The RC Design Functions 8_03 spreadsheet is now available for free download from:
The main changes are:
… is unveiled for the first time:
Click image for link to map with pan and zoom:
On July 25, 01585, near the end of a century of unprecedented change, four Japanese boys stopped in Milan on their way back home to Japan. They’d been sent as the first Japanese Embassy to Europe three years earlier by the Jesuit missionary Alesandro Valignano. Their European tour took them through Spain, where they met King Philip II, and to Rome, where they met with the Pope. Now, in Milan, they encountered Urbano Monte, a gentleman scholar from a wealthy Milanese family whose interests had lately turned to geography. Writing about meeting the Japanese boys, Monte “commented on their appearance and manners; the former he found odd but he thought their manners impressive and their eating habits fascinating.”
The encounter with the Japanese embassy inspired Monte to undertake an ambitious project that would consume his efforts for the next twenty years: the Trattato Universale, a four-volume compendium and geographical treatise that attempted to showcase the entire geographic knowledge of the world. The third volume of the Trattato contained his most impressive and innovative work: a map of the world across sixty individual sheets that, were it to be stitched together as his instructions dictated, would be the largest world map made in the sixteenth century.
See the full article at: Urbano Monte’s planisphere was centuries ahead of its time
A live performance from Richard Thompson:
My favourite comment:
“Trying to decide if Suzanne Vega and Louden Wainwright are looking on in awe or thinking “shit we’re next”!”
The previous version of 3DFrame allowed for spring releases at beam ends, but if the release stiffness was entered as zero it was treated as a rigid connection for that freedom. Effectively zero stiffness releases could be modelled by entering a very low stiffness value, but this sometimes caused arithmetic problems, resulting in enormous deflections being reported for the released freedoms. To avoid this problem the code has been modified so that any freedom entered as zero stiffness is treated as fully released. The new version (Rev. 2.08) may be downloaded from:
The solver links to two dll files that need to be installed as described here:
Installing C# dll files, reminder
The download zip file also includes a VBA only version, that should work without any further installation, other than extracting from the zip file.
Typical input showing both spring and zero stiffness releases is shown in the screen shot below:
Further details of the program 3Daxis system and the related stiffness matrices can be found at:
Newton Excel Bach, not (just) an Excel Blog 