François-Frédéric Guy - Beethoven Piano Sonatas

This arrived in the mail from Presto Classical today (Mozart's Birthday).  I was disappointed that there wasn't a DVD as advertised in the Presto Classical description.  However, I listened to the last disk and Opus 111 first.  I am not disappointed.  These are live recordings.  Pollini is still supreme for me in Opus 111 (what perfect pianism!).  François-Frédéric Guy is a pianist I will listen more to!

New Living Translation

This Bible arrived in the mail yesterday. My son was asking if he could take his Bible to school to read as he saw some other student bring a Bible to read.  I told him to take a Good News Bible to school.  He started to look at this new one as well.

I've had a Living Bible for a while, but don't often read it.  This website has critical reviews of various Bible translations.  The Living Bible is not highly regarded by scholars because it is a paraphrase like the Good News Translation.  For a kid, it might be a good way to get into the Word of God.  A lot easier than the New King James Version (grade 8 level).  He has a NIRV Bible too, but it's falling apart (that's at a grade 3 level).

Tableau Public - Data Visualisation in a Snap

I was searching for some data for my CS20 students to analyse when I happened upon Tableau Public.  This ComputerWorld Article discusses 22 visualisation tools and Tableau Public is among them.  Here are some resources for it:

• Short PDF tutorial
• Getting Started (Duke University LibGuide)

 In the same ComputerWorld article, QGIS was mentioned and I have previously written about it.

Genetics Problem and Combinations

In the Saskatchewan Grade 9 textbook, there is a lab on genetics (page 57).  One of the questions is to figure out how many different combinations of fruit fly possibilities based on the following traits

• Long Legs (L) or Short Legs (l)
• Tan Colour (C) or Ebony Colour (c)
• Long Wings (W) or Stubby Wings (w)

 Note that capitals denote dominant alleles and lower case denote recessive alleles.  I looked up the definition of combinations and then relalised that this involved selecting 1 item from each of the three sets which are possible for each of the three traits:

• {LL, ll, Ll}
• {CC, cc, Cc}
• {WW, ww, Ww}

 Note that

• LL and Ll are both long legs, whereas ll is short legs
• CC and Cc are both tan colour, whereas cc is ebony colour
• WW and Ww are both long wings, whereas ww is short wings

So, I would think the sets could be reduced to

• {LL, ll}
• {CC, cc}
• {WW, ww}

Now, I got rather tired of trying to figure out from the math definitions what the possible unique combinations of the three sets were, so I wrote a brute force computer program in VBA (code here) and found that it was 8.  So, of the 27 possibilities of genotypes (used a triple loop over the three traits), there are 8 unique phenotypes. I think since homozygous dominant and heterozygous dominant result in the same trait, it must be be 2^3?  Note, if we just loop over the reduced sets, it's three loops over 2 items:

LL CC WW = Long legs, Tan, Long Wings
LL CC ww = Long legs, Tan, Short Wings
LL cc WW = Long legs, Ebony, Long Wings
LL cc ww = Long legs, Ebony, Short Wings
ll CC WW = short legs, Tan, Long Wings
ll CC ww = short legs, Tan, Short Wings
ll cc WW = short legs, Ebony, Long Wings
ll cc ww = short legs, Ebony, Short Wings

I think it would have been even easier to write the code in Python, but I wouldn't have the GUI interface easily like I do with VBA.

Dementia and Music

This story from The National suggests early music education can stave off dementia later in life.  I was curious about this and looked up the following

• CNN article from Sept 2013
• Scholarly article about Swedish twins and this topic
• Music therapy for dementia patients

Joel Osteen mentions in his latest book, Break Out!, that the physical expression of dementia was found in the brains of some people who never exhibited the symptoms of dementia.

A load of laughs arrived today

This arrived today from Amazon.ca Marketplace.  Hopefully, these are the uncensored Tom and Jerry cartoons.  We have favorites like Cat Concerto, Johann Mouse, Solid Serenade and Framed Cat.  They don't make cartoons like this anymore!

Framed Cat

Some interesting programming tools for kids

I downloaded the latest Portable Python versions today.  Interestingly, Portable Python 2.7 lets you use the Python 3 syntax for the print statement.  It doesn't work perfectly, but at least it doesn't crash your program.  I also found a new Pygame textbook on the Pygame site.  Programming Arcade Games with Python and Pygame could be used as a textbook for an intro Python course (click here).  It's not free like Al Sweigart's Pygame books, but the website version is free.

One of the bugs I've been finding with the Scratch 2.0 offline editor is that the sprites get 'off-centre' and this can make it look like your program isn't working properly (x,y coordinates seem off).  This is a persistent, unpredictable bug in this beta software.  A few 10 year olds are finding Scratch more fun than Lego Mindstorms EV3. They are quite interested in how many views their Scratch projects have had.  I also hear things like "can you remix this on my computer".  Scratch is super-cool.   One of them was even looking into Pygame for a little.  This great, free resource has Scratch tutorials that truly engage 10 year olds!  Here is the Space Invaders project made from a tutorial from TeachICT.com.  I like using Creative Commons audio clips from SoundBible.com in my Scratch Projects.

Scratch 2.0 Offline Editor Bug - Sprite is off-centre