Warning: this demo doesn't always work. You might just get a swirling logo, after hitting Run.
If you want to see the fish, you'll need to hit the Run button and then select the Output window from the lower dash. That's where the fish are swimming.
Mouse click to create more. The D key eliminates several but never the very last.
Carol was reluctant to follow orders this morning. I'm making it sound like a boot camp, but any nurse knows it's about being a bit bossy sometimes. She's still pretty strong. She cycles.
Speaking of cycles, I just finished another one of my Algorithms and Data Structures class, the one I usually drive out to.
However, this morning, on top of cajoling Carol, I could not for the life of me find my car keys. I eventually decided to swap my on-site Monday for an on-site Thursday instead. Then I found the keys, under the paper towels I'd purchased the last time I shopped.
"What do cycles have to do with Algorithms and Data Structures?" you may well ask. Well, I'm thinking in terms of cycle notation, where you take a Permutation, say of letters mapped to those same letters in a different order, and express the same mapping in terms of cycles.
Think of watching wheels turning, or at any rate wheels of different sizes. When do they ever come back to the configuration in which they started? That's where the LCM comes in, or lowest common multiple of cycle lengths. The will give you size of your overall wheel.
Maybe all this sounds pretty hard and you've decided I'm just trying to show off as some kind of egghead.
My point, though, is in this era beyond only calculator in the schools, we have hands-on access to such groups and are free to play with and flesh out the concepts while learning them. Calculators don't have the symbolic abilities a language like Python or Julia does.
So here I am, teaching eighth grade, in much the way I'd like to be taught were I back in 8th grade myself, but with all these new toys at my disposal. How could anyone expect me to slog through high school, without my Jupyter Notebooks?
That's what Oregon Curriculum Network is all about: prototyping the curricula of tomorrow, which may also include sourcing them.
I did manage to make TrimTabbers, after Bonnie's great talk, because FSI has a hard stop at a certain time. I joined the Zome workshop only a few minutes late. My head was next to David Koski's in my Zoom mosaic.
Then later that day, Uncle Bill was to arrive at Union Station for one of his two-hour "bend the elbow" visits. We usually go to Ringler's on Burnside, just close enough to the station to allow a quick lunch. If Coast Starlight is a bit late, so much the better. RingSide is up the street (further west), a steakhouse where Ed treated me to a great dinner that time.
However, en route to the station (Go By Train) by car, my car, I noticed the orange check engine light all of a sudden. A few moments later, the dashboard thermometer caught my attention. It was going sky high. I reached the station, coasting when I could, but met Uncle Bill with the news: driving anywhere would be problematic.
Coast Starlight had been early, by about 30 minutes. Bill, age 96, pushed his walker out to my parking space under the viaduct onto the Broadway bridge. I'd been in touch with AAA about whether I was up to date with my membership. I was. However it was too early to request a tow truck without at least checking the radiator's water level, being careful to let it cool first.
All the water had boiled away I believe, and now in retrospect I know a large crack was permitting quick escape. Jiffy Lube checked it out the next day, and suggested I get a new radiator on the spot, which I did, after checking their price with my usual mechanic. The check engine light is still on. Jiffy Lube suggested that had been about something else. Mind blowing. Dr. D. says Auto Zone will give me a readout for free.
So thanks to the water I bought at Union Station, three large bottles of the kind meant to be consumed by train passengers, and quite expensive for water (it pays for marketing and fast cars), I was able to fill the radiator after Uncle Bill and I had determined the station's swank restaurant was closed until evening. An onlooker reported no great leak at the bottom (the crack is near the top) as I poured in bottle after bottle.
So we went to Ringler's after all, for our brew pub style lunch. Bill had a Terminator (their signature stout) while I stuck to Hammerhead. He shared his pizza with me, on top of the burger, so I must have consumed a good 3000 calories, and I wasn't done yet for the day. I should blog about that stuff more, as it's customary when journaling to note facts about diet and health.
Fortunately, Coast Starlight was running 20 minutes late. I had Uncle Bill back by about 3:30, but it was nice to have that cushion. I called him later, when he was already almost to Olympia.
On that topic of personal health, I'll just add that Dr. D. and I strode about on Mt. Tabor yesterday, including ascending the west stairs to mid-reservoir. I call them "the calculus stairs" because of the changing first derivative, and maybe 2nd and 3rd for all I know. They get steeper towards the top.
I'll be tuning out the lower decks insanity crisis (aka war hysteria) for much of today.
I doubt I'll make Zome Workshop II given the overlap with FSI's presentation. TrimTabbers have been good about recording, so lets hope I catch it later. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to Bonnie's talk on the tetrahelix.
The phase-in of more nutritious "right brain content" -- to use the jargon -- is only by means of slow trickle osmosis that I can see. The science journals, such as MIT Technology Review are mostly keeping out of it, while the literary journals tend to be online and few and far between.
Disruption of the status quo would be noticed, whereas making the graphics more in accordance with what's found in nature (graphene, buckminsterfullerene...) is safe. Like I said, it's a right brain diffusion, mostly under the radar of the left brain.
I was back to looking at the Urbit ecosystem last night. However with two sections of Algorithms and Data Structures and the mini boot camp, I haven't had much time for recreation.
When I jumped on the Wordle bandwagon (I still have yet to play the official version) I didn't yet know about Stanford GraphBase and the list of 5-letter words at professor Donald Knuth's website.
I thought I was somehow being original in discovering the relevance of such a list, of 5757 words, to the subject of Graph Theory. A less original discovery I could not have made.
