{"id":244,"date":"2008-08-11T10:07:11","date_gmt":"2008-08-11T15:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/desktop\/2008\/08\/11\/olympic-fever\/"},"modified":"2016-04-03T15:28:38","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T19:28:38","slug":"olympic-fever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/2008\/08\/11\/olympic-fever\/","title":{"rendered":"Olympic fever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watching the Olympics opening ceremonies, I’m reminded of my very first MATLAB program. I was a beleaguered freshman in a scientific computation class for which I did not meet the prerequisites. The first problem set was a warm-up to get used to doing assignments using MATLAB-files. To test our plot<\/tt> skills, the professor had us plot Olympic rings in a figure window.<\/p>\n

It was an interesting challenge – learning trig functions, the subtleties of plot<\/tt>, and the twist of interlocking rings of different colors. Unfortunately, I did not start archiving my assignments until my sophomore year, so I don’t have that original M-file to share. Here is an unelegant, non-vectorized replica that I came up with today. I’m sure Loren<\/a> could come up with something more clever, but it is a fun thing to do and in the spirit of the times.<\/p>\n

\"five<\/div>\n
\n
%rings.m plots olympic rings<\/span>\r\nN = 100;\r\nangle = linspace(pi\/4,9*pi\/4,N); %all the way around<\/span>\r\n\r\n% Make the x and y's for each of the five circles<\/span>\r\nxb = cos(angle) * 0.9;\r\nyb = sin(angle) * 0.9;\r\n\r\nxy = cos(angle) * 0.9 + 1;\r\nyy = sin(angle) * 0.9 - 1;\r\n\r\nxk = cos(angle) * 0.9 + 2;\r\nyk = sin(angle) * 0.9;\r\n\r\nxg = cos(angle) * 0.9 + 3;\r\nyg = sin(angle) * 0.9 - 1;\r\n\r\nxr = cos(angle) * 0.9 + 4;\r\nyr = sin(angle) * 0.9;\r\n\r\n% Make the Figure<\/span>\r\nfigure\r\nhold on<\/span>\r\nplot(xb(1:3*N\/4),yb(1:3*N\/4),'b'<\/span>,'linewidth'<\/span>,10);\r\nplot(xy(N\/4:N),yy(N\/4:N),'y'<\/span>,'linewidth'<\/span>,10)\r\n\r\nplot(xk(1:3*N\/4),yk(1:3*N\/4),'k'<\/span>,'linewidth'<\/span>,10);\r\nplot(xy(1:N\/4),yy(1:N\/4),'y'<\/span>,'linewidth'<\/span>,10);\r\nplot(xb(3*N\/4:end),yb(3*N\/4:end),'b'<\/span>,'linewidth'<\/span>,10);\r\n\r\nplot(xr(1:N\/2),yr(1:N\/2),'r'<\/span>,'linewidth'<\/span>,10);\r\nplot(xg(1:N),yg(1:N),'g'<\/span>,'linewidth'<\/span>,10);\r\n\r\nplot(xk(3*N\/4:N),yk(3*N\/4:N),'k'<\/span>,'linewidth'<\/span>,10);\r\nplot(xr(N\/2:N),yr(N\/2:N),'r'<\/span>,'linewidth'<\/span>,10);\r\n\r\n%make the axis pretty<\/span>\r\naxis equal<\/span>\r\naxis off<\/span>\r\nset(gca,'XLim'<\/span>,[-1.2 5.2])\r\nset(gcf,'Color'<\/span>,[1 1 1])<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n
What does this have to do with the desktop? Well, not much. I thought I’d come up with some gold-medal metaphor, but nothing uncontrived comes to mind. Instead I’ll leave you with a request for MATLAB programs analyzing olympic results, or even better, predicting olympic results. To get started, I recommend using urlread<\/tt> with an updated results site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Watching the Olympics opening ceremonies, I’m reminded of my very first MATLAB program. I was a beleaguered freshman in a scientific computation class for which I did not meet the… read more >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3398,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions\/3398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}