Oh, apparently Coldplay will be playing a free show in Brixton on June 16th to promote their new album. I want to go, but I doubt anyone will come with me. Regardless, I will attempt to score tickets. If you do want to (try to) come with, please get in touch.

Also, have a look at the new announcement out of Microsoft, Live Mesh. It looks extremely interesting, and the hardest part about it is actually saying what it does. In a nutshell, it provides a platform that automatically pushes data around between endpoints, be they devices or some kind of service.

It sounds kinda dull said like that, but the implications are pretty huge. Basically, it’s a tool for keeping your data in sync. If you have a desktop computer and a Laptop, for instance, you can set up Live Mesh to share the folders. When you add a photo to the folder on the laptop, it’s automatically replicated to the computer. What makes it even more useful is that Microsoft provides a large (5 GB-ish, I think) glob of storage, so even if your desktop is turned off, the photo will replicate up to the service, then down to your desktop when you switch it on.

You can also access all the data stored on the service straight from a browser. And it’s not hard to create your own kinds of custom endpoints. One example is creating an interface to Facebook, so the moment you load photos onto your computer they could start replicating up to Facebook, automatically, in the background. And vice-versa, any pictures of you that appear on Facebook are automatically grabbed into your mesh.

Absolute tip of the iceberg. The platform is pretty much completely general. This is going to be huge. Sadly, it’s in private beta right now, so it’s not so much possible to use it unless you get invited, and then only with some difficulties (there’s a silly country lock) but I’m itching to get my hands on it.

So today I sat down with the intention of figuring out how to solve ∇²u = 0, otherwise known as the Laplace equation, in spherical polar co-ordinates. Because it’s part of my course.

It may sound as a task somewhat obscure, but it’s really not. It governs any kind of potential, like gravitational, or fluid, or electrical, whatever.

Solving the equation in spherical polar co-ordinates gives insight into any problems in which potentials are important in a spherical environment, like the hydrogen atom. As it turns out, the various solutions to this equation are what create the energy levels in atoms, what makes a metal like copper behave differently from a gas like argon. It’s kinda fascinating that you are just going in solving this equation, and this kind of really fundamental stuff just leaps out of the mathematics.

Like the basis of energy levels is that a component of this differential equation has a series solution, a long chain of terms. If this chain of terms is allowed to go off to infinity, it’ll be unbounded - the sum of the series will itself be infinite. So you have to impose an artificial cut-off to the sequence for the solution to exist. The series of terms has to be finite. The really odd part is then this cut-off number, known as L, actually is something physical.

If you ever studied chemistry, you’ll know about s, p, d, and f orbitals, and how different numbers of electrons can fit in each. Well, if an electron is in the p orbital, then the L number I mentioned is 1. d, the L number is 2. You can probably guess what f is!

The reason that chemistry is the way it is all falls out of the solutions to this kind of equations. That really boggles my mind that the way the world is seems to be an inevitable result of the equations that govern it. Amazing.

Have a look at this video from BBC News.

Looks genuinely fascinating! I hope I find the time to go check this out.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

I meant to go to sleep, then I forgot. Anyways, if the words “Web standards” and “IE8″ mean anything to you, you should read the above article. It’s gold.

I’ll just quickly bash out what I’ve been thinking lately, which isn’t much, all in all.

Doctor Who was on again on Saturday, so if you haven’t watch it yet, spoilers abound in the next paragraph or so. Then I’m going to talk about the finale of Skins, so if you haven’t watched that either, you might as well give up now.

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Yesterday, Dickie, Shell, Fish, Ben, and I went go-karting in Stourbridge.

Rather bizarrely Ben turned up first; apparently army training in punctuality does work! I arrived second, mysteriously managing to not be asleep or otherwise in bed, even into the early evening (a feat I haven’t repeated today) and then everyone else turned up after.

We handed over our entry, watched the now-annoyingly-familiar safety video, donned our overalls, several-sizes-too-big gloves, and helmets, and waited for the people ahead of us to finish their race.

The basic layout of the event was thus: a 10-lap qualifying session, followed by a 45-lap race. In the qualifying, Dickie posted the fastest time, then Ben, me, Shell (who should have done better, with those go-faster points on her license) and Fish.

Alas, I can’t give you a blow-by-blow of the race that followed, but it was marked by Fish and Shell being really, really slow and getting lapped a lot; Fish completed only 40 laps, a whole 5 adrift of the race leaders. He also had an annoying tendency to spin his kart out right in front of you on a full-throttle corner. In the top 3, me, Dickie and Ben continually jostled for position, with some defensive driving (by me) and general violence and general bad sportsmanship (by Ben) marring Dickie’s attempts to overtake.

In the end, the result was:

1. Me
2. Dickie
3. Ben
4. Shell
5. Fish

Which I can’t say I entirely deserved, as Dickie really is the faster driver, and I was lucky to capitalise on the few mistakes he made (which included me overtaking both him and Ben when they couldn’t agree on who was getting flagged).

Then there was curry and wine, then some more wine at a pub, and it was all good.

I was earlier reading about the NUS conference on the excellent Live! website, and it basically looks like a complete cluster-fuck. Once again, the conference has been hijacked by the far-left, more obsessed with idealism and political activism than with making the NUS an organisation which acts in the best interests of students.

I advise you to take a look at Live! to see the full disaster of the thing. but it more or less boils down to a defeat for reform, policies calling for a disastrous national bursary scheme, and the like.

For those of you who aren’t Imperial students, we only (re)joined the NUS last year after a narrowly fought referendum. It was sold by the “Yes” campaign on a promise that the dysfunctional NUS would reform, and would give Imperial a national voice. This rather emphatically hasn’t happened; the reform has failed, and most of the motions went against Imperial’s interest. It gets worse - the delegates to the conference were elected on the basis that they were mandated to represent the position of the Union, and by extension, the students. One of the Imperial delegates, Camilla Royle, broke mandate three times to vote with the Student Respect faction. Absolutely disgraceful behaviour.

The NUS is mess - even the most clear-cut benefit, that of discounts, is debatable. You have to buy their NUS extra card, and then the NUS lobbies for discounts to be restricted to only card holders, rather than being for all students; a despicable policy.

Anyways, if you’re an Imperial student, the campaign for disaffliation has already begun. Join this Facebook group and sign the petition, 500 signatures will trigger a referendum on leaving the NUS. If you’re not an Imperial student, I would suggest seeing if such a thing can be done with your Union.

On another tack of stupidity, I saw this on the Bad Science Blog:

Luckily, it also had the antidote, a Feynman chaser.