What Makes an Equation Beautiful
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Readers of Physics World magazine recently were asked an interesting question: Which equations are the greatest?
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The Islamic pattern-making process appears to have involved an advanced math of quasi crystals.
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This week we look at valid names, declaring, initializing and displaying variables and mixed data types. We conclude this section with an introduction to form variables. By Ellie Quigley. 0122
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With varying degrees, all digital cameras produce images with electronic noise, chromatic aberrations, and vignetting. This week you'll learn how to reduce the effects of these imperfections in your RAW files. By O'Reilly Media, Inc. 0708
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Evolt.org has an interesting new article posted today about combining CSS and PHP to display fractions correctly on your pages.   Most of us are uncomfortable with using fractions when writing programs. If we encounter a fraction, we will first convert it into a floating point number (with decimals) and proceed from there. Most programming languages would prefer to use 0.5 as opposed to 1/2 because the later might conflict with the syntax of the languages. In this article, I will discuss my attempt to work with fractions in one of the PHP projects that I have done.   They start with the CSS to handle the output before moving into the PHP code. The code given will take in a decimal number and do its best to match it up with a fraction string value out of an array. The result is the echoed out with sup and sub tags to create the correct effect.
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Sometimes, the two concepts can blur.
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Microwave brightness of Titan reveals surface properties such as temperature composition and roughness. Image Credit: NASA/JPL. Looking at radar reflections of Titan, scientists are puzzled by what they see
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It's a question of keeping up standards. That famous slab in Paris has lost 50 micrograms, so Australian scientists are creating a perfect sphere out of Silicon 28. They even know how many atoms it'll contain.
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LONDON, Sept 22 (Reuters Life!) - The building blocks of   geometry hardly rank as the perfect formula for a blockbuster   art show.
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An azure lake glimmered while ancient pines loomed nearby. My parents and I admired nature's simple beauty, but does everybody look up from their technological wonders to view the natural ones?  Nature gives us everything from oxygen to the material items we enjoy.
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Asymptote (http://asymptote.sourceforge.net) is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language for technical drawing, inspired by MetaPost but with an improved C++-like syntax. Asymptote provides for figures the same high-quality level of typesetting that LaTeX does for scientific text.    A new picture size routine, which maps specified user coordinates to a given final size, provides a convenient way of forcing the plotted  subregion of a graph to have a fixed size. The correct surface normal is chosen when calculating lighting. The comment character can now be escaped when reading strings from data files (but is disabled when reading raw characters with getc). The new word file mode is useful for reading  white space-delimited strings. PostScript output files are now explicitly designated as EPSF in the header line. The minimum width and height of flowchart blocks may now be controlled separately. Interpolation and knot theory modules were added. The usage of path vs. guide in the base files was  standardized.   https://sourceforge.net/projects/asymptote
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Whereas most of todayâs software tools follow the âbigger is betterâ philosophy, Savvysoftâs (Profile, Products, Articles) TurboExcel proves the adage that great things really do come in small packages.
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On the SitePoint PHP blog today, Troels Knak-Nielsen has written up an article that talks about dependencies in your applications - those little interconnections your code relies on to do more with less.   In lack of better words, I'll call this compositional programming style. It's a style which is usually more prevalent with experienced programmers. [...] There is, however, a dark side to composition - dependencies.   He starts with a definition to bring everyone up to a level field then moves on to how their used (through a "global symbol" or directly passed in) and how they can "leak" if you're not careful.    To help protect you and your code from any kind of damage down the line, Troels suggests making a container to keep objects where they need to be. He even includes an example with namespace support to make things even easier down the road.
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Mathematicians have made a model of the stable manifold of the origin of the Lorenz system - in crochet.
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In a new post to his blog, Jacob Santos talks about why object oriented programming just "isn't easy" - including a few of his dislikes about OOP in PHP.   Functional developers have it easy. Damn straight and I wonder why so many developers choose to write functions, when they can opt for more beautiful classes instead. [...] It is easy to get functions right, all you have to do is prefix them and name them properly and you're done.   He notes that most people get OOP up to a certain point - that being the "has-a" and "is-a" relationships - where things start flying over their heads. He expresses his dislike of the way that Singletons are used (or not used) and places some of the blame on the tutorial and book authors out there trying to teach novice programmers with analogies that don't make sense in a codign situation.
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From the PHP-Coding_Practices.com site, Tim Koschuetzki has posted an interesting suggestion for developers working with long expressions to make thing simpler - substituting temporary variables for portions of the expression.   Introduce Explaining Variable is particularly useful with long if-statements. You can take each condition, introduce an explaining variable and the conditional logic will read very well. Another occasion is a long algorithm where each step in the calculation can be explained with a well-named temporary variable.   The method is basically the following - declare the temporary variable with part of the expression, replace where needed in the expression, repeat for other parts of the expression. In his example code, he demonstrates its use, pulling out portions of an equation to calculate an item's price to make it much more readable.
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The German language isn&#39;t normally thought of as being pretty, but that hasn&#39;t stopped the Goethe Institute from holding a competition for German&#39;s most beautiful world.