Ringger

Senator Lee,

I hope that you and your family are enjoying the holiday weekend. My family and I are enjoying some down time, even as one of my sons is visiting Oahu with his high school band to commemorate the loss of our servicemen at Pearl Harbor 70 years ago.

At a recent town hall meeting at Provo City Hall I watched you stake out some hard principled positions. I have seen your Democrat counterparts do likewise over the years. Between the two positions there is a gulf, a tangible divide. I posed one question at the meeting about how we as a nation can make progress when the two sides stake out such positions across the divide without a hint of bridging it.

In my experience in the NLP Lab, ABBYY FineReader is the best OCR engine around. A recent review in PC World agrees. If you need to convert image to text, start with ABBYY.

Saturday morning, Kirsti assigned me to return a composter to Costco. When assembled, the composter looked like a WW2 sea mine -- a big black plastic sphere with a circular lid -- but without the spikes. The problem was that it wouldn't open, try as we might, after it had been sitting for a day with some compost inside.

I went looking for some software to help me better manage our home computer use. I found TimesUpKidz. http://www.timesupkidz.com/ Looks like a great addition to our PC. Windows Parental Controls allows you to set the time of day during which the computer can be used. TimesUpKidz allows you to limit total time during that window of opportunity.

My Grandfather’s home-teacher, Steve Frisbee, spoke at his funeral in November and shared the following quotation from a French mountaineer as part of his remarks:

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.

St. Nicholas Day is celebrated on December 6th. In Switzerland, he's called "Samichlaus" or "Santiklaus", depending on where you're from. On that day St. Nicholas comes to your house to visit. If you've been good, then you receive gifts. If you've been bad, then he threatens to stuff you in a sack and take you to the Black Forest to peel carrots for a year.

On various occasions, my Grandfather Louis E. Ringger would tell us a story about St.

The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing has come and gone. With all of the coverage, I was feeling like a kid again. This find was especially impressive: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged all but one of the Apollo landing sites. Keep up the good work, NASA.

If you're a computer scientist, then you've heard of the halting problem. If you're a mathematician or even a middle school geometer, then you've heard of proof by contradiction. If you're an English-speaking child, then you know Dr. Seuss. Put them together, and what do you get? An amazing Seuss-esque poetic proof of the undecidability of the halting problem, one of the most famous results in mathematics and computer science. Look here: http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/loopsnoop.pdf . Wow.

Elder M. Russell Ballard, as a leader of and spokesman for the LDS Church, encouraged members of the Church to share their stories and feelings about things that matter in life here on the web. I'm not a frequent blogger (check the dates of my posts!) and my predilection is for privacy, but I am happy to share glimpses of the reasons for the hope that is in me, even if only in small ways.

My friend John Dehlin is a prolific blogger and podcaster and occasional screencaster. His primary topic of choice? Mormons and their stories. For a view into the diversity of Mormon people, their hopes, their challenges, their contrarians, and their stories, check out John's blogs:

http://www.mormonstories.org/

http://www.mormonmatters.org/

and

http://www.johndehlin.com/

I wish I could keep up with it all.