I have gotten some comments about my new avatar, including a few commenting that while my picture is clear on the blog contributors sidebar, it is "blurry" on my blog posts. I just wanted clear this up.  I am not in the witness protection program; I just really love singular values.  My new avatar, just like my old one, is a rank 4 approximation of a picture of me using the singular value decomposition.

I lived in the UK before making the barely-considered decision to move to Canada.  I still have savings denominated in pounds sterling (all dutifully declared on my Canadian tax return).  Accordingly, I keep a close watch on the GBP-CAD exchange rate so I have some sense of my net worth.

When I arrived in Canada in July 2008, one pound sterling bought $2, down from $2.30 two years before that.  Today, the pound has devalued further and is worth around...

In a series of posts now imported to the Maplesoft blog (starting here), I have been talking about pseudo-random number sequences, but since part of what kicked off this series was a paper on true random number generation (with LASERS!) I thought I would share some routines I wrote that alllow you to use the two main true random number sources available on the web (neither using lasers, sadly).

I spent this past week preparing a Webex presentation to a client who was interested in using Maple for a physics course in chaos. Of the two texts selected for the course, I had one on my own bookshelf. So I scanned Steven Strogatz' text Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos (Addison Wesley, 1994) for topics that would profit from investigation with Maple.

I ran across something called wordle, somewhat of a quick visual word analysis, a collection of words used collected in an article and put into a collage of large and small font words based on the amount of times they were used. 

Here I have attempted something similar in Maple. 

wordle_project_proce.mw

I slightly modified and shortened...

Quite often, when plotting an expression in involving trigonometric functions applied to (a rational polynomial of) the main variable, it is desirable to have the major ticks along the x-axis be labeled by multiples of Pi. In particular, it can be much more appealing to have those tickmarks be labeled with short rationals multiplied by the 2D Math symbol π.

I just wanted to let everyone know that we recently added some interesting new packages to the Application Center. These packages had been available as third party products. Now, the authors have chosen to make these products freely available to the community through the App Center. Follow the links below to take a look.

Harmonic Analysis

Structural Mechanics

Quaternions

FuzzySets

One of the best things about growing up in the “Hood” is that it feels really good when you leave. I grew up in a neighborhood called Downsview in Toronto whose claim to fame used to be it was the home to the DeHavilland Aircraft company but today is more associated with ongoing issues of crime, poverty, and many other urban illnesses. So every time I hear that someone from the Hood did something great, I take notice and I take special pride. This is the story about...

In this post I'll introduce is a nice visual test of randomness from signal processing. The main idea of this test to look at how a random sequence correlates with itself.

I have just had my first scientific publication (Journal of Multi-Body Dynamics 2010 Vol24 No K2) and I thought I should include the acknowledgement here

 “The development of algorithms in Maple was assisted by the advice from the MaplePrimes forum including John Fredsted who provided an initial coding idea for automated detection of plane division”.

                ...

An example of the magic of java. It has an excellent widget toolkit too! Study the beautiful image below for an example of what it can accomplish.

When selecting Plot > Plot Builder > Options the gui hanged like this with no way to restore the program, the x buttons had no effect, and no other input had an effect. I was left to close the process and lose my changes to the .mw file. It's running on XP 64-bit.

It's been a while since I wrote one of these random posts, but I still have a couple more I wanted to write.  In this post, I want to describe one of the tests used in the paper that initially inspired this series of posts: the Wald-Wolfowitz runs test.  This test is interesting in that it does not test for uniformity

Reputation plots seem to be broken at this time. There are just blank spaces, on pages where they'd normally appear.

I suggest that, if possible, the database or site-crawling used for Mapleprimes Searches not store pages ending in "/feed". It just adds to the chaff in search results.

I'd submit this as a Software Change Request, if there were a Mapleprimes checkbox on the form.

Many badges on this site will not get used for years if not decades, given the trends to date in site participation.

The suggestion has been made before. Why not rethink the criteria?

On a related note, I wonder how this Post became the first (and so far only) one to get over 1000 distinct views. (Was it imported into the "new V.2 of Mapleprimes from one of the separate and...