4 ms·
Matlab's First Customer
- throw20102010 7y agoI really hope that's listed in chronological order, because otherwise he's throwing serious shade at the Royal Society. Edit: I checked it out- Matlab has been around since 1984, and Prof Trefethen was made FRS in 2005. Safe.
- n4r9 7y agoNot necessarily. As a UK professor in numerical analysis, being an FRS is practically a given. I'd be more proud of the MATLAB one if it was me.
- thanks1banks2 7y agoA bit off topic tidbit: Early Matlab version(s) had an interesting Easter egg. Once when frustrated with the learning on the REPL, I typed "fuck you" and the console spit out "your place or mine?" instead of an error that I was so used to.
- vladTheInhaler 7y agoAnother little easter egg: typing "why" will return a randomly generated answer.
- teekert 7y agoalso imagesc with no arguments (used to at least) return an upside down picture of some person. This led to some confusion in our lab at some point.
- bauta-steen 7y agoJust 'spy' used to return one of the "spy vs spy" guys, but now seems to result in a dog.
- CretinDesAlpes 7y agoYes, it's showing the oldest son of a early matlab's employee. https://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2006/10/17/the-story-behind-the-matlab-default-image/ https://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2006/10/17/the-story-behin...
- mattkrause 7y agoThis Easter egg is responsible for one of the most terrifying evenings of my life. My first project in grad school was a visual perception experiment, written in Matlab. People were shown images that were either just noise (think static or clouds) or noise + a very faint shape, and asked to report which was which. The goal was to analyze the noise patterns associated with each response to identify how people recognize shapes (e.g., do you need all four corners to recognize a + sign). I tested the task on myself first. It’s fairly late, maybe 9:30 or 10pm, when I finally get everything running just so. Sitting in our pitch-dark testing room, in the middle of a deserted floor of a medical school, I run the analysis code. I’m expecting to see some simple shapes emerge from the processed noise; I think I used crosses, triangles, and Gabors as targets. Instead, however, window after window pops up with the creepy, distorted face of that child. I was tired, hungry, and had just seen The Ring, so I did the obvious thing: I slammed the laptop shut and high-tailed it home. The next morning, my labmate helped me figure out that I had written imagesc somewhere, instead of images, the variable that contained my results. TL;DR: Typo terrified me.
- relenzo2 7y agoI WASN'T THE ONLY ONE!
- wallnuss 7y agoAs far as I know he bought that license for one of his student at the time, Alan Edelman, who then ended up co-creating the Julia language.
- SiempreViernes 7y agoInteresting, how did you come across this very specific bit of trivia?
- tw1010 7y agoAlan Edelman has done a lot of talks, so if I had to guess, he mentions it somewhere in one of those. But I have no actual clue.
- ChrisRackauckas 7y agoHe does mention this.
- juliafan 7y agoBecause he works for the JuliaLab and Alan mentions this bit of trivia all the time.
- selimthegrim 7y agoHe ought to add to that list “finder of mistakes in Feynman lectures”