My day has been fractured into a dozen or so task-defined particles. First, I took the kids to the dentist. They did well, considering how long it’s been since they last went. Pippa has two small cavities, Si none.
Midday mass, with laying on of hands and anointing for healing.
I went to Evanston-Northwestern Hospital to give blood this afternoon. I’m quite anxious about giving blood; I’ve fainted several times under other circumstances, but the ENH staff know this and talk me through it beautifully. One phlebotomist asked what I did for a living and, when she heard I taught Greek, asked about my other languages. “Well, my French is pretty good, German just barely adequate, and I had to learn Hebrew and Aramaic for grad school.” It turns out that one of the other phlebotomists knows Aramaic, is from the Middle East.
I’m using the big word “phlebotomists,” Frank, not to show off but because I don’t know which smaller word fits these personnel best. They aren’t nurses, I don’t think, nor are they doctors. They are technicians, I suppose, but that doesn’t sound just right for “someone who pokes a needle into my arm so blood can ooze out of it in a more-or-less controlled manner.” The more important part of their job is swathing me in ice bags, keeping me talking, pumping me full of cranberry juice, and distracting me from anything that’s happening near where my arm meets tubing.
So the Mid-eastern blood-drawer shows me some glyphs on a yellow pad. I’m thinking, “I squeaked through Aramaic more than a dozen years ago, and this afternoon I get a pop quiz while having blood drawn? That’s just not fair.” But I gathered my consciousness, looked at the pad, and saw nothing I could recognize.
She frowned. “Those are the first three letters: aleph, beth, gimel. . . .”
“Aaah,” I interjected, “I learned from typeset letters, not handwriting.”
“Well, how would you make the letters?” I drew an
א, ב, ג
for her, and she frowned again. “That’s not Aramaic, that’s Hebrew.”
“Oh, I see; the books I learned from wrote the Aramaic words with Hebrew characters.” (This is, by the way, the truth. My grasp of Aramaic vanished with the closing minutes of Prof. Orval Wintermute’s Dead Sea Scrolls class, but the whole time we were reading from a text printed with Hebrew characters.) By now, though, she’s frowning noticeably; I seem like a fake, even though noone asked me, “How would you do if I modern Aramaic-speaker wrote some stuff down in handwritten exemplars of a script you never learned?” I’d have been able to tell them that I’d flunk that particular exam. Instead, they ambushed me, and I looked even more foolish than usual.
Then in the evening, Margaret defies terror by taking Amtrak to Rochester, to visit Nate on Family Weekend. Nate’s just been through midterms week, a rude trial for a home-schooled kid who had never experienced anything like it before.
Posted by AKMA at October 25, 2002 11:54 PM | TrackBackI'm curious about how, if at all, you've tried to simulate or present the test-atmosphere in homeschooling. Since you knew college was coming, did you discuss it with your kids? Other friends of mine who homeschooled ran into the same issue, and it really fascinates me--how someone who may not be acculturated to academic methods gets used to them all at once. What did Nate say about it, if I may ask?
Posted by: steve at October 26, 2002 07:10 AMI've actually audited several college courses before, so although nothing resembling midterms ever really occured at home, I was relativle familiar with the process, and it wasn't quite as rude a trial as Dad thinks. It was definately stressful, but I gather that it's stressful even for kids who went to public school for 12 years.
Posted by: nathaniel adam at October 26, 2002 08:26 AMThanks for the response, Nate. And yes, midterms were stressful despite my public school experience.
Posted by: steve at October 26, 2002 08:38 AMOh, admit it, Nate, you were a cowering shambles, a heap of blubbering agony. And it was only my harsh child-rearing techniques—the weeks without food, the midwinter forced swims in Lake Michigan, the 34-mile marches carrying your own piano—that lent you the fortitude to survive the brutal Eastman midterm sequence.
See, they move out and forget all that you’ve done for them. . . .
Posted by: AKMA at October 26, 2002 08:40 AMYou know, Nate. Parents prefer their revisionis histories. It is best that you allow them this particular quirk so then, some day, you too can inflict such a charge on your own wee ones.
Posted by: Tripp at October 26, 2002 02:26 PMAKMA, I can handle "phlebotomist." I've had my share of phlebotomies. And how does that old caricature-Asian-accent joke go... "I'd rather have a phlee bottle in flont of me, than a kick in the pants." or something like that.
***
[Apologies to all my Chinese friends who had to grow up listening to people who thought the "l" "r" alternation was funny. Except my apology does not extend to Phil Chang who always knew the people who thought that was funny were themselves funny.]
Each Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.
Posted by: Jucentius at January 12, 2004 11:17 PMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Etheldreda at January 12, 2004 11:17 PMOur next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.
Posted by: Annabella at January 12, 2004 11:17 PMThat gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.
Posted by: Tristram at January 13, 2004 08:32 AMWhen a variable is finished with it's work, it does not go into retirement, and it is never mentioned again. Variables simply cease to exist, and the thirty-two bits of data that they held is released, so that some other variable may later use them.
Posted by: Jeremy at January 13, 2004 08:32 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Alice at January 13, 2004 08:32 AM