On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 12:36 AM, kirby urner <kirby.ur...@gmail.com> wrote:
<< SNIP >> > How about scholarships for veterans to enter nursing, other medical > professions? > > The health professions are ravenous for computing and data > services. > > My daughter is the Portland district champion debater at 15, > having started her high school's team in the first place. I worry > though: why waste her talents at some backward academy > that doesn't even teach about tetrahedral mensuration? How > many dead mineshaft canaries does it take I wonder? > > Maybe by the time she graduates we'll have some respectable > colleges out there. > Of course the above won't make a whole lot of sense if you're just tuning in, as what means "tetrahedral mensuration" and why should any respectable college -- such as Earlham in Indiana (the topic of a cell phone conversation from the Pauling House this morning) -- include that on a syllabus? The following three posts may provide some elucidation, plus they are using Python (the 1st shows execution, the 2nd shows source code) and so are especially apropos on edu-sig: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/synergeo/message/58259 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/synergeo/message/58260 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/synergeo/message/58262 Basically I'm using the Decimal type to give the flavor of some extended precision "arithmetic" regarding some basic polyhedral relationships. As some of you know, our subculture (ethnicity) has a unit volume tetrahedron, per this TV segment outline (more storyboarding for CSN): http://coffeeshopsnet.blogspot.com/2010/04/smart-bar-lcds.html Also here: http://groups.google.com/group/mathfuture/browse_thread/thread/4aa4b568e87ba90b?hl=en A problem with the Synergeo archive, however, is it doesn't support significant whitespace, whereas this Mailman archive does, making it much better for sharing actual source code. Therefore I am taking the liberty of reposting that here: #===== import decimal from decimal import Decimal import re print """ I will now give you the radius of a rhombic triacontahedron of volume five, computing in tetra- volumes. """ myothercontext = decimal.Context(prec=100, rounding=decimal.ROUND_HALF_DOWN) decimal.setcontext(myothercontext) print decimal.getcontext() # long limo vip numbers one = Decimal('1.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000') two = Decimal('2.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000') three = Decimal('3.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000') five = Decimal('5.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000') print "Five: %s" % five radical2 = two.sqrt() radical3 = three.sqrt() radical5 = five.sqrt() print "2nd root of 2: %s" % radical2 phi = (one + radical5) / two print "Phi: %s" % phi scalefactor = (two/three) ** (one/three) print "Shrink by: %s" % scalefactor print "Radius: %s" % ((phi / radical2) * scalefactor, ) """ phi to a 100K places (potentially, check this resource: http://goldennumber.net/PhiTo100000Places.txt ) """ phi_million = "1.618033988749894848204586834365638117720309179805762862135448..." # add more digits for a match strphi = str(phi) results = re.match(strphi, phi_million) if results: print "Successful match for phi value: %s" % (results.span(), ) # (( ),) returns tuple as single %s else: print "No match with phi_million" #===== Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig