[Geowanking] mapping with GPS and Mathematica

[SteveC]

I cannot recommend enough trying Mathematica if you never have, and  
even if you've played with other functional languages. I had the  
extreme luck and privilege to work there as an intern a decade ago  
otherwise I would never have learnt or taught it.

Your nearest major university will have a site license if it's any  
good, and the home edition is a new license option and relatively  
cheap compared to what it used to cost you. I would work through the  
Mathematica book too, it's brilliant. It's included electronically  
with Mathematica itself, but you really want the hard copy.

You will find Mathematica references in books like Cryptonomicon and  
Information Rules, too.

Best

Steve


On 6 May 2009, at 19:21, P Kishor wrote:
> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:04 PM, Mike Liebhold <mnl at well.com> wrote:
>>
>> A Wolfram Research person's hard working Mathematica hacks to map his
>> outdoor excursions:
>>
>> http://blog.wolfram.com/2009/04/17/mapping-gps-data/
>>
>>
>
>
> as much skepticism I have for Wolfram Alpha, I have even more
> amazement at the stuff Mathematica can do. Here is a post from
> Wolfram's blog that I noted a few months ago
>
> http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/12/01/the-incredible-convenience-of-mathematica-image-processing/
>
> If only remote sensing had been so much fun. Just for the above, I
> will buy Mathematica and futz around with it.
>
> Now, that same Theodore Gray (the one who shows fun ways of doing
> image processing in the link above) has this to say about the role of
> Mathematica in the creation of Alpha
>
> "This is the essence of what has made Wolfram|Alpha possible. It’s not
> so much that it would have been impossible to do without Mathematica,
> but that it would have been impractically difficult. In fact, the
> easiest way to create Wolfram|Alpha without Mathematica would have
> been to write Mathematica first, then use it. Which is precisely what
> we have spent the past 23 years doing"
>
> See http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/01/the-secret-behind-the-computational-engine-in-wolframalpha/
>
> Wolfram seems to have a mindset similar to the Goog's... the solution
> to every problem lies in data. The more data you can gather and
> analyze, the better solution you can create. Google's approach seems
> to be that the world is their data, and they analyze it as is,
> programmatically, more less with the internet and its openness as
> their modus operandi, while Wolfram wants to take the data, dice it,
> prep it, dress it using their own finite experts and their own
> proprietary code. I am not expressing it well, but that is my
> uninformed but intuitive gist of what I think the difference is
> between Google and Alpha. And then there are the breed of new
> aggregators/filter-ers such as kosmix and the ilk (see
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15ping.html). In any case,
> fine by me... as long as data can be free, we will see Wolfram's
> Alpha, someone else's Beta, and everyone's Gamma.
>
>
>
> -- 
> Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org/
> Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org/
> Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http:// 
> www.osgeo.org/
> Science Commons Fellow, Geospatial Data http://sciencecommons.org
> Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> collaborate, communicate, compete
> = 
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>
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