Longtime Mathematica user Flip Phillips recently sent us this tremendously amusing error message generated by Mathematica. Much as you might think when stumbling upon a pickup truck hanging from a tree, your first reaction is probably, "How does something like that even happen??"
Read MoreIt's been possible since Version 6 of Mathematica to embed images directly into lines of code, allowing such stupid code tricks as expanding a polynomial of plots.
But is this really good for anything?
Read MoreThe New York Times recently published an "Op-Chart" by Tommy McCall on its Opinion page showing what your returns would have been had you started with $10,000 in 1929 and invested it in the stock market, but only during the administrations of either Democratic or Republican presidents. His calculations showed that if you had invested only during Republican administrations you would now have $11,733 while if you had invested only during Democratic administrations you would now have $300,671. Twenty-five times as much!
That's a pretty dramatic difference, but does it stand up to a closer look? Is it even mathematically plausible that you could have essentially no return on your investment at all over nearly 80 years, just by choosing to invest only during Republican administrations?
To answer these questions, I of course turned toMathematica.
Read MoreI've been interested in education for a long time, and when someone suggests that the software system I've been working on for 20 years is bad for education, I take it personally. So I was upset when a New Scientist magazine article "Physics Tool Makes Students Miss the Point", reported on a study by Thomas Bing and Edward Redish, "Symbolic Manipulators Affect Mathematical Mindsets", strongly implying that the study concluded that replacing paper-and-pencil calculations with Mathematica was educationally unsound.
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