Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #847 - Sense of Dread - Here comes the March of Octopuses - Happy Halloween

More than two dozen octopuses came ashore on a beach in Wales on Oct. 27. (Brett Stones)

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #847 - Sense of Dread - Here comes the March of Octopuses - Happy Halloween

Hi Mom,

The cephalopods are coming for us. They are coming for us all. They are climbing OUT of the ocean, crawling onto the land, and their tentacles will be at our throats by MIDNIGHT.

Happy Halloween, if you live long enough to enjoy it.


SHARE:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/10/30/two-dozen-octopuses-crawled-to-shore-en-masse-and-no-one-knows-why/?utm_term=.bbfb11d1fccb




Two dozen octopuses crawled to shore en masse and no one knows why

By Lindsey Bever October 30 at 1:21 PM

More than two dozen octopuses were spotted slogging along a shoreline in West Wales, worrying beachgoers, who spent some time picking up the critters and plopping them back into the ocean.

Brett Stones, who runs SeaMôr Dolphin Watching Boat Trips, said Monday that he was finishing a tour on Friday night when he saw something moving on New Quay beach in Cardigan Bay. When he got closer, he saw that it was an octopus — and many more were spread across the sand.

“It was a bit like an end-of-days scenario,” he told BBC News.

Stones said that he had never seen anything quite like it.

“Seeing something like that out of its environment, you get this sort of feeling of wanting to protect them,” Stones said in a phone interview with The Washington Post.

“They won’t survive out of the water,” he added, explaining that he and others gathered about 25 of the octopuses and put them back into the water to keep them alive.

Videos posted on SeaMôr’s Facebook page show the pinkish sea creatures.

“We collected the ones that were totally out of the water, and plopped them back in at the end of the pier, hopefully saving them from getting stranded. If you’re around over the next few evenings, get in touch and we’ll let you know where to go,” the company wrote in the post. On Saturday morning, the company posted pictures showing several octopuses on land that appeared to be dead, suspecting that they might be dying after spawning.

“They spawn in autumn, and some of them die after that. They don’t live very long apparently, 1-3 years!!” SeaMôr wrote in the comments beneath the Facebook post.

Others online reported subsequent sightings.

Graham Pierce, a research scientist at Instituto de Investigaciones Marinas in Vigo, Spain, said the beached animals are most likely curled octopuses, or Eledone cirrhosa, which he said are characterized by a single row of suckers along the arms.

He said there could be several reasons that they moved on to the beach, including spawning, weather and water temperatures.

James Wright, curator at the National Marine Aquarium in the United Kingdom, told the Daily Telegraph and Newsweek that the number of octopuses seen on the same beach at the same time is “quite odd.”

“But them even being found in the intertidal is not common and suggests there is something wrong with them, I am afraid,” he said.

“As the areas where they are exhibiting this odd behavior coincides with the two areas hit by the two recent low-pressure depressions and associated storms of Ophelia and Brian, it could be supposed that these have affected them.

“It could simply be injuries sustained by the rough weather itself or there could be a sensitivity to a change in atmospheric pressure.”

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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = 848 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1710.31 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #846 - Hallow - Musical Monday for 1710.30

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #846 - Hallow - Musical Monday for 1710.30

Hi Mom,

Some music for you today and for Halloween tomorrow.

Not too much in the way of rhetoric from me. I have been coding and learning to code and setting up a Git Hub and a Cousera profile.

So, just music. For now. Beware. I am coming for you with more content soon.

But I will say that the Xero Music stuff is completely different than the smooth cool grooves of "Whispers from Silence" and "Visiting Cat."




Hallow | Xero Music

https://zacbentz.bandcamp.com/album/hallow

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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = ## days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - date - time

NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #845 - Zen of Python

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #845 - Zen of Python

Hi Mom,

Notice something different?

First time without a picture.

I signed up for a Coursera course today on Python, the one I learned about at Penguicon back in April.

I have been reading this book:

Python: A Crash Course by Eric Matthes,

which at the time of this writing is out of stock at Amazon.

It's a good book, and from the looks of things has more than covered everything in the first of the Coursera Python courses, which for me should be review.

So today, just this.

I like this about Python: The Zen of Python.

What I really like is that this zen collection of principles is an easter egg in the Python interpreter, as explained below.

Coders will "get" how cool that is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python

Zen of Python

The Zen of Python is a collection of 20 software principles that influences the design of Python Programming Language,^[1] — only 19 of which were written down — around June 1999 by Tim Peters.^[2][3] The principal text is released into public domain.^[4]

Zen of Python is written as an informational entry number 20 in Python Enhancement Proposals (PEP), and can be found on the official Python website. It is also included as an easter egg in Python interpreter, which would be displayed by entering a statement import this.^[1]

PrinciplesEdit

Principles are listed as follows:

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than right now.^[5]
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea—let's do more of those!

ReferencesEdit

1. ^ ^a b "Code Style". The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python. 2015-11-18.
2. ^ http://www.wefearchange.org/2010/06/import-this-and-zen-of-python.html
3. ^ https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/1999-June/001951.html
4. ^ Tim Peters (2015-11-18) [2004]. "PEP20 -- The Zen of Python".
5. ^ In the interpreter easter egg, this is written as 
6. "Although never is often better than *right* now." 
7. This follows a longstanding convention of plain-text communication- 
8. in which common formatting features are often impossible- 
9. where emphasis is represented with asterisks.

External linksEdit

• PEP20 on Python website

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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = 846 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1710.29 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #844 - Star and double-star Pointers in the C Programming Language

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/138:_Pointers

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #844 - Star and double-star Pointers in the C Programming Language

Hi Mom,

I have been reading Programming in C by Stephen Kochan, as I continue my computer studies.

Remember, this blog is often dedicated to my study. Like I wrote about here:

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-729-not-my.html

"Not my teaching but my study" from a quote by Montaigne via Warren Ellis.

So, I have been reviewing pointers. Kochan devotes a huge chapter to pointers, but he fails to describe the double-star pointer (which is simply a pointer to another pointer). That's no so hard, but it keeps eluding me in other reading.

Mainly, I am reviewing pointers because I started working on a stack implementation with in the C programming language with a linked list, and I am having errors. I want to be able to claim that I am fluent with C in my current job search, so I have to master this issue.

One thing that took me some time to wrap my head around is that &i sets something to point to something else as in

k = &i;

I know this means take the memory address of the variable of i and store it in k, but the better way to think of it is to "make k point to i."

The following list helps understand pointers pretty simply.

int i = 10; //i is an int, it has allocated storage to store an int.
int *k; // k is an uninitialized pointer to an int. 
        //It does not store an int, but a pointer to one.
k = &i; // make k point to i. We take the address of i and store it in k
int j = *k; //here we dereference the k pointer to get at the int value it points
            //to. As it points to i, *k will get the value 10 and store it in j

Likewise, the star gets at the value. I knew this, also, but in practice with structs (data structures), it can be confusing when I am defining a pointer to a structure and so the type of the struct is pointer, hence something like

data_stack_t *stack

This is a pointer called stack (*stack makes it a pointer) of type data_stack_t.

And so I started reading more about pointers to make sure I fully understand them and that I can complete my program by fixing my errors. Pointers are a concept in C that many people struggle to grasp, and so in my searching for extra information, I cam across this Stack Overflow page that addresses (heh) this issue of pointers, especially double star pointers, like **i.

I love STACK OVERFLOW, and I am not alone in this love.

I decided to share (with due credit to all contributors) the Stack Overflow page here but just a select few of the many responses and discussion that resulted. I had to cut some of the explanations as it added too much meta-data to this post.

Expect a lot more of these posts, Mom. Yes, a limited audience, but it's my study not my teaching.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5484624/how-to-understand-the-pointer-star-in-c

How to understand the pointer star * in C?

I'm struggling with the pointer sign *, I find it very confusing in how it's used in both declarations and expressions.

For example:

int *i; // i is a pointer to an int

But what is the logic behind the syntax? What does the * just before the i mean? Let's take the following example. Please correct me where I'm wrong:

char **s;
char *(*s); // added parentheses to highlight precedence

And this is where I lose track. The *s between the parantheses means: s is a pointer? But a pointer to what? And what does the * outside the parentheses mean: a pointer to what s is pointing?

So the meaning of this is: The pointer pointing to what s is pointing is a pointer to a char?

I'm at a loss. Is the * sign interpreted differently in declarations and expressions? If so, how is it interpreted differently? Where am I going wrong?

c pointers dereference

msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/1x82y1z4(v=vs.71).aspx – Mitch Wheat Mar 30 '11 at 9:43
	Check out my lecture notes (from my Advanced C++ class at Brooklyn College)on pointers. Lectures 15 & 16dealt with pointers. – Moshe May 31 '12 at 0:16

Take it this way:

int *i means the value to which i points is an integer.

char **p means that p is a pointer which is itself a pointer to a char.

answered Mar 30 '11 at 10:06

pradeepchhetri

1,51732040

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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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- Days ago = 846 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1710.28 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.