Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Date Archive: 2016 June

Products

Comparing Apples and Oranges with the Wolfram Language

We've all heard the phrase "You can't compare apples and oranges." Well, the "impossible" can now be done within the Wolfram Language. With the help of new features and new data, you can finally compare the two fruits from the inside out. Along with a variety of interactive visualizations, the real difference between apples and oranges---or between frozen and chain pizzas, or even food-related Pokémon---is just a few lines of code away.
Products

Explore Yoga with Wolfram|Alpha

Each person enters a yoga class with their own unique goals. Some hope to stretch their legs, while others might want to strengthen their core, improve their balance, perform an advanced pose, or simply destress. As a yoga teacher, my goal is to balance my classes to accommodate everyone's needs and deliver information that will be potent and relevant for as many students as possible. However, there is so much information to explore in the field of yoga that it would be impossible to deliver it all in an hour-long class. Now it is possible for yoga enthusiasts and budding students alike to explore yoga using Wolfram|Alpha. You can now use Wolfram|Alpha to discover information about 216 yoga poses. If you want to learn about a pose, you can search by either its English or Sanskrit name and find basic instructions, along with an illustration. You can also look at the muscles that the pose stretches and strengthens, get ideas for ways to vary the pose, or learn about preparatory poses that you can use to build up toward more difficult poses. If you are recovering from an injury or ailment, you can check a list of precautions and contraindications to discover if the pose might be aggravating for your condition. You can also learn about commonly practiced sequences of yoga poses, such as the Sun Salutation.
Design & Visualization

Special Event: Solving Image Processing Problems

Satellite images, MRIs, live video feeds, and your family vacation photos can sometimes need light or heavy-duty touchups. Finding features, removing backgrounds, filtering for noise, and fixing oddities are common image processing problems for all sorts of 2D and 3D images. Luckily, the Wolfram Language can help you solve them. Join us for a free special virtual event, Solving Image Processing Problems: Wolfram Language Virtual Workshop, on June 22, 2016, 1–3pm US EDT (5–7pm GMT). Learn how to tackle problems involving images using current and upcoming features of the Wolfram Language and Mathematica 11. Also engage in interactive Q&A with the workshop's hosts, Wolfram Language experts Shadi Ashnai and Markus van Almsick.  
Computation & Analysis

Wolfram Community Highlights: Animation, Chernoff Faces, Fingerprint ID, and More

Wolfram Community members continue to create amazing applications and visuals. Take a look at a few of our recent favorites. Wolfram Language animations make it easier to understand and investigate concepts and phenomena. They're also just plain fun. Among recent simple but stunning animations, you'll find "Deformations of the Cairo Tiling" and "Contours of a Singular Surface" by Clayton Shonkwiler, a mathematician and artist interested in geometric models of physical systems, and "Transit of Mercury 2016" by Sander Huisman, a postdoc in Lyon, France, researching Lagrangian turbulence.
Education & Academic

Special Event: Computational Thinking with Wolfram|Alpha

Last month marked the seventh anniversary of Wolfram|Alpha. Since its launch, Wolfram|Alpha has earned a reputation as an indispensable tool for learning math and many other topics. We have been continually adding new content and capabilities to Wolfram|Alpha, and now we want to show you how it can be used to support computational thinking in any classroom. We invite you to join us at a special virtual event, Wolfram|Alpha in Your Classroom: Virtual Workshop for Educators, on June 15, 2016, 2--3pm US EDT (6--7pm GMT). Come see examples of how Wolfram|Alpha's built-in data and analysis capabilities can be used to enrich many types of classes, and take the opportunity to preview upcoming tools from Wolfram that will make teaching and learning easier.
Products

What Do Gravitational Crystals Really Look (i.e. Move) Like?

In a recent blog, Stephen Wolfram discusses the idea of what he calls "gravitational crystals." These are infinite arrays of gravitational bodies in periodic motion. Two animations of mesmerizing movements of points were given as examples of what gravitational crystals could look like, but no explicit orbit calculations were given. In this blog, I will carefully calculate explicit numerical examples of gravitational crystal movements. The "really" in the title should be interpreted as a high-precision, numerical solution to an idealized model problem. It should not be interpreted as "real world." No retardation, special or general relativistic effects, stability against perturbation, tidal effects, or so on are taken into account in the following calculations. More precisely, we will consider the simplest case of a gravitational crystal: two gravitationally interacting, rigid, periodic 2D planar arrays embedded in 3D (meaning a 1/distance2 force law) of masses that can move translationally with respect to each other (no rotations between the two lattices). Each infinite array can be considered a crystal, so we are looking at what could be called the two-crystal problem (parallel to, and at the same time in distinction to, the classical gravitational two-body problem).