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12:30 PM

@R.M @Szabolcs I can publish now - I added a little bit of text to the post but I don't think it's essential if the notebook isn't word for work identical

Can someone please offer a second pair of eyes? mathematica.blogoverflow.com/…

I work at a place where we have three separate proofreaders on everything that gets published, plus management reading it over and over. So I'm constitutionally incapable of pushing "publish" without someone else oking it.

Szabolcs

@Verbeia I'm going to read through it again.

Verbeia

@Szabolcs great - thanks for dropping by - much appreciated

We should probably work out a process for this (you know, person 1 writes it, person 2 edits it and person 3 proofreads it).

Szabolcs

@Verbeia First suggestion: let's link to the WRI blog post you mentioned.

I think when another article is mentioned, there should be a link right there. It really bothers me when newpapers omit link (newpapers love to do that)

Verbeia

12:46 PM

@Szabolcs completely forgot - done now. Do I need to reshare, or do you have edit powers?

Szabolcs

Is this the one you mean?

Verbeia

I've added it, and yes, that's the one.

Szabolcs

@Verbeia no need to reshare

Mr.Wizard

@Verbeia IMHO: (1) I would merge the second and third sentences in the first paragraph. (2) I would leave out "Fortunately, we had Mathematica." as this is not a marketing piece. Probably also "none of this would have been possible without Mathematica." as the rest of the post should speak for itself. (3) WRI always italicizes Mathematica and I would follow suit, simply to reinforce the fact that Mathematica is a distinct product.

Szabolcs

@Verbeia Take a look at this sentence please: "Next, color in the segments with a light grey background (that’s the colour3 rule set), and the segments according to how far they are from the center (the colour4 rule set). "

Spelling is again inconsistent, some of it is American and some Commonwealth (I always notice color -- colour). Can we make that consistent within a single post, whichever standard we choose?

Mr.Wizard

12:55 PM

@Szabolcs Agreed.

Szabolcs

I thought I corrected it to Commonwealth spelling yesterday

Verbeia

@Szabolcs Sorry, I changed it back. The functions are colour but everything else is "color". I got cold feet about using Commonwealth spelling for a global audience.

@Szabolcs See what you think of the new version.

Szabolcs

@Verbeia Please don't! There are 800 million people in Europe, most of whom are taught the British spelling rules when learning English

We are not native speakers, but we are part of that global audience.

Verbeia

@Mr.Wizard (1), (2) and (3) all done

@Szabolcs Ok, will change back

I'd missed the second paragraph anyway.

Szabolcs

It up to you really, I don't want to make you work extra. :-) just don't have a bad feeling about using it, if you do prefer it yourself :)

Mr.Wizard

1:01 PM

@Verbeia :-) I like the finish much better now.

jVincent

Quick suggestion: use something like ngon[n_: 5] :=
Polygon[Table[
N[{Cos[t], Sin[t]}], {t, Pi/2, 5/2 Pi - 2 Pi/n, 2 Pi/n}]]; Rather then the rigidly defined p5 and p7. It makes the final code easier to mess around with.

Szabolcs

I'm finished reading :-)

Verbeia

@jVincent It's a good suggestion but I wanted to stay true to the code we actually used.

@Szabolcs Thanks - I've changed the spelling back to Commonwealth.

Szabolcs

Once we have 5 or so posts up, I'm going to post an announcement about the blog on MathGroup. But not just yet. Let's have more content first. (Steve C won't let me post more than one announcement.)

Verbeia

I'm just going to go clean my teeth (step away from the computer for a while), come back, read through one more time and hit publish. Should be just a few more minutes.

jVincent

1:07 PM

I understand the motivation, however I would argue that this is pretty true to the used code, it's just a better encapsulation intended for the purpose of allowing readers to mess around with it. Having the final logo change shape by switching from ngon[7] to ngon[3] seems much more in the spirit then having to c/p the definition for p7 make a new one for p3 and then replacing it.

Mr.Wizard

@Verbeia This can always be editing after publishing, right? (I'd know if I'd get off my duff and get more involved.)

@jVincent Since I see Verbeia's point of remaining true to the history of the logo, perhaps posting a newly refined version at the bottom of the post would be an option? It might in fact be interesting to contrast the two: incremental development vs. refactored code.

Or not. :-)

jVincent

Can the grayed out scrollbars be removed?

Szabolcs

@jVincent They will be removed, when the new theme is launched.

Please ignore them for now.

acl

@Verbeia you probably want to change "Wolfram’s layers" to "Wolfram’s lawyers"!

Verbeia

@Mr.Wizard My suggestion would be to have another post, in a week or two from now, showing a more general play-with-polygons framework. @jVincent are you volunteeering ;-)

@acl good catch! Can you tell I wrote this in an airport lounge on an iPad?

Ok folks, I'm going live now.

And it's done!

Szabolcs

1:15 PM

Mr.Wizard

@Verbeia Jin is working to get rid of the unnecessary scroll bars on the code boxes, right?

Verbeia

thanks everyone for your last-minute help - I'm off to bed

Mr.Wizard

Sleep well!

Verbeia

@Mr.Wizard I don't know - was that mentioned in meta?

Goodnight!

Szabolcs

in Stack Exchange Community Blogs, yesterday, by Grace Note

@Szabolcs This is already in the pipeline

Mr.Wizard

1:17 PM

Thanks.

Stack Exchange

1:34 PM

Mathematica - Stack Exchange Blog: Build Your Own Logo with Mathematica (and a Few Friends)

verbeia on July 26, 2012

Mathematica has powerful graphics capabilities that can be used to explore the space of graphical forms in a very flexible way. Wolfram Research itself has already published a blog post showing how to manipulate various corporate logos, so it should be no surprise that the Mathematica StackExchange community came up with its own logo – not once, but twice! – and that we did it using Mathematica.

This isn’t my story alone. wxffles had the original idea; J.M. came up with a variant that allowed the colouring to be defined in a very granular way. I took their code and started playing with it, and …

4 hours later…