Castle Rock, Colorado, is in the Front Range between Denver and Colorado Springs. The town was first settled in the 1870s and named for the rock formation on its western edge. More than 5,400 acres of open space, 250 acres of parks and 57 miles of trails surround the town. Castle Rock offers many activities throughout the year.

Douglas County Fairgrounds

The Douglas County holds a rodeo every August. Many activities are held in the city during the rodeo, including 4-H exhibits, animal shows and the farm yard, a hands-on educational area providing information about animals and agriculture. Local singing and dancing acts perform on the Community Stage. Carnival rides and games ensure that children have fun.

Town Recreation

Activities Castle Rock Recreation Center features 84,000 square feet of fun, including a leisure pool complete with water slides, spa and lazy river. Rent one of the meeting rooms and host your child’s birthday party. Introduce your child to cooking basics through classes such as Little Chefs, Holiday Cooking Arts, Just Desserts and Iron Chefs. Discounts with membership cards.

Metzler Ranch Park

Metzler Ranch Park features many outdoor activities for children. Kids can join a youth baseball or softball league, ride a bike along the paved path or swing and climb on the playground equipment. Bring your child’s in-line skates and glide along one of two in-line hockey rinks or try out skills at the lighted skate park. Discounts book online.

Theatre of Dreams

Theatre of Dreams is a 72-scat theater that presents magic and illusion entertainment. Two professional magicians founded the theater. Children especially enjoy the family-oriented shows. The facility can be rented for special events such as birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. Reserve in advance.

People often ask how I decide where to go, and I usually get hesitated with my response, as I don’t actually have an answer to that. For more than three years, I have been making movements with the universe, traveling from location to location at seemingly random intervals.

A friend of mine posted a Facebook status asking if anybody was interested in a job teaching English in China. So I jumped on a coming plane. Walking into my first class, I was bombed by 16 strange children who couldn’t understand a single word out of my mouth. When I walked out of my last class, six months later, I had made a personal connection with them. Some of my students could barely speak Chinese or English. But somehow, through determination and force, we connected.

Every class was not only a lesson in English, but in good fellowship, being a role model, being a parent, and being a friend. I became a father to some, an older brother to others. I was loved and adored, feared and hated. I had to learn discipline, and not only how to deal it out, but how to discipline and conduct myself as a role model. But in between the discipline, I had to make learning a fun experience. And they forgave me when I yelled or got upset. And when they threw temper or bruised their knee or missed their mommy, I forgave them, kissed their bruises better, and gave them a shoulder to cry on.

Teaching English in China is, by far, the most emotionally rewarding and fulfilling thing I’ve ever challenged myself to do. I have walked away from this job with a softened heart, knowing that I have made a difference in so many lives. I want that. I want my teachings to be reciprocal because they taught me how to unconditionally open my heart and how to be a more 1oving and patient person.

African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) bear the unfortunate nickname “jackass penguins” because they communicate through honking, donkey-like sounds. Laugh at them if you like, but a new study suggests that their jackass language act actually follows the same basic rules as ours.

In the study published in the journal Biology Letters, researchers recorded nearly 600 vocalizations (发声) from 28 adult male penguins living in Italian zoos. (Males tend to vocalize a lot during the mating period, which is why the researchers turned to this population.) The scientists knew from previous research that African penguins bonk using three distinct types of sound, similar to human syllables (音节), when greeting one another, mating, or defending territory. But the researchers wanted to know whether those “syllables” followed two common linguistic (语言学的) rules.

One of those rules, called Zipf’s law in short, was proposed in 1945 by the linguist George Zipf. The law states that the more frequently a word is used in any language, the shorter it tends to be (think of words like “the,” “to” and “of” in English). Previous studies have analyzed more than 1,000 world languages for evidence of Zipf’s 1aw and the rule holds up in all of them.

The other rule, known as the Menzerath-Altmann law, says that the longer a word or phrase is, the shorter its component syllables are, while shorter words are more likely to have longer syllables. The word “onomatopoeia,” for example, is made of six very short syllables, while “couch” is made of one longer one. Previous studies have shown that nonhuman primates (灵长类动物) follow both these rules when they communicate with each other but what about jackass penguins?

The researchers in the new study found that, yes, the songs of the male jackass penguin conform to both Zipf’s and Menzerath-Altmann’s laws. The shortest calls tended to be the most common, and the longest phrases were made up of the shortest syllables. This jackass study provided the first nonprimate evidence that these common linguistic patterns extend into the animal kingdom, the authors wrote, and that’s nothing to hem and haw at.

Much of the information that is sent back from space is useless. Pictures taken by satellites orbiting the Earth might take days to download, only to show lots of cloud hiding the area of interest. The subject matter may also be surrounded by irrelevant information.

Processing data in space before sending back would reduce unnecessary information, but this can be tricky. Rays in the universe randomly flip the ones and zeroes that computers operate on, introducing unpredictable errors. High levels of radiation can also damage electronic circuits (电子电路). KP Labs, based in Poland, is building a satellite to overcome some of these problems. Their device, called Inuition-1, is controlled by a neural network, a form of artificial intelligence modeled on the human brain.

Intuition-l will be equipped with a hyper spectral imager (超光谱成像仪), which takes 150 pictures of every scene it looks at. Each picture is at a different frequency, so contains different information. The neural network pieces these together using powerful graphics chips (芯片) hardened against radiation. The developers have also built error correction into their software. But instead of sending back every bit of image data, the satellite will summarize what the user requests as useful information. This might, for instance, be a heat map showing areas of weeds in a field or the location of a forest fire. Reducing the data loud means that some of the information can be sent live.

The satellite will be used to prove that a hardened neural network can survive in space. This could pave the way for other space applications. For example, the Curiosity rover (探测器) on Mars was successfully upgraded in 2016 with a set of algorithms to detect “interesting” rocks for investigation, instead of picking them randomly. A neural network could provide future rovers and deep-space probes with a better ability to make decisions.

The neural network and hyper spectral imager have already been built and tested by KP labs. They will go into a satellite body being constructed by Clyde Space. After that there will be more intelligence in space.