Winter 2023
In this lab, you’ll write a program to read historical earthquake data from a file and plot each earthquake on a map using turtle graphics. An example output is shown here:
Create a lab8 directory in your lab environment of
choice. Download the following files from the course webpage and place
them in your lab8 folder:
plot_earthquakes.py - this file contains skeleton code and pseudocode
earthquakes.csv - this file contains the data you’ll be reading
earth.png - this will be set as the
background image in the turtle graphics canvas (this is done for you by
the turtle_setup function given in the skeleton
code).
Implement the parse_row function and the remainder of
the main function according to the pseudocode included in
comments. Follow the same coding style conventions we’ve been using up
to this point: comment at the top, good variable naming, and so on.
You’ll find that you need many of the structures and concepts we’ve covered in this course to complete this task - ask your TA if you encounter any problems, and use this opportunity to take note of any topics you need to brush up on before the final exam.
Some hints:
The algorithm given in the pseudocode reads each line of the CSV
file into a dictionary, appending each dictionary to a list. Each
dictionary has the same four keys, corresponding to the column headers;
its values are the values for those columns in the given row. This gets
us a list of earthquake records whose properties can be accessed by
name, (e.g., quakes[3]["magnitude"] would give the
magnitude of the fourth earthquake in the CSV file, assuming you called
the list quakes).
The first line of the file contains column headers, so you’ll need to skip over it before starting to read data.
Plotting earthquakes on the map is quite simple: the map image (and turtle canvas) is 720x360 pixels, with (0,0) in the center. Longitude (the \(x\) axis) goes from -180 to 180 and latitude (\(y\) axis) goes from -90 to 90, so (0,0) is in the center. To get the canvas \((x, y)\) coordinates based on a given (lon, lat) coordinate, simply multiply each coordinate by 2.
The skeleton includes an implementation of the
teleport function from Lab 5.
You can use a turtle object’s circle method to draw
a circle. See the documentation for details on how to use it.
Coloring the circles is optional. In my color scheme, the red channel is proportional to magnitude, while the green and blue channels are inversely proportional to magnitude. For an extra challenge, try coloring the circles based on the date instead of the magnitude.
Take a screenshot of your program’s output and save it as
earthquakes.png. Submit earthquakes.png and
plot_earthquakes.py to Canvas.
This lab is graded out of 30 points:
2 points: You submitted earthquakes.png and
plot_earthquakes.py to Canvas.
3 points: The top of your program has comments including your name, date, and a short description of the program’s purpose.
15 points: The program reads the earthquake data into a list of dictionaries
5 points: A circle is drawn for each earthquake
5 points: The circle’s size varies with the earthquake’s magnitude
An anagram of a word is a different word spelled using the same letters. For instance, “elbow” is an anagram of “below”. For purposes of this problem, we’ll consider only anagrams that use exactly the same letters, without leaving any out or repeating letters more times than they appear in the original word. For example, “bow” and “bellow” are not considered anagrams of “below” for purposes of this problem.
Download words.txt and write a program that
finds the largest set of 6-letter words that are all anagrams of each
other. As an example, among 3-letter words, there are two sets that tie
for largest: [’tea’, ’eat’, ’eta’, ’ate’] and
[’aer’, ’ear’, ’are’, ’era’].
My program is able to find the three-letter sets in a second or two
on my laptop. Finding the 6-letter set takes a little longer - around 45
seconds. I didn’t import any modules from the standard library, but you
may if you’d like—itertools might be particularly helpful.
For the sake of efficiency, you may want do some thinking and/or
research into what kind of collection you store things in; lists may not
always be the best choice.
Name your program anagram.py and submit it to Canvas for
up to 2 points of extra credit. One point is awarded for a correct
solution; the second point is awarded for solving it without importing
any modules.
