26 August 2008

Some Easy Arithmetic

Today I made graphs. Lots of graphs.

The goal was to make a two-month time series. I picked out 19 days. The figure for each day had four panels. Each panel had two lines. Each line had 110-190 dots.

So, that's 19 figures. 76 total panels. 152 total lines. 9,348 total dots.

Predictably, the first one was insanely difficult and took 5-6 hours. (Arrr Matlab.) After that, I had a script. The other 75 took maybe 20 total minutes (interspersed over a bunch of blog reading... >.>). Yay Matlab. :p

Printing involved some voodoo (is there any other software out there where, if something fails to work the first time you do it, it inexplicably works fine when you do it a second time? even if you change absolutely nothing in between?), but fortunately it didn't involve sacrificing any goats like the last time I had to work with YY-plots.

Tomorrow? I get to do it all over again with the same 9,348 dots - only this time, I'll be doing it in 3D.

6 comments:

Nathan said...

I really don't mean to seem totally egotistical, but it's occurred to me that you may only do this stuff to torture me. :)

John the Scientist said...

No, MWT does it to amuse Tom, Vince and me. Annoying you is a freebie. :D

MWT said...

Aww come on ... ARITHMETIC! Surely you have to add and subtract from time to time...

*will try to go even slower next time*

vince said...

Poor math-challenged Nathan, it is fun to abuse him :-).

(is there any other software out there where, if something fails to work the first time you do it, it inexplicably works fine when you do it a second time? even if you change absolutely nothing in between?)

I've had it happen. I usually don't try to figure out why, because I'm usually so bloody grateful it worked the second time because deadlines are involved.

Anonymous said...

It actually happens quite often in tech support. Stuff spontaneously self heals. You try the same thing a few times, reboot a couple of times, give up - and voila ... starts working again.

Usually when you're trying to demonstrate what's wrong with it.

Math is a good thing but it should be licensed and regulated and done in darkened rooms by adults over 18. (says the woman who can present a 2-hour detailed financial and statistical analysis of her projects that leaves her dept's CPA in the dust)

MWT said...

Heh, no seriously. Absolutely no changes whatsoever - no rebooting or anything. I click for "print preview", try to change the settings to make it print in color, and nothing happens. I close "print preview" and immediately open it again, and voila it works.

At the time I wrote that, I had to open print preview twice for each of the 19 figures. Yesterday, I was printing 19 new figures and had to open print preview for each of them four times. It's redundant and retarded to have to open and close it three times before it'll work. -.-