Motion to Improve

I stopped drinking Diet Coke a few weeks ago, and swapped in sparkling mineral water instead. As always, I can't do things by half, so I go through almost a gallon of mineral water every day. Still, that has to be considered an improvement.

In other self-improvement news, I'm taking an online course in applied cryptography. (It's available through www.udacity.com and it's free so check it out.) I've completed the first of six chapters and here's what I've learned so far:

1) It's been a long time since I studied statistics. I never really liked statistics, but so far that hasn't been a problem.

2) If I had been the one in charge of cracking the Lorenz cypher, the Allies would not have won WWII. By intercepting one encrypted message and the almost-identical message encrypted in the same way, these people managed to figure out the structure of the whole German machine that they'd never seen and build a new machine to decrypt messages. Sometimes I can't even put all the pieces of my food processor together correctly.

So, yeah, this week I learned I'm an idiot. But at least I'm a caffeine-free idiot, so I've got that going for me.

Anyhow, here's a picture of the black dog and the black cat cuddling. (Or more accurately, a picture of the black dog sleeping deeply, and Ripley taking advantage of that to sneak in next to her. )

Have a good week...