. . . (below)¹

The file data.db can be copied from the /home/phys210/ directory in hyper. It is in a format originally designed to be read in by a program called db which I wrote several decades ago, and which is now adopted as one of the recognized input formats for the Java spreadsheet program $\mu V\!iew$, whose use will be demonstrated in class. Not surprisingly, that format seems self-explanatory to me by now; its one non-obvious aspect is that every "column" of data comes with two "errors" (uncertainties): a positive error and a negative error. Thus, in the first row, "1,,," in the DSN column specifies a value of 1 for the Data Set Number, with no errors; "-20,1,2," in the X column specifies a value of -20 for X with a positive uncertainty of +1 and a negative uncertainty of -2; that is, ${\tt X}_1 = -20{+1 \atop -2}$. When the first error is finite but the second one is missing, as in "-1.2,0.2,," in the Y column (second row), it does not mean that the negative uncertainty is zero; rather that the uncertainties are symmetric - i.e. ${\tt Y}_2 = -1.2 \pm 0.2$, and so on. I hope this is clear. Lists of arbitrary length, like LABELS and DATA, are terminated by a blank line.

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. . . matlab.dat;²

Actually it turns out that one file with values delimited by blank space works for all the other applications; so I have just called it "db.dat" and linked to it in all the subdirectories.

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. . . reason,³

"Æsthetics" are the subject of endless and passionate debate because they involve subjective, idiosyncratic and undefinable values. In other words, graphics is an art form. It is also open-ended: you can invest an arbitrary amount of time in "perfecting" any single graph, only to discover that someone else doesn't like it. That is not the aim of this assignment.

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. . . Source.⁴

Another freeware "cousin" of matlab is scilab, a project supported by the government of France (presumably to free that country's engineers from the grip of MathWorks). Each of these handles scripts that are very similar to the basic matlab ".m" scripts, but each has its own idiosyncracies, especially with respect to plotting. There is also a python package called pylab which emulates matlab and makes nice plots, but these five are enough for one assignment. We'll get back to matlab soon . . . .

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