Vacation Fun

We spent the second part of our trip in Nebraska. One of the sights I really wanted to see was this great monument of mystery, rising from the Salisbury Plains Great Plains:
Unlike Stonehenge, you can actually go right up to Carhenge:
Vinny found some wheels that still turned, within his reach:

We then went to my grandmother's memorial service, which went quite well (as far as memorial services combined with family dysfunction goes). Actually, though, I got to see a lot of relatives whom I hadn't seen in decades, as well as my oldest sister's gravestone (she died of leukemia when she was four years old, a year before I was born), and spoke plainly and honestly to my mother about the situation between us. This isn't really the place to discuss it, but it's possible that some progress has been made.

Anyhow, we decided to go to every single children's museum in Nebraska. We are now children's museum connoisseurs, folks. It's interesting to see what other children's museums in other states have.

The defining characteristic of Nebraska children's museums is that they all have these pin boards that you can press into, like the picture below:
Jeff pressed first his face and body, and then Vinny's, into this particularly large specimen at the Lincoln Children's Museum, which I would rate as an excellent children's museum.

We also went to the Children's museums in North Platte (a fantastic little museum in its own right), Kearney (where Vinny had a lot of fun with a cloud generating machine), Hastings (where he had a great time with their pizza place), and Omaha, where he got to ride on the carousel
and played for hours in this room full of gears, wheels, and balls:
The "super gravitron," as they call it, consists of all these different ways to move the balls through the Rube Goldberg-esque tubing via different techniques, such as levers, pulleys, and gears, but also pneumatics and hydraulics. Every so often, a siren would go off and the plexiglass bin on the ceiling would open (as it is in the picture) and all the balls would fall out. Vinny enjoyed this room so much that we went back to the museum the next morning. I must admit that I had a blast in that room myself.

We didn't just see children's museums. It's just that those were the only places I had my camera out. But we also saw some interesting museums for grown-ups, including the Nebraska Prairie Museum and Harold Warp Pioneer Village. Did you know that German POWs during World War II were held at Holdredge, Nebraska? They actually were free to work in the area and provided a lot of labor to the local economy.

I spent a summer in Lincoln, Nebraska as an undergraduate, so I had to expose my family to some Nebraska culture. We ate at Valentino's (a fabulous regional pizza chain that originated in Lincoln) and Runza (also emanating from Lincoln, whose eponymous menu item is a unique calzone-like sandwich -- stuffed with ground beef, cabbage, and spices).

After leaving Nebraska, we traveled to my former babysitter's house and had the fabulous windmill cake you saw in the previous post. We had a great time playing games with Alice and Jerome as well. We played one called Labyrinth, another one about zombies, and lastly Settlers of Catan. They were all a lot of fun.

We left their house on Sunday at about noon. The original plan was to stop somewhere for the night, but eventually we just decided to go the whole way. So, we arrived home at about 4:30 am on Monday.

It was good to be back home. Plus, I got to sleep in my own bed for twice as many nights before heading on business travel as I would have otherwise.

It was a really fun and refreshing trip overall. A break from work to spend some fun time with my family was just what I needed. Now, it's back into the grind.

Happy Birthday, Vinny!

Today is Vinny's third birthday! It is hard to believe that it's been three years since he was born. On the one hand, it feels like it was just yesterday that he was an itty-bitty baby. On the other hand, I almost can't remember what my life was like before he came into it.

Since he doesn't really know the difference between one day or another, we're celebrating throughout the month. His first celebration was when we visited Alice, my former babysitter (as in, she used to babysit me when I was a child), and her husband, in northwestern Missouri on Friday and Saturday, and she baked him a cake, complete with his favorite obsession (windmills) on it -- see the following pictures.




Alice got some small fans on clearance and put them on the cake to look like windmills. (She also bought him some bigger hand-held fans on clearance and gave them to him as a birthday present, and he played with them all the way home from Missouri. The buzzing sound was irritating, but much better than whining might have been.)

After I get back from a business trip this week (yup, I'm leaving tomorrow, and coming back on Thursday), we'll have a family celebration. And then we'll hold a birthday party later this month.

Good Times in South Dakota

We've had a fun time on our vacation so far. On Monday we drove the entire width of SD, to get to the Black Hills. The day started out cold and rainy, but on the way, we stopped in a few places. First, we saw the Corn Palace. We enjoyed the corn mosaics there but unfortunately it was still cold and rainy when we were there.

We pressed on, to 1880 town, which was the most interesting site we saw that day. It's a collection of buildings and artifacts from the era and the area. Vinny really enjoyed running around the town and looking at things.

Our final stop before Rapid City, where we spent the night, was Wall Drug. The Wall Drug billboards are amusing and entertaining as you cross the countryside, but Wall Drug itself is somewhat disappointing. We had dinner there and paid more than $30 for worse food than you could get at McDonald's for $15. My advice, should you ever find yourself driving across SD on I-90, is to skip Wall Drug and go see other more interesting things.

We stayed at a hotel with an attached waterpark in Rapid City, which Vinny really enjoyed. It seems like any hotel worth its salt in South Dakota has an attached waterpark, presumably because there's nothing else to do in South Dakota. ;)

On Tuesday, we went to the North and West areas of the Black Hills, stopping at Sturgis (home of the famous motorcycle rally), Devil's Tower, and Deadwood, where we saw the cemetery that is the final resting place of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. Then we went camping that night at Big Bear Butte State Park. Vinny had been really excited about the prospect of roasting marshmallows by the fire and sleeping in a tent. We got to the campground about 30 minutes before sunset, and set up the tent and built a fire. We were the only folks camping at the campground, and it was extremely cold -- lows in the 30s F. We could hear coyotes howling all night, and Jeff thinks he heard something get eaten by a predator. We didn't get much sleep because it was so cold and we had to keep moving Vinny back into the sleeping bag.

We woke up before dawn and we just packed up and left. We had a breakfast at Denny's before going to see Mount Rushmore. Mount Rushmore was spectacular and really interesting to see. But we were feeling tired and dirty so we checked into a hotel in the early afternoon, and took showers and went swimming for probably nearly 3 hours with our swim-obsessed son.

It's kind of an odd contradiction, but Vinny both loves swimming and is terrified of the water. But he's getting less afraid of the water the more time he spends in it. By the end of yesterday he was able to "swim" a couple of feet between me and Jeff, and feel okay with the fact that his face was in the water (although head dunking is another matter entirely). We will have to sign him up for swim lessons or something, because he seriously loves the water so much.

Today we're going to head south to the Badlands and maybe even onward to Western Nebraska, which is also beautiful (rolling hills, not exactly what you think of when you think Nebraska). Ultimately we have to make our way to Lexington, Nebraska, for my grandmother's memorial service on Saturday. I'll try to keep you updated as the trip progresses!

Greetings from South Dakota!

Just a brief post to let my vast fan base know that I am alive and well. We are having a great time on our vacation so far. We spent the past couple of days with my sister Laura at her house. We left this morning and made it as far as Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where we are spending the night tonight.

We hope to make it to the Black Hills by tomorrow night. More later!

Sew Much Fun

I really enjoy sewing, but I don't get much of a chance to do it. I took a couple of years of sewing classes in 4-H, so I have some basic sewing skills but nothing very advanced. I prefer making things rather than making clothes, because if my curtains are a little uneven, for example, it doesn't look half as bad as if my clothes are a little uneven.

I took the initiative when I bought Melvin, the tiniest, babiest computer, to order some fabric with which to sew a case for him. I wanted something pre-quilted, and this sunflower fabric immediately caught my eye:


So I made up my own pattern and cut it from the fabric:
I soon realized, however, that the double-pull zipper I had bought was of the wrong orientation. You see, it was a jacket zipper, so when the zipper pulls are apart, the zipper should be zipped together on a jacket.
But I needed the opposite for my laptop case -- the zipper pulls should open the zipper when they are far apart. So, I performed a little zipper surgery, cutting off the safety teeth at the ends of the zipper and rethreading the top zipper pull to the bottom of the zipper:
Then, I sewed the zipper to the fabric pieces I was going to use for the top and narrow sides of the case:
I also made some carrying handles for the case, and put them on the wider sides of the case. I should also mention that I decided to make this case appear to have no visible seams. I did what's called a French seam -- first you sew wrong sides together, as appears in the picture below.
Then you pin the wrong sides together such that they hide the raw edges, and sew the raw edges within the seam, as I did in this picture (you're looking at the inside of the case in this picture).
Here's the finished product -- first of all, the inside of it, with two pockets (one for the laptop, and one for the power supply and other accessories):
And here's the outside of the case
And here it is holding the laptop:
This project was a lot of fun and I hope that I will be able to find more time in the future to make fun projects like this again!

Nine Eleven

Today's normally somber mood is somewhat lightened by the fact that it's my last day of work before we go on vacation! But still, it is quite a sad day.

On this fateful day eight years ago, I was getting ready to go to class. I'd showered and gotten dressed, and was eating my cereal and surfing the internet when I got an email from my sister who was living in DC saying that she was fine, and not to worry.

Huh?

So I went onto CNN.com and I could barely get on and saw that the first plane had hit the twin towers and the plane had hit the Pentagon. There was speculation that a plane had hit the White House too. At that point I had to leave to catch my bus, but I remember thinking, "This can't be a coincidence."

As the day progressed, I was able to get more and more information. I watched them bulldozing and searching for survivors live on TV.

What were you doing that day?

Impatience

Vinny was really excited about his new fan, and wanted us to be finished installing it already. He kept on asking, "Are you done yet? Are you done yet?"

I kept telling him, "We'll tell you when we're finished, sweetheart." But within 5 seconds, he was asking again.

I just realized yesterday that "Are you done yet?" is very similar to "Are we there yet?" Hopefully he won't have that one figured out when we go on vacation next week.

Lucky Nines

Today is the ninth day of the ninth month of the year two thousand nine. And this post is dated 9:09 AM. Cool!

Labor Day Update

It was the best of weekends; it was the worst of weekends. A lot of money was spent, mostly on important stuff. A lot of work was done, and most of it not futile.

• We bought a lot of stuff in preparation for our trip. For example, we decided that a portable DVD player that could work in the car would be a good investment for keeping a certain little boy we know and love happy during the long stretches of driving. We also bought some new DVDs to roll out one at a time after he gets bored with the old ones.
• But, Vinny dropped my camera, lens-down, on the concrete floor, so I had to replace it. That's $100 down the drain.
• I sewed a carrying case for the DVD player and a laptop case for Melvin, the tiniest, babiest computer* (I managed to get all the pictures off the damaged camera, so a post will be forthcoming). I had a blast sewing those.
• We replaced the light fixture in Vinny's room with a colorful ceiling fan, which was a good thing. That boy is still obsessed with fans, and we'd bought that fan several months ago but just hadn't gotten around to installing it yet. Yesterday evening he was just wanting to sit in his room and watch the ceiling fan go round and round.
  
• But, in that process, I learned not to use the Amps (current) setting on your multimeter to determine whether wires are live. One of the multimeter probes melted and burned when I tried that. So, don't do it, unless you want to replace your multimeter's probes at a minimum, and possibly the entire multimeter and some of the surroundings. Thanks to the spray of molten probe, I need new lenses on my glasses. (This is the one time I'm happy to be nearsighted.) Use the voltage setting instead!
• I saw the movie The Gangs of New York last night. I did not realize how crazy and lawless things used to be in this country! I always chuckle at people romanticizing the past so much that they think they'd like to live back then. No, thank you! I'm sure that the Five Points area where the movie took place was much worse than just about anywhere else, but sheesh! Even the wealthy periodically had their homes mobbed, or people infiltrating disguised as maids or help staff who would rob them, etc. I'm happy for things the way they are right now, thank you very much.
  

* You have to be one of my sisters to understand how hilarious this statement is. Yes, ladies, I did name my new netbook Melvin!

Vacation Preparation

Sorry for dropping off the face of the earth there, folks! I've been so busy lately that I've had little time to think about topics for awesome blog posts. We've had a lot going on at home lately (such as planning our upcoming vacation), plus I'm trying to get lots of things done at work before this three-week vacation starts next weekend. We're going on a road trip -- out to the Black Hills, swinging South to Nebraska, where my grandmother's memorial service will be held on September 26, and then looping back home.

In preparation for this trip, we upgraded our membership to the local children's museum to a reciprocal membership, where you can get into hundreds of children's museums worldwide for free. The extra cost was only $30, so two visits to reciprocal museums is all it takes to break even. I've discovered that there are five children's museums in Nebraska -- presumably because there's nothing else to do in Nebraska? -- and we plan to hit at least three of them after the funeral.

Unfortunately, the Children's Museum of Indianapolis is not a member of this association, but we plan to begin our trip there anyhow, because I know Vinny will love it. We used to go there when I was a kid, and it was fantastic. Back then, they didn't charge admission, but I'm willing to fork out nearly $40 for my son to enjoy it.

Question of the Day

Who took the summer weather, and what did they do with it?

It feels like fall. I've been enjoying the beautiful weather, but it just feels wrong for this time of year. A high of 80 F? Unheard of, this time of year.

Maybe the cool trend will continue and we'll have an actual winter, with snow and stuff. That would be awesome!

Last night, Terminator 3 was on television. I'd never seen the movie, so this gave me a chance to make fun of all the computer stuff in it.

The computer that controlled our national defense was a 60 Teraflops machine, meaning that it was capable of doing sixty trillion floating point operations per second. (A floating point operation is just any basic arithmetic operation involving a decimal point: 1.1+1.1, for example.) I looked at the Top 500 list from 2003, the year the movie came out, and the fastest supercomputer was the Earth Simulator, at 36 Teraflops, which had come out the year before, so I suppose that machine would have been considered super-powerful.

It's just that, to me, a 60 Teraflops machine is quaint. I work with a machine that is 1.6 Petaflops (that's 1.6 quadrillion floating point operations per second). Let me say something about these machines, though.

First, they are very delicate. In the movie, John Connor talks about having enough C4 to take out ten supercomputers, which made me laugh again. You don't need C4 to take out a supercomputer. The easiest way is to destroy its air conditioning system. Without air conditioning, it will be a pile of silicon goo in no time. If it is so smart that it has a backup system (more on the intelligence of these machines in a minute, by the way), then seriously, it would be pretty easy to just go in and pull out a few boards and cables and do a lot of damage. A machine that is fault-tolerant enough to handle something like that is but a dream at this point in time. And furthermore, you could probably just wait a couple of days and the machine would go down on its own. Without human intervention, these machines are helpless.

Second, supercomputers are stupid. They are tremendously skilled at performing floating point operations, but that is a far cry from intelligence. Our brains operate a whole lot differently than a computer's processors. Artificial intelligence is really the holy grail of computer science. All the petaflops in the world aren't going to help anything. I mean, humans are pretty flops-deficient, yet we've accomplished a lot more with our intelligence than computers have.

Here's just how flops-deficient we are compared to computers: if we took everyone in the world (babies, old people, and everyone in between) and we all did floating point operations at a rate of one flop per second (which is a pretty fast pace), it would take us more than three days to do what it takes my friendly neighborhood supercomputer to do. But floating point operations aren't the way that our intelligence operates, whereas they are the only way that a computer's intelligence operates. And there's not a very good way to use floating point operations to mimic our type of intelligence, which is why even a petaflops machine would not be able to take over the world.

Vinny's First Computer Art

Drawn with Tux Paint

On Students

I have had the privilege of mentoring three students since I started working. While others I know have had bad experiences, working with these students has been a very positive and fulfilling experience for me.

Of course I was careful to select only the best students to hire, but I think that the main reason my experience has been so positive is because of my attitude going into the mentoring relationship.

I see an internship as an opportunity for an up-and-coming scientist to learn science, not as a way for me to get some extra work done. And because I have that attitude, I'm never disappointed.

I fully expect my students to be time sinks, and I have developed ways of mitigating the worst wastes of my time; for example, I provide them with a handout detailing the project parameters on the day they report, and I schedule weekly meetings with them and try to touch base briefly once a day. They can read the handout rather than having to rely on any notes they would have taken while I was verbally explaining the project, resulting in fewer gaps in their understanding. I schedule for one hour per week of my uninterrupted time, and I usually go touch base with them about 15-30 minutes before a meeting, allowing me an excuse to escape if my time is being wasted.

I also assign them a project that it would be nice to have completed, but that is not vital to my work. In this way I can be only pleasantly surprised by their progress on the project, rather than depending on their work.

So far I have not been disappointed. Even if my student gets nothing tangible done, I do not consider my time to have been wasted. Students don't learn high-performance computing in school; it's really something that has to be learned through experience, and that is what I have enabled them to do during their internship with me. And if we don't give them the chance to learn it, how are we ever going to be able to develop the next generation of computational scientists?

I was once a student who knew nothing about high-performance computing. Someone took a chance on me and I was hired as a graduate research assistant in our university's HPC center, despite my lack of knowledge. It took some mentoring and time-wasting on his part, but I learned the skills that I needed to get to where I am today. I think it's only fair that I give others the same opportunities that my mentor gave me.

My New Toy

I'm typing this from my new toy: a Dell mini, 8.9", with a 16 GB solid-state drive and Ubuntu Linux. It is really cute and little!

I got it as an early birthday present, so that I could have a computer to take along on our trip next month. It is so small and so light (about 2.5 lbs) that it will be easy to just toss it in a bag and take it with us.

The only problem is that some of the keys have been moved, so, for example, the apostrophe is down a row and I keep pressing enter rather than apostrophe. No doubt it will take some getting used to.

Running Update

I'm still running three times a week at noon. It's summer, and not really possible to run outside at noon (unless you like that kind of misery, but I sure don't!), so we've been going to the fitness center at my workplace and using the treadmills and elliptical machines.

A treadmill is way easier than actual running, and I suspect that I will be miserable when we transition back to road running in the fall. The road isn't padded like the treadmill is; plus, this is East Tennessee, so the roads aren't level!

My fearless coach was gone for three weeks in the summer, so I recruited another friend to go along with me, and now she's hooked too, making it three of us. I was really impressed with myself that I didn't just let it go while my colleague was away. We'll see how I fare when I'm gone on vacation the second half of September. Maybe running in flat Nebraska will be just like running on a treadmill!

Health Care Reform: The Ethics and Morality

This series of posts features my thoughts about health care, organized into some simple categorizations. It is this data, these experiences, and these moral arguments that inform my opinion about health care reform. It is, of course, incomplete compared to everything in my head, and I welcome your questions and comments.

I care a lot about other people. It is very important to me to care for others in this world. As an atheist, I see this life as the only one that we have, and that makes it all the more important to do the best with it that we can.

But it's not just atheists who care about other people. Religious people also care about other people. Every major religion (and the minor ones, too!) compels its followers to take care of the sick and the poor.

The big question, then, is to what degree should we/are we obligated to use our money to pay for others' health care? I posit that we should form a national (or possibly regional or statewide) pool of money from which everyone draws to pay for health care. This is an option that is not only possible, but is affordable and will benefit everyone.

We live in the most prosperous country in the world, and health care is not a scarce resource. (Health care is not accessible to some people because of the costs involved, but that is the primary barrier. There are some locations where it is scarce as well, but again, this has more to do with costs than anything else -- doctors need to make a living and can't do so if none of their patients can afford to pay them.)

Currently, we spend more money per capita than any other country does, and receive suboptimal results from it. We could take that same money and apply it more intelligently, and receive much better results.

A single-payer system could be financed by a 9% payroll tax -- 2% paid by the employee and 7% paid by the employer[1 -- the question about raising taxes, but the whole thing is an interesting read]. My personal income is in the 90th percentile of American incomes, and my employer and I would be coming out ahead on this deal. Together, we pay $1250/month to insure my family -- and this rate applies to everyone they insure, not just high-income professionals.

Having a single-payer system would benefit everyone. It would benefit those who currently lack access to health care, for obvious reasons. But it would also benefit those of us who do have access to health care as well.

Something I worry about, as the primary breadwinner and person who enables my family to have access to health insurance, is what happens to my family if something happens to me. The best case scenario is if I am killed instantly -- my family collects on my life insurance policies, they can use the proceeds of that policy to pay for COBRA, their regular bills, and training for my husband to get himself back into the workforce. Hopefully he would be able to get a job with benefits that would cover his pre-existing conditions, although that could be difficult to find.

The worst case scenario is if I linger. Jeff will want to spend those last weeks or months with me, and taking care of me, when he should be getting himself back into the workforce. I'll be terminated from my job -- perhaps I'll receive long-term disability payments, but no longer an employee of my workplace, I'll have to begin paying the full health insurance premium -- and the clock will start ticking on COBRA. My care will eat up our savings, as our health insurance company finds limits in our policy that I hadn't realized were there, and I'm too weak to fight them for it.

A single-payer system, on the other hand, entirely eliminates this worry. My family's pre-existing conditions will always be covered, regardless of my employment status. My final months of life will not send my family into bankruptcy, because it's all covered by the system. But this is not the only way in which I will benefit.

If everyone has access to the health care they need, then they will be able to innovate without worry of the consequences. If I come up with a brilliant idea for a new company, I'll be able to pursue that idea without worrying about the consequences to my family's health insurance coverage. (It's a good thing I love my job, because I am basically tied to working for a large employer with health insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions, thanks to our health history as a family.)

A healthier workforce means a more productive workforce. If everyone has access to the health care they need, then there will be fewer people on disability. A person with diabetes can get the treatments they need to prevent blindness, for example. A person with a broken leg can get it set properly so that both legs are the same length and their back doesn't get strained by the imbalance.

Even the wealthy would benefit from a single-payer health insurance system. The amount of money that their businesses would have to pay to provide health insurance to their employees would decrease, lowering the bottom line. Their assets would not be at risk should they develop a costly or life-threatening illness. And they could use their influence with the government to improve the quality of health coverage, should they be unhappy with it.

A single-payer system is the right choice ethically and morally. It's a system that works well for many of our peer countries, and that could benefit the United States too.

Health Care Reform: The Math

This series of posts features my thoughts about health care, organized into some simple categorizations. It is this data, these experiences, and these moral arguments that inform my opinion about health care reform. It is, of course, incomplete compared to everything in my head, and I welcome your questions and comments.

I. Money

In the United States, we spent $2.4 trillion, or $7900 per person, on health care in 2007. This is 17% of our GDP [1]. Health insurance premiums increased by 5% last year -- twice the rate of inflation. Our neighbors to the north (Canada) spend half what we do per capita, yet have the opportunity to consult with doctors nearly 60% more than we do (an average of 6.0 visits vs 3.8 visits per year) [2].

II. Demographics

In exchange for the highest per-capita investment in health care, we end up with suboptimal health outcomes. We have the 33rd or 46th lowest infant mortality rates in the world (depending on if you use the UN or CIA factbook statistics), getting beat out by countries like Cuba and Israel [3]. We have the 30th or 38th longest life expectancy, getting beat out by Cuba, Greece, and Jordan [4]. In the WHO assessment of health care systems by country, the United States ranked 37th out of the 191 countries evaluated, behind Saudi Arabia [5]!


What are we getting for all that spending, then?

For those who have access to healthcare, we get some of the best care in the world -- the United States has a lot of resources that aren't available in places like Cuba, after all. But those who lack the access to healthcare, well, they may as well be living in a country that doesn't have any of those resources, because they won't get a chance to see them until there's such a dire emergency that the medical bills just can't be avoided any longer.

Here's the dark side of what we're getting: we're getting a whole lot of money wasted on administration -- six times the amount per capita than is spent in our peer Western European countries, all of which achieve superior health outcomes to us. We're getting CEOs rewarded with nine-figure bonuses when they merge two large health insurance companies into one mega-company. We get our insured health care decided based on profit, not on what's actually best for the patient, and all health care rationed based on people's assets rather than their needs. We get 68% of medical-bill-related bankruptcies being folks who had health insurance when their medical condition began [1].

Surely there's got to be a better way. We could spend all that money more wisely and provide better healthcare for more people.

Next: The Ethics and Morality

Adventures in Rollerskating

Vinny was invited to a 7-year-old's rollerskating birthday party, and we all attended it today. I had told him last night that in the morning, we were going to need to take a bath and then we would go rollerskating. He's never skated but he knew what rollerskating was because there's an episode of Oswald where Oswald learns to roller skate.

He was really excited about the idea of rollerskating, and in fact this morning he remembered that today we were going rollerskating! After a relatively short bath, we headed out to the roller rink.

We got Vinny a pair of skates, and Jeff and I remained in our shoes and helped him around the rink. At first he could hardly keep his feet under himself, but as his time on skates progressed, he improved dramatically. He couldn't really skate without assistance, but he wasn't falling flat on his behind. And in fact, he was able to get up from sitting and balance himself for a short time before he got too wobbly.

One thing that did not help his roller skating was all the cool blinking lights up on the ceiling, which were much more interesting to look at than the rink. At first he was just skating while looking straight up, but eventually we were able to get him to look ahead of him instead, which dramatically improved his skating.

This evening when I tucked Vinny into bed, he asked me if we could go rollerskating tomorrow. Evidently it was a big hit with him!

Su(doku), Meet Ken(Ken)

I'm on business travel this week, and in celebration (?) of that, I decided to get myself a book of sudoku. When I looked on the shelf, there was a book of another sudoku-like game called KenKen. So I bought that to try out on the plane.

KenKen is like sudoku in the sense that all the numbers have to appear exactly once in each row and column, but there are bolded "cages" in which the numbers have to make a number in the upper left corner of the cage by using the operator that follows the number (e.g. 17+ means the numbers have to add up to 17).

I read the basic instructions at the beginning of the book before starting to work on the puzzles. It has been so much fun to develop my own techniques for solving these puzzles. I look out for unique cages first: for example, a two-square cage with 3+ must contain a one and a two, and a two-square cage with 15x must contain a 3 and a 5. I then use the column- and row-uniqueness rules to solve the puzzle.

I am fast falling in love with KenKen puzzles. I did 15 of them while on the plane! Okay, so I've only done the easy puzzles, but they are so much fun that it made the ache in my hand and arm from writing too much totally worth it.