Stan’s Blog

The plan is to celebrate the 4th of July on the 4th of July. Preceded by food if anybody brings some and followed by foo foo if we make any.

Since my lawn maintenance worker decided to stop mowing my lawn, I had to get Nick to fix the walk behind mower that I bought from him about 10 years ago.  After Nick played with the carborator, it started on the second pull.  I decided to mow my lawn today.   So I chased the mower around the yard and when I got about 3/4 thru, the mower started surging and then died.  I called Nick, who remotely diagnosed that  I had water in my tank.  I drained some gas into a bottle and could not tell if there was any water in there.  I had to syphon the gas out of  the tank and I now remember vividly what gas tastes like.  I then practiced spitting a lot.  I tore things apart and figured that there was a bunch of dirt at the bottom of the new tank that Nick had put on the mower.   The new gas filter he had put on, was full of junk.  I was jamming Q-Tips into the drain thing to try to clear out the clog but nothing worked.   I eventually put a hose on the drain thing and blew air back into the tank.  At first it was hard to blow and then it blew clear.  I once again remembered what gas tasted like.  When I hooked things back up, the gas was flowing freely.  I finished mowing the lawn.  Later I decided to chop down a maple tree that was putting too much shade in my back yard with my Axe. It was only about 6 inches in diameter, so I figured I did not need to get out the ChainSaw.   After about 3 minutes of chopping the tree went Thump, Thump and was leaning against another tree with a very long 3 inch diametor branch sticking out over the back yard.  It was about a foot  over my head and I tried to swing at it to start cutting it off.  I missed.  It was a very hard swing.  I had not expected to miss it.  My arms continued to move in an arc past the branch and then down straight in front of me.  Next thing I knew, it had stopped by hitting my left ankle.   I had sharpened my Axe very well.  I looked down at my foot, expecting the worst, but found that I had put my hiking boots on in order to mow the lawn.   There was no blood.  I went inside and took the boot off.  I had a 3 inch line of scraped skin starting at my ankle that was beginning to swell.  Like Ouchie.  I had thought about wearing my Teva sandles to mow the lawn,  but in retrospect, I made the right decision.

The Good News: Google Maps has high resolution pictures of the Cabin.

The Bad News: The Images are from Feb 2006. The dry pond is not done and Betsy’s house is full of trees.

It will be there from April 31-May 5.   I plan to be there the whole time.   Maybe heading up Wed Nite.   The usual things will occur.   A Raffle, a Fire Pit.   Mabe the Tiki Bar will be back.   Music is being Negotiated.   I cut the tree up that fell down in my camp site.

Itinerary From the Facebook page

Friday: Cabin Fun

Saturday:
Potluck Dinner: Please have you food ready and on the table by 6:00pm. We need someone to cook burgers!
Raffle: Some time after dinner
Band: “Patent Pending” will be playing Saturday Night. They are a Blue Grass band.
Marshmallow Fight: Watch out, you never know when it will happen!  I will try to find the big ones
Sunday: Pancake breakfast?

The power lines across the Pancos will be doubled up as another set of powerlines will be added next to the existing powerlines. The start of work will be very soon. They will extend the width by another 150 feet. It looks like they will be graveling the North 60 entrance from Laurel Grove to the powerline.
Changes are happening!

Title: Spring Fling Location: Cabin Start Date: Thursday 2009-04-30 End Date: Tuesday 2009-05-05

Bee there.  Things will happen.  Food will be consumed.

I have a Brita water filter in my office space which I use to make my coffee each morning. After I made my coffee today, I noticed that there appeared to be a green sticky stuck to the bottom of the flask. I could see it since the container was clear an it was a pretty green blobby color on the bottom. So I went ahead and brewed my coffee. While I was drinking it, I stared at the blob and decided it was not a sticky but it looked like someone had used a green highlighter on the bottom of the container. This seemed like a silly thing for someone to do and I realzed that the green was on the inside of the container. So I stuck my hand in the water and rubbed some green slime off of the bottom. Ah Ha! I thought, I have algae in my filtered water. How did it get there? My fancy filter should remove anything the algae might want to eat. My next thought was that I was drinking chlorophilliated flavored Coffee. I wondered if the brewing process would kill any algae poisons that might exist. Possibly it might actually be healthy. Some sort of macroBiotic NewAge drink. Maybe I have just started a trend. I decided to clean my filter.

Well Brother Jim gave another lecture in August 2008 in Hawaii.  I found it by googling around.  Anyone who wants to comment on it should contact Jim.

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Beyond Newton’s Method: Generalized Higher-Order Approximation Methods
James D. Turner

Finding the root of an equation f = 0 is a common problem in computational science and
engineering. Many line search and derivative-based methods are available. Newton’s
derivative-based Method, discovered in 1669, takes a starting guess, uses first-order
derivative information, and iteratively refines a solution until a specified accuracy level is
achieved. Under well-know conditions Newton’s Method converges quadratically. Higher
order versions of Newton’s Method have been known since Halley’s discovery of a cubically
convergent version of the algorithm in 1694. Chebyshev extended Halley’s cubic algorithm
to vector-systems of equations. The classical higher-order algorithm derivation strategy
develops scalar algorithms and then proposes vector extensions. This paper presents a
three-part strategy for systematically developing and generalizing higher-order versions of
Newton’s method, without introducing ad hoc assumptions or approximations.
Computational differentiation tools are introduced for generating high-order partial
derivative models. New homotopy-based algorithms simultaneously generate differential
correction terms, as well as solution gradients. The solution gradients are exploited in an
analytic continuation version of Davidenko’s method, to provide high-order extrapolations
for the correction update term. Several numerical examples are presented to demonstrate
the effectiveness of these new methods. The resulting math models are compared with
Halley’s and Chebyshev’s algorithms. The proposed high-order successive approximation
strategies are expected to be broadly useful for knowledge discovery applications in science
and engineering where the underlying problems are fundamentally nonlinear.

The PDF form of the Abstract is -> Here

Enjoy

According to Paul. SuperBowl weekend is the official time for Winterfest at the Cabin.   The plan is to spend Saturday evening there.   We will stoke up the stove in the Cabin and stick Kids in there.  The adults will find flat places outside to snore. It will be fun. Espessially if all this snow that is coming tomorrow makes it into a Winter Wonderland there.   So be there.  Rah.

Well we tried again to make a fast car.  We failed.  We got 6th place out of 12.  But Eddie’s new car design still won 2nd place for show.  If the 1st place winner does not want to go to the Reginals then we get to go.  We will find out later.

I got to run the software for the pinewood derby race for all 124 scouts in our pack and each scout ran 6 races 3 at a time for for a total of  248 races.   The software would time how long each car took to run each race.  It was a cool mix of  Hardware and Software with a lazer being triggered at the starting gate and another lazer at the finish which would be used to identify the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners of each race.  Everything went smoothly except for the couple of times that it failed to work. The fun part about that is you get 30-40 parents who are giving you the evil eye while they are wondering if the whole event has just been ruined and they are going to have to go home with their disappointed crying child.   It made things more interesting.  I was able to clear up each of the problems and nobody succeeded in killing me.

Mom has a new kitten which jumped onto my lap and fell asleep.   I had to go look at something, so I picked it up and placed its limp sleeping body in the chair.   When I was done I came back and sat down.  After about 10 seconds I felt something move under me.   I looked down and saw  a little black paw sticking out from between my legs.   It wasn’t making any noise or struggling in any way.  I got up and the cat was just laying there on its back with its legs all kinda splayed out.   When I picked up the kitten, it was all limp in my hands.   I couldn’t tell if the cat was just still asleep or that I had killed it.  I shook it some to see if I could just wake it up, but I was worried that if something in the cat was broke, that I would make the cat’s problem worse if I shook it too hard.   So after some gentle wiggling of the cat, it seemed to move its legs a little.   Eventually after much poking, I woke the cat up and it walked slowly away from me.  Now I don’t know if I knocked the cat out or just had a hard time waking it up, or both.   But the good thing is that I didn’t kill mom’s cat.

At least for today, when I search for “Stanley Turner” on Google.  I appear at the top of the Google list.  At least my LinkedIn page does.  My blog isn’t doing so well in the google list.  Oh well.

OctoberFest went off with perfect weather and everone had a great time.  Great food, PumpKin carving, the raffel, Great BlueGrass Music by Flint Hollow, A performance by the DillPickers and the traditional MarshMallow fight.  The only injury that I was aware of was that Anna took on a  barbed wire fence and lost.

On OctoberFest weekend on Friday night, Laura had not arrived yet and I went to bed about midnight. The night was chilly and it took a while for me to get warm under the sleeping bag. So I was in a light sleep when I was awakened by a noise way out in the woods that sounded like someone yelling something. I tried to listen but started to fall back asleep when I heard a call that maybe was someone crying for help, but I wasn’t sure. I sat up and listened for a while but did not hear anything else. I laid down and kept listening more attentively. A minute or so later It came again. A childs cry from off in the woods saying “Help me“. This woke me up. I got up and while I was getting dressed he called again “I need Hel-l-l-p-p-p-p“. I got my shoes on and found my good flashlight and started walking down the path in the direction of the call. I figured it would be better to find out what the problem was quickly rather than wake up a bunch of people to go find a kid lost in the woods. I had my Cell phone to call for help if I needed to. As I hiked in the voices direction, he yelled some more “Somebody come help me“, this was in a very anguished voice. I yelled out into the night “Keep calm, I am coming“. I hiked on some more and came upon a tent that was lit up from the inside. I called out “I am here, what is wrong?” The kids voice yelled out “I need help, the zipper is stuck“. I went around to the other side of the tent and sure enough, the doors zipper was caught in the storm flap. I asked the kid, “I guess you need to go to the bathroom?”, “Yessss” said the kid. He was about 12 years old. It took me a while to unstick the zipper and open the tent door. I asked the boy if he had any other problems and he said no. I guess that his father was still hanging out around the camp fire. I hiked back to my tent, got undressed and it took a while to get warmed up in the sleeping bag so I could fall asleep.

Bill can rejoice because the hornets at his campsite have been exterminated. Mike and his friends barrage of double barreled blasts disabled the swarm and they were free to shoot at it untill it fell. Yeah.  I also got the nest on the other side of my campsite with some bee spray.  Now Laura will come camping.

What shotguns do to a hornet nest

OctoberFest will start up on Oct 9-14.   I have not received any particular special unique events for the weekend, but don’t forget to bring things for the raffle.  There will probably be a wine tasting and a Pot Luck.  I have herd that there will be Suda-food created on the grill.  If you don’t know what it is, you can know that Turners grew up on it.  Bring your swim suit for a quick splash in the Dry pond.  Bee there.

When we discovered the Hornet nest next to our Camp Site last month I only thought I had to get rid of one Nest.

Stan's Nest

HAH!! I went to the cabin today and sent Faye to go look at our hornet nest. When she came back, she had found another nest on the other side of our Camp site. It was directly over where Laura’s brother Bill camps. Right here.

Later when I sat on the George Pavillion looking over the Field. I saw the following

So anyway.  Three nests at the cabin.  2 of them my problem.  I think I will need to find a new camp site for Octoberfest this year.

Bummer

The Anna Clan is bringing a bunch of Scouts to the cabin the weekend of Sept 20-21.  If you come to the cabin, act like a good scout.

On August 24 My nephew Tony got married at Annapolis. I took some Pictures. They are Here. Enjoy

Can be purchased pre-scented.  Laura accidentally bought a box of scented trash bags.  Since I am sensitive to perfume, it felt really funny to be repulsed as I replaced a stinky trash bag with a smelly one that made me want to sneeze.  When Laura came in the kitchen, she accused me of spraying bug killer around.  So now we have a box of smelly trash bags that we do not want to use.  Maybe we will take them to the Cabin.