Category: Miscellaneous

Programming in Unknown Languages

I’ve often thought that the immersion method of learning a language was setting yourself up for failure – it isn’t like knowing the fundamentals of grammar and pronunciation in English helps you in any way when you find yourself in Karnataka trying to communicate in Sanskrit. There are rather complex algorithms that attempt to derive meaning from an unknown language, but apart from body language, pointing, and gesturing … that’s not something I can manage in real-time as someone speaks to me.

*Programming* languages, on the other hand, I am finding are rather easily learnt by immersion. I know several programming languages quite well – C/C++, F77/F90, perl, and php. I know a dozen or so other languages well enough to get by.

Some of our home automation scripts are written in CoffeeScript (which is evidently a way to write JavaScript without *actually* knowing JavaScript) – and I would never be able to write the program. But to come into the middle of the conversation (i.e. to take someone else’s non-functional code and try to fix it), I can glean enough of the language to debug and fix code. And there’s always Google for any syntax I cannot guess.

I wonder if someone who is fluent in multiple disparate languages (knowing half a dozen Romance languages doesn’t really give you a good base of knowledge – I mean someone who speaks Italian, Hindi, Cantonese, Swahili, and some Levantine dialect of Arabic) is able to do something similar — they know enough words to pretty much guess what words mean & enough different language structures to guess words in their context.

Sometimes, math *is* hard

A recent meeting included a call back to “math is hard barbie” — back in 1992, Mattel produced a ‘talking’ Barbie that (among other phrases) said “math class is tough”. They ended up recalling the doll – a process which I assume cost the company quite a bit of money. And bad press. As a sophomore in high school, I didn’t understand the controversy. I was concurrently taking both Algebra 2 and Geometry (allowing me to complete two years of Calculus at graduation), so I had some experience with math classes.

The thing that struck me — the actual phrase is not untrue. Sometimes math class was hard. As someone with hand-eye coordination issues, art class was hard too. As someone who is tone deaf, music class was really hard. People who take offense at someone declaring something to be ‘hard’ have themselves declared difficult things as somehow negative. Not worth doing. I understand that the offense was people familiar with existing stereotypes extrapolating the statement to mean “girls think math is hard and girls avoid difficult academic subjects” or “females think math is hard because their brains don’t work that way and males have an innate advantage”.

I worry that we’re selling people false hope by refusing to tell them that something is hard. At some point, you’re going to encounter reality. I studied theoretical physics – gravitation, specifically gravitational phenomenon brought about during binary black hole collisions. Had someone told me it was going to be a super easy way to earn money – head into a computer lab for a few hours a day, drink some coffee, do a little typing, and head home … wow, what a shock my first day would have been. Why don’t we work on teaching people that a lot of things are hard. And each person makes their own effort:reward analysis. Raising chickens is a lot harder than picking a carton up at the grocery store; but if you like fresh eggs, or if you like to ensure the welfare of the animals providing your eggs, if you want to avoid using fossil fuels to transport your food, or if you just want to be involved in the process of generating your food … you decide to get some chickens. If you want to understand the mechanisms of the universe, you learn the math and physics. You do the research.

Buzzard Day Celebration

Join us on 20 March for any of the Buzzard Day activities:

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The arrival of the Buzzards at the Hinckley Reservation on 15 March is an annual occurrence. The Hinckley Township web site has a page detailing the history of this event.

Hinckley’s Buzzard Sunday celebration is the first Sunday following the return of the buzzards — 20 March . Details about Buzzard Sunday can be found at the Hinckley Chamber of Commerce web site.

We plan to meet at the Elementary School at 10AM for the pancake breakfast and then check out the festivities downtown. Weather permitting, we can walk the paved trail around the lake; and we plan to grill some burgers for dinner.

Last year, many of the newly arrived vultures perched in the trees along our driveway. Near sunset, the group took flight and flew around our property and the park. We are hoping to capture pictures of the flight on our BloomSky. Even if you cannot make it to Buzzard Day, check out the BloomSky time-lapse movies to spot some Buzzards.

And for any early risers out there … at 7 AM on 15 March, the Hinckley Reservation has an official Buzzard Spotter at the Buzzard Roost. Maps of the Hinckley Reservation can be found at the Cleveland Metroparks web site. The buzzard roost is at the south end of the park, at West Drive and State Road. Since this is 7 AM on a Tuesday … we weren’t planning on attending this particular event 🙂

Primary Elections In Ohio

This is mostly a note for myself, but if anyone else in Ohio is currently an unaffiliated voter who wants to cast a primary ballot for a party, you can switch party affiliation at your polling location by asking for the party ballot. Since you did not cast a ballot for that party in the previous primary (I’ve used the non-party issues ballot for the past few years. In Arkansas, you did not have to be party-affiliated to use a party’s primary ballot), you may be challenged by the poll worker. If that is the case, tell them you wish to switch parties and would like to complete the appropriate form.

Per Ohio Revised Code 3513.20, this is the proper process *provided that you “support the principals of the political party whose ballot” you vote*. Political party principals are *really* generic (and don’t specify the specifics to reach those goals) – not a lot of people who want more crime, think primary education is a bunch of nonsense, wish there was more unemployment, and so on. Really, even long time party members disagree about how to reach a goal and how well an individual candidate reflects the principals of their party … so not liking a specific policy implementation does not negate my support for the PRINCIPALS of the party.

Buzzard Cam — Almost There!!

We got our BloomSky!!! There has been a lot of snow, and it is very cold. We shoveled our driveway on Sunday hoping there’d be some melting today & delivery vehicles would be able to get up our hill. Then we got another two or three inches of snow overnight. Scott and Anya did some shoveling and put a large plastic box at the bottom of the driveway … and they actually delivered packages to the large plastic box. WooHoo!

The Buzzard Cam is almost ready! Right now it’s inside — so it looks like you could take a tropical holiday in Hinckley because it’s 65 degrees on our window 🙂 But we’ve got the network set up, the device registered, and can upload data. We’ll get the device mounted up outside on Friday or Saturday when it’s not so cold and snowy.

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Buzzard Cam! (Coming soon to a web site near you!)

The buzzards that hang out in the Hinckley Reservation roost in the trees that line our driveway. Last year on Buzzard Day, right before the sunset, an enormous flock of buzzards took off from the trees and flew varying paths across the sky. I guess checking out the area before going to sleep for the night. It was incredible to watch.

There’s this weather station with a wide angle fish-eye lens camera — Bloomsky — that we will be installing next week … way before the buzzards should be arriving. Hopefully we’ll have the same area over-flight … but it’ll be available online for everyone to see!

Middlemen, or lack thereof

How the Internet has changed business constantly amazes me. I made a cape for Anya over the summer, and we didn’t want something tied around her neck … so I wanted to use a magnet to hold the cape closed. It gets caught in something and the cape breaks free. A single pair of magnets, at the site where I was purchasing the fabric, was 7$. I’m sure they are *REALLY* nice magnets (or, rather, at 7$ for two maybe 1″ diameter magnets they better be really nice magnets), but that price seemed somewhat outlandish.

Enter the Google search for magnet closures (most of which seem to be for purses and have a snap in the centre of them). I happened across Alibaba — where the exact same thing could be had for 2¢ per piece. With a minimum order of 1,000 units. And, yeah, 20$ is a lot more than 7$ … and I wasn’t actually sure if it was 1,000 pairs of magnets or not. But even if I only got 500 pair for 20$ … that’s 4¢ a pair for something retailing for 7$. I could sell half of them on eBay or something, have a lifetime supply of magnetic button closures, and probably have paid less than 7$. Except — I don’t really have any idea how to ship something out of China. A lot of listings on Alibaba (probably because it is more geared toward B2B transactions) require you to sort out the shipping from whatever foreign port.

I wasn’t willing to put the effort into figuring it out — although it looks like being an importer with an online store could be a fairly lucrative endeavor. In poking around the Alibaba site, though, I found AliExpress … same companies offering the same products at a slightly higher price, but in smaller quantities and with someone else sorting the shipping. Ten pairs of magnet buttons for 3.55$ Buying something posted from China means you cannot be in a hurry — estimated delivery is 4-6 weeks out … but jewelry findings (especially clasps) are a quarter the cost, sewing bits, housewares (I got some of the plastic cutters to make ‘animal crackers’ for a tenth the price @ Williams Sonoma).

Maybe I’m not getting the exact same thing — since the 7$ magnet says it is made in China anyway … that’s debatable — but buying something you don’t need for a few months sure saves a lot of money. I can see why Alibaba — basically a broker that connects manufacturers with retailers and end customers — makes so much money Yahoo wants to divest their money losing search engine / e-mail business and just ‘live’ off of their investment in Alibaba.

New HVAC

The heat exchanger on our old propane furnace is cracked. And propane is an expensive way to heat a home. Here, it is trucked in and pumped – so in the worst of winter, we’ve got to manage to clear the driveway so the delivery truck can get here safely. All in all, not sad to see it go. We’re comparing air-exchange heat pumps with geothermal heat pumps.

Obviously the air-exchange sales guy has a lot of terror stories about loop fields going bad, digging up the whole yard, and incurring tens of thousands in repair expenses. Our neighbor has a geothermal system and says he’s constantly using emergency heat so it’s really a super-expensive propane furnace.

I spent some time searching for the down sides to geothermal. Found a news article republished in quite a few small town news sites with a study claiming a town had so many geothermal installations that they caused their own localized warming. Suck heat from earth, pump to house to heat, lose heat through exterior walls … town heats up. Except all other heating sources extract an energy source from elsewhere, heat the house with it, and lose heat through exterior walls too. It’s not like we rip out our exterior insulation to get geothermal. If they’d wanted say the Earth’s temp lowered locally, it would at least pass a prima facie logic test. But they wanted to scare off the global warming types, so they went with “you’re causing global warming!!!”. And ended up with a completely illogical argument. If they wanted to talk about older, undersized, systems that created hyper-local problems caused the system to run on emergency heat … well, don’t undersize your system.

The only down side I’ve found is the installation cost and potential cost of emergency heat. We’re going to get the air exchange heat pump – the infinitely variable pump is supposed to operate in sub-freezing temperatures, and it’s a quick install instead of taking a month or two.