In the first post on Cistercian Numbers, I covered drawing the Cistercian numerals zero through four using ucblogo (Berkeley Logo). Five was left as a future exercise with the point that it’s possible to think of five as the result of combining drawing both four and one:
In this post, we’ll dive into an approach to drawing certain numerals as combinations of other numerals.
Continue readingI recently became aware of Cistercian numerals, a system for writing numbers up to 9999 which was developed in the middle ages by the Order of Cistercians. Personally, I think they have a pleasant geometric form which could be well suited to turtle graphics:
In this series of posts, I’ll walk through one way of teaching the Logo turtle to draw Cistercian numerals in ucblogo (Berkeley Logo). We’ll start with the numbers zero through four and then build up from there, eventually getting to the full range of numbers from 0 to 9999.
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has made something rather special with the Raspberry Pi 400. It evokes nostalgia for the computers of the 80s; but, it does so thoughtfully. The nostalgia feels like the natural outcome of reexperiencing a fundamentally good design, a design which considers how the computer will fit into a home. Similarly, Logo presents a view of coding which considers how software will fit into people’s lives, rather than insisting people change in order to meet the requirements of software. I don’t see either of them as a walk down memory lane so much as complementary paths into a future where humans drive technology.
The following are my notes on using the two together – building and installing ucblogo (Berkeley Logo) on the Raspberry Pi 400. Hopefully, others will take this journey too.
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While there is more to Logo than turtle graphics, I suspect drawing with turtles holds a special place in many of our hearts. With Berkeley Logo (ucblogo) under active development and available for modern operating systems (including OSX, Windows, and Linux), it feels like a natural fit for generating interesting shapes to plot on a modern plotter like the AxiDraw.
The Logo environment is designed to make it easy to jump in and get started drawing. In fact, something interesting to plot can be produced in a single line:
REPEAT 360 [ FD # RT 89 ]
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