Bits of py

Since I started at Dynamic Controls about two years ago, engineers have done free online courses in machine learning, artificial intelligence, cryptography and digital electronics. These services are just starting to build momentum, have a go at many computer science topics at coursera.org or udacity.com , for something completely different learn a language while transcribing the web at duolingo.com . The business also promotes internal classes, from topics related to each department like Finance 101 to classes run by enthusiasts in a particular domain like the Chinese language or Programming in Python. I'm about to embark on teaching the "Introduction to Programming" course for the third time. It is so rewarding to see many of my previous students use Python to automate some repetitive part of their job. Everyone has been happy using Python 3 as their first programming language. We live in a wonderful world with a rich culture of free learning and education.

This is my building, I want to know how much each floor moves in an earthquake... Also it would be nice to know the acceleration experienced by each floor. First off we need some data. I have an earthquake data file containing ground acceleration data from the Kobe earthquake  of 1995. It is a matlab file, so the data will have to be extracted into a numpy format. Scipy has an io module which contains a matlab submodule. Since we want to visualize this data somehow, the pylab package will also be used. Firstly I'll make a small helper function that enforces complex symmetry, useful for after the frequency domain analysis: from scipy.io import matlab as mio from pylab import plot , show , ylabel , xlabel , title , figure , legend , annotate import numpy as np def enforce_complex_sym ( array , nyquist ): '''Enforce complex symmetry''' array [:, nyquist + 1 :] = np . conj ( array [:, nyquist - 1 : 0 : - 1 ]) Next I'l...