
Matlab's First Customer - gballan
http://people.maths.ox.ac.uk/trefethen/honours.html
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thanks1banks2
A bit off topic tidbit:

Early Matlab version(s) had an interesting Easter egg. Once when frustrated
with the learning on the REPL, I typed "fuck you" and the console spit out
"your place or mine?" instead of an error that I was so used to.

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vladTheInhaler
Another little easter egg: typing "why" will return a randomly generated
answer.

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teekert
also imagesc with no arguments (used to at least) return an upside down
picture of some person. This led to some confusion in our lab at some point.

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mattkrause
This Easter egg is responsible for one of the most terrifying evenings of my
life.

My first project in grad school was a visual perception experiment, written in
Matlab. People were shown images that were either just noise (think static or
clouds) or noise + a very faint shape, and asked to report which was which.
The goal was to analyze the noise patterns associated with each response to
identify how people recognize shapes (e.g., do you need all four corners to
recognize a + sign).

I tested the task on myself first. It’s fairly late, maybe 9:30 or 10pm, when
I finally get everything running just so. Sitting in our pitch-dark testing
room, in the middle of a deserted floor of a medical school, I run the
analysis code. I’m expecting to see some simple shapes emerge from the
processed noise; I think I used crosses, triangles, and Gabors as targets.

Instead, however, window after window pops up with the creepy, distorted face
of that child. I was tired, hungry, and had just seen _The Ring_ , so I did
the obvious thing: I slammed the laptop shut and high-tailed it home.

The next morning, my labmate helped me figure out that I had written imagesc
somewhere, instead of images, the variable that contained my results.

TL;DR: Typo terrified me.

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relenzo2
I WASN'T THE ONLY ONE!

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wallnuss
As far as I know he bought that license for one of his student at the time,
Alan Edelman, who then ended up co-creating the Julia language.

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SiempreViernes
Interesting, how did you come across this very _specific_ bit of trivia?

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tw1010
Alan Edelman has done a lot of talks, so if I had to guess, he mentions it
somewhere in one of those. But I have no actual clue.

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ChrisRackauckas
He does mention this.

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selimthegrim
He ought to add to that list “finder of mistakes in Feynman lectures”

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throw20102010
I really hope that's listed in chronological order, because otherwise he's
throwing serious shade at the Royal Society.

Edit: I checked it out- Matlab has been around since 1984, and Prof Trefethen
was made FRS in 2005. Safe.

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n4r9
Not necessarily. As a UK professor in numerical analysis, being an FRS is
practically a given. I'd be more proud of the MATLAB one if it was me.

