What's New -  January, 2009

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January 25, 2009: 

One more math posting for this month, a demo of the multivariate Newton-Raphson method for solving systems of  non-linear equations.   It only implements quadratic equations with up to 4 variables, but if you want to calculate the square root of 99 to 12 decimal places, or, as in the example at right,  find the intersection points of a couple of conic sections, or find the intersection points for three spheres, this may be just the ticket.
  

January 19, 2009:  GPS receivers have chips that perform some pretty sophisticated math to convert satellite messages into the current receiver coordinates.   Today's Point from 4 Sensors program scratches the surface of the problem. 

January 13, 2009:  Think you could mentally flip a coin 100 times and fool a statistics professor into believing that you had recorded actual flip results?  Probably not.  But if you feel the need to try, play with this Coin Flip Run Lengths program first!

 

January 5, 2009:

 Holidays are over for now, time to get back on the diet and to get back to work, physical and mental.  For the mental part, today's Four-Bar Linkage program is the first version of a mechanical linkage simulation that seems worthy of posting.   A search of DFF for "linkages" produced only one hit before today.  In an August 2002 Newsletter I wrote "I've been working on a mechanical linkages simulator program this week, but it's going to take at least another week to get anything even close to working."   Guess I underestimated the complexity of that task!.  It has taken 60+ hours to get today's posting which only scratches the surface of the "mechanical linkage simulation" topic.   I'll  be working on simpler projects for awhile to let my brain recover from the strain

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