Wolfram Mathematica - 2012-07-02

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12:01 AM

@MrWizard There shouldn't be a problem; the blog being independent from SE and all, you should be able to do whatever you want, and express any opinion you have there freely.

@MrWizard since the Q&A are all CC-BY-SA, you're well within your rights to do whatever you want with the material. Personally I would have no problem with it and don't really see why anyone else would object either.

12:15 AM

Rep reset!

Ready to get to 10K

@Rojo You did!

Congrats :)

WOOOHOOOOOOO

Let's calculate the happy magic prime 10K!

881249

Thanks @RM

Got my +2 as well. (+1.5?)

@Rojo get ready for that awkward feeling when you realize nothing has really changed :D

@MrWizard no, certainly not (and even if it did upset someone, I don't see why you'd need to take into account their opinion, it being your blog)

12:20 AM

@Rojo BTW, I had meant to say, I really liked your solution for the happy numbers problem. Very neat indeed.

@acl, he's from Gryffindor, he cares

@Rojo 50 POINTS TO GRYFFINDORRRRR!

wow, I had to goole that... shame on me

@RM that's only because I haven't got to 20K yet. That's where everything changes

Thanks @OleksandrR

Hm... I'm not really into Pokémon.

12:21 AM

@MrWizard I don't think it's a question of upsetting anybody. RM expressed it well in his answer on meta, I think.

@OleksandrR I like this more than @acl's comment

@RM Even if it is stolen from xkcd ;)

@OleksandrR That one is so old, I forgot that it was XKCD :)

@RM yeah, so did I. Not really a huge fan of xkcd but that one was good.

has there been a blog post?

@RM next time I'll try harder :)

12:26 AM

@acl no, the first (introductory post) will go up when we graduate...

or were you asking Mr.Wiz? ;)

@RM no, I saw Rojo saying "I was reading the blog and saw that it was a wanted feature" (about his discovery of a profiler in mma) and wondered what blog he was referring to

in fact, which blog are you referring to @Rojo?

@acl, I didn't mean what I said. I meant the meta question on the blog topics, and one last post of Afslkas (or something like that) proposing posts on profiling

and their comments

Nothing personal Afslkas, I'm just bad with names, ask @rcollyer / rycoller

I missed that, I'll read up, @rjoo

Rojo was a man who thought he was a loner
But he knew it wouldn't last.
Rojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona
For some California grass.

Get back, get back.
Get back to where you once belonged

@RM Very poetic

12:38 AM

Haha

@Rojo Rojo the cowboy

speaking of music, I went to a concert by Lou Reed last night. My girlfriend and I were by far the youngest people around... made me feel much better

@belisarius, el chico vaca

@belisarius, sounds better in English...

yep

1:18 AM

@Rojo This.

1:48 AM

@MrWizard I see, so you plan to start a personal blog to expand on answers that have been underappreciated or something like that?

2:03 AM

I don't see how that wouldn't be a positive thing. It wouldn't compete against this site.

9 hours later…

11:11 AM

@Rojo That is indeed "Being Bad With Names". But don't worry, no offence taken:)

1 hour later…

12:29 PM

@MrWizard Your "personal blog" seems a great idea. Now you should start collecting an equivalence class for the sentence And then there is that stupid answer ...

1:28 PM

<- hangs new wallpaper, as it was looking a little drab in here

2:03 PM

WRI support is great:

mma tells me to send them some error message it pops up:

user image

I send it and am told that the Home Edition does not provide technical support.

What a great way to make me feel like I haven't wasted my time sending them this info.

2

(sorry for venting)

@acl I had that happen to me as well.

@Heike I am tempted to send them instead my license number from work, to see what this Premier Support would do about this dialog box.

@Heike You'd think that they'd have set it up so that reporting this sort of thing would result in an acknowledgement or something. oh well

When messages like this ask me to describe what I was doing when the error occurred I'm always tempted to write something like "reading my email" or "drinking coffee" or so.

@acl I wonder what happens to the automatically generated error reports I get when a program on my mac crashes.

@Heike flickeflu.com/groups/1223310@N20

@Heike they go to some apple server. presumably, not much happens to them

I don't let them leave as I don't like the idea of someone looking at a list of threads running on my machine when the thing crashed

if you allow the log to be sent, it's sent encrypted, so I am not sure if they send anything else.

what is interesting is that if you use the curated data thing, mma sends requests unencrypted and includes your license. all unencrypted

or so it did a couple of years ago when I checked.

@acl I rarely send a crash report since I don't think they will make any difference.

@acl Curated data thing?

The thing that annoys me is that so many programs seem to need administrator rights to install themselves. I'm always a bit worried when I type in my administrator name and password when I have no idea what a .pkg is actually installing.

2:21 PM

I mean if you use CounteyData, for example

Isn't that what it's called?

@szabolcs Please read the comments to this post. Thanks.

@acl It is. I hadn't heard of that term either until early in the private beta when JM tagged those questions as curated-data

@Heike it's because the applications folder is located on /... you'll need to enter your password to do anything to any folder on /.

@RM I understand the reason, but for all I know they're putting some stuff in other folders as well.

oh, yeah sure... that is always a worry.

You can try using sudo opensnoop -p <pid of process> to see what files it's accessing/writing

@RM Seems useful. I didn't know about opensnoop

3:02 PM

@acl that is definitely the case for W|A, but not AFAICT for the curated data. If you send some nonsense in place of your licence and activation ID then W|A refuses to give you any results.

3:14 PM

@acl oh no, you're right, I found that part in the paclet manager too. Again if you send nonsense it won't play ball.

3:48 PM

@heike there is a spotlight viewer showing you what the pkg contains

There is opensnoop and also at least one GUI program showing the files being accessed in real time

@oleks you can simply capture and read the packets sent, they are unencrypted. I don't know anything other than it sends the license number unencrypted

@acl it's referenced in Manager.m. It sends the $LicenseID, $MachineID, and $ActivationID.

@acl in the old days it used to be the case that if you knew the $LicenseID you could basically do anything, like log into someone else's premier service for example. But nowadays security seems better.

4:04 PM

@OleksandrR Don't they work with activation codes nowadays?

@acl I'll try that next time I'm installing a .pkg

@Heike yes, exactly.

4:37 PM

@Heike here's what I had in mind if you haven't found it:

mothersruin.com/software/SuspiciousPackage

5:02 PM

@RM I don't think that's the reason, eg, cd /Applications followed by echo 'I exist'>test.txt happily produces test.txt without sudo

5:22 PM

Hi everyone ! Found this snipped of code online http://www.math.harvard.edu/archive/21b_fall_04/exhibits/soundmix/index.html

a=Import["scherzo.wav"];
type=a[[1,2]]; n=Length[a[[1,1,1]]];
It is stereo file, what is the function of a[[1,2]] and a[[1,1,1]] ?

5:53 PM

@newprint Head[a[[1]]] is equal to SampledSoundList so a[[1,2]] will be the sampling rate and Length[a[[1,1,1]]] the number of samples.

@Heike How did you came up with this information ? FullForm ?

No, I just ran Head[a[[1]]]

And looked at the help entries for Sound and SampledSoundList

podcasts.ox.ac.uk/computation-and-future-mathematics-video "Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, gives a talk about the future of mathematics and computation"

@acl acl, please send me a message at arnoudb@wolfram.com and I will look into what happened here. Apologies.

SampledSoundList[{Subscript[a, 1],Subscript[a, 2],...},r] Oh, ok, so Head[a[[1,2]]] will be the "r" which is sample rate !

6:04 PM

@newprint No, not Head[a[[1,2]]], just a[[1,2]]

@acl You're right, else you can't drag files from a dmg to the applications folder. Must be with writing to /Library

@RM That depends if the user is in the admin group.

@Heike hmm.. so if you're not admin, it simply writes to ~/Library without prompting for admin password?

@RM I meant that since my normal account isn't in the admin group I can't write to /Applications without sudo.

@Heike If a[[1,2]] is "r", what than a[[1,1,1]] in terms of SampledSoundList[{Subscript[a, 1],Subscript[a, 2],...},r] ??

6:12 PM

@Heike Mine is in the admin group and it still asks for pkg files. dmgs, I can simply drag-drop

@newprint a[[1, 1, 1]] will be Subscript[a, 1] in this case.

@RM I deliberately removed mine from the admin group and created a separate admin user.

@ArnoudBuzing ok will do that. thanks

@MrWizard I've a lot to do this week, haven't had much time to work on this. But I did start working on some improvement recently. There are some problems I need to fix before checking them in.

I think ordinary users (or at least the primary user) are in the admin group by default but I read somewhere that it's safer this way.

That's why it annoys me that I need to give programs root permissions to write their stuff to disk. It sort of defeats the purpose.

yeah, it probably is safer your way

6:20 PM

@RM but more of a hassle as well.

6:34 PM

Hi!

Hi, @belisarius

What is the easiest way to do this kind of thing

DSolve[-Derivative[1][f][1/x] == x x f[x], f[x], x]

@belisarius something like this? :P

@RM Is that the mma.SE equivalent of LMGTFY?

hehe... only, less helpful

6:59 PM

@RM Very helpful ! >p

1 hour later…

8:08 PM

when I copy the long string of numbers, Ma gives me this slashes mixed in with numbers just like this "43167235574019\800582550372"

Helloo

Hi !

Hi @newprint

@Rojo Hi Red

Hi @belisarius

How's it going?

8:17 PM

@Rojo Rainy

Hehe

At least the ceiling does not leak

Good for you. I had to went through mud to get to work

an hour and a half away

only to be released at midday because they were leaving

:)

@Rojo You should abandon your rural way of life and come to the city

Hehe

I live in Caballito

8:22 PM

@Rojo Little Horse

That's right

Sounds Siouxy

in Good Airs

Hey, something unimportant that I was trying earlier... How would you turn a parametric region into one defined by equalities and such?

For example, say the circle, ParametricPlot[{Cos[2 Pi t], Sin[2 Pi t]}, {t, 0, 2 Pi}]

That's just an example

I thought of Resolve[Exists[t, 0 <= t < 2 Pi, Cos[2 Pi t] == x && Sin[2 Pi t] == y]] but it never returns

and you want what kind of expr instead?

x x + y y ==1

Something that can be fed to RegionPlot, something without "t"

That's right

8:25 PM

@Rojo Eliminate[Thread[{x, y} == {Cos[2 Pi t], Sin[2 Pi t]}], t] ?

That returns 1 - y^2 == x^2

Humm, that's good @Heike

Eliminate[] sounds like Obliterate[], Murder[] ..

Exterminate[]

Assimilate[]

IAmADalik

Erradicate[]

AnimationRate[] (?)

Be back in a min

(I meant Dalek)

Back

Hi @RM

8:34 PM

I am still trying to digest what the OP in the bitvectors question is trying to do

@belisarius So am I

too many delayed defs

@belisarius And constructions like a:=b;Return[a]

yep

@Heike Example

o := Table[ADD[fa, fb, i], {i, 0, n}];
Return[o];

a/:Label[a]:=Goto[a:=Return[a]]

8:38 PM

Time for an uncomplicated film. If only I could decide which one.

I like that you can do stuff in such weird ways

@Heike, you are a stupid movie regular?

@Heike Want an uncomplicated film? Pick anything from Hollywood

@Rojo stupid movie regular?

@Heike, I mean, have you seen all the "very uncomplicated not to say terribly stupid" classics, like, say Zoolander, the wedding crashers

Instead I am just a regular stupid

8:41 PM

@belisarius Some Hollywood films are actually worth watching

@Heike yep. mine was an over generalization

@Rojo I can't stand films like that.

but pretty close

Haha, ok, not so "uncomplcated" then

My tolerance for stupid movies grows a lot with good popcorn

Mine grows with complicated work

8:42 PM

@Rojo I've narrowed it down to either the incredibles, finding nemo or shrek

finding Nemo is the better one

@Rojo Eliminate[BabyMonsterGroupB[]]

@Heike, haven't seen any of those?

I think I meant that last one to belisarius

@Rojo I've seen all of them at least once

Finding nemo more than the other 2

8:46 PM

@RM Do you mean I am a baby monster, or just that I should be eliminated?

@belisarius how do I choose between chocolate and icecream?

I'll go with both: you're a baby monster that should be eliminated

@RM Diabetus !!!!!!!

@RM Ok. Agree.

There should be an "insults with Mathematica" contest

use of DictionaryLookup[] or W|A not allowed

@RM Are visual insults allowed?

8:51 PM

Manipulate[OwnValues[]] is shorthand for "go f*** yourself"

@Heike Good point. No, and neither is Import*

@belisarius, hahaha

Catch[DownValues[]] is a metaphor for when things get hot

in spirit of Borat SexyTime[]

After seeing Borat in a theater, I gave my self a promise, that I will never go to movie theater ever again. I hold this promise to this day

@newprint you should've gone for Brüno

9:01 PM

I have seen clips of it ......

enough said

If[Length@BabyMonsterGroupB, Break@Colon]

&& Colorize@Bottom

Red

Alright gentlemen, wish me luck, I have Numerical Analysis exam. Talk to you later

Axis->Large

Bottom==Placeholder

This is getting out of control

@RM You coward!

Yeah

This proves MMA is too verbose

9:07 PM

@Rojo Heh, insults are harder than random silliness

Yeah

Show[TitsGroupT]

Haha

@RM

continuing on that line

Remove@Bra

As @Leonid once eloquently put it:

Hold[ package["myPackage", inContext["Private"]]]`

Haha

9:09 PM

@newprint Good luck

@RM, a lame insult could be

Mean

but it could be less lame

Factorial2[Mean]

or, in standard form Mean!!

@acl it took him a while to realize that

@RM I only noticed it once yoda pointed it out, but then it screamed out

@RM What? his package?

What are you all, 8?

I'm going to read a book and be back in a min

9:11 PM

@Rojo I am 12 and what is this?

@Rojo Maybe in tortoise years.

@OleksandrR Keep your eyes shut

If you open them when I say so , you were cheating

Hahaa

Good luck @newprint

@Rojo the discussion in the past hour is the best mindset to walk into an exam

@acl you know when you search the documentation and every time you get "x matches on Wolfram sites" in the top right hand corner? That query submits your $LicenseID and $MachineID in the clear too, apparently.

9:18 PM

What is the name in English of the game where you try to get from one word to another changing one letter at a time, with all the intermediate words being in the dictionary?

I was thinking how to solve it with Mma

Couple of votes needed to remove this one... it's been 2 hours since my nice comment and he has been around to ask a question and accept an answer since then

@belisarius, there was a post on the wolfram blog on that I think

word ladder

The longest word ladder ever

Something like that

@Rojo Thanks

@Rojo what's a word ladder?

THINK -> THICK -> CHICK-> CLICK

@RM

9:23 PM

ah, I see.

I was now trying to make a function

that takes a list of 1s and 0s

and returns the position of the "center" of the consecutive sequences of 1s

rounding down if there are an even number of 1's

the positionS

Don't ask me how I ended up with this

getPosMiddleOnes[l_List] := Flatten@Position[#, 1] &[
Split@l /.
r : {1 ..} :> ((# /. {1, j__, 1} :> {0, #0@{j}, 0}) &[
r]) /. {1, 1} :> {1, 0} // Flatten // Quiet]

A good psychiatrist would understand what it says about my state

@OleksandrR oh. let me check

@OleksandrR, they were just insulting each other in MMA language

@Rojo Very nice function. Are you sure you can find it a purpose?

@belisarius, I was needing it. I had a list of sample points of a function, needed to find peaks. So, UnitStep[list, threshold] gave a list of 1s and 0s

I want the position of the peaks

as halfway between those sequences of 1s.

9:33 PM

@Rojo There are a few questions on that problem

So I made that probably unefficient but fun function

There are?

Yep.

@OleksandrR hm yes... sends license, mathid etc

So, what can be done with my license and machine id?

@belisarius I once wrote a few different routines to play hangman (in mma). gave me a new appreciation of how inefficient my code can be

@RM I don't know, but why is it necessary to send the query along with personally identifiable information?

9:39 PM

@acl Ha! Nice wording for such a confession

what if I enjoy searching for PinkUnderwear in the mma docs? why should WRI know it?

3

@acl it'll be built in in v9

I wish we knew at least something about what's coming in v9

@Rojo we could write scripts to start searching for "Whats coming in v9" in our docs whenever we're away from the computer.

"they'll" get the message eventually, and tell us

but yes, I agree with your concerns... I'm all for privacy and not sending any more info than absolutely necessary. My question was actually on what could be done with it, and not a rhetorical "why do you worry" question :)

9:47 PM

on the other hand, if you uncheck "allow mathematica to connect to the internet", it doesn't send anything

(in the prefs)

It doesn't seem like license ID alone is all that meaningful... WRI certainly don't bother encrypting it in other communications either. It's present in plain text in all emails from them and also printed on the invoice.

(of course, WRI knows about your pink underwear)... it's more 3rd party sniffing that I'm talking about

@RM right, but it identifies me

@RM I don't have any, which is why I am searching for some in the docs

Plot3D[UnderWear[x],{x,acl}]

10:06 PM

Bye for now

10:55 PM

lol, did I really just try Plot3D[UnderWear[x],{x,acl}], haha, Plot3D::argrx: Plot3D called with 2 arguments; 3 arguments are expected. >>

So when is the next version coming up? I hope they don't change the documentation too much. I'd also like to be able to search for underwear there...

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