[Server-sky] paper on vibrational modes of a disk (3)

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
>> Here is a website with animations of drumhead modes:
>> http://www.kettering.edu/~drussell/Demos/MembraneCircle/Circle.html
>
> Good stuff.  Actually, I am most interested in learning how they make
> the animated GIFs - if there is an easy-to-use open source tool for
> that, and I can do a lot of drawing with it.  For now, I plan to
> generate big heaps of coordinates with Perl and gnuplot, or just with
> subroutines in gnuplot.

Keith and any other Portland-area folks interested in open source
tools for "animated GIFs" and other nifty things having to do with
"data visualization" might want to join my Google group on the
subject, http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization. Meanwhile,
I have collected lots of links, galleries, animation and open source
packages to do stuff like that. Just about anything you can do in
Matlab or Mathematica can be done in an open source tool.

>From a general scientific / mathematical perspective, the most
comprehensive tool set is called Sage, and it can be found at
http://sagemath.org/. There is also a web site where people can
collaborate on Sage workbooks at http://www.sagenb.org/. Another
possibility is the Blender animation package. Both are
Python-scriptable, and I'm told Python is the easiest scripting
language to learn.

I personally work almost exclusively in R these days, with occasional
Ruby and Perl scripts to do things that R isn't all that good at. I'll
go visit that site and see if I can duplicate it in R, assuming they
didn't write it in R already. :)

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://www.linkedin.com/in/edborasky

I've never met a happy clam. In fact, most of them were pretty steamed.