Submitted without comment.

Assessment Results: Mark

Mark’s Full Scale IQ was in the “very superior” range of ability. His percentile ranking was 99.5, indicating that Mark was performing as well as or better than 99.8% of peers his age. It is with 95% confidence that his “true” IQ lies within the “Very Superior” range of ability.

However, Marks Full Scale IQ is not a unitary construct because there was a significant difference between his Performance IQ and Verbal IQ. Therefore his Full Scale IQ is not interpretable.

The Verbal IQ was in the high “very superior” range of ability. Mark’s percentile ranking was 99.5, indicating that Mark is performing as well as or better than 99.5% of peers his age. It is with 95% confidence that his “true” Verbal IQ score lies with the “very superior” range of ability.

The Performance IQ was in the “Superior” range of ability. Mark’s percentile ranking was 95, indicating that he is performing as well as or better than 95% of peers his age. It is with 95% confidence that his true IQ score lies within the “Superior” range of ability.

Subtests

Performed best in subtests which tap into:

* short-term memory via auditory means. This involves short-term acquisition and retrieval.
* Verbal comprehension
* Acquired knowledge and general factual information
* Long-term memory.
* Crystallized Intelligence and Fluid Intelligence
* Visual perception of meaningful stimuli (people and things)
* Non-verbal reasoning
* Synthesis (part-whole relationships) and anticipation of relationships among parts.

Subtest scores identified difficulties in the following areas:

* Distinguishing essential from nonessential details
* Creativity
* Visual perception of abstract stimuli

NB: Superior IQ range lies between 120 and 130.

Very superior IQ range is greater than 130.

Woo hoo, I say, to have discovered a grocery store that sells pepperoncinis by the jar. I've been making myself sick on them since discovering them last week. This country is pepper-deprived.

Interesting note on Australian language. Lately, I've started noticing how much they use "whilst" down here in place of "while". For instance, in the trams there are signs that read, "Do Not Talk To The Tram Driver Whilst The Tram Is Moving". It just sounds wrong -- archaic -- to me. Turns out, it's from the English: in England, all official signage uses "whilst" instead of "while" for an interesting reason. Seems that in the north of England, "while" is often used to mean "until". Not a big deal, unless you consider a sign that reads something like: "Do Not Cross Train Tracks While Lights Are Flashing".

We got Laika two years ago today. Marjorie wants to buy her an anniversary gift, as if she would know the difference. Kind of like the woman I used to work with who bought her cats Christmas presents, wrapped them, and opened them for the cat on Christmas. I don't get it.

We did find the perfect place, though, to take her out to for the occasion.

Odd names. A woman I am about to start a project with has a somewhat unusual name. I can't mention it here, but it started a conversation tonight about odd names.

In junior high I remember two brothers, Linwood and Cherrywood Reed. Unusual, and a little unwieldy, but not too bad.

I also remember a Sunday school teacher at our church named Mercedes Ferrari. (The first name was pronounced "MER-seh-dees".)

I think Marjorie topped it all, though, with a family she's encountered at her work. The children are named Laverne, Shirley... and Ann. I didn't get the "Ann" at first, but then Marjorie explained, "Laverne... Ann... Shirley".

There's no law against it, but maybe there should be. Not life in prison, but a year or two, surely.

Big Blue. I've spent the last month locked in battle with IBM's WebSphere-based web content management tool. Today we came across this gem of an error message in a log file:

Syndiation error occured during reponse

Three misspellings in the space of five words. That has to be a record.

They say no one's ever been fired for going with IBM. Maybe it's time they start.

By popular request, some jokes:


Man in a doctor's office: "Doc, it hurts when I go like this."
Doctor: "Hmmm, step up on the table and let me have a look at that."


Later...
Man: "Doc, when this heals, will I be able to play the violin?"
Doctor: "Yes, you will."
Man: "That's a relief. You see, I'm a concert violinist and I was worried that this would affect my career."


A tourist visiting Manhattan: "Excuse me, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?"
Pedestrian: "It's three blocks up, on the right."


Q. Why did the chicken cross the road?
A. Probably in search of some food, but it's difficult to tell the motivation of animals.


"Take my wife, for instance..."


There was an airplane about to crash. The pilot had a heart attack and there were 4 passengers on the plane but only 3 parachutes! Right away one man grabs one of the chutes and said "I am Tiger Woods -- the greatest golfer of all times and I am taking one." He put on the parachute and jumped out of the plane. The next one to get up was Bill Gates. He said, "I am the smartest and most successful businessman in history, so I deserve one as well." He put on the pack and jumped out of the plane. The two people left were the Pope and a small five year old boy. The Pope turned to the boy and said "Bless you my son. I am an old man and I have lived a long and good life. You are young and have everything to live for. I insist that you take the last parachute and jump." The boy turned to the Pope and said, "Thanks!", and he put on the parachute and jumped.

Kind of cool. Looks like in a few weeks I'll be working on the Lonely Planet website. This is not just some Aussie-based version, but the global site. We've always used their guidebooks, and I used to even consult their site a lot, so it should be interesting to work on. The downside is that it might mean an extra 20-30 minutes commute most days.

Aside: apparently there's some London-based nutter that's been harassing them for something like eight years now, posting inappropriate material to their forums two or three times daily, creating a new login each time after the old one gets kicked off. Seems he's disgruntled after being rejected on a book deal. You just can't compete with crazy.

Recommended reading. You wouldn't think something written in 1889 would still be funny. I'm halfway through Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat". Here's a excerpt, where he's talking about his hypochondria:

In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being "a general disinclination to work of any kind."

What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down to laziness.

"Why, you skulking little devil, you," they would say, "get up and do something for your living, can't you?"--not knowing, of course, that I was ill.

And they didn't give me pills; they gave me clumps on the side of the head. And, strange as it may appear, those clumps on the head often cured me--for the time being. I have known one clump on the head have more effect upon my liver, and make me feel more anxious to go straight away then and there, and do what was wanted to be done, without further loss of time, than a whole box of pills does now.

You know, it often is so--those simple, old-fashioned remedies are sometimes more efficacious than all the dispensary stuff.

And the beauty of books that are this old is that the copyright has run out and you can read them online.

Soccer season is over, save for a few cup games and one-offs. Great season as we finished as the strongest team in the league. I ran the numbers today, and the last half of the season went like this:

team	Played	Wins	Draws	Lost	Gls	Gls Agnst	Pts
MIDDLE PARK FC	9	8	0	1	23	10	24
vermont	9	7	2	0	42	7	23
south port utd	10	7	2	1	38	8	23
caulfield cougars	10	5	2	3	39	15	17
kooyong jfc	9	5	1	3	31	29	16
carringbush	9	4	2	3	23	15	14
marcellin eagles	9	4	1	5	21	14	13
olympiakos east kew	9	4	1	4	25	22	13
kew deaf united	8	3	0	5	21	40	9
highlander united	8	1	0	7	5	37	3
port melbourne	11	1	0	10	8	53	3
oakleigh series	9	0	1	8	8	26	1

We were pretty near unstoppable for that stretch. Pity the season was longer than just that though.

Kudos to the doctor who fixed up my hip so well! Pretty much a complete recovery, aside from a strange out-of-whack feeling occasionally when I ride my bike. It'll still be nice to take a week off and let my feet and calves recover.

More geeking. John has between 2 and 5 apples. Mary gives him between 3 and 7 apples. How many apples does he have now? If you can understand this simple question, you have the gist interval arithmetic.

I first heard of interval arithmetic while working at Kennedy Space Center; we used it to model pressures and temperatures of liquid oxygen flowing through pipes. There are other applications beyond physical modeling. It is sometimes used in finance to track the rounding error during financial calculation, so people can't steal fractions of cent from each transaction (like they did in Office Space).

I've started a project that provides a Java library for developers wishing to use interval arithmetic for whatever purpose they want: check it out. It's open-source, so anyone is free to download, use, and even modify it. It's still in a very raw state, but I'm hoping to improve it, especially if there is outside interest.

(I'm torn about hosting it on SourceForge; they're the biggest and most widely known repository for projects such as these, but I hate hate hate Unix-y interfaces, huge lists of features that nobody uses, and sparse and inconsistent documentation, and that's what SourceForge seems to be all about. Maybe I'll switch to Google's?)

Geek alert. Flying back from the states, I came across a contest called "Crossing Capitals" in the back of Games Magazine. The object is to take the 50 US state capitals, plus all of the Canadian capitals, and fit as many as possible into a 19 by 19 grid, crossword puzzle style. This is a regular sort of contest they do, called a "stuffer" contest.

This sounded like a fun thing to write a program to solve, so I set to the task, and was soon generating some pretty good results. I started running it overnight at home, and pretty much constantly at work -- I'd estimate a good eight weeks of total computing time. I'm not sure how many million combinations were tried, but it was a lot. I also did a lot of fine tuning of the algorithm.

The deadline is now passed -- here are the results of the effort:

M

O

N

T

P

E

L

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C

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G

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C

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Q

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C

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B

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B

H

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B

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A

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M

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D

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J

A

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D

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That's thirty-four capitals. The tie breaker is the total count of letters used; my total is 243.

Unfortunately, I found a forum for people who do this sort of thing all the time, and it looks like at least three people managed to fit in 35 capitals. At least one did it by hand, too, without computer help! I would have thought that everyone in contention to win would have done it by program -- interesting that brains and computers are so evenly matched.

Steve Irwin died today. The news raced around Australia like wildfire -- I heard it almost simultaneously from about four different directions. Quite sad, I think. He may not have been the best role model for kids, but he was the real deal. Did you know that all the profits from his movie went to environmental causes?

No one's too surprised that he went out like this, except maybe those who were expecting it to be a croc. And yet, somehow, it's hard to imagine him dead.

Fun yesterday as I played golf for the first time in four years, at Yarra Bend. I was predictably terrible (shot 108, I think) but it was the soccer team's annual golf outing, and the weather was great, so it was good fun. Tons of wildlife on the course, most notably the colony of giant fruit bats, but also a lot of eastern rosellas, noisy miners, rainbow lorikeets, and a flock of some sort of black cockatoos.

Then last night we caught the Melbourne Victory beating Sydney in front of the biggest crowd in Australian club soccer history -- nearly 40,000. I'm sure it was the biggest crowd that a lot of the players have ever played in front of as well. Great game and a fun atmosphere.

Brushes with celebrity. For no good reason, here are the famous peeps I've peeped, not counting actual shows, lectures, readings, etc.:

Elvis Costello: Met him after shows a few times. Also sat behind him at a Ron Sexsmith show where he didn't perform, so it counts.

Michael McKean (Lenny of Lenny and Squiggy fame): Sat two rows behind him at an Elvis Costello concert.

Henry Rollins: Saw him in a Starbucks in London. Henry Rollins in a Starbucks.

Gurmit Singh at our grocery store in S'pore.

Molly Meldrum at a footy game. Well, they tell me he's famous.

Shaq, at a nightclub in Orlando. A head taller than everyone else, he was hard to miss.

Horace Grant, at the same club. Shook his hand.

Ted Kennedy: Spooked him in an airport when I suddenly reached into my bag for my ticket just as I recognized him. His bodyguards got him out of there fast!

Michael Stipe, on a street corner in Athens, listening to (what I'm guessing was) a backing track through headphones, and mouthing words over it.

Mike Mills, in a bar in Atlanta. Also saw him driving down the road once.

Not much new to report. Spring is slowly arriving, though, which has made us delay our search for a new neighborhood -- Albert Park is too too nice when it's warm.

Two restaurants plugs:

Santiago -- great tapas, great wine, great atmosphere. Reminded us very much of Spain.

Tandoori Times -- maybe the best chicken vindaloo I've had.

A few weeks back we saw the Picasso exhibit at the NGV. We're both fans, but Picasso's ability to excel at every medium almost makes us angry! Great stuff though.

Next week I'm claiming my birthday present -- we're going to the Melbourne Victory match against Sydney.

Eulogy for Beau


I woke up yesterday to the very sad news that Beau, one of my family's dogs, had been found dead, hit by a car.

This is the email my father sent:

To paraphrase an iconic southern writer, my dog is dead and I don’t feel so good myself.

Bubba Beau, formal name - Beauregard Bocephus (although we were never able to find a registry that would accept him under that or any other name), is survived by Sister Sadie, his littermate and constant companion as well as those of his family handicapped by having only two feet.

Beau suffered from the stigma of being a ‘Replacement’ puppy. His predecessor was a little dog (although too tall for his alleged breed), and when he just plum wore out in June of 1996 the whole Olympic furor couldn’t replace him. So a scout was dispatched to check out a nearby litter with two clear instructions: It would take two big dogs to replace Mikey, and both had to be the same sex. She listened as well as usual and came home with a mixed pair of tiny puppies. They were so small they couldn’t negotiate steps and so had to be carried out to the yard every time they took a drink or had something to eat. Fortunately they could both be transported in one hand in an act we came to call puppy juggling. That came to an end well before Beau hit his peak weight of just over 100 lbs.

They came to us about the same time as the Atlanta Olympics and their birthday was only one day away from mine. I find it much easier to celebrate theirs than mine at this stage of life.

Since he was only a replacement puppy and not a terribly smart one in my opinion (although he could be sly and manipulative) I was determined not to love him. He wasn’t even a real Labrador Retriever, although he looked like one if he kept his mouth shut. (Don’t lots of us reveal things we’d rather keep hidden when we open our mouths?) But 10 years of faithful companionship have a way of worming deep into your heart. I said he was really Marjorie’s puppy, even after she moved out on her own, got married, then moved to Singapore and later Australia. After all when they played and danced she had been known as the third puppy. And Beau always reacted to my announcements that the third puppy was coming to see him, even when the visits were years apart. But when she and Mark adopted their own Laika (kind of an Australian version of Sadie) I had to acknowledge that I was stuck with Bubba Beau. I tried to say he was a sissy and just Linda’s dog, but when he ‘Assumed the position’ (another unique training command that he obeyed usually without command) by my recliner and demanded to be patted or some other affirmative kind of bonding, it was obvious. Would a guy let a dog he didn’t love groom his ears?

Beau was a Retriever and he was genetically programmed to prove it. Sometimes he did that by lugging around some soft toy. Linda continually humiliated him and reinforced the sissy image by buying him pink ‘babies’ to play with. But sometimes a guy just has to prove he’s a guy and go out and validate his place on the table of organization. At those times Beau usually found a possum that was, most often, playing possum. Finding those in the house was a thrill for a great big fellow and terrorized the women who were lucky enough to share the experience. Linda and Becky both became expert on the inverted laundry basket method of possum removal.

We knew that Beau was a (mostly) lab dog, but like I said he wasn’t too smart. He kept getting confused and thought he was a lap dog. When he was half of a puppy juggling act that was certainly an endearing trait, and as a 30 lb. puppy it was still pretty cute. Somewhere around the 75 lb. mark it became dangerous and when he was over 100 lbs it could be damned intimidating. By the way, there’s no thrill like having a 100+ lb. puppy step on your bare foot in his rush to be the first out the door.

Beau had another life long trait. He was a runner! If there was a fence he could find its flaw. If there was electric or electronic reinforcement he knew the second the power was off or the battery ran down. And he encouraged his co-conspirator to follow his example. In the early years there was some doubt about who was lead and who was wing, but not so in recent years. If Beau was having an out of yard experience by himself he was usually docile and responsive to calls, content to show you that all the money you’d spent on fencing and gadgets wasn’t what ran his life. But if his four footed pack was completed then he was off and adventuring. At the end of the adventure we could expect a call.

“Your dogs are in my pool” was the most startling, and for several reasons. They were about half a mile from home and had had to cross a busy road to get there.

But the call always came. Since we moved to Cumming the adventures had picked up again. A new neighborhood had to be explored and again we knew they weren’t respecting the boundaries we’d have drawn. But the call always came.

Tuesday evening we got a call while we were 50 miles away from home that they were on another adventure but hanging around close to home. When we got home several hours later they were nowhere to be found. The next morning I got the call I feared – “Hey, I found your dog.” Singular, not plural. And my heart fell. These were a pair. They’d never been found apart. We looked Wednesday and Thursday morning, putting out ‘Lost Dog’ signs and all. But Thursday we had to leave on a long scheduled trip to Boston, where we had once lived with Mikey many years ago. So we left the search and answering the calls in the hands of our oldest, dearest friends and The Dogs’ Nanny. Carole diligently searched Animal Control with no results and initially was told that no dog of that description had been found on the roads by DOT. But while checking in to our Boston hotel we got the call. Beau had had his last adventure and it had ended near the intersection of Kelly Mill Road (busy - with a high speed limit) and Pittman Road. He was about a block from home and although there was some confusion in my mind about whether he was coming or going, it’s now clear that the adventure had run down and he was on the way home. I’m told he was found on Thursday near one of our “Lost Dog” signs. That doesn’t fit my belief that Sadie wouldn’t have been found Wednesday without him had there been any choice, but it must have been her arthritis that brought her adventure to a premature conclusion on the wrong side of that busy road and within sight of the place where her bubba’s last adventure ended about 30 hours later.

So again, life goes on. I won’t miss the big dumb, hairy so and so. And my keyboard’s not going to rust from my tears falling freely. Revising and adding to this days later, as more that just can’t be left out occurs to me, reinforces my original conclusion that he was a big dumb hairy beast and I’m going to be a long time getting over him.

And anybody that doesn’t think Lewis Grizzard is as iconic a southern writer as William Faulkner can kiss my grits.


Beau was a lovely dog. He was sweet, and had a very silly, easy-going personality, and, in spite of what my father wrote, Beau was a very smart dog, probably the smartest I've known, though he was equally lazy and not worried about impressing anyone.

I spent most of yesterday crying, and imagine today won't be much different. I'm so glad I got to see him last May when I was home.

I'll miss his facination with "the magic floor", dirty laundry, and anything edible (or not so much). I'll miss having him follow me from room to room when I visit my parents. And I'll miss his morning salutations of "roo, roo, roo".

He was loved. He will be very missed. And I'm sure I'll stop crying eventually.

Guinea piggery. One of Marjorie's cow orkers who's working on a psych degree gave me an IQ test this evening, and boy is my brain tired. This was the face-to-face interactive test (not an online mouse-clicky thing) and is a lot more full-on than you might expect. There were 14 tests, and most seemed to start out easy, and ended with you feeling stupid. Here's a run-down of the sections, and a representative question from each:

Information - "Who was Mahatma Ghandi?"

Comprehension - "Why is it necessary for the government to collect taxes?"

Arithmetic - "An item is on sale for one third off the original price. Its sale price is $400. What is the original price?"

Similarities/Differences - "In what way are a friend and an enemy alike?"

Vocabulary - "Define 'tangible'."

Digit span - "Repeat these digits backwards: 4,3,6,2,8."

Letter-Number Sequencing - "Given this sequence, tell me the digits in order, followed by the letters in order: 5,K,2,P,1,J,9,Q."

Performance - "What's missing from this picture?" (A typical picture: two people running along the beach, one leaving no footprints.)

Digit Symbol - Coding - Each digit had a code, and I had to draw the code for a sequence of numbers.

Block Design - "Which picture completes the block?"
Matrix Reasoning - "Which picture completes the sequence?"
Picture Arrangement - "These cards each have a picture on them. Arrange them so the scene makes a logical story."
Symbol Search - "Circle 'Yes' if one of the two symbols on the left appears in the list of five symbols on the right, 'No' otherwise."
Object Assembly - "Arrange these puzzle pieces into a coherent picture."

This after a long day of programming. But it was interesting. I get the results in a week or two.

I'm 40, darnit, and I'm allowed. I asked Marjorie if she's going to be disappointed if I become a huge Gilbert and Sullivan geek. She said she's surprised I'm not already.

I saw Topsy Turvy last night, and kept thinking, where have these guys been all my life?

I'm a sucker for clever wordplay and catchy melodies. Melbourne has their own Gilbert and Sullivan Society who are putting on a play in November -- unfortunately, it's not a Gilbert and Sullivan play. So it'll be a long while before I can experience G&S proper.

It's dawned on me how much of my music taste is the result of collaboration. I love Strummer and Jones, Lennon and McCartney, Difford and Tilbrook, Lerner and Loewe. I'm kind of fond of Bacharach and David, but was never that keen on Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Rodgers and Hammerstein are okay I guess. Who else? Does anyone even collaborate anymore, other than one-offs?

For the record, I just had my second visual migraine. Woo hoo.

There's a ping pong tournament going on at work, and I'm all bitter because I had planned on at least making it to the quarter finals (where I would have had to play a guy that used to be ranked sixth in Australia) and instead I went out in the second round. I was winning the first game 16-7, then just kind of froze up and started trying not to hit the ball into the net, which of course always results in hitting the ball into the net. To the other guy's credit, he took me off my game. Nuts. I blew $10 on a quality new paddle too.

But soccer's going good; my fitness is back and my hip has seemingly made a full recovery. There are hints here and there that the weather is warming up. Fish are jumping. The cotton is high.

Hmmm, that's odd... Eight minutes ago, I started experiencing my first visual migraine. Luckily, my brother had one a little while back, so I know what's going on. It started as a little blind spot, that was making it hard to see the letter on the screen that I was looking at. It has since grown and moved off to the left. It's now like if I were looking out a window where someone had frozen the letter "C" onto the glass, causing a rainbow diffraction effect, except that the ice is also shimmering. It should end within the half hour, by all reports, and I might get a slight headache after. Very strange, and it would be scaring the tar out of me right now (think: stroke) if I didn't know what it was.
Update: It passed as predicted, in about a half an hour. I got the slightest of headaches afterwards, which is also typical. I found this Flash animation that gives a very good depiction of what it was like (except that the distortion was more of a "C" shape for me).