Happy new year - and no worries

A Happy New Year to all of you. And if you remember the advice given in this videoclip - you should be able to forget about your worries. That is: IF you come to grips with the question "Can you do something about it?" if the answer is "yes". If you stop there (without doing anything about it), you should start worrying.
But have a look for yourselves. And: Happy New Year.

St George and the Dragon

There is a fairly old painting by Paolo Uccello called "Saint George and the Dragon"; it was probably painted around 1470. The interesting thing about it - apart from the fact that it deserves a second and a third look - is that it has inspired a number of poets to write a poem about it.

The most famous of these poems is "Not My Best Side" by U A. Fanthorpe. But here is the picture:

By Paolo Uccello - The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=159874

And here is the poem:
UA Fanthorpe, "Not My Best Side"

If you'd like to hear it read - here's a recording (American English):

For more information about the poet, read her obituary in the Guardian (2009):

UA Fanthorpe Obituary

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And finally, another interesting link:

Poems inspired by paintings

Hour of Code

It's the #HourOfCode this week. In our age of digitisation, knowing at least some basic things about computer programming has become a cultural technique that everyone should have acquired at some point.

One of the basic rules is: Computing proceeds step by step, and in order to save time, repetitive steps can be designed as loops - you can tell the computer to do certain steps again and again, until a certain condition is fulfilled (either a certain number of runs has been completed, or the computer runs out of data, or it has found what it was supposed to look for).

In today's Google Doodle, you can practice computer programming in a very easy way. By clicking symbols, you can combine certain steps and even loops to guide a little bunny towards all the tasty carrots. Try it, and have fun!

"Coding for Carrots:" 50 years of kids coding (a Google doodle)

Actually, it's a 50-year anniversary:

Kids Coding Languages (time.com)

Below you can see my results: I started out all right, but later I didn't reach the optimal solutions. Oh well, at least my bunny got its carrots in the end. ;-)