People hate math in general because the schools failed to properly explain what math is and how it can be applied. Math is just a tool used to model the physical world. Math definitely can be used to create wonderful art too, but the problem with teaching math in school is that they take too long to do rote things like mathtables and less time to explain how important math is to applying it in real life. From balancing your checkbook, to designing rockets, math makes life better and simpler. I still admire the craftsman that can feel his way through his craft, but even they model in their heads what to do to transform something to something else. It's the process of modeling that math is all about. Sorry you didn't have good teachers that could have helped you out early Molly. Still not to late to understand it though.

I taught my HS math teachers how to solve square roots longhand. It is truly a lost art.

I vaguely remembered doing that in gradeschool PM, but even I forgot how. lol

I did create a prime number solver that took advantage of the square-root check for my HP calculator while in college (yes; I was a math geek too; even programmed a Hebbian neural network matrix for object identification with it; lol). Now, square-roots is aloof to me. Sad. Even still, when I give change to get a quarter back to young cashregister operators, many freak out (the older cashregister operators don't). How sad is that. If I had my way, I would forbid calculators in class until 10th grade when the Science classes get involved to such an extent the it really requires it (won't do the sliderule thing though). Teaching basic arithmetic as well as why it is important is a necessary that's not being properly taught in schools now unfortunately.

If you think about it everything in this world has a mathematical solution. =)

I still have my sliderule, but never got the hang of my abacus.

My Mom (may she rest in peace) was raised on the abacus. She was so good at it that she didn't even need it anymore and add/subtract numbers in her head (I mean multiple numbers); how cool was that? I still will stick with paper (or virtually with notepad; lol) thank you much.

I no longer remember how to use the slide rule or how to do square root division...pity, but I never have needed to use more than simple math in my everyday life. Still, math and science were my fav subjects. I loved geometry the best because you could draw diagrams and charts and visualize the problem. One thing I never got the hang of was the word problems that involved traveling in more than one vehicle at different speeds and mileage...etc, etc.

I am totally beyond frustrated with the preview on this plugin. But I'm still not giving up on it because I can see some real potential.

what plugin PM. This thread is so off topic, I don't even know what we are talking about.

Embrace the inner Joyce inside you Molly.

trying to get a rise out of PM....so he will come out with another masterpiece... lol

I saw this avatar on one of the sites. I just don't remember who I stole it from. It's good for me!

kewl, and it is something we all do. It is soooo easy to get side tracked...

My mind is so little, it's impossible to stop it from jumping the track!

Well if GIMP wasn't so doggoned interesting with so many ways to do things we wouldn't get so side tracked.

Nobody liked my hand drawn stippling (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=613&start=12) on page 2

It's hard to see the stippling on it. The image just doesn't expand enough to get a really good view of it.

I do like the image.

LOL@avatar =)

Resurrecting this post only because some folk implemented Secord's algorithm in C++ and made a windows compile. I posted links at the registry since I started a discussion on this there but will link here too. I couldn't get the gpu capability to work on my system (-a g is the parameters) but cpu works fine (-a c or nothing at all since it's the default). I including my batch file that I created so you can drag and drop your file onto it to create the resulting svg vector file. The source has to be a PNG file though. I choose a threshhold of 1 for quickness since I am rendering 100,000 points. I wouldn't go below 0.3 though (very good quality with that setting) since it can take quite a long time to complete if you do so even if you only have 10,000 or 1000 points.

http://www.saliences.com/projects/npr/s ... pling.html

batch file used:





Also one with threshold set to 0.4 but on 10,000 points.

Cool stuff, Lyle. It didn't work with Wine, and I haven't figured out how to compile or make a configure file, yet. Looks very promising, though!