Parentheticals

The goats have been pushing through the old fence, so I worked hard over the last little bit to put up a strong chain link fence in the place of the old one. I got sun burned while I put up the new fence, but it looks pretty good (the fence, not the sunburn). Alison has been working on decluttering the entire house because she has been reading Organized Simplicity , which is her (Alison's) mom's  philosophy of life in book form. It says "Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" (apparently one of the definitions of beautiful is also awesome if you are a guy, so an old beat up blackjack taken from a thug in New Jersey is apparently beautiful). Alison comments that it is amazing how much stuff that we have that doesn't fit this criteria. The girls have been 'helping' us to clean up. They mostly think that it is great fun. This Sunday I said that we needed to get the girls dressed for church, and Andrea dr...

The Dancing Robots have taken a bit of a break recently. My server went down and I had to reinstall the os. The power company has been 'trimming' (read genociding) the trees that live in my yard that are near the power lines. One of the maples have given up the ghost and I intend to take it down some time soon (to harvest the wood for use in growing more mushrooms (perhaps more oysters, but more likely maitake)). The vinca are all still alive and they seem to be doing fine. I will probably transplant more of them today if I can't get a hold of a chainsaw. I have picked two more batches of Scotch bonnet from my yard. The people from the mycological society said that they look like they are identified correctly, but that they do not guarantee an identification without more than one image. (I sent them more, but they were having a big morel hunt, and they seemed to be busy). Speaking of mushroom hunting, I tried my hand at it on Saturday. We got fourteen mushrooms all ...

For those who are not technical, skip the gray portion. I have begun to write up a PC version (that is personal computer, not politically correct (I don't think that anything in the game is not politically correct as it is (although I am not quite sure that I would change the game even if it were politically incorrect))) of dancing robots. I have not had a huge amount of time to do so, but it is still moving along to some extent. I suppose that that means that I have to post my neural network code online to fulfill my promise from earlier. I am not entirely happy with the code because it takes forever to train. I haven't yet figured out how to prevent it from eating up all of the memory when asking it to train for a long time. I tried an IRC channel for advice, and though they tried to be helpful, I didn't get an answer that was better than "Rewrite it from the ground up and pray that it doesn't happen again". Here are the class files: /NeuralNet...

Andrea has been having pains in her mouth recently. We went to the dentist to get her checked out and she wouldn't let him look in her mouth. Wedging the mouth open with fingers and mirrors proved to be the only way to get even a glimpse of her teeth. The dentist told us that he saw some cavities, said that if she was going to have the cavities filled we would have to have her sedated. They tried to set us up with an appointment to do it, but then we discovered that our pediatric dentist was out of network on our new insurance. We brought Andrea to an in-network dentist and she opened her mouth for the new dentist easily. He said that she did not have any cavities, but it instead looked like she had bitten her tongue repeatedly recently and it developed some ulcers. The moral of the story is: Don't go to an out of network dentist. After having read The Changing Land  while in Japan I have been reading Dilvish the Dammed  recently. It is a collection of short stories...

Apparently jet lag from Japan to the US is worse than the reverse (that or the fact that I have been staying up late reading (even though I know that I shouldn't be)). Being back is good, though. Sara and Andrea are adjusting to being back with the family again and we are getting back into the swing of things. I recently discovered  androminion , a android phone version of dominion which you can play against bots. The bots are pretty dumb, but it is fairly fun if you have a few minutes to kill. My Haskell neural network has run into some problems. When I try to train it with too many training examples all at once it runs into stack overflows. I need to figure out how to convince the Haskell compiler to compile my training algorithm to not use recursion (which is apparently possible, just not entirely easy to do). I have been really tempted to rewrite the NN in C# so that I can just get it to master tic tac toe and move on to Polynesia or Dancing Robots, but I really would l...

Here is the Haskell code that I wrote to make a neural network. Next I will train it to play Tic tac toe. Here starts Neuron.hs module NeuralNetwork.Neuron where import Data.Binary import qualified Data.Sequence as Seq data Node = Neuron { bias :: Double, priors :: [Int], weights :: [Double], hidden :: Bool } |             Input { value :: Double } deriving (Show, Eq) instance Binary Node where     put (Neuron{bias = bias, priors = priors, weights = weights, hidden = hidden}) =         do put (0 :: Word8); put bias; put priors; put weights; put hidden     put (Input{value = value}) = do put (1 :: Word8); put value     get = do t <- get :: Get Word8              case t of                   0 -> do b <- get; p <- get; w <- get; h <- get;                 ...

Andrea invented a new game today. It is named 'Tapely'. This is how she explained the rules: "One person holds a rubber hose. The other person holds a broken Easter egg." After getting a broken Easter egg (Rea was already holding a rubber hose) Alison asked what happened after that. Rea's response was: "I bop with the hose and you throw the egg" We played it once and Andrea said "Lets play Burpley" Which has the same rules except that it was played with a rubber hose and a burp cloth. Sara learned the word 'up' this week. She is very proud of it, and she says 'up', points to the ceiling, and then looks up. If we do not acknowledge her genius, she screeches. We had an Easter egg hunt at the brown's house Sara got one egg, and immediately started gnawing on the plastic shell. Rea got a lot of eggs, but we didn't let her eat all of the candy in one setting. We are going to ration it out to her. Alison and I have...

This week Andrea asked me for an orange. I asked her "What are you going to give me for an orange?" Her response: "I will give you Sara". And thus Sara was sold into slavery for a orange. Alison and the girls (minus the goats and chickens) have been going on bike rides nearly every day in this spring weather. It snowed a bit this weekend, but it still feels like spring. Alison is getting really strong, pulling two girls in a bike trailer up the hill to the library (with a lunch basket too.) Andrea has been asking me to read her Rosemary Wells books a whole bunch today. We went to the IFA to look at chicks and ducklings on Saturday. Rea wanted yellow ducklings and red chicks. We won't get any more until after our trip to Japan. We have been preparing to go to Japan by purchasing accommodations and train tickets and such things. We don't quite have day to day plans yet, but we figure that such things will come eventually. We are learning some Japan...

Just a brief update: I have been looking around at cloud storage options and decided to give Dropbox a try. The biggest benefit of cloud storage is that you don't have to carry around a flash drive or anything like that. Anywhere that you can access the internet you can access your information. For those of you who don't already have an account, sign up  here  to get 250MB of additional storage (They normally give new people 2 gigs of storage for free, but by referring people, or being referred yourself you can get additional storage.) I think that I am beginning to understand Haskell. If you are interested in seeing the code for an artificial neural network that I made yesterday, here is a link to the files.

Andrea has been enjoying the spring immensely. She loves to spend most of her time outside (she would probably spend almost all of it out there if her mother would let her). She loves to break into the goat food and feed the goats and chickens. She was digging holes under the fence (not to get through (she knows how to open the door) but to use the dirt as play goat food when we don't let her get any more real goat food) this leaves the chickens enough space to squeeze under the fence and enter into our garden area. The chickens have been laying a ton of eggs. The black and white one lays one every day and the other two lay eggs on alternating days it seems. Lala has been still producing milk in decent quantities (it is too bad that we have to dry her off when we go to Japan, but I doubt that we will be able to find someone who is willing to milk her that entire time). Clarabel is still growing it seems. We are looking at getting a stud for her so that she can start produci...

Sam has done it again. Ra  (which is still in ongoing development) is an interesting take on a post industrial magical world, where magic is studied like physics is today, and there is a mysterious group known as 'wheel' which is trying to 'protect' the world from magical artifacts of unknown abilities. I know that I will follow along with it avidly as it progresses toward completion. This last week I began to study Haskell - a functional language which is pretty different than anything that I have looked at before. I haven't yet written an entire program, but I am enjoying learning the language. On Friday Alison told me that she posted Rusty to be sold on Ksl classifieds. I  was never really was a dog person, but I was still quite surprised by this. When I got home I told her that she didn't have to sell him if she didn't want to, but she said that she was selling him because she didn't feel that she gave him enough attention (with us having two kid...