One of the newsletters I subscribe to described the following ‘bug’ in Excel. If you sum the following numbers by hand then you get a result of zero:
-127551.73
103130.41
1807.75
7390.11
9028.59
2831.26
1568.90
1794.71
but if you use Excel to sum these numbers then you get a result of about 8.6402e-12 which, shock, horror, is not zero. So, clearly there is a bug, Excel sucks and we can all have a happy rant about Microsoft’s incompetence. Right?
Wrong! Excel is behaving exactly as I would expect it too and you should expect it to behave this way too. First of all let us determine that this ‘bug’ doesn’t just occur in Excel. Fire up your copy of Matlab (or the open source equivalent, Octave ) and type
-127551.73+103130.41+1807.75+7390.11+9028.59+2831.26+1568.90+1794.71
The result?
8.6402e-12 - exactly the same as Excel.
Either you come to the conclusion that 3 different development teams have produced software ...
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Demonstrations for Pi DayFrom: walkingrandomly.com
Post Date: 2008-03-07 03:57:04
Next Friday will be March 14th which is celebrated by some as Pi Day since the date is 3/14 in American date format and the first three digits of Pi are 3.14 (as if I have to tell you!). One or two people have been looking for inspiration as to what to do for Pi Day in schools and I thought that it would be fun to write a Wolfram Demonstration especially for Pi Day, after all, my Valentine’s day demonstrations turned out to be quite popular .
So the question that rem...
more What’s new in Mathematica 6.0.2?From: walkingrandomly.com
Post Date: 2008-03-12 09:07:34
I have been playing with the new release of Mathematica for a little while now and thought that I would share what I have found. Now, as indicated by the small increment in version number, this is a minor release and so we should not be expecting anything earth shattering. The sort of things that one expects in a minor release like this include things such as bug-fixes, small performance enhancements, documentation upgrades etc. So…let’s see what he have got.
First on the list...
more Mathematica 6.0.2 installation on UbuntuFrom: walkingrandomly.com
Post Date: 2008-03-10 07:13:11
Mathematica 6.0.2 was released back on February 25th but I have only just managed to find the time to install it. I tried to install it on a brand new Dell 755 with a very fresh install of Ubuntu but near the end of the install procedure I came across the following error
“The installer was unable to check for a valid password file. Your Mathematica installation may be incomplete or corrupted.”
I had not been given the opportunity to supply it with any licensing information s...
more My Recipie for a Mathematica Easter EggFrom: walkingrandomly.com
Post Date: 2008-03-14 11:02:25
1.Take one dare from Kathryn Cramer and obtain a picture from her website.
2. Steal ideas from this demonstration by Jeff Bryant.
3. Type the following incantations into Mathematica
SetDirectory[”/home/mike/Desktop/random”];
image = Import[”kramer.jpg”];
xpos[x_] := Floor[x/N[2/374.] + 377/2.]
ypos[x_] := Floor[x/N[2/499.] + 502/2.]
imcol[x_, y_] := image[[1]][[1]][[xpos[x]]][[ypos[y]]]/256.;
a = 1; b = 0.9; c = 1;
Plot3D[{Sqrt[ c^2*(1 - (x^2/a^...
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