorite lefty blog, I saw a pointer to this article about the dangers of the unpoliced community model for Wikipedia. Interesting.

Polo Visit

I hear from Kyla that Missy is going to be there for the home game with UConn. I expect a report from New Haven or Northeast or both.