Greetings earthlings --
For those of you with too much time on your hands, I thought I'd alert you to a recent thread on Synergeo, a Yahoo eGroup: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/synergeo/ In this thread, one John Brawley, probably older than you think, tries to wrap his head around VPython cylinders. He's self-taught in Python, and is in no way a CS major. He cares about a pet theory, which involves geometry and visualization: so VPython to the rescue. Except the cylinder stuff seems to make no sense. A guy named Anton, and myself, trying to explain the meaning of "axis" in cylinder(pos=(x0,y0,z0), axis=(x1,y1,z1), radius=0.1) -- it's *not* the same thing as "destination point." I think John is confused in part because of working with POV-Ray, which also has a cylinder command, but simply asks for start and end points. Way simple. Zooming back, the bigger picture here is: we've got a bunch of people, finding each other through the Internet, talking about geometry and other stuff, and using Python as a tool, perhaps without formal training or any CS background. It's a means to an end, and easy enough to master to get some real work done, even if you're an old guy living with a bunch of cats in some run down trailer (that's a caricature, not a true-to-life portrait of Mr. Brawley). In other words: computer programming for everyman (a more literary, and gender-biased, rendition of the CP4E meaning). Kirby PS: speaking of Yahoo eGroups, and Wittgenstein (a few days back), I'm also pretty active here, in case anyone wants to jump in and join the chatter: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wittgenstein-dialognet/ _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
