I got the zip bag with the magnolia seeds from the
shed, which I put there last year on October 25. I only found two seeds. One already had a little root growing
out. I got pot with potting soil and carefully placed the seeds on top. I
placed the pot inside and added some water. Lets see what will happen.
Last Friday, the Dutch author Hugo Brandt Corstius died. Although he is mostly known for his newspaper
columns, he is, just like Leo Vroman, a scientist
and someone knowing how to program. After he studied mathematics, he became the
first Dutch computational linguist and got a PhD with his thesis
Exercises in Computational Linguistics. In this these, he writes about
an algorithm to split Dutch words into syllables, which has been used for many
years. Another report in this area is Automatic Translation Between Number Names. He wrote two books in Dutch
about computational linguistics: Algebraïsche taalkunde in 1974 and
Computer-taalkunde in 1978. He also experimented with programs producing
poetry. (I Could not find any example of this or information about the programs he
used.) He wrote his progam in Algol 60. He also became famous for his lists of words with certain properties
and wrote several books about these.
On Thursday, February 28, I bought two secondhand monitors:
a Philips 220BW monitor
and a HP LP2065 monitor.
Last Wednesday at 16:58, I dumped our Samsung SyncMaster 223BW monitor because it would take
longer and longer for the backlight to start operating at a
normal brightness. Today, I attached the HP monitor to
the artwork by Peter Stuycken
and I attached the Philips monitor to the lixia computer in my bedroom.
At 14:47, I bought Terug naar Oegstgeest by Jan Wolkers from
bookshop Polare for € 5.00.
Still no news about a possible continuation of the bookshop. Although
they made some good sales in the past weeks, there are still no
noticable empty spots in the shop. The coming weeks a decision has
to be made about the future of the bookshop.
Last week, there was a image on facebook about integer sequence A237707, which is about the number of unit cubes, aligned with a
three-dimensional Cartesian mesh, completely within the first octant of a
sphere centered at the origin, ordered by increasing radius. Today, I
thought about the number of unit cubes that are visible. Just counting
the cubes in the image, I found the numbers: 1, 3, 6, 6, 7, 10. Next,
I wrote a short program to calculate more numbers. A version of this
program in JavaScript is:
prev_c = 0
n = 1
for (r = 3; n < 200; r++)
{
c = 0;
c2 = 0;
for (i = 1; i*i + 2 <= r; i++)
for (j = 1; i*i + j*j + 1 <= r; j++)
for (k = 1; i*i + j*j + k*k <= r; k++)
{
c++
if ( (i+1)*(i+1) + j*j + k*k > r
|| i*i + (j+1)*(j+1) + k*k > r
|| i*i + j*j + (k+1)*(k+1) > r)
c2++
}
if (c > prev_c)
{
document.write((n == 1 ? "" : ", ")+c2)
prev_c = c
n++
}
}
I have submitted this sequence to the On-Line Encyclopedia of
Integer Sequences. Pending acceptance, is has been given the number
A239318.
I thought a little more about sequences that I could contribute to
the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
(OEIS). I thought about the sequences related to Six of six colours on six by six squares. I worked on the program that
I used for this and tried to verify it with the sequences in the OEIS. So I
looked at the sequences related to Latin squares. But I could not find a match with the sequence the
program generated. At first, I thought that there was an error in the
program. With some modifications, it could produce sequence A002860: Number of Latin squares of order n and
sequence A000479: number of Latin
squares of order n with first row 1,2,...,n.. But it did not produce
sequence A000315: Number of reduced
Latin squares of order n. But when I looked up the definition for reduced
Latin squares, I realized that it involves swapping rows and columns as well.
My 'normalization' was only 'rotating' the square along the eight symmetry
axes of a square. Swapping rows and columns would destroy the property that
every combination of 'colours' are exactly four times neighbours. Below a
table with the numbers for the various sequences:
At the end of the afternoon, there was a garage sale nearby our company.
I bought a Creative SBS260 stereo sound system, a painting made in 1982
by Irma Kuiper (with the text
"Waterlandschap 4" Gouache 50/65 on the back) and the following books
for € 30 together:
Nlxl by Karel Tomeï, ISBN:9789055945924.
School maken in het hart van het land by Ad van Liempt and
Janny Ruardy (editors), ISBN:9789089280329.
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker, ISBN:9780393318487.
Unified Theories of Cognition by Allen Newell, ISBN:9780674921016.
Handbook on Ontologies by Steffen Staab and Rudi Studer (editors),
ISBN:9783540408345.
Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative
by Mieke Bal, ISBN:9780802078063.
Language Prototyping: An Algebraic Specification Approach
by Arie Deursen, J. Heering, and Paul Klint (editors), ISBN:9789810227326.
Performance Analysis of Parallel Systems: A Hybrid Approach
by Henk Jonkers, ISBN:9789090085357.
When I came home this afternoon, I took the picture on the right of some
flowers in our magnolia in the backgarden. About
half of the flowers have opened about half way. Last week Monday, I already
thought they would have opened by the end of last week, but that only seems
to happen now, I guess because temperatures had dropped again. The weather
is going to be nice the coming day, so I expect that many flowers will open
soon. Compared to other years, it is a number of weeks earlier that the
flowers start to bloom. The experiment with the magnolia seeds, so far, has
not lead to any visible results. I am a little worried that the seeds have
died because one time I let the soil become too dry. I will give it some
weeks, and then I will dig up the seeds.
Honestly, I had given up hope with respect to the magnolia seeds that I planted on the first,
but this evening, to my surprise, I saw something come out of the ground. I was a little afraid that it would
not work-out because one time, I let the earth dry up. After that I covered
the pot with some transparent foil.
Today, came the news that bookshop Polare,
before De Slegte, will be taken-over by bookshop
Broekhuis on the opposite side of the street. This will include part of
the personel and the stock of second-hand books. Starting from next week,
the second-hand books will be moved to the third floor of Broekhuis, which
now often is used as an exposition room. The purchase and sale of used books
will continue on April 15. The Polare shop will close on May 15. I guess
that until that time the remaindered books on the first floor will be sold
for reduced prices. The recent books will probably also be added to the
stock of Broekhuis. I expect that after next week, the Polare shop will
start to look quite empty.
Annabel and her boyfriend spend some time cleaning the
back garden. He thought that a little twig behind the garbage containers
might be a grapevine. Because it was growing between the pavement and the
wall and in a rather dark place, I removed some stones of the pavement and
planted it in a different spot. I also replanted three little oak trees from
the lawn to another spot. We also cut of the chestnut tree in the back garden. It was almost as high as our willow
tree. We cut it to just below the fence. The willow also required pruning.
The boyfriend of Annabel suggested that maybe next winter it could be
turned into a traditional willow tree by cutting all the branches just
above the crown of the tree. That seems to be a good idea.
This months interesting links
Magnolia
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Sunday, March 30, 2014