On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 5:56 PM, Don Kelly <d...@shaw.ca> wrote: >> And that's what this -@^.@rms bit is doing - finding that angle. > > What you have noted threw me (NB.root mean square)isn't that but is a root > (sum of squares) -really a 'distance'. > (on a plane for the white-black point fixed) between points - apparently > angles in this case (although the original example gave > a magnitude rather than an angle)
Yes. That phrase "rms" was one I picked up in high school electronics class. But wikipedia suggests that it has some general use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_mean_square > and you are then getting the log of 1/this distance. > However, not having ground through your work (and maybe not yet competent > enough in J to do so) I am missing a lot > Is there a need to use -^. or -log rather than the raw "distance"? Good question. Experimenting: the - is necessary and the ^. is not necessary. (I do not get a hexagon without the minus, I do get a hexagon without the ^.). >> As for meaning - meaning is something we assign to observations. >> Whether it's useful or not depends on our tastes and goals (and this >> can involve a fair bit of experimentalism and thought sometimes). > > Agreed - and a curse/benefit of J is that there are so many different ways > to handle a problem It's not just J - this is a characteristic of mathematics and of human thought. (And of other programming languages - though their vocabularies facilitate different kinds of conversations.) A nice thing about J is that some experiments become easy and it's compact enough that conversations about code samples do not necessarily require too much supporting effort.. Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
