Huffman Coding

Yesterday as Emily, our next door neighbor and occasional babysitter, walked home after watching the girls for the afternoon, Claire cheerfully yelled out the living room window: “Goodbye, Enemy!”

Marissa lost her second top baby tooth yesterday. Since we are pro-fairy in the household, we enacted version three of the tooth fairy protocol (TFPv3).

The fairy that visits our house gives out a bronze Sacagawea dollar coin for each tooth. I thought that was special enough, but our pediatric dentist was kind enough to mention the second law of toothfairyism: If you leave a glass of water by your bed, the tooth fairy will color it.

So the past couple of fairy visits, glasses of water have turned green and red.

The first time Marissa lost a top tooth, it dangled for weeks from Marissa

Me: “Katie, girls can have evil plans too.”

While putting the girls to bed, Marissa asked if I fixed computers all day. I clarified that I taught computers how to do things for a living.

I also mentioned that computers don’t speak English but they have there own language. I said I knew about 6 computer languages.

Katie then asked me how to say “hello” in computer language. I rattled off:

#include <stdio.h> newline void main () { printf("hello"); }

Marissa then asked me how to say “goodbye”:

exit(0);

As I turned out their light, Katie’s final question was:

“How do you say ‘booty‘ in C++?”

Hmm. What to do. What to do…

Date: Sat, 01 Oct 2005 16:13:00 +0000
From: Xxxxxx Xxx <xxxxxxxx@hotmail.com>
Subject: Huffman Compression – Sources codes (Urgent!)
To: ken@huffmancoding.com

Regards,
Xxxxxx