MATLAB in unexpected places
Walter Roberson
on 5 Apr 2011
Latest activity Reply by Image Analyst
on 31 Dec 2024
This topic is for unexpected or bizarre or humorous references to MATLAB. Specific citations would be appreciated.
96 Comments
Here it is at the 2022 World Cup Championship, held by Lionel Messi of Argentina.
The TV show "The Americans" was a show about Soviet Union secret agents pretending to be a normal American couple in 1981-82 or so. In the 2nd season's final episode, a military officer shows an FBI agent a computer screen that's supposed to be showing some code from a top-secret computer program called Echo. When the code flashed by I thought it looked odd, more modern than I would have expected for an early 80s program. So I paused the show and took a closer look. I was very amused to see that the top half of the screen contains MATLAB code of a type that did not exist until about 20 years after the show's time period.
The MATLAB code was clearly generated using GUIDE, an old MATLAB tool for GUI development. [full resolution image link]
When I showed this to my MathWorker friend Jason, he did a little investigating and discovered the code's origin. It's from a File Exchange contribution called MATLAB Simulations for Radar Systems Design by Bassem Mahafza.
I'm not familiar with the 3 lines after the guidata() line, nor have I seen a "end select" line before. What do they do?
It looks like the top half of the script was taken from linear_array_gui.m in the FEX submission and the bottom half was added in. I guess GUIDE code doesn't look criminal enough 😂
They should have just run the spy command!
spy
ChatGPT suggests that the bottom of the file is Ada-inspired.
Ha! This is amazing. Great find.
Ohio license plate below:
California license plate:
Using MATLAB to simulate a million golf-balls
And running Snake
According to Ancestry.com, John and Mary Matlab lived in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania in about 1910, along with their children Mary Matlab, John Matlab, and Steve Matlab .
Frances Mupad lived in New York, New York in about 1840.
(I was looking for information on the history of MuPAD and was startled to see genealogy records ;-) )
😂 I'm just seeing this thread now. I grew up near Schuylkill PA.
I also added those youtube videos to my watch list.
For some reason I keep thinking that somewhere out there, some author most have created a character, 'Steve Matlab, PI" (Private Investigator); or perhaps they made him a policeman. Maybe a high-stakes Forensic Accountant investigating the flow of criminal money. But certainly not "Steve Matlab, Caricature Artist", or "Steve Matlab Clowns For All Occasions".
This is what I think about what I cannot sleep at night.
This answer has been marked as potential spam. I'm afraid it advertises the use of Matlab in an unexpected place.
Anyway, I've removed the flag.
MATLAB mention in a humor post about Programming Vehicles:
The is a MATLAB box in the background in the movie Contact when Elie runs in after hearing first message.
There is this guy who hates around everything about MATLAB. Pretty fun to read about his frustration and anger.
At the company I work for, I sometimes provide people with various MATLAB-compiled standalone utilities for their work. When I told him it was MATLAB, one of the people here, who was apparently unfamiliar with The Mathworks and its products, concluded that MATLAB itself was my invention and that I had named MATLAB after myself (because my name is Matt......Matt-Lab......get it?).
that was funny :)
I think Matt means programs built using MATLAB Compiler. The startup icon would be the MATLAB logo.
If you want to develop for dedicated hardware you are more likely going to want to look at MATLAB Coder, or Simulink Coder, possibly with some of the extension toolboxes like Fixed Point Toolbox or HDL Coder.
could you elaborate on 'MATLAB-compiled standalone utilities'? I recently developed a spectral analysis tool for my company as an intern and I am curious how one would go about implementing this on dedicated hardware to be used in the field (middle of the ocean) without needing a matlab license
Playing Cricket: Physicists Cast New Light On Spin-Bowling
As the Ashes series gets underway next week, a pair of brothers from Australia have been exploring the physics behind the spin of a cricket ball.
[...]
Garry Robinson said: "Our results show that the effects on a spinning ball are not purely due to the wind holding the ball up, since a reversal of wind direction can cause the ball to dip instead. These trajectory changes are due to the combination of the wind and the spin of the ball.
"The effects of spin in the presence of a cross-wind, and how to fully exploit it, may or may not be completely appreciated by spin bowlers. Either way, we have provided a mathematical model for the situation, although the model of course awaits detailed comparison with observations."
[...]
Once the equations were constructed, they were numerically solved using a computer software program called MATLAB; the solutions were then used to create illustrative examples for cricket.
[...]
It was only one Nickelback song!! And all I said was that it wasn't as bad as everyone made it out to be!
I imagine the picture for "WALTER DISCOVERS MATLAB" would show the kid a few tick marks to the left.
On an episode of Harry's law (I can't remember which one), Tommy Jefferson (a fast-talking lawyer) boasts about a number of lawsuits he's won against various big corporations. It went something like this:
"Amazon, Microsoft, Matlab, ..."
Which was pretty amusing
From the Acknowledgements section of Spectral methods in MATLAB by Lloyd Nicholas Trefethen:
"... there is a brass plaque on my office wall, given to me in 1998 by The MathWorks Inc., which reads: FIRST ORDER FOR MATLAB, February 7, 1985, Ordered by Professor Nick Trefethen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology."
There is a town in Bangladesh where many studies have been done on diarrheal disease:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795369900146X http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20099756 http://www.indepth-network.org/dss_site_profiles/matlab.pdf
etc.
Some of these are pretty mathematical papers, but I doubt that is why the town keeps getting chosen.
That is the same town where the high levels of Cadmium and arsenic were found in the water table; a high concentration of those metals in the body could cause some pretty nasty effects :(
I think it's kind of funny that he refers to it as a mesh. Isn't it a surface?
"Matlab" in Hindi literally stands for "meaning" - although it's pronounced Muth-lub (both u's pronounced as in the English word "hut").
btw its true.. :)
haha
You could start pronouncing it that way in Mathworks, and see if it catches on!
Some Matlab lyrics.
Unfortunately, I can't make out a single one of these. :(
Done! :)
Kaustubha, if you would do the honors so you can receive the credit ?
I concur, if it were an answer, I'd vote for it
That first comment is worth an answer of its own!
And apparently the first one is from a Nepali group.
"Matlab" in Hindi literally stands for "meaning" - although it's pronounced Muth-lub (both u's pronounced as in the English word "hut"). The last four links refer to Hindi songs. :)
I'm glad ... I guess.
You, sir, have won today's internets by 7 wickets to love in the 4th hole of the 3rd chukka.
Cool DJ logo!
I Hate MATLAB. (3,873 people like this.)
You can choose between I Hate MATLAB, I hate "MATLAB", We Hate MATLAB, I F#$*ing Hate Matlab, or I Hate MATLAB and LABVIEW!!!
Maybe we'll start to see things like:
I Hate MATLAB but I hate those jerks in the I hate "MATLAB" group even more!
Judean People's Front?! We're the People's Front of Judea!
That presents some tough choices: Do I sign up for "I hate Excel", "I hate Excel!", "I hate Excel!!", "I hate Microsoft Excel", or "we all hate microsoft excel"?
There are many I hate Excel groups on facebook!
I love helping folks see how cool MATLAB is! At work I often end up teaching someone how to do something in MATLAB that they couldn't figure out how to do on their own. It is my experience that when people see what MATLAB can do, how quickly ideas can be vetted, and how customizable it is, they end up coming back for more. Great stuff!
Now there is something I just cannot understand - preferring Excel to MATLAB.
Like Matt, I also got my job at MathWorks because I love MATLAB. I actually got scouted from MATLAB Central! :)
I think the professors "forcing" these students to use MATLAB for their homework sets are partially responsible for these reactions. If students only see this as another tool they have to learn to solve something that they *think* they can do with Excel (or a calculator), then I can see them disliking MATLAB. When professors become creative and give interesting problems for students to solve, I think it'll be different. I do think "hate" is kind of extreme. But kids nowadays like to exaggerate everything.
I *LOVE* flossing!! (okay, not really, but it does feel nice afterwards).
I just reported that facebook group:
* Violence or harmful behavior->Self-harm
it's really self-harm :)
A sad statement about my generation Andrew...
And why do people go to a site to say the same thing as everyone else? Do they feel validated?
I also liked "Only 0.18% of people in the industry actually use this langauge. That's how bad it is."
That's just begging for a "[citation needed]".
"The" industry. Which "the" industry, I wonder...?
I know I'm biased (but for the record, for me, loving MATLAB => employment @ TMW, not vice versa), but why would you *hate* MATLAB? I can understand not loving it like we do, but *hate*? I'm not a great fan of FORTRAN (at least F77, which I had to endure through school), but I don't hate it. (And the specific things I hated about F77 were precisely the things that MATLAB fixed!) I find Mathematica syntax far less intuitive than MATLAB, but, again, I don't hate Mma in any way.
All languages/applications have their strengths and weaknesses.
Odd. Very odd.
ok we hate matlab but do any1 knows how to use it??? :D
Really? Which ones?
It's very enjoyable reading some of those...
Matlab - Quality Custom Finishing: "For more than three decades, Matlab has set the standard for quality custom paint and powder finishes ... Woman owned and operated."
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