@halirutan, I'm familiar with Trefethen from the SIAM 100-digit challenge and his stuff on conformal mappings. I decided to look around on his site when I came across this essay.
Wonders of esoteric formats... Shapeways has their own SVX voxel format for 3D printing - which is conveniently just stacks of per-attribute PNGs in a ZIP file with some XML metadata on the side. For some tasks, this is much more convenient than polygonal mesh. They don't actually state that they support uploads on that format, though...
I've had sufficient amount of pain with mesh generation in Mma; I gladly move to producing that format instead.
A stupid hobby: printing mathematical objects in polished silver...
BTW: how feasible it is to build domain-specific geometric editor UIs with Mma? I'm mostly thinking of click-selecting geometric objects on a multi-object view and defining relations (such as "these objects are constrained to have distance of at least X") between them, which would then be visualized in the view, and eventually processed...
I have been trying to create polymer chain. Using this code : a = 1; x = y = 0; p = {}; For[i = 1, i < 100, i++, p = Append[p, {x, y}]; dtheta = Random[NormalDistribution[0, 0.3]]; {x, y} = {x, y} + {a Cos[dtheta], a Sin[dtheta]};]
@MichaelHale: I need to create a two-dimensional polymer path of equal length segments, where the orientation of each segment is changed from the orientation of the previous segment by an angle difference dtheta that is taken from a normal distribution with standard deviation sigma in radians.
I did this anglePath[RandomVariate[NormalDistribution[0, .2], 100], a]
the problem is it would be different from the ordinates that I used to make the polymer before right? Is there a way to put some seed so that I would get same set of co-ordinates for that seed?
@psimeson You could reset a random seed, but normal in this situation would be to just store the anglePath results in a variable and then use those coordinates in the graphics and wherever else you need.
Thanks a lot @MichaelHale. Could you please explain how anglePath[angles_, length_] := FoldList[# + length {Cos@#2, Sin@#2} &, {0, 0}, Accumulate@angles] works? Why does your code appear in such nice format in the chat?
Would starting another instance of Mathematica confuse the first one allready up on my windows PC? I am running long computation on the first one, and I am afraid if I start second Mathematica (so I can do something on another notebook) it might break the first Mathematica running or confuse it?
I know one is allowed to start 2 Mathematica instances on the same PC.
May be I'll just try it and find out. I could always reboot if it hangs.
Well, I tried it. After little bit I got message from the first instance "The kernel Local has quit (exited) during the course of an evaluation." I do not know if this is due to my running a second instance of Mathematica or not.
@MichaelHale I usually plan to waste one whole week if I update an OS. So many things will break, and many new things to reset to get things the way they used to work.
Not as much luck searching for interesting things in symbolic systems as cellular automata. Most interesting one I've found so far isn't nearly as interesting as some that Wolfram found.
I'm going to revisit network automata next, but look at adding types to vertices and edges to see if there is rampant complexity in that space.
