This is not really the next part in my randomness series, but more of an aside.  I used Maple's embedded components to use the Lotto649 drawing data from my last post to create a historical lottery simulator.  Basically, you fill in your prefered numbers, and it simulates you playing the lottery in every draw since 1982.

If you are interested in listing to me ramble for an hour about integration algorithms, it looks like the recording of the Webinar I gave in early September has been posted to the academic webinar archive: Theory and Practice of Symbolic Integration in Maple. I tried to make it a broad introduction for someone with...

I've been making some use of the Maple Cloud for a while now, and thought that I'd share some comments.

So far, it's been quite useful to me, and I like it. This surprised me a bit. I expected not to find it useful, and to dismiss it with an old-timer's "Bah, humbug... as useless as Maple+twitter!" But, to the contrary, I've found a use for it; a need that isn't otherwise...

I have gotten some comments about my new avatar, including a few commenting that while my picture is clear on the blog contributors sidebar, it is "blurry" on my blog posts. I just wanted clear this up.  I am not in the witness protection program; I just really love singular values.  My new avatar, just like my old one, is a rank 4 approximation of a picture of me using the singular value decomposition.

One of the best things about growing up in the “Hood” is that it feels really good when you leave. I grew up in a neighborhood called Downsview in Toronto whose claim to fame used to be it was the home to the DeHavilland Aircraft company but today is more associated with ongoing issues of crime, poverty, and many other urban illnesses. So every time I hear that someone from the Hood did something great, I take notice and I take special pride. This is the story about...

I have just had my first scientific publication (Journal of Multi-Body Dynamics 2010 Vol24 No K2) and I thought I should include the acknowledgement here

 “The development of algorithms in Maple was assisted by the advice from the MaplePrimes forum including John Fredsted who provided an initial coding idea for automated detection of plane division”.

                ...

A sign of a very successful period of work is the tally of how many email messages I’ve written that start with … “First, let me apologize for the delay in my response…” Yes, if you are the recipient of one of these notes from me, you’re probably more annoyed than pleased that I’m finding lots of very interesting things to fill up my ever-shrinking Outlook schedule. It’s been one heck of a summer, and I’m behind on countless...

I came across a website that tracked website usage.  I decided to see if Maplesoft existed there in the top million.  To my surprise, it did!  It may not by all means be useful but it is interesting.  The size of the icon is dependant on the popularity  http://nmap.org/favicon/?q=www.maplesoft.com

I also dedided to check out where our competitors stand.  Interestingly...

As a user of Maple 13, namely in computations on General Relativity & Tensor Calculus, I would like to let you know I just got, using Maple 13, the WRONG SIGN (positive Riemann scalar curvature in stead of correct NEGATIVE Riemann scalar curvature) in studying a threefold used as a 'Public Space' by Milne many years ago.

The square of the distance on the said threefold is dE^2=dR^2+(c*t0)^2*sinh(R/(c*t0))^2*(dtheta^2+sin(theta)^2*dphi^2) and you might be interested...

Although I mostly post about parallel programming, my background is in algorithms and data structures.  I have a soft spot for sorting algorithms.  It probably started when I did some research into adaptive sorting as part of my coursework.  Anyway, someone added sound to visualizations of different sorting algorithms.  I'm not sure if it really helps explain the algorithms any better, but it does make them more interesting to watch.

http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/sorting-algorithms-quite-boring-until-you-add-sound-effects-20100819/

Darin

I used to have a blog entry which contained an except from an Isaac Asimov story entitled "The Feeling of Power".

I had removed that blog entry, but here is a link to the full text.

I was recently reminded of it by two things. The first was that I was reading a blog entry at Walking Randomly which mentioned Maple 14. And I remembered noticing a page on that site before. And the second was ISSAC 2010.

On Tuesday August 10, 2010, the first meeting of an ad hoc group focused on exploring the use of MapleSim in the engineering curriculum met at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.  Faculty from McMaster University, Kettering University, Lawrence Technical University, University of Waterloo, Ryerson University, University of Ontario Inst. of Technology, and the State University of New York (Buffalo and Binghamton).

The full-day workshop provided an ideal...

I've received a suggestion offline saying that I should animate the Pacman. There are two items to animate: Pacman's mouth and pac-dots. To review how pacman's mouth moves, please have a quick look at Google Pacman doodle.

Pacman's mouth only has three stages: open, half open and close. Let's take the pacman that I created in the previous post. Each frame of the animation is done by adjusting the radian values of the "pie" (aka Pacman's body and mouth).

Today is my birthday, and in fact it is also the birthday of at least one other Maplesoft employee (not surprising since more than 23 people work here - considering the generalized birthday problem, I even know of 3 people here who share the same birthday).  Of course, it turns out that birthdays are not evenly distributed through out the year and so I wanted to know if someone with an August birthday is more likely to share than someone with an April birthday. 

Just for fun, I've created a Pac-Man using Maple's plot command:

body := plottools[pieslice]([0, 0], 5, (1/6)*Pi .. 11*Pi*(1/6), color = yellow):
eye := plottools[pieslice]([-1, 2], .5, 0 .. 2*Pi, color = black, filled = true):
plots[display](eye, body, axes = none);

The hairpiece for Ms. Pac-Man can be added easily: