The only thing dynamic going on there is the type system, unless myfunc is recursive. Dynamic programing uses memoization to achieve lower computational complexity, but memoization != dynamic programming.
961 karma · joined March 12, 2009
And re. net worth: That's exactly how I would plot it if I wanted to make a point about income inequality. Carlos Slim is worth US$53 billion. The per capita income in Mexico is US$13,500 and in the US it's $46,000. (Yes I know this is comparing yearly income to lifetime accumulated wealth but ignore that for a moment.) If I give the average Mexican 1 pixel and the average American 3 or 4 pixels, then Mr. Slim gets almost 4 million pixels. At 96 dpi that's roughly 3400 feet. Your monitor would have to be (much) taller than the Burj Khalifa (2717 ft) to accurately show this bar char. This is the picture I would draw if I wanted to make a point about income inequality, a person sitting next to the Burj Khalifa with a ridiculous laptop in is lap that towers over it.
If I just wanted to rank the top 10, I would just list them in order like they do in Forbes.
Another good point, but if bar A is twice as tall as bar B then variable A's value had better be twice that of B's. Anything else is precisely the kind of shady drug-company data manipulation that you're so concerned about. If vertical space is at an absolute premium (not the case here IMO) and you have to cut the bars then draw little cut marks on them to let the reader know that the bottoms aren't at zero.
(Of course I'm talking about cases when there is a familar concept of zero, like percentages or money or population, not temperature. And if the value goes negative then the bar grows down, cf. any recent chart of US economic indicators.)
If you don't base your bars at zero then your bar chart exaggerates differences between data because the reader looks at two bars and compares their relative sizes the same way he looks at the levels in two glasses of beer to compare their volumes.
I'll reiterate my opinion that the purpose of a bar chart is not to give relative orderings (if you want that just list them in order) but to illustrate the magnitude of the differences between data points with respect to the natural range of the data. Percentages have a natural range of values: 0-100. Temperature does not have a natural fixed range, unless we're talking about the weather which is incidentally why I like Fahrenheit.
Looking at these graphs you'd think that: Almost nobody in the south drinks; The vast majority of blacks do not drink; Catholics are twice as likely to drink as Protestants.
And so on, when in fact these are all false conclusions. The real conclusion, which you would easily get from properly scaled graphs, is that the majority of people drink across almost all demographic groups.
If you blame me for drawing false conclusions from such graphs I blame the shitty fucking graphs for being misleading. I mean, they don't all even start at 50%. One starts at %40 and one at %0. Seriously, these graphs are garbage.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/26/happy-hacking-keyboard-li...
What? There is a treaty outlawing this.
There are plenty of free (capital and lower case 'f') alternatives, like Python, Fortran, etc. They may not be as 'powerful' of tools but they are adequate for teaching the basics of how to translate formal mathematical reasoning into concrete code. The only things that Mathematica, Maple and Matlab add are pre-packaged library functions that do all the hard work for you. This is what makes them powerful tools and if the student, after he or she graduates, decides that power is worth the price that's fine, but getting them hooked on it while in school is detrimental to their learning for all the reasons being discussed in this thread.