new floor: pretty but springy

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new floor: pretty but springy
Tuesday, September 27 2011

Today was day one of the installation of a new floor for the upstairs master bedroom and teevee room. A couple real salt of the Earth floor installation guys came. They were grey-haired middle-aged white guys who liked to listen to the local country music station (94.3 FM: "the Wolf"). Not wanting to disturb them, I set up a ladder from the ground the laboratory deck so I could get in and out through the window and not have to go through the teevee room.

At some point in the afternoon, the boss man Tony came out to see how the work was going. Nine years ago Tony was a lowly installer and he did our entire living and dining room by himself. These days he drives a black BMW and mostly just handles sales and logistics. I looked at the floor for the first time while Tony was here. About a third of the teevee room was done at the time and it was a huge improvement over the nasty old carpet.

Later after the installers left, I walked on the new floor for the first time. It looked great, but the feel is going to take some getting used to. It's engineered flooring, meaning its basically a plywood with a top wear layer of our chosen look (a rough cut hickory). But because it's been glued together as a single sheet floating atop the subfloor on a thin foam mat, it has a certain amount of give to it, making it feel unexpectedly squishy, which defies expectations that come from simply looking at it.

With the teevee in the laboratory, it was easy for me to go on something of a junk television marathon, watching several episodes of Sister Wives, the show about a doofy polygamous husband and his four wives (who, unlike other Fundamentalist Mormons, don't appear to own any dresses).

My computational task today was to track down an algorithm for determining the distance of a point from a line defined by two other points. I found something somewhere written in C, but it treated points as two member arrays and only worked with integers. I had to make a number of changes. The resulting code, in Objective C, was as follows:

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// -(double)distanceOutOfLineOfPointLat:(double)lat lon:(double)lon lineLatOne:(double)lineLatOne lineLonOne:(double)lineLonOne lineLatTwo:(double)lineLatTwo lineLonTwo:(double)lineLonTwo{ double R = 6371; // km //NSLog(@"Lat:%f Lon:%f ", lat, lon); double denom=[self distanceax:lineLonOne ay:lineLatOne bx:lineLonTwo by:lineLatTwo]; double num=[self crossax:lon ay:lat bx:lineLonOne by:lineLatOne cx:lineLonTwo cy:lineLatTwo]; //NSLog(@"Lat:%f Lon:%f, Denom:%f Num:%f", lat, lon, denom,num); double dist = R* num/denom ; //NSLog(@"THIS DIS:%f", dist); return fabs(dist); } //Compute the dot product AB · BC -(double)dotax:(double)ax ay:(double)ay bx:(double)bx by:(double)by cx:(double)cx cy:(double)cy{ double ABx; double ABy; double BCx; double BCy; ABx = bx-ax; ABy = by-ay; BCx= cx-bx; BCy = cy-by; double dot = ABx * BCx + ABy * BCy; return dot; } //Compute the cross product AB x AC -(double)crossax:(double)ax ay:(double)ay bx:(double)bx by:(double)by cx:(double)cx cy:(double)cy{ double ABx; double ABy; double ACx; double ACy; ABx = bx-ax; ABy = by-ay; ACx = cx-ax; ACy = cy-ay; double cross = ABx * ACy - ABy * ACx; return cross; } //Compute the distance from A to B -(double)distanceax:(double)ax ay:(double)ay bx:(double)bx by:(double)by{ double d1 = ax - bx; double d2 = ay - by; //NSLog(@"Distance ax:%f bx:%f d1:%f d2:%f", ax, bx, d1, d2); return sqrt(d1*d1+d2*d2); }

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