I just spent the majority of my day sitting in front of a computer screen trying to do a math project on an absolutely ridiculous program known as Mathematica. Actually, the program itself is pretty cool, but neither my partner nor I really knew what on Earth we were doing. We were given a packet of problems to work and basically set loose to work them how we pleased. The first several problems were pretty straight forward, but the second to last was just a series of 3D graphs of what they called a spherical lock. Basically it was two domes that we had to animate to close simultaneously, one right outside the other. No numbers or anything. We were just given the pictures and told to replicate them. We looked up the equation for a sphere (hooray for Wikipedia!) and then cut the intervals in half to make our domes. Now the problem was how to animate them. We tried about a million different things until suddenly I stumbled upon a way to combine 4 different half domes to get the 2 domes we needed. The only problem was, they didn't combine into 2 domes until halfway through the animation. To make it look like we had it right all along, we just changed the animation so it would start in the middle and go to the end, so no one ever has to know that we didn't really do it right. Our teacher will probably realize this, but he's more of a set you free then when you inevitably do it wrong, he'll just explain it and give you an A for effort kind of teacher.
The problem after the lock problem was all about launching projectiles off of a tower on a hill, and I won't even get into that. We stared at it until we got kicked out of the computer lab in the math building because they were closing. We relocated to the library and stared at it some more. Finally, we made up some stuff that seemed at least halfway right and called it a day. We have one more Mathematica project this semester. I am looking forward to the future when Mathematica will be a thing of my past.
P.S. I was trying to find a picture similar to the spherical lock we were animating to give you a better idea of what we were doing, but instead of locks coming up in Google images when I typed in spherical lock, this picture came up instead. Go figure.
P.P.S. What were they thinking?
P.P.P.S. I wonder how much that cost...
2 comments:
OOoo, one of the creepier cakes from the cakewrecks blog.
I never did anything in the business lab because they kept "business" hours: 8-5. What college student can work under those conditions?
'cause everyone wants a life-size cake of themselves...
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