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Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson
Last activity about 5 hours ago

This topic is for unexpected or bizarre or humorous references to MATLAB. Specific citations would be appreciated.
Welcome to MATLAB Central's first Ask Me Anything (AMA) session! Over the next few weeks, I look forward to addressing any questions or curiosities you might have about MATLAB, the forum, sasquatches, or whatever's on your mind. Having volunteered as a contributor to this community before joining MathWorks, I'm excited to act as a bridge between these two worlds. Let's kick things off by sharing a little-known fact about the forum’s staff contributors!
A couple of years ago, before I joined MathWorks as a developer on the Graphics and Charting team, I often wondered who were the MathWorkers with the [staff] moniker answering questions in the Answers forum. Is their MATLAB Central activity part of their day-to-day job expectations? Do they serve specific roles on some kind of community outreach team? Is their work in the forum voluntary in the same way that non-staff contributors volunteer their time?
Now that I'm on the inside, I'd like to share a secret with my fellow MATLAB users and MATLAB Central enthusiasts: with the exception of the MathWorks Support Team, staff participation in the Answers forum is completely voluntary! The staff contributions you see in the forum arise from pure intrinsic motivation to connect with users, help people out of ruts, and spread the word about our product!
For example, Steven Lord has contributed 20-150 answers per month for 9 years! Steven is a quality engineer for core MATLAB numerical functions. Cris LaPierre develops training material and has been a faithful contributor in the forum for almost 6 years! Kojiro Saito and Akira Agata have been tackling Japanese content for more than 7 years! There are many others who have inspired me as a user, and I am honored to now call colleagues: Peter Perkins, Michio, Joss Knight, Alan Weiss, Jiro Doke, Edric Ellis, and many others who deserve appreciation.
The forum's success hinges on the invaluable contributions from the majority of non-staff volunteers, whose dedication and expertise fuel our community. But I know I wasn't alone in wondering about these staff contributors, so now you're in on the secret!
I'm curious to know what other topics you're interested in learning about. Ask me anything!
Adam Danz
Adam Danz
Last activity about 11 hours ago

Zhihao
Zhihao
Last activity on 25 Dec 2024 at 5:15

Hi everyone, I wrote several fancy functions that may help your coding experience, since they are in very early developing stage, I will be thankful if anyone could try them and give some feedbacks. Currently I have following:
  • fstr: a Python f-string like expression
  • printf: an easy to use fprintf function, accepts multiple arguments with seperator, end string control.
I will bring more functions or packages like logger when I am available.
The code is open sourced at GitHub with simple examples: https://github.com/bentrainer/MMGA
Image Analyst
Image Analyst
Last activity on 24 Dec 2024 at 21:30

Attaching the Photoshop file if you want to modify the caption.
Peter Fryscak
Peter Fryscak
Last activity on 24 Dec 2024 at 14:53

What better way to add a little holiday magic than the L-shaped membrane atop your evergreen? My colleagues output the shape and then added some thickness and an interior cylinder in Blender. Then, the shape was exported to STL and 3D printed (in several pieces). Then glued, sanded, primed, sanded again and painted. If you like, the STL file is attached. Thank you to https://blogs.mathworks.com/community/2013/06/20/paul-prints-the-l-shaped-membrane/ and a tip of the hat to MATLAB Ornament. Happy Holidays!

この場は MATLAB や Simulink を使っている皆さんが、気軽に質問や情報交換ができる場所として作られました。日本語でも気軽に投稿ができるように今回日本語チャネルを解説します。
ユーザーの皆様とのやり取りを通じて、みんなで知識や経験を共有し、一緒にスキルアップしていきましょう。 どうぞお気軽にご参加ください。
Thanks to Hernia Baby さん、Iwasato Takuya さん
そして日本語チャネル開設にあたってコメントくださった皆様、ありがとうございます!
Adam Danz
Adam Danz
Last activity on 20 Dec 2024 at 15:43

Check out this 3D chart that won Visual Of The Year for 2024 by Visual Capitalist. It's a mashup between a 3D bubblechart and a categorical bar plot yet the only graphical components are the x-axis labels and the legend. Not only does it show relative proportions of material in a laptop but it also shows what the raw material looks like.
I love the idea of analog data visualization. I wonder if any readers have made a analog "chart".
We’d like to announce a change on the Machine Translation feature on MATLAB Answers.
When users are visiting our international domains (e.g. China or Japan), Answers provides the option to translate the content. Recently, we identified several security threats involving high-volume requests from certain IP addresses targeting our translation service.
As one of the countermeasures, we have now placed the Machine Translation feature behind a login requirement. While non-logged-in users will still see the 'Translate' button, it will be inactive (greyed out) until they log in.
We are actively collaborating with adjacent teams to develop solutions to better detect and block malicious requests.
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.
syms u v
atan2alt(v,u)
ans = 
function Z = atan2alt(V,U)
% extension of atan2(V,U) into the complex plane
Z = -1i*log((U+1i*V)./sqrt(U.^2+V.^2));
% check for purely real input. if so, zero out the imaginary part.
realInputs = (imag(U) == 0) & (imag(V) == 0);
Z(realInputs) = real(Z(realInputs));
end
As I am editing this post, I see the expected symbolic display in the nice form as have grown to love. However, when I save the post, it does not display. (In fact, it shows up here in the discussions post.) This seems to be a new problem, as I have not seen that failure mode in the past.
You can see the problem in this Answer forum response of mine, where it did fail.
If you have a folder with an enormous number of files and want to use the uigetfile function to select specific files, you may have noticed a significant delay in displaying the file list.
Thanks to the assistance from MathWorks support, an interesting behavior was observed.
For example, if a folder such as Z:\Folder1\Folder2\data contains approximately 2 million files, and you attempt to use uigetfile to access files with a specific extension (e.g., *.ext), the following behavior occurs:
Method 1: This takes minutes to show me the list of all files
[FileName, PathName] = uigetfile('Z:\Folder1\Folder2\data\*.ext', 'File selection');
Method 2: This takes less than a second to display all files.
[FileName, PathName] = uigetfile('*.ext', 'File selection','Z:\Folder1\Folder2\data');
Method 3: This method also takes minutes to display the file list. What is intertesting is that this method is the same as Method 2, except that a file seperator "\" is added at the end of the folder string.
[FileName, PathName] = uigetfile('*.ext', 'File selection','Z:\Folder1\Folder2\data\');
I was informed that the Mathworks development team has been informed of this strange behaviour.
I am using 2023a, but think this should be the same for newer versions.
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson
Last activity on 19 Dec 2024 at 13:37

At the present time, the following problems are known in MATLAB Answers itself:
  • Symbolic output is not displaying. The work-around is to disp(char(EXPRESSION)) or pretty(EXPRESSION)
  • Symbolic preferences are sometimes set to non-defaults
I'm beginning this MATLAB-based numerical methods class, and as I was thinking back to my previous MATLAB/Simulink classes, I definitely remember some projects more fondly than others. One of my most memorable was where I had to use MATLAB to analyze electrocardiogram (ECG) peaks. What about you guys? What are some of the best (or worst 🤭) MATLAB projects or assignments you've been given in the past?
The MATLAB Online Training Suite has been updated in the areas of Deep Learning and traditional Machine Learning! These are great self-paced courses that can get you from zero to hero pretty quickly.
Deep Learning Onramp (Free to everyone!) has been updated to use the dlnetwork workflow, such as the trainnet function, which became the preferred method for creating and training deep networks in R2024a.
Machine Learning Onramp (Free to everyone) has been updated with the following enhancements:
  • Content streamlined to reduce the focus on data processing and feature extraction, and emphasize the machine learning workflow.
  • Course example simplified by using a sample of the original data.
  • Classification Learner used in the course where appropriate.
The rest of the updates are for subscribers to the full Online Training Suite
The Deep Learning Techniques in MATLAB for Image Applications learning path teaches skills to tackle a variety of image applications. It is made up of the following four short courses:
Two more deep learning short courses are also available:
The Machine Learning Techniques in MATLAB learning path helps learners build their traditional machine learning skill set:
This post is more of a "tips and tricks" guide than a question.
If you have a folder with an enormous number of files and want to use the uigetfile function to select specific files, you may have noticed a significant delay in displaying the file list.
Thanks to the assistance from MathWorks support, an interesting behavior was observed.
For example, if a folder such as Z:\Folder1\Folder2\data contains approximately 2 million files, and you attempt to use uigetfile to access files with a specific extension (e.g., *.ext), the following behavior occurs:
Method 1: This takes minutes to show me the list of all files
[FileName, PathName] = uigetfile('Z:\Folder1\Folder2\data\*.ext', 'File selection');
Method 2: This takes less than a second to display all files.
[FileName, PathName] = uigetfile('*.ext', 'File selection','Z:\Folder1\Folder2\data');
Method 3: This method also takes minutes to display the file list. What is intertesting is that this method is the same as Method 2, except that a file seperator "\" is added at the end of the folder string.
[FileName, PathName] = uigetfile('*.ext', 'File selection','Z:\Folder1\Folder2\data\');
I was informed that the Mathworks development team has been informed of this strange behaviour.
I am using 2023a, but think this should be the same for newer versions.
Christmas is coming, here are two dynamic Christmas tree drawing codes:
Crystal XMas Tree
function XmasTree2024_1
fig = figure('Units','normalized', 'Position',[.1,.1,.5,.8],...
'Color',[0,9,33]/255, 'UserData',40 + [60,65,75,72,0,59,64,57,74,0,63,59,57,0,1,6,45,75,61,74,28,57,76,57,1,1]);
axes('Parent',fig, 'Position',[0,-1/6,1,1+1/3], 'UserData',97 + [18,11,0,13,3,0,17,4,17],...
'XLim',[-1.5,1.5], 'YLim',[-1.5,1.5], 'ZLim',[-.2,3.8], 'DataAspectRatio', [1,1,1], 'NextPlot','add',...
'Projection','perspective', 'Color',[0,9,33]/255, 'XColor','none', 'YColor','none', 'ZColor','none')
%% Draw Christmas tree
F = [1,3,4;1,4,5;1,5,6;1,6,3;...
2,3,4;2,4,5;2,5,6;2,6,3];
dP = @(V) patch('Faces',F, 'Vertices',V, 'FaceColor',[0 71 177]./255,...
'FaceAlpha',rand(1).*0.2+0.1, 'EdgeColor',[0 71 177]./255.*0.8,...
'EdgeAlpha',0.6, 'LineWidth',0.5, 'EdgeLighting','gouraud', 'SpecularStrength',0.3);
r = .1; h = .8;
V0 = [0,0,0; 0,0,1; 0,r,h; r,0,h; 0,-r,h; -r,0,h];
% Rotation matrix
Rx = @(V, theta) V*[1 0 0; 0 cos(theta) sin(theta); 0 -sin(theta) cos(theta)];
Rz = @(V, theta) V*[cos(theta) sin(theta) 0;-sin(theta) cos(theta) 0; 0 0 1];
N = 180; Vn = zeros(N, 3); eval(char(fig.UserData))
for i = 1:N
tV = Rz(Rx(V0.*(1.2 - .8.*i./N + rand(1).*.1./i^(1/5)), pi/3.*(1 - .6.*i./N)), i.*pi/8.1 + .001.*i.^2) + [0,0,.016.*i];
dP(tV); Vn(i,:) = tV(2,:);
end
scatter3(Vn(:,1).*1.02,Vn(:,2).*1.02,Vn(:,3).*1.01, 30, 'w', 'Marker','*', 'MarkerEdgeAlpha',.5)
%% Draw Star of Bethlehem
w = .3; R = .62; r = .4; T = (1/8:1/8:(2 - 1/8)).'.*pi;
V8 = [ 0, 0, w; 0, 0,-w;
1, 0, 0; 0, 1, 0; -1, 0, 0; 0,-1,0;
R, R, 0; -R, R, 0; -R,-R, 0; R,-R,0;
cos(T).*r, sin(T).*r, T.*0];
F8 = [1,3,25; 1,3,11; 2,3,25; 2,3,11; 1,7,11; 1,7,13; 2,7,11; 2,7,13;
1,4,13; 1,4,15; 2,4,13; 2,4,15; 1,8,15; 1,8,17; 2,8,15; 2,8,17;
1,5,17; 1,5,19; 2,5,17; 2,5,19; 1,9,19; 1,9,21; 2,9,19; 2,9,21;
1,6,21; 1,6,23; 2,6,21; 2,6,23; 1,10,23; 1,10,25; 2,10,23; 2,10,25];
V8 = Rx(V8.*.3, pi/2) + [0,0,3.5];
patch('Faces',F8, 'Vertices',V8, 'FaceColor',[255,223,153]./255,...
'EdgeColor',[255,223,153]./255, 'FaceAlpha', .2)
%% Draw snow
sXYZ = rand(200,3).*[4,4,5] - [2,2,0];
sHdl1 = plot3(sXYZ(1:90,1),sXYZ(1:90,2),sXYZ(1:90,3), '*', 'Color',[.8,.8,.8]);
sHdl2 = plot3(sXYZ(91:200,1),sXYZ(91:200,2),sXYZ(91:200,3), '.', 'Color',[.6,.6,.6]);
annotation(fig,'textbox',[0,.05,1,.09], 'Color',[1 1 1], 'String','Merry Christmas Matlaber',...
'HorizontalAlignment','center', 'FontWeight','bold', 'FontSize',48,...
'FontName','Times New Roman', 'FontAngle','italic', 'FitBoxToText','off','EdgeColor','none');
% Rotate the Christmas tree and let the snow fall
for i=1:1e8
sXYZ(:,3) = sXYZ(:,3) - [.05.*ones(90,1); .06.*ones(110,1)];
sXYZ(sXYZ(:,3)<0, 3) = sXYZ(sXYZ(:,3) < 0, 3) + 5;
sHdl1.ZData = sXYZ(1:90,3); sHdl2.ZData = sXYZ(91:200,3);
view([i,30]); drawnow; pause(.05)
end
end
Curved XMas Tree
function XmasTree2024_2
fig = figure('Units','normalized', 'Position',[.1,.1,.5,.8],...
'Color',[0,9,33]/255, 'UserData',40 + [60,65,75,72,0,59,64,57,74,0,63,59,57,0,1,6,45,75,61,74,28,57,76,57,1,1]);
axes('Parent',fig, 'Position',[0,-1/6,1,1+1/3], 'UserData',97 + [18,11,0,13,3,0,17,4,17],...
'XLim',[-6,6], 'YLim',[-6,6], 'ZLim',[-16, 1], 'DataAspectRatio', [1,1,1], 'NextPlot','add',...
'Projection','perspective', 'Color',[0,9,33]/255, 'XColor','none', 'YColor','none', 'ZColor','none')
%% Draw Christmas tree
[X,T] = meshgrid(.4:.1:1, 0:pi/50:2*pi);
XM = 1 + sin(8.*T).*.05;
X = X.*XM; R = X.^(3).*(.5 + sin(8.*T).*.02);
dF = @(R, T, X) surf(R.*cos(T), R.*sin(T), -X, 'EdgeColor',[20,107,58]./255,...
'FaceColor', [20,107,58]./255, 'FaceAlpha',.2, 'LineWidth',1);
CList = [254,103,110; 255,191,115; 57,120,164]./255;
for i = 1:5
tR = R.*(2 + i); tT = T+i; tX = X.*(2 + i) + i;
SFHdl = dF(tR, tT, tX);
[~, ind] = sort(SFHdl.ZData(:)); ind = ind(1:8);
C = CList(randi([1,size(CList,1)], [8,1]), :);
scatter3(tR(ind).*cos(tT(ind)), tR(ind).*sin(tT(ind)), -tX(ind), 120, 'filled',...
'CData', C, 'MarkerEdgeColor','none', 'MarkerFaceAlpha',.3)
scatter3(tR(ind).*cos(tT(ind)), tR(ind).*sin(tT(ind)), -tX(ind), 60, 'filled', 'CData', C)
end
%% Draw Star of Bethlehem
Rx = @(V, theta) V*[1 0 0; 0 cos(theta) sin(theta); 0 -sin(theta) cos(theta)];
% Rz = @(V, theta) V*[cos(theta) sin(theta) 0;-sin(theta) cos(theta) 0; 0 0 1];
w = .3; R = .62; r = .4; T = (1/8:1/8:(2 - 1/8)).'.*pi;
V8 = [ 0, 0, w; 0, 0,-w;
1, 0, 0; 0, 1, 0; -1, 0, 0; 0,-1,0;
R, R, 0; -R, R, 0; -R,-R, 0; R,-R,0;
cos(T).*r, sin(T).*r, T.*0];
F8 = [1,3,25; 1,3,11; 2,3,25; 2,3,11; 1,7,11; 1,7,13; 2,7,11; 2,7,13;
1,4,13; 1,4,15; 2,4,13; 2,4,15; 1,8,15; 1,8,17; 2,8,15; 2,8,17;
1,5,17; 1,5,19; 2,5,17; 2,5,19; 1,9,19; 1,9,21; 2,9,19; 2,9,21;
1,6,21; 1,6,23; 2,6,21; 2,6,23; 1,10,23; 1,10,25; 2,10,23; 2,10,25];
V8 = Rx(V8.*.8, pi/2) + [0,0,-1.3];
patch('Faces',F8, 'Vertices',V8, 'FaceColor',[255,223,153]./255,...
'EdgeColor',[255,223,153]./255, 'FaceAlpha', .2)
annotation(fig,'textbox',[0,.05,1,.09], 'Color',[1 1 1], 'String','Merry Christmas Matlaber',...
'HorizontalAlignment','center', 'FontWeight','bold', 'FontSize',48,...
'FontName','Times New Roman', 'FontAngle','italic', 'FitBoxToText','off','EdgeColor','none');
%% Draw snow
sXYZ = rand(200,3).*[12,12,17] - [6,6,16];
sHdl1 = plot3(sXYZ(1:90,1),sXYZ(1:90,2),sXYZ(1:90,3), '*', 'Color',[.8,.8,.8]);
sHdl2 = plot3(sXYZ(91:200,1),sXYZ(91:200,2),sXYZ(91:200,3), '.', 'Color',[.6,.6,.6]);
for i=1:1e8
sXYZ(:,3) = sXYZ(:,3) - [.1.*ones(90,1); .12.*ones(110,1)];
sXYZ(sXYZ(:,3)<-16, 3) = sXYZ(sXYZ(:,3) < -16, 3) + 17.5;
sHdl1.ZData = sXYZ(1:90,3); sHdl2.ZData = sXYZ(91:200,3);
view([i,30]); drawnow; pause(.05)
end
end
I wish all MATLABers a Merry Christmas in advance!

The int function in the Symbolic Toolbox has a hold/release functionality wherein the expression can be held to delay evaluation
syms x I
eqn = I == int(x,x,'Hold',true)
eqn = 
which allows one to show the integral, and then use release to show the result
release(eqn)
ans = 
I think I already submitted an enhancement request for the same functionality for symsum.
Maybe it would be nice to be able to hold/release any symbolic expression to delay the engine from doing evaluations/simplifications that it typically does. For example:
x*(x+1)/x, sin(sym(pi)/3)
ans = 
ans = 
If I'm trying to show a sequence of steps to develop a result, maybe I want to explicitly keep the x/x in the first case and then say "now the x in the numerator and denominator cancel and the result is ..." followed by the release command to get the final result.
Perhaps held expressions could even be nested to show a sequence of results upon subsequent releases.
Held expressions might be subject to other limitations, like maybe they can't be fplotted.
Seems like such a capability might not be useful for problem solving, but might be useful for exposition, instruction, etc.
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