Much ado about a "sex link" on the home page of the Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (brief translation: Ministry for Family and Women) today here in Germany.

Said web-page features a "link of the month" and this month it pointed to a webcatalog for women that among other things indirectly contained links to sex sites.

The issue was raised by the Bild-Zeitung (the leading German tabloid), and the major opposition party, CDU. Needless to say, you can also indirectly reach a sex site from the CDU home page...

Sketch 0.6.6 should be available in a few days. The main thing that's missing is the Spanish translation and I've received the first update for that. The rest will be done soon, I hope.

I think I'm also going to include most of the scripts that were posted to the Sketch list yesterday. One of the scripts creates a rough approximation of an Archimedean Spiral. I'm not sure whether that's the correct English term, but mathematically, it's the set of all points whose polar coordinates satisfy r = k * phi where k is a constant.

I'm not sure whether it was meant to be an approximation of that particular kind of spiral, but as I wanted to work out how do that approximation for quite some time, I finally put pencil to paper and did it. Today, I posted a better approximation to the list. Even though there is one part that may not be exactly correct, the difference between a spiral approximated with my version and a polygon approximation is negligible.

The part I'm not sure of yet is a "magic" factor that I just took from the circle approximation. It should be correct in the limit phi->infinity because then a quarter revolution of the spiral is just a quarter circle. It seems to work for small phi as well.