One of the most common foods prepared at this time of the year, and arguably the most common kitchen disaster, is turkey. 

There are several employees here at Maplesoft (myself included) who are full-fledged foodies:  not only do we enjoy eating good food, but we enjoy preparing it with all our cool kitchen gadgets.  Just as mathies may compare calculators, we compare chef’s knives.  So being a foodie and a mathie, I was quite intrigued when a co-worker sent me an article that found the optimal cooking temperature for a turkey.

For those of you who have had to take on the task of preparing a turkey, you’re probably familiar with this basic rule of thumb (thousands of burnt turkeys must have contributed to this rule): preheat the oven to 400°F, and then cook it for 20 min/lb at 350 °F.  Essentially what this rule means is that the time required to cook a turkey is directly proportional to the mass of the turkey.  We know that this cannot be true because some people who adhere to this rule will have a turkey that is moist and tender, and others will have a turkey that is dry and tough.  If we take more variables into account, like the size of the turkey (l), oven temperature (T), average density (ρ) and thermal conductivity (κ) we can create a function with respect to time . We can now do a bit of dimensional analysis on this to evaluate the accuracy of the traditional rule of thumb.  By using dimensional analysis, we can formulate a relation between a set of known variables, even though we are not sure of the relationship between these variables. The immediate advantage of this procedure is that less experimentation is required to establish a relationship between the variables, allowing us to take given data and see how it will fit with the equations that are created in the analysis.  I won’t go into full detail here, but I’ve created a Maple worksheet that shows the calculations used in the analysis.  The important part comes from the graphs that are generated:

The black dots represent various cooking times of various sizes of birds.  The red line is the old rule of thumb, which you can clearly see is not very reliable.  The green line represents the new rule of thumb which falls in line much better.  So, what is the magical formula that you should use?  Based on the analysis:  where x is in lbs and the resulting time is in minutes.  Now I will be honest, I haven’t put this to the test yet, but I’ll be sure to try it out this Christmas.

We have recently released updates to four toolboxes. Here are the highlights. More details, and instructions on how to access each one can be found on the Maplesoft downloads page.

MapleSim LabVIEW Connector - now also connected to NI VeriStand. As a result, this product gets a new name. It's now the MapleSim LabVIEW/VeriStand Connector.

MapleSim Control Design Toolbox - improvements have been made to performance, functionality, and examples.

Peter Stone's Lectures about Math & using Maple: I always liked them, missed that
for a longer time (ok, had them filed to my disk) and now find them back on the web.

I would like to introduce a new face that you will be now be seeing on MaplePrimes from time to time.  His name is Rick Andrade, and his primary role within the Primes community is to pay close attention to your questions, to make sure that help is being offered where needed, and to engage appropriate people from within Maplesoft.  And while the majority of his work within MaplePrimes will be done quietly in the background, you can also expect him to post stories and/or links that he thinks you will find interesting. 

When I click on my Maple Rank icon on the upper-right of the site I am taken to:

http://www.mapleprimes.com/pointinfo/8408

The content reads:

"The table below shows the number of points that each user receives for each type of posting The number of times that OptimusMaplePrime has posted each type, and how many points that OptimusMaplePrime received for all of their posts of that type"

(Note that periods are missing on the page, not just in my quotation of it.)

While running Maple (13.0 and 13.02) on a Linux system that has IPv6 enabled (Debian Sid AMD64 as of December 8, 2009) I found that the xmaple interface was unable to connect to the Maple kernel.  Command line maple worked fine with a simple test of 2 + 2.  Xmaple had some odd behavior as the kernel connection issue is not reported until running a calculation.  Aslo I found the many of the menu items were dimmed out such as "Help" -> "About" and "Help" -> "Maple Help."  Further selection of the "Tools" menu caused t

Resellers buy products from a manufacturer, and sell to consumers.  They are an important factor in many industries, including the one in which I work.  Maplesoft operates through a network of resellers throughout the world (apart from North America and a few other territories).  Some may suspect I’m somewhat biased in promoting the importance of resellers; I spent seven years working for Adept Scientific, Maplesoft’s partner in the UK.

The largest resellers are based in larger, better developed markets with a strong manufacturing and research base (like Cybernet and Scientific Computers in Japan and Germany).  Conversely, many smaller resellers, like Multi-On and Czech Software First in Mexico and the Czech Republic, operate in markets with significant growth potential.

Eleven years ago, one of the Maplesoft developers sent around the office this Maple language port of the first example of obfuscated code here.

This code below is text, for insertion in 1D Maple Notation, and runs in

This is a suggestion designed to make it easier for newbies to use Maple.

Example:

 > solve(f=0,x,x=-1..1);
 Error, (in solve) invalid arguments

could be instead:

I realize this is far from a new suggestion. Earlier discussions may be found here and there (see some links below). 

Has anyone yet produced a no-frills version of maple2latex? My main interest is in creating tables and matrices from Maple input, possibly containing symbols. Here is the wishlist:

a simple maple2latex that (1) does not insert unwanted ornaments such as font control, and perhaps (2) inserts line breaks and space where one usually finds them in LaTeX code. An example here:

http://www.mapleprimes.com/files/9249_maple2latex.pdf

I am studying the Julia sets and Mandelbrot. I know how to generate them. I know how to animate a simple function in the real field but until now not able to animate the Julia sets and the Mandelbrot. Is there any user guide or examples that explaines how to animate these two things in 2-D or 3-D?  I already have the user manual guide and the advanced programming guide downloaded from maplesoft but they do not contain any information or examples about what I am looking for.

The program mint, bundled with Maple, is a very useful syntax checker and program analyzer.

As provided, `mint` works best with Maple program source when contained in plaintext files. Inside Maple itself there is a command maplemint which does some of the same tasks as the stand-alone program `mint`. Unfortunately `maplemint` is quite a bit weaker than `mint` is, for quite a selection of procedures. Also, `maplemint` doesn't have the sort of flexible control that `mint` provides through its optional calling parameters.

I had previously posted a Maple language procedure for the purpose of calling out to `mint` while inside Maple (Standard GUI, or other). Here it is below, cleaned up a little. Hopefully it now works better across multiple operating systems, and also provides its optional parameters better.

Yesterday I attended a lecture by Fran Allen, as part of the "David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Distinguished Lecture Series".  Allen worked a IBM Research from 1957 to 2002, she was awarded the ACM's Turing Award in 2006.  Here is her biography from Wikipedia (let's hope it is accurate). 

Aside from some technical issues (why can't a room full of computer science professors and students successfully attach a laptop to a projector?) the talk was quite interesting.  There were two main sections, the first discussed Allen's career at IBM and the second was about the future of computer science.  Allen's work at IBM focused mostly on compilers and high performance computing.  She made a few interesting comments about the importance of high performance computing.  For example, one of the systems she worked on was designed and used to model the detonations of nuclear weapons.  The development of this system ended the need for the United Stated to perform actual test detonations.

Our first article introduced Maple's polynomial data structure and explained how Maple spends a lot of time working with monomials. To multiply polynomials having n and m terms, Maple must construct, simplify, hash, and sort all nm pairwise products to determine what monomials are equal. This work is performed even if the result has far fewer than nm terms, making it a rather inefficient way to multiply large multivariate polynomials. This article describes a new data structure for multivariate polynomials that is being added to Maple for a future release.

9xyz  -  4yz  -  6xyz  -  8x  -  5

Although the digital world has provided me with a wonderful career and countless enriching experiences, in my heart I will always have a special passion towards the analog world: vinyl LP’s, multiple print sets of the Encyclopædia Britannica, a manual wind watch, fountain pens, film cameras and a darkroom, and carbureted motorcycles all have privileged spots in my house. With digital equivalents being so much more accurate, faster, convenient, and cheaper, what could possibly be the appeal of these ancient artifacts?