Little Accomplishments.

[swestrup]

So, a few weeks ago I acquired a copy of Mathematica, and I've been taking the occasional free moment now and then to try and figure out if its as nifty as folks say. I'm beginning to think it is. Yesterday I managed to update the WorldPlot module with the necessary transformations to plot Eckert IV Equal Area maps. Its extra nifty when you realize the transformations are non-analytic. Anyway, I can now get an Eckert map of the world in about 9 seconds of compute.

The reason this is important to me is that I've drawn all my RPG world maps in Eckert format and had no idea how to transform them into a globe or some other view. Now I'm fairly confident that I can write something that does the reverse transforms (which thankfully ARE analytic) and then reproject my world in any desired map format. Oh, and I'm sure I can get that 8 second delay down below 1/4 second. After all there is NO evidence that the WorldPlot routines were written with speed in mind.

Comments

[denizsarikaya.livejournal.com]

Heh. We are such geeks. My first thoughts upon reading the post were... how does Mathematica compare to Matlab? Which packages are you using to generate your transforms?

And why the hell aren't the Mathematica libraries written with speed in mind? I know Matlab is continually looking for ways to make theirs perform faster and would assume the same holds for Mathematica. Maybe you haven't found the best functions to call yet and are doing too much work?