Too lazy to pull down the scroll bar? Quick jumps to items on this page:
Alpha Watch '08
Sudoku
Le Cercle Français
Ecole des Trois Ponts
Other trips
The Fibonacci code
Kronos
Camp Robinson Crusoe
Compute the day of the week
The other Larry Krakauer
Spuds and Tashi
|
Want an interesting take on the current crop of Presidential candidates? My sister Alice, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, notes that biologically, "We're wired to follow an alpha -- one who's virile, charismatic, and confidence-inspiring." Click the following link, or on the picture, to see her web page on this subject, Alpha Watch '08 (with her alpha ranking of the candidates). |
Like many people these days, I'm having fun solving Sudoku puzzles. But while I like logic puzzles, I don't like to do mechanical work that could be easily automated. So I wrote an Excel spreadsheet that automatically propagates constraints in a Sudoku puzzle. It also helps you spot rows, columns, and boxes in which a particular number could only appear in one position.
Or click on this link for some of my notes and musings on Sudoku. You can also link to the spreadsheet download page from there.
|
Le Cercle Français meets every other Wednesday evening in the vicinity of Wayland, Massachusetts (USA) for conversation in French. |
|
In September, 2004, Margie and I studied French for a week at the Ecole des Trois Ponts in Roanne, France.
|
Click here to learn about some of the trips we have taken.
|
As a barcode, it conveys almost 60% more information than Code 39, and 40% more information than Interleaved 2 of 5. |
|
As a self-clocking serial data code,
it is 33% denser than Manchester Encoding or Phase Encoding. |
|
Where do I work? Nowhere. I retired from Kronos Incorporated, in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, at the end of October, 2003, having worked there for twenty four and a half years. Click on their logo at the left to go to their web site.
Starting in 1979, I collected misspellings of their name.
I worked on the Y2K problem at Kronos.
Click here to read a humorous speech that I gave in 1999 on the subject of the upcoming Y2K. |
|
Many moons ago, I attended Camp Robinson Crusoe in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. About forty years later, in 1999, a reunion was held at Camp Taconic in the Berkshires (Camp Robinson Crusoe no longer exists). Click the logo to the left, or click here, to see old camp photos, photos from the reunion, read some stories about my experiences at the camp, and to find out what's happening on the camp land now.
Did a course I taught make Robinson Crusoe the world's first "Computer Camp"? |
|
Want to become an idiot-savant? Given a date, learn to compute the day of the week in your head. |
The town of Wayland, Massachusetts has fewer than 14,000 inhabitants, but it has two residents named "Lawrence Krakauer". Not only that, but we're both MIT graduates working in the computer industry! Actually, he's the local guy, having grown up in Weston, Massachusetts, an adjacent town. I'm an import, having grown up in Great Neck, New York, 200 miles (330 Km) away. It's purely a coincidence. We are not related, and we finally met for the first time after the Wayland Town Meeting in April 2002. I looked around for a photographer to record our historic meeting, but couldn't find one.
| Me | Him | |
| Nickname | Larry | Larry |
| Middle initial | J. | A. |
| MIT degree | Ph.D. ' 70 Electrical Eng. | SM ' 80 Management |
Click on one of the pictures above to learn about my daughters' pets: a pet rat named "Spuds", and a pet cockatiel named "Tashi"