Quote:
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Originally Posted by Bill_Hancoc
If you were to extend the length on the main cylindrical feature the extremes would be parallel, but if you to expand the height and width so that the poece would always be a perfect square the sides of the parabola would just be intersecting with the corners of the square shape and would continue in a parabolic "line"
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GW is right. The curved edge is elliptical, not parabolic. Referring again to the the mathworld site, an
ellipse is a section through a cylinder (a circle is the special case in which the section plane is perpendicular to the cylinder's axis), while a parabola is a
conic section (section through a cone).
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Richard Wallace
Mentor since 2011 for FRC 3620 Average Joes (St. Joseph, Michigan)
Mentor 2002-10 for FRC 931 Perpetual Chaos (St. Louis, Missouri)
since 2003
I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
(Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97)