Shopper

I am Xmas shopping for a smallish tablet. These are the prices I find: $$300, 400, 500, 700. Tablets 1 and 4 lie outside one standard deviation and have some s'plaining to do.

McMansion Saga

From UT San Diego

America has too many big houses -- 40 million, to be exact -- because consumers are shifting preferences to condos, apartments and small homes, experts told the New Partners for Smart GrowthThursday, holding its 11th annual conference in San Diego through Sunday.

Relying on developers' surveys, Chris Nelson, who heads theMetropolitan Research Centerat the University of Utah, said 43 percent of Americans prefer traditional big, suburban homes but the rest don't.

"That means we are out of balance in terms of where the market is right now, let alone trending toward the future," he said.

He estimated that this demand suggests a need for 10 million more attached homes and 30 million more small homes on 4,000-square-foot lots or less. By contrast, demand for large-lot homes is 40 million less than currently available




http://grist.org/list/america-has-40-million-big-houses-that-no-one-wants/

OAM

I have long been an ardent bicycle-riding environmentalist, and zero-tolerant on industrial pollution, but one the climate change issue, I find myself increasingly of andere meinung ie of a different mind, or opinion.

Different than that of the environmental lobby, as I see it.

Cutting down C02 emissions is probably do-able, but so what. 6 billion++ people are going to live warmer than 2 billion people. 6 billion people are going to find alternative ways to keep warm, and short of cutting off the lived-in environment from the natural environment, it's going to be warmer outside than it used to be, and that means more extreme weather events.

Here in America, after Hurricane Sandy, engineers are starting to find a public for grandiose engineering projects to protect New York, projects that even not long ago seemed insane even to them, 20 billion dollars insane. But - ironically - that's what Hurricane Sandy is going to cost, au bas mot.

I'm not ready to sign that check just yet, but I am not willing to sink on the C02 issue either. Is there a better way.

　

LOC

 

 

 

EdgeOfNight

4 pm

Things are moving along on my eRecipe Book of Festive
Desserts. I can now drag and drop text onto a page of my app, and the app now has
controls that permit me to fetch an image for the Picture box from anywhere
on the computer.

So I have a solution to the main pick-up tasks.

Next I am going to need some sort of array structure to index the recipes I pick-up.

Adding menus to a form is simpler than I thought with respect to coding - Visual
Studio really does deliver the goods with respect to properties and methods - but
trickier with respect to what one wants. An undo button that makes the same thing appear
and disappear in an endless loop is a daunting  issue to begin the day.

Not to mention Garbage Collection, an inverse Tooth Fairie that removes
unused code in the night. Because if you try to do it yourself, you will get a
run-time error that just won't go away. Grrr...

L'ning ther Ropes

Humble Beginnings

It would be nice to, when surfing the net, be able to pick up recipes that get transferred
to a standardized e-book. One could later browse lazily through the book ...

Choices

This calculator is a variant of the earlier Doxa one. The underlying code is a bit different

The numbers and display still work in the same manner: the numbers are entered and

concatenated as string, parsed and stored as numeric variables which are then operated on,

and converted back to string for the answer display.

The difference is that instead of using boolean values to identify the pertinent operation

to be enacted, one uses 'switch' and 'case' between operators. The code is lean and mean.

I still have issues about the looks a calculator should have. There is always muddling through

whenever one uses a new one, looking for where things are. Ongoing...

I have also lifted the icon form an icon archive. Should probably design my own but I like this

one.

There are a lot of decisions to be made about the properties of a Windows form, whether the

user can resize it, what minimum size values it can take, whether a scroll window should

appear. These are real issues if one is designing apps for mobile devices.

One could get pretty creative with what appears, and what doesn't.

 

Tinkering...

Mr Page

One sometimes hears of unscrupulous types who seek to improve

their page-rank Google standings by nefarious means. Yet one must realise that

a pagerank is not something that happens to nice sites that a lot of people might

visit; it is a mathematicl construct based on the number of existing links to a site.

The original algorithm was developed by Larry Page in 1996 - while working at Standford 

University and hence the name PageRank - and does not refer to a Miss America pageant 

of Web pages.

In mathematics, a Markov Chain is a stochastic process wherein the future state of a system is 

a probabilistic result of a current state. The  elements of a Markov chain

are thus probability snapshots of a system over time.

A Fourier/Grenoble paper illustrates pagerank with the following example. An arrow from

a site to another is a link, which is assumed to be a positive vote for the reliability of the

site. One can finesse these votes, for example, by dividing outgoinglinks by the number

of links from the site, thus creating a weightd vote. One needs to inject assumptions about black

hole pages with no outgoing links.

http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~eiserm/Enseignement/google-promenade.pdf

I_Spy

                                              source : Wikipedia.

Save the Twinkie

Awesome Calculator

This awesome-looking calculator actually works. Clicking on one of the operations sets
a boolean value to true for that operation, and the other operations at false. The code for that
operation then gets executed thanks to a conditional if, if else...etc function.

source: It is calculator 1 for VS C#, from the UK Home and Learn site.

XmasApp_Prototype

Does_It_All

EOTW

Le Monde informs us today that a British team of astro-physicists has developed a scenario
for the end of the world. For the lonnnnng term, then.

The surprising element for me : the sun was 70% of its present heat propagation at its inception
and can only get warmer; not a freezing in the dark scenario at al!!







http://passeurdesciences.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/11/11/qui-seront-les-derniers-habitants-de-la-terre/

Works for Me !

Sort'N Filter

Congratulations!!**

http://www.mathsisfun.com/algebra/matrix-calculator.html

Analyst

An avid follower of tech news, I have been bravely making my way

through tutorials on how to build apps. The hoopla surrounding the question

on the web is centered on Microsoft's will to power, as it tries to find

a footing on the mobile computing market but there is an underlying

discussion to all that much more important. Apps are a good thing.

And taking our recent experience with Sandy à temoin, I would want to go

much further : apps are vital. And further yet, our computing devices are now an true

extension of ourselves, of our very intelligence.

I have in memory an event some 25 years ago : I had gone afield from my

appartment for a morning music lesson using my bicyle. There was pouring rain - and I

mean pouring - when the lesson ended so I made my way to a nearby shopping mall.

I was going to have a coffee and wait it out... I waited, and waited, and it was dark

and I was still there. It was getting embarassing because the mall was a quite

upscale place, with import designer clothes and so forth. There I was in bicycle clothes -

and one can only eat so many muffins, cookies etc - with my books, and I felt silly.

I ended up bicycling home in the dark on the Ottawa bikeway in the still pouring rain.

How could I have missed there was a hurricane or somesuch going on, were these news

people totally irresponsible, my clothes were soaked through after a few minutes and

this was late autumn cold rain. I could drink gin in a hot bath and still catch my death,

I should have sacrificed my vanity bike to the inevitable and taken a cab home...etc.

So I survived that one. Today I have a weather app on my destop with shows radar images of

moving clouds : I'm not sure I particularly trust weather news as forecasters to this day and I

am my own weather analyst. And phone apps are important, but I don't mean because I

intend to move to Florida with my tech money. Important to me as a free agent on daily

business.

I have below an interesting presentation of WHO health data. It was put together by

a marketing firm and I find it awesome. My Ottawa acquaintances would howl that

free data circulates without interpretation but I am my own lifestyle analyst as well.

I found it while asking for breast cancer by country because I know people...



http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/world-health-rankings