Reconnecting...
We catch up with some friends and family, both expectedly and unexpectedly.
Thursday the 25th, we had plans to let Taylor come over for some homework help later that evening; so Athennia decided to order Domino's to give us more time to focus on that instead of on cooking something ourselves.
I was positively thrilled when Taylor opened up her math assignment and we discovered that we would be factoring polynomials—something universally regarded as a giant PITA :)
For those who want to relive the riveting days of high-school algebra—which I don't doubt is every single one of you—a given problem might look something like this:
\(48a^2b^2c^2 + 24ab^3c^3 + 72a^2b^3c^2\)
Typically, you'll start by looking for the greatest common factor among the coefficients of each term: In this case, 12 is the largest number that cleanly divides 48, 24, and 72.
But of course, the thing with integer factorization is that there's no quick, efficient way to break a product into two factors like there is for, say, multiplying two factors into a product—which is easy, even if both numbers are a mile long.
There's no known means of factoring an unfathomably large number in polynomial time (unless, of course, you already know one of the factors—which just reduces the problem to the level of simple elementary-school-level division). And so, there's a nice asymmetry at play between creating large semiprimes, and attempting to deconstruct them back into their two prime factors...
It's kind of like jamming a tree through a wood chipper, versus asking someone to rebuild the tree from the resultant pile of wood chips. One is easy; the other is damn near impossible. (Technically this is changing as quantum computers slowly but surely become more capable... but luckily, we'll always have brilliant people who love individual freedom more than they love governments; and so, rest assured that quantum-resistant cryptography has already long been a thing!)
Fortunately, Taylor works at the 12th grade and not at the NSA, so the numbers are decidedly on the smaller side.
So...
\(48a^2b^2c^2 + 24ab^3c^3 + 72a^2b^3c^2\)
Again, we can see through sheer trial and error that the GCF is 12—since 12 is the biggest number by which we can cleanly divide 48, 24, and 60.
So, we pull out a 12 from each of those, which leaves us with this:
\(12(4a^2b^2c^2 + 2^3c^3 + 5^2b^3c^2\)
Then we just do the same for each variable—examining to what power each one is exponentiated, and determining what (if anything) we can strip out of each term.
It looks like we can yank an a, a b2, and a c from all three:
\(12ab^2c(4ac + 2bc^2 + 5abc)\)
What fun!
There were also a few in a form like \(x^2 - 6x - 16\), which all formulaically reduce to something like \((x + 2)(x - 8)\). Those were tremendous fun too. For sure ;)
Taylor had some robotics work as well—which would've involved writing some C++ code to drive the motors and blink the lights and such—but she and Athennia found out that one of the motors had died just while sitting in a box in our apartment for the last few weeks.
Even with fresh batteries, the thing didn't want to pull its weight—making the assignment incompletable and robbing us of the opportunity to write some garbage procedural code common in high-school programming curricula and virtually nonexistent in the real world.
Bummer ;)
Friday morning, Athennia took her car to Mr. Tire to have them try to diagnose the cause of her Check-Engine light that came on a few nights prior. Luckily for us, this particular code is one of those "catch-all" codes that could signify any number of half a dozen problems—many of which are in the range of $400-500 or more to correct.
But, Dave and Tom at Mr. Tire are ethical guys who didn't want to force Athennia to play an expensive game of Bingo and start swapping out parts until they had identified the actual issue; so they recommended she take it to the dealership first and pay them a couple hundred bucks to give the car a full lookover and hopefully better diagnose the issue.
That probably takes a good 10-12 minutes, all in... So, naturally the dealership wouldn't possibly be able to squeeze that in until Tuesday. (Then again, I'm sure they probably assumed we'd actually give them our business and pay premium prices for dealership-inflated labor charges and "official" Ford parts. Dream on, boys!)
Suddenly lacking any further justification to miss an entire day of work, Athennia decided to go in late and work a full day... which was no problem, except for the fact that she and Riley had made tentative plans to meet Riley's birth father Bradley at Silver Lake Park for 5:30 P.M.
Riley hadn't seen him since she was three; but she found him on Facebook last year and had been kicking around the idea of reaching out for quite awhile; so, she'd finally started a dialogue with him about a week ago.
So...
Staying at work two hours later, Athennia hit full-on rush-hour traffic and didn't get back in the area until after 7:00 P.M. But luckily, Bradley and his wife Dee were cool with adjusting the timing; and we were able to get over to Silver Lake by 7:30 to meet them.
It was ridiculously cold and windy for the end of April, and neither Riley nor I had dressed for that. But, other than that, the visit went really well. Bradley seems to have sobered up and cleaned up his act (relative to the stories I've heard), and Dee was perfectly pleasant and seems like a genuinely great person :)
We stood there freezing for probably a good hour and a half before we decided to call it a night, and then Kitten, the molerat, and I grabbed some Burger King for a super-late dinner on the way home.
Oh, but wait!
I almost forgot that we got stuck behind this cockeyed goofball on the way over to the park; and I mentioned that if I were a cop pulling them over, I'd stroll up to their driver's-side window like this...
Like, there's an entire lane for your kind over there on the right, and you're just refusing to use it, and that's shameful.
Now, click it or ticket... and I don't mean your seatbelt: I mean your right turn-signal.
Saturday the 27th, we were invited to Orlando's birthday party at Ken and Aimee's house. During the drive over, it looked like a dicey day to be hosting an indoor/outdoor party...
...But the weather held all night.
There were about two dozen people there, although Athennia and I only knew maybe half of them.
There was lots of alcohol, lots of gossip about the goings-on at Athennia's old job (where the majority of these people still work), and lots of smoked and grilled meat: Burgers, dogs, swordfish, burnt ends, chicken and beef kebabs, you name it.
I met one of Athennia's old bosses Ian—who brought the best jalapeño poppers I've ever had, along with a party game called Don't Get Got.
Basically, everybody gets a set of "secret missions" that they have to try to accomplish throughout the duration of the party—but without getting called out on it (like, "Hey, wait; is this part of the game?")
These were mine—which I foolishly assumed would be child's play...
But, a short time later, I executed my bulletproof plan to try my hand at knocking out #3...
Me: Man, I don't know why, I just got "Pretty Fly for a White Guy" stuck in my head all of a sudden...
Me: 'Uno, dos, tres'...
Athennia: <knowingly> Yeah, nice try.
Me: Dammit.
Then about 10 seconds later, this guy Mickey came into the kitchen where a group of us were standing; and he dripped a bunch of water from the sink all over the crotch of his jeans. Then he waited for an unsuspecting passer-by to walk in and obligatorily ask him, "Bro, did you piss yourself?"
...At which point he revealed that that had been his final mission: to get someone to ask if he peed his pants.
With a charisma not seen since the likes of Charles Manson, the dude literally won the game in like eight minutes.
I wanted to get a picture of Athennia and her best friend Emily—though, as everyone knows, posing for pictures is not my family's strong suit.
Luna jumped in as well.
Riley declined when I asked her, but then jumped in two seconds later when Em asked her.
I figured if I took enough shots, I might get one where Kitten and Riley were accidentally letting their guard down and maybe even smiling.
But, no... no... no...
Ah! That one wasn't bad :)
And finally, after we sobered up and got home later that night, Athennia and I watched The Best of Victor Borge (which we had each seen numerous times before over the course of our lives, but it was stuck in my head).
On Sunday, we got invited over to my parents' house. We ordered from Taormina's for dinner, and then Liv asked her cool cousin Riley to come outside and do sidewalk chalk and play soccer with her...
Hannah was hamming it up quite a bit all day as well :)
Then it was back to work on Monday; and Tuesday finished out the month of April...
...which means...
...it's time for cats.
Ready? Go!
