The big news, of course, is the dog: Sydney. Our extended family up north dropped her off on extended loan, a Christmas present for Carol, who has been asking for a canine companion. She joined us yesterday and has been adorable ever since.
Just now, I "he manned" it through the briar patch, the side yard, to prove I could win against brambles and reach the gate, and close it. We don't want Sydney wandering off. I have a driveway gate also, to guard visitors from the vicious dogs.
In other news, I've jumped back into curriculum development and testing. By testing I mean practicing, as when doctors and lawyers "practice". One may become "practiced" (experienced) but these professions stay in practicum mode, not claiming higher seniority than "practitioner".
Come to think of it, "practitioner" is akin to "professor". The former practices something, say an art, or over the road trucking (OTR type, meaning in contrast to in-city delivery and so on). The latter "professes" about something, i.e. lectures. We've all seen the "chalk and talk" genre, unlikely to disappear, but getting more competition. Sir Roger Penrose likes using transparencies, with an overhead projector.
The testing materials are not by me, primarily, but are secondarily. I'm getting the synthesis and branding from a track curator closer to Istanbul (Byzantium), with a local version on Github I'm free to modify and expand.
For example, I added a sudoku.py module this morning, which is supposed to brute force recurse a solution to a 9x9 sudoku, meaning generate a solved one from a pseudo-random seed. If it won't solve, try a new seeds. It'll take thousands of attempts and take up to 25 seconds to get one. All in Python, using numpy, which is the main point (to show numpy in action).
I'm still coming up to speed on sudoku though. For example, how do I know a given puzzle has only one solution? Do a simply try to solve it several times and see if all answers are equivalent. That's mean putting more randomization into the algorithm I'm using now.
Zoom World is alive with memorial services and memory sessions regarding CJ, quite a few years my junior. A comprehensivist scholar, consciously pioneering what that even means (and doing a good job of it).
I could update about other family members, but I'm not posing as some exhaustive chronofiler, trying to capture every detail of my life. My blogs provide only glimpses.
We held our Winter Solstice potluck at the Linus Pauling House, as we've been doing, with a Zoom-only interval.
