Today is Feb 2nd 2023. Today is Feb 2nd 2023, and it is Groundhog day. The Groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil will be brought out of his den and if he sees his shadow he will retreat back into his den and we the people will experience 6 more weeks of winter. It’s all true this tradition has been going on in the United States for 136 years. The first groundhog day was Feb 2 1887.
There was a movie in 1993 called “Groundhog day” in the movie the meteorologist is cursed by his ex girlfriend to relive groundhog day until he can find true love. Groundhog day has been repeated for 136 years and will continue to be repeated. In computer programming there is a technique called recursion. Recursion is when you repeat a process and break that porcess down each time you repeat it. As you repeat the process the process becomes bigger or smaller until you have accomplished your task. An example would be, a program that takes the phonebook in a user phone and goes though and calls everyone until it has called all phone numbers in that users phonebook.
When I was 9 years old a school teacher told me that there were simple machines and complex machines and that complex machines were simple machines grouped together to perform a task. To my fathers chagrin I became obsessed with machines and took apart anything I could get my hands on. My grandmother understood me and bought me encyclopedias. I enjoyed the encyclopedias with the illustrations the most. I loved to learn how things worked and didn’t work. Everything in life was a simple machine connected to another simple machine it was great.
Recursion is a technique that can help when solving some complex issues but it has to be done right. We have to repeat all but a few things every time or we could find ourselves stuck in an infinite loop.
Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.
Vince Lombardi
When faced with complex tasks that we must repeat we would do well to learn and grow by evaluating each iteration and improving on how we perform the iteration. The wash rinse repeat and reform is how we grow.
The Corrigan Encore 