Janet had discovered that her vitamins contained caffeine.

North_Fork_Trails said...
What kind of pill has caffeine? NoDoz?

Maybe you should try coffee. After all, you are a writer.

Interesting clouds this morning. I am working on a new polar zonohedron algorithm for POV-Ray. I have got two versions of POV, one is UNIX and runs under X11, the other is Mac. I've got the UNIX version rendering 1200 640X480 frames for an animation, each frame takes about 15 or 20 minutes. It will take many days. Two and a half days so far, frame 216 is rendering right now.

But that leaves my Mac version of POV free for other work.

I had a funny programming experience. I decided to make a polar zonohedron as a "solid of translation" in POV. I would take the n vectors v[n], and first translate a sphere along 0*v[1], 1*v[1], ..., 9*v[1]. So, a line of ten spheres.

Then I would translate this line of spheres along 0*v[2], 1*v[2], etc.

Then I would translate this rhomb of 100 spheres along 0*v[3], etc. etc.

And so on.

But I neglected one thing: the number of spheres grows large very quickly.

I got the basic procedure up and running and said, OK, time for n=8.POV crashed almost immediately. I re-opened and examined my code. Tried again. Crash. Again. Crash. Again. Crash.

Then it finally occurred to me: I was asking POV to render 10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10 spheres! Or one hundred million. And that was too much.

However it works fine for n=4. I will send you an animation of a rhombic dodecahedron made from 1000 spheres.

Love,

Dad
November 30, 2007 10:26 AM