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Making a spiral (1 of 2)

You're sitting on your back deck. It's mid-morning in late Spring. You have your coffee in hand and the local paper on your lap. You're looking out over the back 40. You decided not to plant corn on this parcel to let the soil recuperate a bit.  

There's an article in the paper about a farmer who lives not too far from you who swears he saw a UFO. You don't think so. But to prove to yourself you're open-minded, you get the idea to make some kind of design on your parcel that would signal to a UFO that there is semi-intelligent life down here. You look up how to make a spiral. You decide that an Archimedean spiral (named after the 3rd-century BC Greek mathematician Archimedes) will suffice. 

You are going to make something that looks like this:


You figure 800 footsteps will do. You grab a stake, measuring tape, and a pair of snow shoes. You pound the stake and start walking in a circle, letting out the measuring tape a little at a time. It takes you less than 20 minutes to accomplish but you can't see the result for obvious reasons.

You go back to your porch and start looking at other spiral geometries and wonder if you should have made a different type of spiral.

The Archimedean Spiral is described in polar coordinates by the equation: 

Learn more about it HERE.

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