Farm News 04-29-07

Sunday morning, after chores

Goslings
Two goslings hatched under Bebe Friday night. She has two more eggs which hadn't hatched yet by Saturday evening. I knew Bebe had babies when she attacked me Saturday morning as I started chores.

Sexual Orientation and Wiener Dogs
The nice young woman who is married to the young man who lived next door when he was in high school now works in the veterinarian's office. She and her nice young husband gave Weasel to me, Weasel formerly being the dog of the nice young man's deceased grandfather. Well, that nice young woman was so tasteless as to list, on the official Veterinarian's records, that Weasel was a wiener dog mix. Nonsense! Weasel is a Labrador Low Rider, an extremely rare breed known for being bilingual.

Anyway, thinking about wiener dogs led me to wonder about the Freudian connotations of lesbian couples owning wiener dogs. I know a lesbian couple who own two wiener dogs named Sigmund and Siglinda. How Freudian is that? They are, by the way, both bitches (Sigmund and Siglinda, not the lesbians). They (the lesbians, not the dogs) remind me of the first openly lesbian couple I met.

I was but a lad in high school, living in the early 1950's America, and wondering why it seemed that everyone else was crazy. I tried to solve this problem, the one of everyone else seeming crazy, by consuming lots of beer. One evening these two old women, old to me, perhaps, but only in their 50's, came bouncing into the bar where I was consuming beer.After they had been there a bit one of them crooked a finger at me, beckoning me to come over. I did, they asked me to join them, and then bought me a beer. That's enough to turn any half-drunk teenage boy into an admirer.

It wasn't until I had known them several months that they mentioned that they were lesbians. That was extremely interesting information because, prior to that, Lucille had related many stories and shown pictures of the days when she was a high-priced hooker. Sometime prior to 1920 her first client hired her to accompany him on a trip to North Africa. She had a wonderful time and showed us a picture of herself standing with a pleasant appearing portly older gentleman in front of a pyramid. Another client took her on an around the world cruise and, at the end of the voyage, presented her with the deed to the small cottage in which she had been living. After all that, an announcement of homosexuality was not shocking in the least.

Sandra, her partner, did not particularly approve of Lucille's penchant for educating teenage males, but was gracious enough to not be unpleasant about it. Lucille never offered me sex, of course, but she told me how a young man should behave toward any woman kind enough to do so. They fed me several times, teaching me that proper dinner conversation was more important than using the proper fork. Lucille taught me how to sit in a chair, stand, walk across a room, and pour a glass of wine.

In the 1950's lesbians were not recognized by the general population as possibly decent people. I don't think I had ever come across the word 'lesbian' at that time, and Lucille never used it. She simply told me that she and Sandra were lovers. That seemed alright to me, because I really wanted to learn about being a lover. Today I recognize the greatness of spirit they had which allowed them to be open about their relationship.

They were a fine pair of ladies, but they were not the ones who own Sigmund and Siglinda. The owners of the wiener dogs are contemporary lesbians, not nearly as romantic to me now as were Lucille and Sandra, but very nice ladies. I asked them once if Sigmund was named for Freud. They said that both dogs were named for Freud, Sigmund because that was Freud's name, and Siglinda because Freud was a cross dresser. I think those two women just need a good man to straighten them out.

Existential Crises
Do as many young people today feel as alienated as many of us did fifty years ago? It seems like a far smaller segment of the populace now falls into what we called existential crises, those periods when life seems pointless. It is pointless, of course, but in my day we used to despair over that and call it a problem. Why doesn't it appear as a problem to young people today?

Colin Wilson wrote The Outsider, an excellent book about existential crises and such. I have recommended it to several young people who were caught in the depths of despair and emptiness. It doesn't offer any solutions (now I now there aren't any) but it does show that the situation isn't new or unusual. Sort of like when I first saw the film Rebel Without a Cause. Up till then I thought I was the only one who knew everyone else was crazy.

To subscribe, unsubscribe, contribute stories, complain or send a gift subscription, send an email to FarmNews@GeezerNet.com . The editor reserves the right to steal ideas submitted, rewrite submissions, and sign false names to them whenever it strikes his fancy to do so. Farm News is now a blog at idfafarmnews.blogspot.com

Farm News 04-22-07

Sunday morning, after chores, 66°

Bunny and Kitty Adventures
On Tuesday the bunnies and kittens went to school. They visited two classrooms at the school and then went to the day care center for more visiting. They were very well behaved and left no messes behind. By Thursday the bunnies were hopping out of their nest box and bouncing around the cage. They will soon be big bunnies.

Shotgun, the mother cat, has moved her kittens from where they were easy for children to reach to a place that requires long arms to reach them. Silly cat, she doesn't understand that the more children play with her kittens, the more likely the kittens will find good homes.

Bebe the goose is still on her nest, keeping her eggs warm. She usually leaves around 5:00pm to go eat a bit, have a drink of water, and exercise. After twenty minutes or so she is back on her nest, protecting her eggs. Her babies are due to hatch at the end of this month.

After the Freeze
About half of the garden is planted with lettuce, radishes, beets, peas, carrots, onions, potatoes, zinnias, and marigolds. The asparagus is coming back after the freeze. The daylilies look terrible, worse than they looked in February. There probably won't be any fruit this year. The apples hadn't bloomed before the freeze, but the apples have never bloomed or bore fruit. I'm ready to cut them down and replace them.

The flowering dogwood is now covered with brown, crumpled flowers. The tulips that are left are missing half their petals. Enough of the Koreanspice Viburnum survived to bring in a few flower clusters that filled the house with fragrance.

Generating Text
Icon is a programming language developed at Arizona State University by Ralph Griswold. It is a great language for doing things with text. Icon is not widely used, the last time I checked there were two people in Kansas who were on the mailing list, and that was at least twenty years ago. Nevertheless, Icon is what I am going to use, because it fits the task so well.

Most programmers are comfortable with only one programming language and try to use that language for every task. I prefer to use a language that best matches the task at hand. I am not an expert in any language but I manage, especially now that I'm retired.

This task will, at first, be broken down into two programs, one to create data files and the other to use those data files to create travesties. The first, Scan, will go through the text and create a list of ngrams. An ngram is the little two to five character group that is found in the original text, where n is the number of characters. Take the sentence, “See Spot run.” If we set n equal to 2, the ngrams in the sentence are “Se, ee, e_, _S, Sp, po, ot, t_, _r, ru, un, and n.”. I substituted underscores for spaces to make it more clear. Also notice that the period at the end of the sentence is included.

It helps to know that, in most personal computers, a 'line' is a paragraph. The actual length of the line on the screen usually depends on the width of the window in which it is displayed.

I'm going to start with a very simple program, Scan0, which simply copies the original file to another file. This is what the Icon code looks like for that program:

# File: scan0.icn
# Subject: Simply copies input file to output file, one line at a time
# Author: The Geezer
# Date: 04/18/07
#
# file copier, a basis for a text scanner
#
#
procedure main
# Open files
lgf := open("Scan0.log", "w")
inf := open("Sample.txt", "r")
outf := open("Scan0out.txt", "w")
write(lgf, "Files opened")
#
# Initialize the variables
LinesRead := 0
line := ""
write(lgf, "Variables initialized")
# Process lines
while line := read(inf) do
{
LinesRead +:= 1
write(outf, line)
}
# Done! Write the number of lines to the log file
write(lgf, LinesRead)
# Close the files
close(inf)
close(outf)
write(lgf, "Files closed")
close(lgf)
# End of program.
end

In Icon any line starting with '#' is a comment, not a working part of the program. When the program runs, lines beginning with '#' are ignored. So, skipping all the comments, the first line of the program is procedure main(), which is the required name for the main part of an Icon program. The parentheses at the end are for command line arguments, which will be discussed later.

The first job is to open the files for use. A file variable is a name for the place where you put stuff you want to write to the file, or where you go to find what is read from the file. In some programming languages the file name is used instead of a file variable, but that practice can create some problems, so Icon uses file variables. The programmer can use any name he wishes for the file variable. I chose to use lgf for the log file, inf for the input file, and outf for the output file.

First the program opens the log file, with a “w” to tell the program it will be writing the log file. The the input file is opened with “r” to tell the program that it will be reading that file. Finally, the output file is opened for writing. When the files are opened the program writes a note to the log file that the files have been opened. A log file is not required, but it can be a help when something isn't working right and the programmer can't find the problem.

Next the program creates a variable I chose to call LinesRead and intializes it to zero. Because a line is a paragraph to the computer, this will keep track of the number of paragraphs processed. The next variable is line, which is used to carry the paragraph from the input file to the output file, and it is initialized to be an empty line. Notice that the operator := is used to assign a value to a variable. The := is used to avoid confusion with = which is used to compare to variables to see if they are equal.

Now we come to the actual work of the program. The statement while line := read(inf) do tells the program to do whatever follows every time it can read a line from the input file. When there are no more lines to be read the statement will fail and the program will move on to the next statement.

There are two things to do each time a line is read: increment LinesRead by 1 and write line to the output file. The operator +:= is a very handy thing, it tells the program to increase the value in the variable to the left by whatever number is to the right. The write statement is pretty much self explanatory, write the paragraph in line to the file indicated by outf.

Once the while statement has finished, the work is done. The only things left to do are to write the number of lines to the log file, which might be helpful if things didn't work correctly, and then to close the files. Those are simple tasks, and then end is the end of the program.

So, there is a program that does nothing worthwhile, but it works. Next week I'll start changing it to bring it a step closer to the desired program, one that creates a data file for a travesty generator.


To subscribe to receive Farm News by email, unsubscribe, contribute stories, or complain, send an email to FarmNews@GeezerNet.com . The editor reserves the right to steal ideas submitted, rewrite submissions, and sign false names to them whenever it strikes his fancy to do so.

Farm News 04-15-07

Sunday morning, after chores, 40°, light frost

Whoops

I've had a cold and didn't write anything for Farm News this week. There isn't a lot of news, really, other than a late freeze and light snow. The planet is warming up, so it snows in mid-April in Kansas. It looks like the freeze destroyed any hopes of having apricots, cherries, or peaches this year. The mulberry trees are covered with dead flower buds, so we might not have mulberries, either. The shortage of wild fruit might make life difficult for the orioles, so we bought a large jar of grape jelly to start feeding them. We've never had any luck attracting orioles before, but the experts say that orioles can't resist grape jelly.

Computer Generated Text

Claude Shannon was, in my opinion, a great man. I never met him (he died in 2001) but I wish I had. He spent a good deal of his career at Bell Labs, where he became known as the father of information theory and also did the groundwork for digital circuit design. Shannon was also well-known for riding his unicycle up and down the halls of Bell Labs while juggling items from his lunch sack.

Shannon once noticed a peculiar characteristic of written text, and mentioned it, but never pursued it. Take the text of, let us say, War and Peace, and copy each two character pair found in the text onto a slip of paper. You end up with a large bag of small slips of paper, each carrying a two character pair. Shake up the sack and then start drawing out slips of paper. Read the two character pair on the slip and write it down, placing them in the order in which they are drawn from the bag. The result will be almost sensible, and will clearly show Dostoevsky's style of writing. Computer programs which carry out this process are called travesty generators.

I have long been interested in the problem quadriplegic, dysarthric people have in generating speech. If a person is limited to pressing one switch and has no other way to communicate, carrying on a conversation is very time-consuming. A computer can present a letter, wait a bit, and, if the switch is not pressed, present another letter, until the switch is pressed and the letter selected. Then the same process is repeated for the next letter. Several quadriplegic, dysarthric, adolescent males have told me that the letter at a time process is too slow for a guy trying to make out with a girl. Also, the computer gets in the way.

When I retired I decided that I would devote some time to creating a travesty generator that, guided by a user with a single switch, could rapidly generate text. A heart attack and subsequent open heart surgery did just enough brain damage that I found I could no longer create computer programs. Recently, though, the necessary skills seem to be returning, and I hope to be able to finally pursue my retirement project. There is a problem, though. When I found I couldn't write software any more, I switched to something I could still do. That project, the Neighborhood Network, is on-going and requires quite a bit of time. How did I ever find time to hold down a job?

One of the problems I had in the past when working on travesty generators was finding suitable source text. The program has to read something before it can generate a travesty. Farm News, I have realized, would be a handy source of text. And, in fact, if I had a good travesty generator I could use it to write Farm News on weeks like this, when I had nothing else ready.

My programming skills are still a bit flaky and I would appreciate some co-developers. Anyone interested?

Farm News 04-08-07

Sunday morning, after chores, 23°

Global Warming
The parts of the garden that are planted are now covered with floating row cover, a lightweight protective sheet. Supposedly the temperature underneath the cover will be about two degrees higher than the air above the cover and it will protect the plants from frost. Keeping the plants two degrees above the air temperature is very helpful, even though it doesn't sound like much. On clear nights the heat radiated by the ground is not reflected back, and the surface temperature of the plant leaves can drop lower than the air temperature.

That is how frost is able to form when the air temperature is below 42° but still above 32°. The air must be still and the sky clear for frost to form. Saturday morning the temperature was 23° and the sky was clear, but there was a very slight breeze, enough to keep frost from developing.

The temperature this morning is 23°; the record low for this date is 20°. The sky is clear and there is no breeze, so, yes, there is frost.

Goodbye Goats

Sally goat, who was born last year, had her first kids this year, a buck and a doe. The buck failed to start and died when less than a day old. The little doe, named Silly, has been growing rapidly. Sally, unfortunately, figured out how to get through an electric fence without being zapped. As I have said many times, intelligence is not a desirable trait in most domestic animals. Last week I had finally had enough of Sally nibbling on the fruit trees, so she and Silly both went to the sale on Saturday. It was cold and breezy, resulting in very few buyers who were willing to stand outside and bid on a goat. The pair of them sold for $32, about half of what I would normally expect to get for them. Now, though, they are someone else's problems.

Bunnies Visit Cardiologist

Thursday, two of Suzette's bunnies went to visit the Cardiologist. It was an exciting trip for them. First, we stopped at the Oskaloosa State Bank, where the bunnies learned about money. Each of the women working in the bank made the mommy sound, a long, warbling, “Ohhh,” when they saw the bunnies. The bunnies were very nice to them and didn't pee in anybody's hand.

After the bank they stopped at a convenience store, where I purchased coffee, and the young woman at the cash register held one of the bunnies while I felt around in my pocket to find money for the coffee. She also made the mommy sound. The bunnies didn't ask for donuts or pop, being a bit young for junk foods.

At the Cardiologist's office each of the front desk clerks looked at the bunnies and made the mommy sound. Even the Cardiologist made a shortened, deeper, version of the mommy sound when he saw them. The bunnies' hearts are in good shape, so it was a pleasant visit for them.

On the way home we stopped for a cheeseburger, my reward for visiting the Cardiologist, and the young woman at the drive-thru window made the mommy sound when she saw the bunnies.

Making the mommy sound seems to be a universal female response to cute little mammals.
Some years ago I read a book in which the author insisted that a pet monkey was necessary for a thinking man's well-being, and that a pet rabbit was necessary for the monkey's well-being.

Monkeys, he said, can get cold in the night, and benefit from having nice warm rabbits with which they can snuggle. This makes me wonder if there is an equivalent monkey mommy sound that female monkeys make when they see a baby bunny.

Maybe Dr. Alexander, who did the very clever study of young monkeys and toy preferences, will shed some light on this question. I am still puzzling over her study of monkeys and toy preferences by sex.


E-mail Subscribers: To subscribe, unsubscribe, contribute stories, complain or send a gift subscription, send an email to FarmNews@GeezerNet.com . The editor reserves the right to steal ideas submitted, rewrite submissions, and sign false names to them whenever it strikes his fancy to do so. Farm News is now a blog at idfafarmnews.blogspot.com

Farm News 04-01-07

Sunday morning, after chores, 46°

Ad Astra

This morning it is not only April Fool's Day, an important day for one who currently presides over the office of Chief Fool, having been properly elected to that office by the membership of the FOOLs, the Friends of the Oskaloosa Library, or, at least, a majority of those present and voting, all of whom were bossy old women and I was the only male target available; it is also a day in which the sun and moon pass through opposition. A Chief Fool is responsible for taking note of such occasions and muttering the proper incantations to keep the collection safe.

The FOOLs worked their way up to April Fool's Day by holding a book sale on the preceding three days. The sale was a success, bringing in over $500 to the treasury, most of which will be used to purchase folding chairs for the Community Room. Those folding chairs will, during the next election of FOOL officers, probably be occupied by the broad beams of bossy old women, thus assuring my continued tenure in this very important office.

Bunnies, Chicks, Goslings, and Kittens

Friday evening both Bebe and Beth were sitting on their nests, setting their eggs. If successful, the should walk off their nests around the first of May with little goslings. The chicks, now down to 24, are growing rapidly and eating about a pound coffee can of feed twice a day. The kittens are also growing and their mother is probably eating close to a pound of cat food every day. Every time I see her she is either eating or drinking. The bunnies are growing and their mother is eating and drinking all the time, also.

The Fragrance of Spring

It smells great here, most of the time. There are peach and cherry trees blooming, daffodils and hyacinths, and Weasel. In the spring the things that have been lying dead and frozen all winter start to thaw out, and dogs like to roll in the remains. Weasel has found something, somewhere, that has a horrible stench, and she has covered herself with it. Yukk!

What does one do with a stinky dog? Hope for a return of winter? That will take too long. Weasel doesn't notice there is a problem and is her normal, cheerful, friendly self. When I go out she trots up, tail wagging, expecting a pat on the head or a scratch behind her ears. Touching her anywhere makes one want to run for the nearest soap and water.

Geese, fortunately, do not seem to have a sensitive olfactory sense, for the nest in which Weasel sleeps at night is also the nest in which Bebe lays her egg each morning. The nest smells so bad that you can almost see colored waves of stink rising from it.

E-mail Subscribers: To subscribe, unsubscribe, contribute stories, complain or send a gift subscription, send an email to FarmNews@GeezerNet.com . The editor reserves the right to steal ideas submitted, rewrite submissions, and sign false names to them whenever it strikes his fancy to do so.