Shaman Guys

We got lost in the desert. Spencer played Home on the Range on his harmonica. We hunted dinosaur tracks. We opined on the meaning of Horseshoe Bend's Great Gallery. Our inner-Shamans battled cougars. We made a friend in National Park ranger Joyce. Joel told riddles. Emily alarmed the Green River locals, changing the jukebox from Metallica to Phoenix. We stole someone's campsite.

All in all, a great Canyonlands weekend.

Defense

Remember the equations that created straight lines or curved parabolas in high school math? Well, Spencer just defended his prospectus on support vector machines, which are basically equations that draw lines like this green one here:

SVMs, as they're called, come in handy when you're classifying data into say, blue or red, or employed or unemployed, or, if you're the U.S. Postal Service, in teaching a computer how to tell a four apart from a nine in an address.

His master's project is setting out to show how SVMs come in handy, too, when you have to impute—which is basically making an educated guess—a missing answer when someone takes a survey and leaves a question response blank.

The Proper Care and Feeding of Hydrangeas

I found these little guys in my office Feb. 14  . . .

The End of the Universe as We Knew It

The Daily Universe is going to an all-online format with the exception of a weekly printed edition

The times they are a-changin', but I'll never forget the clips that Emily would cut out and hang on the fridge every time Lyndsey (other roommate and fellow Newsie) or I made the front page. I spent a fair portion of my life in that newsroom.

Here are some fun front pages from the decades, snapshots from a little project I built for work. You can see it in full at magazine.byu.edu/dudigital.