Kirby Urner wrote: >In Fuller's synergetic geometry, circles don't become infinite lines, but >just bigger and bigger circles. Lines that appear locally straight are just >that: local. Clearly we're starting with different assumptions than those >of Euclidean greek metaphysics. More from Democritus. Lines aren't >perfectly straight either -- zoom in and they become zig-zaggy/wavilinear. >Zoom out, and all you get are curves and great circles. > FWIW, I am working with (as in studying and implementing some tools in PyGeo to enliven that study of) the geometry of complex numbers. And doing so in such a way that all fundamental elements are defined by its 2X2 hermitian matrix. So I am getting fairly abstract - a "line" has hermitian[0][0] == 0, else I am looking at a "point" or a "circle". Drawing the damn things is a lot less abstract - and as hermitian[0][0] approaches 0, a line makes a better represetantion - is all. And since things are dynamic, I need my iinstances to think on their feet as to what makes a better representation. If/else is really all I need - but I was playing in my head with trying something more "dramatic".
Fredrk Lundh - the fbot and author of PIL - posted a blog entry a few months ago about working with complex numbers to do basic image manipulation. With Numeric in play, I can imagine a lot of efficiency gains by working with it and the Python built_in complex numbers- via Hermitian matrixes and 2X2 mobius transformation matrixes - to accomplish a lot of the kind of image transformation effects that I imagine are normally done otherwise. I expect that experimentation along these lines is going to eventually get me more into playing with bitmap graphics, whereas until now I have been a vector graphics kind of guy. Art _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
