David's Blague

The kids asked me, after a few more stories about Ralph, whether we had any other animals on the farm. "Of course we did," I told them. After all, there were skunks and porcupines, and a fat cat in the stories I told you. And that's just a start.

But if I had to pick the most interesting critter who lived with us on Spring Creek Farm, I'd have to say it was Fuzzball. "What kind of an animal was Fuzzball?" my older one asked.

Funny thing about that is, we didn't know at first. This is the story I told them.


The day your grandpa came home with Fuzzball, he called over your Uncle Dan and Uncle Doug and me to see what he had in his hard hat. It was a tiny little grey ball of fuzz, which is where he eventually got his name. I thought it might be a mouse or a squirrel, but Dad had already looked closer and seen that Fuzzball had only two feet, and that he also had wings, and a little tiny beak.

He was an owl that one of Dad's logging buddies had knocked out of a tree. For some reason, this guy brought the owl to Dad, whom I suspect was known as a bit of soft touch among Doubravsky's fallers. Dad brought the owl home, and we all wondered what it would grow into.

Between the Fort Vancouver Regional Library and this other buddy of my dad's who inexplicably knew a thing or two about owls, we figured out pretty quickly that Fuzzball liked eating bugs. Especially grasshoppers with first both, then one, then none of the jumping legs pulled off. Grasshoppers were in abundant supply that summer. I don't think it was much more than a month before Fuzzball was flying around on his own.

He turned into a beautiful Flammulated Owl, not more than six inches tall full grown. As one would expect, he could do owlish things, like if he was sitting on your finger and you turned your hand, he could make his head go all the way around. You might think Fuzzball isn't a very dignified name for an owl, but it's better than that Ron Weasley character who named his owl Pigwidgeon, and besides, we didn't really know he was an owl at first.

Anyway, before we knew it, it was time to let Fuzzball go. One night, he flew away, and that was that. It was sad and happy at the same time. Sad because he was gone, but happy because he got to go do owlish things, and hopefully to find an owl friend or two. We didn't have any idea where he went.



I don't remember how much later it was, but it wasn't too long, when one day Larry Littleton was standing under an apple trees in our yard. Fuzzball came flying out of the tree and landed on his shoulder. Larry was always keen on Fuzzball, and Fuzzball on Larry, and he might have been the one who found Fuzzball in the first place, but my memory is murky in that regard.

From that point forward, Fuzzball would fly off at night, and come back to the house during the day to sleep in his little owl cage, which wasn't to keep him in, but to keep any of the other farm critters from bothering him.

And that was how we came to have an owl in residence at Spring Creek Farm.

A graph is a kind of model that contains edges and vertices. It's reasonably easy to draw pictures of graphs, where each edge is a line, and each vertex is a little bubble, maybe with a label in it. I use the program Graphviz to do this, and it's satisfactory.

I've been spending some time thinking about hypergraphs, which are a generalization of graphs, in which a hyperedge might connect more than two vertices. It was already true in a graph that a vertex might "connect" more than two edges, and this remains true in a hypergraph.

It's a bit tougher to draw a picture of a hypergraph, for the same reason it's hard to draw pictures of hypercubes or hyperspheres: the simplicity of the structure cannot be captured in a two-dimensional projection. Simple hyperstructures start to look complex when rendered in only two dimensions. For instance, consider a unit hypercube: each edge being of length one. Each surface of the hypercube is a cube, which is easy enough to draw, but that is only one surface of the hypercube, which is sort of like drawing a square to represent a plain old cube.

But I digress.

The question is this: difficulty of drawing the pictures aside, doesn't it make sense to collapse the hyperedge and hypervertex into a single concept for a hypergraph?

Basically, I think a hypergraph is simpler than a graph, because it lacks any distinction between edges and vertices. But maybe I'm thinking about it wrong. If you are Reinhard Diestel and you've stumbled along to this post, could you possibly clear that up for me? Comments are open.

Labels: graph theory

After the last post about Ralph, some people were wondering, "Is Ralph a Real Dog?" And if they were asking someone who lived in Klickitat County in the eighties or the early nineties, they'd learn that a real-er dog never chased skunks in the East County, probably not in the West County either.

Yeah, Ralph was a real dog, and all the stories about him are real stories, and you can tell they're real because none of them have a moral or anything. Some of them don't even have a point. Ralph didn't go around teaching lessons to children, he was a dog who lived a dog's life, and Dan and Doug and I happened to be part of it for a while, so I tell the stories to my kids.

They asked me to tell a new story about Ralph, and this is what I told them.


Ralph was the fastest, smartest, bravest dog in all of Klickitat County, maybe even the entire state. Which isn't to say he was the friendliest, though he did have some friends, and Uncle Dan and Uncle Doug and your daddy were three of them, and there were some coyotes he was friends with, too. But Ralph was not friends with skunks.

It wasn't for lack of trying, though. Ralph was always trying to make friends with skunks, which is strange, because as a rule, skunks don't like dogs. And besides, skunks stink.

Now, I read on the Internet that the Pilgrims kept skunks as pets, which I can't really imagine, because (as I may have mentioned), skunks stink. I wonder if Ralph got his ideas from the Pilgrims, though, because the Pilgrims did have some strange ideas. Not that I'm one to talk. But Ralph, for whatever reason, wanted to be friends with a skunk.

Eventually we got this black and white cat name Filbert, except we always called him Pigbert, because he was really fat. I think he and Ralph got to be friends eventually, and maybe that filled the void in Ralph's life that ought to have been filled by a skunk, or maybe he just eventually learned not to chase skunks. Or maybe I just stopped paying attention to Ralph's skunk-stink. Or maybe, just maybe, Ralph finally figured out the perfect way to get the smell off of him.

Anyway, the first few times Ralph tried to be friends with a skunk, he came back to the yard with a skunk in his mouth, smelling like a skunk. Which (as I may have mentioned) is not a nice smell. Skunks really stink.

We generally wouldn't let Ralph in the yard with a skunk. Especially not a dead one, which they usually were, which was probably part of what made it so hard for Ralph to make friends with them, on account of his always biting their heads with his big mouth. He never seemed like he was eating them, though it's possible he gave them to his coyote friends, I guess.

The first time it happened, we were pretty surprised when he came back later that night (without a skunk) and he didn't smell so bad. The other thing about skunk smell, is that it's hard to get off. It's why I never personally tangled with a skunk. But we just kind of shrugged and accepted that maybe he hadn't been sprayed that bad. We fed him his dinner, and went on with the important lives of boys, which included sleeping outside. With Ralph close by, but not too close, because he still smelled a little bit like a skunk, but not too much. Enough unless we got scared of something it was nice for him to be a ways off, but if we were scared, it would be nice if he were right there.

But it happened again, Ralph getting sprayed by a skunk, and then coming back not smelling too bad.

Eventually, we figured out that he was going down to The Wasteway, where he would roll in the mud, then jump in the water, then roll in the mud, then jump in the water, then roll in the mud, then jump in the water, and so on, and so forth. I guess Ralph thought if he took a bath, the skunks might like him better. I don't know if that worked, but it was sure nicer for us when he came back and he didn't stink.

Ralph was the fastest, smartest, bravest dog in all Klickitat County, maybe even in the whole state. I'm not saying he was the friendliest, but he did have friends, and Dan and Doug and I were three of them.

We found Ralph, or maybe he found us, on Spring Creek Farm. We weren't farming it, but we moved out there because Roger Falter was farming it and there was a house on it, and he already had a house. Mr. Falter went to church with us. He told us before we moved out there that we might see a dog that he'd been feeding, but that was all I remember him saying.

The place is still there, and I was surprised recently to find it on Google street view:


View Larger Map

Anyway, when we got to Spring Creek Farm, it was early in the summer of 1983. We walked up, and there was Ralph, limping along on three legs, with the fourth leg tucked up underneath him.

I guess he was part Saint Bernard. He was a big dog, with a mouthful of teeth, and my cousin Matt used to call him Cujo after the dog in the Stephen King novel, but we'll come back to that later, and why it wasn't a very good nickname for the fastest, smartest, bravest dog in all of Klickitat County, maybe even in the whole state.

So here's this big dog with questionable social skills and he's got a bad foot, and Dad was only recently gone back to work after getting his back broken by a tree, and it's pretty clear the dog is in bad shape. On the farm, this was generally the sort of circumstance that would lead to the dog being euthanized, by which I mean someone would dig a hole, put the dog in the hole, and shoot it. That's how dogs are euthanized in the country.

But, for whatever reason, we took the dog in to see Carl Conroy, the vet, whose daughter Jodi was in my class, and he told us that it looked to him like Ralph had been caught in a coyote trap and he'd pulled hi foot out and pulled most the skin off of it. He couldn't do much with it, but he didn't see any reason to amputate it, since the wound itself seemed to be healing up okay. Carl told us the foot was just kind of dead.

We only ever got Ralph to ride in the truck twice, I think. That time and once when he got a mouth full of porcupine quills that we just couldn't get out with pliers.

Whenever there were any people around, Ralph would tuck that leg up under him and limp around like he was a three legged dog, which I guess he sort of was. Except that after we'd only been on the farm for a little while, we heard a noise across the fields over by the canyon that sounded like:

"Rrrrowf!"

"Yi yi yi yi yi!"

Wouldn't you know that Ralph was out playing some kind of game with a coyote, where he'd chase the little bugger across the field until he caught it. He'd "Rrrrowf!" at it, and then run away until the coyote gave up chasing. The he'd turn around again, and chase the coyote back until he caught up, and so on.

Ralph was running on all four legs, without any apparent problem.

That wasn't even the surprising part of the story. The surprising part of the story, is that when he came back, he had those damn coyotes' lunch with him. A juicy, meaty spine from a little deer, that we figured he must have taken from the coyotes, though I bet he left some for them, too.

I think he was friends with the coyotes, too. And he tried to make friends with the skunks and the porcupines, but those are stories for later.

An alternate title for this post could be: "Don't Let the Perfect be the Enemy of the Good."

There are times when waiting for the elegant architecture, the scalable system, the perfect answer, keeps people from using the easy solution at hand. Inevitably, the easy solution has something to do with a Perl script, a spreadsheet, or a plain text file. The perfect solution has to do with information architecture and systems design and usability testing.

And in keeping with that philosophy, I'm not going to spend any more time editing this post for speling and grammer or content.

The project I work on at the Library of Congress (I do not speak for them, represent them, etc., etc.) just released its millionth digitized page of old newspapers. A few people have asked me where the link can be found, so there it is. And, for the record, here's what you get if you search for the exact phrase "David":

I finally got around to reading Claude Shannon's Master's thesis.

Wow.

His thesis showed a correspondence between Boolean logic and electronic circuitry. By itself this is a profound achievement, but Shannon's thesis went further. He "programmed" electronic circuitry using Boolean logic, simplified his designs using De Morgan's laws, and from there drew circuit diagrams.

Which is to say he noticed Boole's logic was a valid "programming language" for circuits and demonstrated this to be an accurate observation. He wrote code using this programming language. He then ran it through an optimizer, resulting in optimized electronic circuits for several applications: binary adding, prime numbers, vote counting.

It's astonishing work. Reading it left me feeling humbled- it's not even Shannon's most notable work, and only he was twenty-one when he wrote it. For mathematical beauty, Gödel and Turing may have him beat, but in terms of both approachability and importance, Shannon is right at the front of the pack. His work arguably even edges out Konrad Zuse's Plankalkül as the first "high level programming langauge," though it notably lacked an implementation of a universal computing machine to run on.

Not that that slowed him down much.

An ancient puzzle asks how many grains of wheat must be placed on a surface before they form a heap. Is one grain a heap? Two? Three? Ten thousand? There are a dozen poetic variations of the puzzle, and (here, I'm speculating) a dozen-dozen poetic responses to each. I have taken an informal survey of friends, family, and complete strangers who have provided me some great fodder for thinking. Here are some of the responses:

• "Interesting question. Next question?"
• "This is a cognition problem. It is a heap when you see a heap."
• "Who cares?"
• "It is in a quantum superposition of a heap and not a heap until it is observed, when the wave function collapses and it becomes only one or the other."
• "Define 'heap.'"

Perhaps my favorite of these is, "who cares?" It doesn't need to be a rhetorical question- just find the person who cares and ask that person. It's likely to be a good answer. But it also begs pragmatism: if we can define what purpose (or person) the answer serves, it will be easier to identify which alternative is more suitable.

Programmers of various paradigmatic bents can answer the questions in just about as many ways:

• "Does it have heap interfaces, or only wheat interfaces?"
• "It depends upon how it is serialized."
• "Treat the wheat as value, the heap as pointer(s)."
• "How many instances of type grain are required by type heap?"

When I first started thinking about this post, I was sure my conclusion would be that programmers share no such paradox, but I've arrived at a different result. The puzzle is a paradox because solving it requires re-contextualization. We assume mathematical induction will work (since it sounds like an induction problem), but it doesn't. Even those of us who don't call it "mathematical induction" probably initially approach the problem that way. But eventually we pick some alternate approach, of which there seem to be many.

How do we choose?

It depends on what we want. We choose based upon the outcome. We ask who cares, what impact the choice will have, examine it with a couple different tool-kits and pick the one that makes sense.

Anyone want to argue with me? I'm going to leave comments open for a couple days, see if I can have an Internet argument about it. [Edit: comments closed, nobody wants a blog fight any more. Boo hoo. Email me if you change your mind.]