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January 8, 2012 Delphi For Fun Newsletter #62 Best wishes to all for a happy and prosperous new year! We had a good holiday season. I now have a new stack of books to work through in the coming months in case real winter ever arrives. It looks like program production slowed in the past quarter most likely because the programmer (me) is slowing down. The two posted in December were pretty satisfying though; first, an dragstrip timing tree simulator which drives an external relay board to operate a physical tree built by one of our viewers. The second is an earth satellite simulator. One of the books in my unread stack is "An Introduction to Celestial Mechanics" so I hope to tackle multiple interacting orbital bodies this year. In the meantime here are the new posting in the last quarter of 2011. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- October 14, 2011: We're back home from a short hiatus visiting a grandson at college, Williamsburg Colonial village, Jamestown, Yorktown, and the Virginia Sate Fair. A Yorktown, I picked up "The Campaign That Won America, The Story of Yorktown" by Burke Davis and I've found it fascinating reading even though there is not an equation or puzzle in it. The main takeaway for me: the French played a crucial role in winning our independence from evil old Britain. I may have to reconsider my opinion of things François. I posted another update today to a program included in our Wordstuff program, Unscramble this time. I added an option to handle cases where, rather than being scrambled, words are "interlaced". Letters for 2 or 3 words appear in the correct order but interspersed with letters of the other words. A new checkbox on the Unscramble form indicates that the letters represent interlaced words. The sample set of 17 letters included on the form represents 3 synonymous words in a puzzle from a recent Mensa Puzzle Calendar page. I did not successfully identify the words using human brainpower, but the program finds them in several ways in a minute or two.
October 21, 2011: Scrambled Letter Blocks was posted today in our Delphi Techniques section. The puzzle is from the October 17 page of my 2011 Mensa 365 Brain Puzzlers Calendar
"Form six 9-letter words by combining two 3-letter blocks below with each ending already placed in the grid. All blocks will be used. If you do it correctly, one of the vertical columns will spell a bonus word. Use these groups to complete the words in the grid: AFT, ARC, BET, DEM, ERG, HEN, KEB, ROT, SCO, SNA, UND, YST" |
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A satellite with initial altitude of 1000 miles and 15000 mph velocity will circle the earth in 100 minutes at altitudes from 1000 down to 100 miles above surface |
December 18, 2011: Whew! It has been a busy month between deer hunting, Christmas preparations, and educating myself about how satellites manage to orbit the earth. A decent little 4 point buck is in the freezer, the Mission style bookcase for the wife's scrapbooks finished, and Earth-Sat Satellite Simulator Version 1 was posted today.
Of the three activities, the
simulator took the most time by far, but I now have a pretty good handle on how
and why satellites manage to stay in the sky. I'll be checking and
cleaning up the documentation in the next day or two, but I believe the
program is in pretty good shape.
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter. ~Mark Twain
Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional. ~Chili Davis
Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes
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