Wednesday 07 Oct 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so I’ll take it as read that you all know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. You’ll probably be unsurprised to hear that mathematicians use several more advanced operations than these in the course of their work. The first such operation goes by several names, but I will refer to it as “exponential”.

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Wednesday 07 Oct 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

After the success of Saturday night, I’ve decided I need more dancing in my life. OK, actually I decided that a few weeks ago. I spotted that there’s a new Rock & Roll class for beginners running on Tuesday evenings, and I decided to go along.

And then I got a cold, and didn’t go to any classes for 3 weeks.

But now I’m back up and running, I decided to make good on my original plan. At this point, I’ve missed 4 weeks, so I’m not sure how far behind I’ll be. On the other hand, it is a beginner’s class, and I already did that short 5-week course with Steve and Mavis, so I’ve got some idea what’s going on. (And I know that Rock & Roll is a really neat dance!)

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Monday 05 Oct 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

I was bored, so I decided to play with Google SketchUp.

It’s surprisingly addictive — something which can’t be said of normal 3D modellers. (For a start, most of them only allow you to manipulate individual triangles, one at a time.)

So what does SketchUp actually do? Well, it’s very good at modelling things that have lots of straight lines. Stuff like buildings, machines, tools, that kind of thing. If you wanted to model complex organic shapes, I’d imagine SketchUp is a pretty bad choice. It is primarily a modeller; you can colour in surfaces and do a few other very simple things, but basically it’s a tool for editing 3D geometry, not a full texturer and renderer like POV-Ray or something.

SketchUp’s main tool is extrusion. Draw a square, pull it, it’s now a cube. Draw a circle, pull it, it’s now a cylinder. Draw some arbitrarily complex 2D shape, pull it, it’s now 3D. But you can go further. Draw a thin rectangle, pull it, it’s now a wall. Draw a rectangle on the wall, pull it, it’s now a shelf. Draw two rectangles below the shelf, pull those out, they’re now support brackets.

Things get interesting when you discover that you can push as well as pull. This cuts shapes into an existing shape — possibly even all the way through to make a hole. Take your wall, draw a square, push it, you now have a doorway. You can also draw a triangle across the corner of something and push it along to make a bevelled edge, and so on.

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Monday 05 Oct 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

After several weeks of having a cold, I was finally able to return to my dance class on Friday, yay!

As I had feared, I’ve fallen far behind my classmates. It seems while I was away they learned an entire new dance, and I have literally no clue how it goes. Neither does my partner, apparently. (Even though she claims she does.) Or maybe she just can’t count.

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