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Tuesday May 29, 2001
Delphi For
Fun Newsletter #18
Here are the "What's
New" excerpts since last time:
May 20, 2001:
"Hour angle", "solar time",
"declination", "right ascension"
"ecliptic coordinates", "nutation in
the obliquity of the ecliptic" ---- just a few of
the many concepts a budding astronomy student
must learn. But if you just want to fool around
with sun positions for any location, date, and time of
day - here's a Solar
Position program that will
provide that information. The only
required concepts are latitude/longitude for where we
are on earth and azimuth/altitude for the Sun's
location (angle clockwise from North and angle
up from the horizon). As a
bonus, we'll throw in sunrise and sunset
information and a plot of the "analemma" for
your location (and even tell you what the heck it is).
May 26,2001: We'll just make this Astronomy month. I'm finishing up the TAstronomy class which includes Moon and eclipse information, maybe planets too if I get real ambitious. In the meantime, here's a Draw the Moon page in the Delphi-Topics section which describes one way to draw phases of the moon on the screen. Mainly an illustration of using Arc and Floodfill procedures along with a little bitmap pixel manipulation. Source code available for download of course. May 29,2001: I'm taking a break from Astronomy - hung up on getting eclipse prediction working. So here's a Measuring Cups program. It was prompted by this puzzler from the May 5th edition of the "Cartalk" radio show: You have a four-ounce glass and a nine-ounce glass. You have an endless supply of water. You can fill or dump either glass. It turns out that it's possible to measure six ounces of water using just these two glasses. What's the fewest number of steps in which you can measure six ounces? Of course, through the miracle of programming, we can find the moves for any volume for any cup capacities just as easily as for this case. Now if I only knew lots of people that needed to measure their water this way. Tom and Ray Magliozzi, two of the smartest and jolliest mechanics you'd ever care to meet, produce Cartalk weekly on National Public Radio. The Puzzler is a regular feature and also archived online at cartalk.cars.com.
"Don't wish it was easier,
wish you were better. Don't wish for fewer problems,
wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenges,
wish for more wisdom." -- Jim Rohn
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