This evening, Annabel and I went a little
earlier to the university and around half past seven we met Ton and
his two childeren Sara and Titus for playing Go.
I played one game against Sara on a 13x13 board, while Annabel played
against Titus. Then Annabel and Sara played some games, while Ton and I
started to play on a 19x19 board, where he got an eight stone handicap.
I was not very happy with the game (SGF,
PS), because for some reason I kept on playing
bad moves, at least that is how I felt about it, and it looked like
everything I tried, did not work out well. At the end of the game
I also made some mistakes with respect to recording the game. It was
around ten that we went home. I lost with about 25 stones.
Around 8 o'clock in the evening, a package from China arrived. It contained mainly clothes send to us from
our family in China. The clothes included four pillow covers, that
my mother-in-law knitted herself.
There were also some bags of very nice tea from the first harvest
of tea in Taisun. The tea is called "San Bei Xiano", which means
"Fragrant for three cups" because you can pour new hot water on
it for three times. The Chinese say that the taste of the second
cup is always the best. The taste of the third time is usually
not so good anymore, so it is a mark of quality if it still is
nice.
Someone enters the office, and asks "what are those beer bottle doing here?"
The laptop of a colleague stopped working with the message that it
was too hot. It has been warm in the past days (after a month with
a record amount or rain), but not that hot. In order to salvage some
of the data on it, we used a pack of apple juice and two beer bottles
from the fridge to cool the laptop. Twenty minutes later, we were able
to start it up again, my colleague was able to retrieve his data.
This afternoon I had the opportunity to talk with Billy Foley. It was very interesting to talk with him and to hear about
his ideas with respect to his drawings and paintings. I will write
more about this later. It appears he
has been inspired by the book The Quark and the Jaguar by
Murray Gell-Mann.
Yesterday, Andy said "Naam!" (Dutch for "Name!") to
a lady in church. She did not realize that this is his way for asking the name
of someone. He has been using that phrase for some days, mostly when he wants
to know the name of some character in some video. He gets rather annoyed when
we fail to give it immediately, and seems not to be satisfied with the answer
that we do not know.
To night, I went to the introduction evening at Andy's
school. On the way going there, I listened to the song
True Friend by
Treble. We watched some video
of Andy's class, explaining what they do during the day. Afterwards, I
talked a little with his teacher. She told me that some of the children
looked down on him, because he is quite small and do not speak so well.
Some of the children were a little bit surprised when they realized how
much he already can do. He has no problems with reading sentences consisting
of three pictograms.
It seems that the debate with respect to the cause of Kabuki Syndrome
has not ended yet. Today, there was a posting on the
KSN_L list
with new information. Last year December,
Dr. Milunski reported that he and his team had found the cause of
Kabuki Syndrome on the P arm of chromosome 8. However, other groups were
not able to reproduce his findings. On June 18,
I suggested that Dr. Milunski had found a separate syndrome.
About a week later, I found some interesting
details with respect to the further research of Dr. Milunski.
Now, Dr. Milunski replied to some parent (making inquiries with
respect to the testing of blood samples of a child) with the following
statement:
We have been engaged in a number of blinded trials over the past 4-6 months
testing submitted samples from other research groups that have not been able
to replicate our findings. Thus far we are still able to identify the KS
samples (blinded) by our methods. Hence, we have not tested additional
samples. We hope to continue our research testing after the next batch of
blinded samples are sent to us (and analyzed) from England. As soon as we
analyze your families samples, I will be in touch.
It seems that although others have not been able to replicate the testing
method of Dr. Milunski, it does seem it is a valid test. I hope that
he will soon reveal the exact details of his testing methods, such that
others will be able to replicate it. But I am afraid he will not do so
before he has written a solid publication in a scientific journal, or
(worse, I fear) got a patent on his new method.
I have been asked to look at some graph layout algorithms. I found an
interesting overview of
major layout algoritms used by yFiles. A good starting point is
graph drawing directory from Google. It seems that GraphViz is mentioned often. I downloaded it, and studied the
DynaGraph interface.
Read this incredible
story about what happened during the 2004 Republican National Convention
in New York City. It is hard to believe that this is happening in a western
country with democracy and freedom of speech. Or do we have to conclude that
the USA is slowly changing into a police-state.
This months interesting links