The "lie" is that some Bézier-spline drawing programs let you restrict on-curve points to a "symmetric" configuration where the control points are at an equal distance on opposite sides of the on-curve point, but this doesn't necessarily make the curve itself more symmetric or more smooth. The proposed alternative is to control the bend radius instead, and ensure that the curve bends the same on both sides.
It’s trading one property for another, isn’t it? Standard beziers with symmetric handles are C1 continuous but not necessarily G2 continuous; author’s scheme is the other way around, which makes them better for some use cases and worse for others.
The author was having a little fun calling it a “lie”, it’s more like a popular simplification. The question is how to join Bézier curves smoothly, and it’s fairly common for people to join them by matching the velocity, which means if you join two cubic segments (for example) with control points [a,b,c,d] and [d,e,f,g] where you’re joining at point d, then setting d-c == e-d, which puts c,d,e in a line with d as the midpoint, will connect the two curves smoothly. Lots of Bézier curve editing software will have a mode that enforces symmetric control points around the join point. The problem, or “lie”, is that this symmetric strategy doesn’t match the 2nd derivative, so there can be an abrupt change in curvature at point d. You can have a smoother join by adding constraints like curvature or 2nd or 3rd derivative matching, and that’s what the article goes into - one way of achieving smoother matches.
This WP entry mentions several other alternatives to smooth joins besides matching curvature:
either the agents are not good enough to do it, or they cost too much, or perhaps they refuse (i.e. seeing it as trying to subvert the intended function of the site or something).
I was a TA at Princeton ~5 years ago, and I had forgotten about the honor code until reading this. Yes it's true, we did not proctor exams, and students seemed to take pride in it. On every test, you got the names/signatures of those sitting next to you. But also, I had a student who was accused of not putting his pencil down when the test had concluded, and the bureaucratic process to fight the accusation was so crippling that they had to take a semester of leave anyway. So I don't see harm in tearing it down.
Wouldn’t you end up in front of the Undergraduate Honor Committee rather than the Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline?
The Faculty-Student Committee on Discipline “adjudicates all potential violations of academic integrity regulations by undergraduate students other than those violations involving in-class exams (which fall under the jurisdiction of the Honor Committee)” [0]
There are 101,000,000 books visualized. Another way of looking at it is how incredible it is that we can catalogue (and archive) so much of humanity's writing.
That's funny, I came out of it with the opposite impression.
In the section for my native tongue, I zoomed in a few times, here and there, and I only once did I stumble upon an author I knew.
To me, writing a book feels like such a monumental endeavor that I find it hard to fathom the amount of collective effort that it took to write all this, especially considering how most of these works are almost forgotten by now (something something power law).
