re: #419 island

Too bad the guy who “did it” has no idea at all what the code is intended to do or what it meant by the comments. No one does, at least not based on the incomplete fragments supplied.

But as someone who works with computer code on a daily basis, a great deal of it produced by scientists who are not professional programmers, I’ll tell you what my first interpretation of that single line was - you’ve got an array, and every element in the array is multiplied by 0.75. Why? I’ve seen similar constructs many times, and the most common use is to scale one axis of a graph so it fits within a particular display size. The scale factor is the “fudge factor” mentioned in the comments, which are there as a note to remind the author that shrinking the graph this way is an off-the-cuff workaround done quickly to provide a reasonable margin around the graph. This is reinforced by the range of the values - just shy of 3.0 altogether, which would press the graph itself uncomfortably close to the “edges” of a graph made 3 units high.

A better approach to such a problem, of course, would be to take into account the actual display geometry and scaling, make a pass over the data to determine it’s range at runtime, and calculate the “true” scale factor to use in order to produce the desired margins. But that’s harder, and has nothing to do with the problem at hand.

Is my interpretation correct? I have no idea. It’s just something I’ve seen done hundreds of times that happens to exactly match what’s going on in the code and explains all of it’s features.

Which is quite unlike the article you reference, which leaves out references, explanations and illustrations of several important elements necessary to understanding. The entire article reads like it’s been “fudged” to support a predetermined explanation involving guilt and fraud, and is deliberately written to obscure the thin explanation provided. And, frankly, I’m being very kind by omitting any commentary on what others will surely point out is outright misrepresentation of certain key elements of the tale related. But I’ll leave that for others.

The fact is, you have no idea what the code is supposed to do, you don’t understand the article you referenced, and the author of it likewise is working completely in the dark.

I hope you realize that this sort of blatant shoveling is going to bite opponents in the ass, hard, when it turns out that the code is entirely correct and produces reasonable results.