Ah, the life of a night owl.

I know it sounds weird, but you might try keeping a sleep journal. It could help you collect data and maybe see what's going on. I just started using a program called SleepChart. Seems like it will take a long time to gather enough data, but maybe it will be helpful.

IANAD or anything, though. Just someone else who isn't a morning person.

It may look like it is calculating something impossible; however, I believe it is actually taking a shortcut. Its assuming that you want to take the dot product of two vectors.

You can confirm this by using letters instead of numbers.

X=(a,b)
X*X
      a^2 + b^2

Y=(c,d)
dot(X,Y)
      ac + bd

I believe MATLAB has similar "shortcuts" that you have to be careful of.

If you're worried, it does in fact check the matrix dimensions:

Z=((a,b),(c,d),(et,f))
dot(Z,Z)
      Stop: inner: tensor dimension check

dot(transpose(Z),Z)
      [ displays a large, correct matrix :) ]

I would actually like to learn how to use a slide rule. Do you know of any good places where I could purchase one? I would prefer a linear one, rather than a circular/pilot style slide rule. Thanks!

No problem! I do what I can :)

This has been posted several times in this thread, but I thought it was worth a link since you mentioned MATLAB...

GNU Octave claims to be a free replacement to MATLAB. Even says so in the FAQ: "Octave is a high-level interactive language, primarily intended for numerical computations that is mostly compatible with Matlab." Cheers!

http://eigenmath.net/

If anyone actually reads this far down, Eigenmath is an awesome open source graphing calculator that supports scripting. It has good symbolic support, calculus and matrix functions, and really good documentation (for an open source app).

Think of it as MATLAB-lite.

http://www.guitarrising.com/

This will be awesome if done correctly. My only hope is that we see this kind of technology become available for other instruments, as well.