> From: Ken Knoblauch > > > >I remember that my father had a French curve: it was a > plastic template > >used for drawing which had several smooth edges of varying curvature. > >You could use it to draw a wide variety of curved shapes. > No doubt the > >French called it something else. > > Nobody, up and down the corridor here, of age to have used one, could > think of a name, but we looked it up in a universal French dictionary > on the web, and it came up with ``un pistolet''.
I recall reading: E.J. Wegman and I.W. Wright. Splines in Statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, vol 78, N382, 1983. which mentioned `spline' as a tool that draftsmen used to draw curves, but the description does not match the french curve I know, which _is_ a template-like piece of various curvature. (I used one of these in the year I spent in Architechture school right after high school. No, I not _that_ old... I believe they are still in common used today.) Andy > ____________________ > Ken Knoblauch > Inserm U371, Cerveau et Vision > Department of Cognitive Neurosciences > 18 avenue du Doyen Lepine > 69675 Bron cedex > France > tel: +33 (0)4 72 91 34 77 > fax: +33 (0)4 72 91 34 61 > portable: 06 84 10 64 10 > http://www.lyon.inserm.fr/371/ > > ______________________________________________ > [email protected] mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide! > http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > > > ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
