quartic mandelbrot 060703

quartic mandelbrot 060703
Originally uploaded by rabinal.

MGJ sent me a link to visionsofchaos, whose software generated this image which comes top of the popular/interesting rank at www.flickr.com/photos/rabinal/

I am now trying to recover some old C programs, by writing a new image driver for them using GD and the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C/C++ at Bloodshed (google it).

The original chaos work and fractal generation dates from the early 1980s, before I became Editor of the IJE.

Mathematics and Clergy

The Vicar and the Virger are standing in front of the church looking up at the West door, over which is inscribed the year when the church was built.

Vicar:- "It's funny, but that number is the sum of the squares of the ages of my cousin's two daughters"

Virger:-"I can't tell you their ages uniquely. Are they the same age?"

Vicar:-"If I was to tell you that, you'd be able to do the problem, so I'm not telling you."

Virger:-"Aha Vicar, now I know uniquely" and he tells the Vicar the ages of the cousin's two daughters.

When was the church built?

----------------------
credit David W Masser, Nottingham, 1970s. 

Students

This is an observation about students. I seem to remember in the 1960s being considered to be a very bright student. This was probably because I always tried to appear to understand everything that was said to me in tutorials, and to express my own insights in my own words.

Recently some students have not understood why they are marked down for plagiarising other sources. With the time pressure we are all under nowadays, there is every motivation to submit pre-cooked work for assignments; it saves effort and in its own way requires careful selection and assembly of material. Academics have been doing this for years, with their long lists of sources, references, and bibliographies in published articles. The rules of the game are that one gives credit to other people for their contributions.

Plagiarism by students wears down the academics, who instead of providing helpful feedback, spend hours searching for likely prime sources for what they are reading. Often the work goes through undetected, to be quoted anew by later plagiarists.

Eventually, people ask about everything, "where did that come from?" which is unsettling if the work in question really IS novel and original.

Strange attractor

sec2 - attractor
Originally uploaded by rabinal.

Follow the links from the picture to see what this might be all about other than just being a pretty proto-biological pattern.

Ball games

Teams

DJ Ecuador
CJ Iran
CV Australia

9th June 2006
Ecuador 2
Poland 0
Yay!

12th June 2006
Australia 3
Japan 1
Yay!

15th June 2006
Ecuador 3
Costa Rica 0
Yay! Yay!

21st June 2006
Summer Solstice
Iran 1
Angola 1
Yay!

22nd June 2006
Australia 2
Croatia 2
Yay! Sigh of relief!

Parus Caeruleus

Parus Caeruleus 2006 at 14th May

Newly hatched eggs. There is another nestbox waiting to hatch, a few days later. The site below will show both boxes.

For birds see

www.flickr.com/photos/parus2006/

For other topics see also

www.flickr.com/photos/rabinal/

LP record processing

CJ's method:-

Use Mac powerbook laptop or other Mac
Use iMic (Griffin) line-to-usb input converter
Use decent turntable, play record and capture as .wav file on Mac using free "final vinyl" software from griffin site.
Use "max" software (google it) to convert .wav to .mp4 file.
One Vinyl LP occupies 40MB as .mp4
Play .mp4 on iPod or Mac directly.

Windows users, play using realplayer
Download freebie realplayer (NOT full version)
Go to realplayer site, click on 5th tab along saying "realplayer" and choose "basic version" for download.
About 17 LP records fit on one CD as .mp4