Each week for the remainder of the semester I will be posting a series of questions raised by the material we are covering. These questions will range from direct and straight forward through to open ended and perhaps even intentionally vague.

Each student enrolled in the course is a member of a 4 or 5 person discussion group on RamCT. Here are my expectations. I am not looking for each student to necessary address each question individually, but I am looking for the group as a whole to cover the questions and for every member to participate. Sahar Habib will moniture the discussions closely and I will review them as well.

Participation is required and part of the overall grade for the semester. That said, these forums exist for your benefit and what we are looking for is useful discussion. We're not looking, in general, for 'right' answers. Anyone actively participating with relevant contributions should expect to receive full credit for this aspect of the course. Not surprisingly, anyone choosing to ignore this aspect of the course should not expect credit. A discussion period will be indicated with each and while students may of course discussing topics if they please, for the sake of course credit, we will assess the discussions at the close of these time periods.

One last thing, in addition to discussing the questions below, feel free to say (type) a few words of introduction to your other discussion group members, Sahar and me (Ross Beveridge 8/29/2012)

Hopefully the underlying motivation for these questions will be apparent to you as you begin to relate them to what we are covering we respect to modeling and 2D transformations. Here are the questions:

1. In terms of CS data structures, what distinguishes a 2D point from a 2D vector?
2. Mathematically, are points and vectors essentially the same thing?
3. How does one create a unit length vector?
4. What geometrically does a dot product with a unit length vector signify?
5. What does a dot product equal to zero signify?
6. What does it mean to state that a 2x2 matrix is orthonormal?
7. What does the phrase 'basis vector' signify?