What's New - June 2004
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June
17, 2004: Here's a small update to the Scientific
Grapher program with better default values if two series
are being plotted and the ability to control the scale of the
dependent variable. I also added Fermat's Spiral to the
sample curve files.
By the way, it has been reported
that practitioners of omphaloskepsis, (contemplating one's
navel), use Fermat's Spiral as
their symbol. I'll admit though, that my
search for "Omphaloskepsis" images turned up lots of
belly buttons, but few spirals.
June 14, 2004: I've been trading problems and puzzles with a bright young lady I met at the Destination Imagination Global finals a couple of weeks ago. She sent me this one the other day: Insert +, -, x, ÷ symbols into the digits 99999 to make an expression that equals 10.
It's not too difficult to find one, but I thought she deserved to see all possible solutions. Besides, I'm trying to convince her programming would be a great career choice. So here is ExpressionsForBethe, which solves not only this problem but similar problems for any given set of digits evaluating to any given value.
June 11, 2004: Here's an update to the Computational Geometry page over in Delphi Techniques section that adds the solution to this problem: . Given a point and a polygon, determine if the point is enclosed by the polygon.
How to do it? Hint: Draw a long line from the red dot in this
image in any direction that doesn't pass through any
vertices. Notice that your line intersects an
even number of polygon edges.
June 9, 2004: I uploaded a
revised version today of the DFF Play CD, a file that contains
executable versions of 60+ programs from this site. I put it
together last December for use in our schools
here. The file includes an autorun file to start
automatically from a CD but will run fine from a hard
drive. There's a loader program, Programload.exe,
used to select programs by category (Science, Math,
Games, Puzzles, Tricks). If you run it from hard drive or if
auto start is not enabled on your PC, start by double
clicking the loader
program, . The zipped DFF Play
CD file is about 20mb in
size.
I plan future updates with additions, deletions, and enhanced versions, so pertinent feedback with bugs reports or suggestions will be appreciated as always.
In the process of updating the CD, I ran across a few typos and minor bugs. As a result, new versions of Brute Force, Card Trick, and Magic Matrix programs have been uploaded.