The Kosmala Blog

Last week, I was pursued by hundreds of females. All of them were after my hot body and wanted to make babies with me.

Damn mosquitos…

So this past Tuesday, I got to participate in a presidential primary/caucus that actually mattered for the first time in my life.

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As the old saying goes, “it’s the little things in life that matter.” Well one of the little things in my life is recursion. What is recursion, you ask? Well if you’re programmer you probably know what it is, and if you aren’t you wouldn’t understand even if I explained it. Just know that recursion is great, because it’s simple, elegant, and extremely efficient. The only downside to it is that it’s kind of hard to understand at first look. Unfortunately in today’s coding environment of bloatware with objects and resources being allocated everywhere with little prior thought, coding techniques like recursion often get lost in the shuffle.

Well today I actually got to use a bit of recursion to accomplish a bit of string manipulation. Basically I had to strip off all the leading characters of a string that were alpha characters (letters). Needless to say, it made me smile to see something accomplished so elegantly. For those that care to see it, here’s the (badly parsed… thanks WordPress) code. It’s written in Visual Basic .Net (not my choice):

Private Function stripLetters(ByVal word As String) As String
   ’ Recursion, everyone cheer!
   If Char.IsLetter(word.Chars(0)) Then
      Return stripLetters(word.Substring(1))
      Else
   Return word
   End If
End Function

That, folks, is a perfect function in every way, and I don’t get to write them too often.

Streetview has come to Minneapolis. You can even use it to look at the building where we live now. Just be sure to use 174 for the address (the numbers are always approximate in streetview and it thinks our building is #174).

Update: You can go over the 35W bridge (the one that collapsed) as well!

You may or may not have heard about geologists’ fondness for beer. In order to illuminate this point, I want to mention that during afternoon breaks at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting, we have Anchor Steam (free) on tap for attendees.

That is all.

Here are 2 new family members:

This is Cassie at the top and

This is Timo at right

Aren’t they cute!!

Happy Thanksgiving!