John, The talk I gave on Oudemans' curve will show up in a future issue of The Compendium - so I'd rather not rehash it here before it has a chance to see the light of day. But I'll be glad to respond to your note.
> the shape of these "Oudaman's curve". If I recall his talk, he said that > the arrow shape I came up with is wrong, and that a proper Oudaman curve > produces a dial which is more eliptical in shape. Please note to begin with that I have made no comment about the design you came up with - which I have never seen. The approach you outline is essentially the approach I recommended for approximating Oudemans' curve. I simply used a computer program that did things in much smaller increments: one second of time for an increment instead of your hour of time. The smaller increment gives a much better approximation to the theoretically correct Oudemans' curve - which is simply somewhat more rounded than the arrow shape that had been published earlier in the BSS Bulletin. Presumably the reason you want to have equal intervals (of length, not angle) between the hour points is so that when you interpolate, say for the half or quarter hour, your estimate is a good one. Your technique doesn't give what I would consider a good interpolation estimate. It gives the aesthetically pleasing appearance that the hour points are all equidistant from their adjoining hour points - but I don't view this as going far enough to assure a good value when you interpolate between them. It's simply a matter of how precise you want to be. > I don't understand why my drawing is wrong if it obviously works! It's not - and had you contacted me to discuss the question first, I would have told you so. Fred Frederick W. Sawyer III - Sciatherics 'Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show, 8 Sachem Drive, Glastonbury CT 06033 Play'd in a box whose Candle is the Sun. [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
