It was lucky the Scarecrow and the Woodman were wide awake and heard the wolves coming.
“This is my fight,” said the Woodman, “so get behind me and I will meet them as they come.”
He seized his axe, which he had made very sharp, and as the leader of the wolves came on the Tin Woodman swung his arm and chopped the wolf’s head from its body, so that it immediately died. As soon as he could raise his axe another wolf came up, and he also fell under the sharp edge of the Tin Woodman’s weapon. There were forty wolves, and forty times a wolf was killed, so that at last they all lay dead in a heap before the Woodman.
Then he put down his axe and sat beside the Scarecrow, who said, “It was a good fight, friend.”
Available at Project Gutenberg
We’ve finally uploaded some of the photos we took at Long Beach, NC. Careful, irresistible Edward cuteness is contained therein.
The trip was very nice. The house mom rented was an incredibly spacious rental with some really nice features. The large screened in section in the corner of the wraparound porch was especially relaxing as it was situated to catch just about any available breezes. There were also little spigots for feet rinsing outside of every door, even those from the balconies on the upper floors. That was great for sand removal, sure, but it also meant we had a ready-made Edward playtime anywhere we wanted.
At long last, a new photo gallery (Germany) is finally uploaded! Sarah and I took these pictures during our wonderful honeymoon in June 2003.
Oh, also I changed the site design. Hope you like.
Google has launched Google Squared to their labs. It returns results in a manipulatable table format that acts like a more user controllable wolfram alpha search.
For example, search Wolfram|Alpha for planets
And we get a lot of great information about the eight planets in our solar system, but all the information we see is what WA thinks we might want. Of course we can manipulate the search itself to get the data we might want (say, escape velocity).
Those results are fantastic (see how it’s graphing the relative comparison bars for us, that’s awesome!) but we’ve lost all the original results. If we want to built up our own set of data we’ll have to spend more time making our search increasingly complex.
With Google Squared we can search for planets and get a similar grouping of initial data. But see that we can add/remove rows or columns! So in “Add Columns” just type “escape velocity” and that dataset will be dynamically appended to the results. Very nice! Downside? The data out of the box is crap!
Google Labs is definitely not an obviation of Wolfram|Alpha. The biggest drawback it that it lacks WA’s ability to search and sort the results. In other words, you can’t use Google Squared to find the five largest countries by area as you can with WA. Nor does it have anything close to the graphing and data analysis capabilities provided by WA (growth charts anyone?) and all those other nifty features like morse code translation, puzzle solving, mathematical exploration, etc. You also can’t mathematically manipulate the results (say dividing the power usage of a country by its population). Google Labs also isn’t citable as a primary source because its data isn’t vetted.
But for just quickly and easily building up datasets for specific items it should be a decent resource.
You know how in Star Trek: The Next Generation the crew was able to just ask their computer any question and get computed coherent results with accompanying graphs and suggested information?
Well now we have it too. Or closer than I thought we were going to get for at least another ten years or so.
But don’t take my word for it, I’ll let it speak for itself.
Computer, What is the weather in Durham, NC?
Computer, What was the weather in Richmond, VA on April 29, 1979?
Computer, Compare MSFT and Apple (Note I didn’t have to give it AAPL for Apple’s stock.)
Computer, Compare Titanium and Platinum
Computer, Where is Mars?
Computer, Compare Alien and Aliens
Computer, United States Internet Users / Total Population
Computer, What are synonyms for the word puzzle?
Computer, Hurricane Andrew
Computer, What is the velocity of an unladen swallow?
Computer, Ohm’s Law
Computer, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping
And that’s even getting into its crazy awesome mathematical capabilities.
f(n)=f(n-1)+f(n-2), f(1)=1, f(2)=2
Have fun, and check our their gallery of examples.