6 ms·
Computing the Eclipse
- cjk2 2y agoThis would be really cool if it wasn't a thinly disguised Wolfram sales pitch.
- elevatedastalt 2y agoWhy care? It's his life's project, and he's giving useful information to boot. And Mathematica is a wonder.
- cjk2 2y agoWhen in Rome do as romans do. That means keep it in the neutral language of the subject, which is not wolfram language despite his ego thinking otherwise.
- tzs 2y agoWhat would be the "neutral language of the subject" for the material he covers in the article?
- elevatedastalt 2y agoConsidering that "Rome" here is Wolfram's personal blog, I think he is doing exactly as Romans do.
- andrewla 2y agoPutting aside the Wolfram Language related content, this is a really interesting introduction to the mechanics of solar eclipses. The notion of a "synodic" vs "draconic" really clears up a lot of my questions about why there are not eclipses during every new moon. One thing I was wondering from looking at this is whether there is a good map projection that preserves the shape of the "solar disc" (my term) that represents the side of the earth illuminated by the sun, weighted by the solid angle from the view of the sun, so that eclipse paths would look like straight lines of constant width.
- dhosek 2y agoSuch a projection would be possible-ish, but it would need a different centering depending on the eclipse. The NASA solar eclipse maps (these are the ones that you’ll see in the Wikipedia articles on the eclipses) kind of hint at in that direction.
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- lordnacho 2y agoI heard somewhere that the Spanish managed to wow the people they met in the new world with an eclipse. Is this true? What calculations did they do to figure this out with 16th century math?
- rufus_foreman 2y agoChristopher Columbus did it to terrorize people into giving him food (lunar eclipse, not solar): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1504_lunar_eclipse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1504_lunar_eclipse
- ShamelessC 2y agoGeez, what an ass hole.
- rufus_foreman 2y agoHe did alright.
- Zpalmtree 2y ago[flagged]
- digdugdirk 2y agoThe previous comment was likely more a callout to all the slavery and the pillaging.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoIt was his nth trip of how many? I think by 1504, the asshole might have brought trade goods of some sort or another, rather than committing robbery. Just a thought. Not big on the "wokeness" thing myself, but not a big fan of flimflam artists and extortionists either.
- RangerScience 2y agoMan, people just don’t want to /work/ anymore. What ever happened to a labor trade?
- dhosek 2y agoWeird coincidence: while driving home from the eclipse yesterday, at one point I was right next to the Wolfram building in Champaign.
- davidjhall 2y agoI wonder if it would be easy to figure out, given a set of coordinates, if there would be a totality in the next 100 years there and when. I cant figure it from the examples but that would be a neat website.
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- trollerator23 2y agoAre all names in Mathematica really all together in a single namespace? Seems odd not to have such a specific function like SolarEclipse behind some kind of importable module. And how do I discover what functions I want?
- olavfosse 2y agohttps://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/SolarEclipse https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/SolarEclipse
- Affric 2y agoI mean when you run it it downloads it.
- onedognight 2y ago> Are all names in Mathematica really all together in a single namespace? No, there are package namespaces (Contexts) like most languages. When you import a package (call Needs) it adds that package’s namespace to the namespace path ($ContextPath).
- jamesgreenleaf 2y agoStephen Wolfram is a national treasure.
- morgango 2y agoThe UI for Wolfram is SO much prettier than Jupyter notebooks.