Duncan Golicher’s weblog

During the holiday Mickey and I have been watching a program called brainbox challenge on the BBC. Neither of us can keep up with any of the competitors, although Mickey sometimes beats them to it on the memory games. One of the games is called code 9. The rules are (fairly) simple. The competitors are given a mathematical operation to perform on two numbers. However each digit of the numbers has first to be coded by subtracting it from 9. Thus 1 becomes 8; 12, becomes 87 etc. After completing the operation the competitors have to apply the code again to the answer. So 1 +1 becomes 8+8=16, which is then recoded to give the answer 83. As I just can’t get my brain to do it unaided I thought of writing a function in R to help.

This line carries out the operation on whole positive numbers.

code9<-function(x)as.numeric(paste(unlist(lapply(strsplit(as.character(x),”"),
function(x)9-as.numeric(x))),collapse=”"))

so

code9(code9(10)+code9(10))
[1] 821

This works as a one liner, but there should be a better way requiring fewer steps within the function using a regular expression. 

I grew up in Lincolnshire which is rarely in the news, so I was quite proud to hear that it was at the epicentre of an earthquake that measured 4.8. To put this into perspective the earthquake I reported at 6:52 am on the 12 February in San Cristobal measured 5.2. However to be fair an earthquake in England is a rare event, while in Mexico we have several every year. I imagine that tomorrow’s news will be full of eye witness reports of the event. Much of the reporting will no doubt be quite light hearted. British residents don’t appreciate the sheer terror that people experience when an earthquake is felt in regions where they are destructive. Even though San Cristobal itself has had few major earthquakes, every time we feel the earth move we are very unsure how bad it could turn out to be. But this time we have been stirred rather than shaken.

As an aside I made the small illustration above using a Nasa satelite image and the excellent open source software QGIS. QGIS stands for Quantum GIS. It took less than a minute to connect to the Nasa site, download the image and find the rough epicentre. I am a great fan of Google Earth but at the moment the fact that GE has a mess of overlays at different scales is a barrier to it being used for illustration at a regional scale. Also the 3d terrain in Google Earth is great for Chiapas, but rather irrelevant in Lincolnshire.

On monday Nicole took part in the Mini Olympic games at El Pequeño Sol. She had been practicing her running and jumping all weekend, but she did have a few last minute nerves. Nevertheless she played a vital role in the success of her relay team and showed great poise and balance on the high bar.

I recently uploaded this older video (November 2006, Nicole aged 1) to You Tube. It helps to fill some of the gaps between this web log and previous ones as far as family life goes. Nicole and her mum were just as beautiful then as they are now. Nicole aged one was an expert at bottom shuffling and even gave lessons on technique to Mickey. She never learnt to crawl and took some time in walking alone. Music “Ain’t that enough” an all time classic from the greatly underrated Glasgow band Teenage Fan Club. The lyrics of this lovely, heart warming song fit all the feelings we had at this time and mean a lot to our family. Every time I see this again I get a lump in my throat in spite of the very silly transitions between scenes!

Mickey wants to work with dangerous animals, particularly snakes, when he grows up. He has started already.

If you haven’t realised, Gimp is the open source equivalent of photoshop.

Nicole started maternal at El Pequeño Sol” two weeks ago and is really enjoying playing with other children. After the first day, “no more waah” (her words). I love taking her in the mornings and seeing such a happy face as she waves bye bye.

Her only problem is deciding what to wear every morning!

(Click on the thumbnail to see a full size picture)

See Nicole and Mickey on You Tube