Parentheticals

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 ...

The work on my Dancing Robots computer game is moving along. Nothing playable by a human yet, but the computer is able to complete a game and follow all of the rules. (They are really stupid, and until yesterday they would cheat horribly). I think that first I will try to get the game all working correctly and then I will add in the neural networks. The hardest part will be figuring out what training data to use. We uprooted a few vinca plants from the backyard and have moved them to the front yard. They seem to be taking, so perhaps we will have a bed of vinca there soon. The mushroom that I found appears to be a scotch bonnet (which would make it quite edible.) Last night Alison found a clump of them in the back yard and I found two rings in the front yard. They are apparently considered a pest if you want your lawn to look good, but if they are edible I am willing to put up with ugly lawn. I picked about half a dehydrator try full of them and dehydrated them last night. I ...

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...

Monday we checked out of our hotel and went to the beach north of town. We accidentally missed the beach because we didn't get off of the bus at the right time, but the bus driver saw our concern and expelled us from the bus with directions on how to get to a bus going in the opposite direction (he also didn't charge us for our ride since we didn't get to where we wanted to go (Japanese people are very kind)). We saw a shrine by accident on the way to the beach and ate some Chinese food by accident on the way back from the beach. The beach was cold and windy. The sand was blowing everywhere. They also had large cement Xs and jacks all over the place (by large I mean 6 feet across or more). I realize that I should have taken pictures of it now that I look back at it. My picture discipline on the last few days was pretty lax. After that we got on a night bus to Tokyo for our final day in Japan. We decided to blitz Tokyo and visit every major site in the cit...

Unexpectedly I met someone from home today. Small world isn't it? He said to tell his mom and Daniel hi.