I’m in the library, revising for my electromagnetism exam by reading some of the Feynman lectures on physics. He presents the material in a clear, accessible, and interesting way, and it’s a real joy to read. He also goes off on some great tangents to relate the basic material to more complex unsolved problems in Physics, and it’s really, really interesting. He addresses all the issues you have as an undergraduate - should I have a mental model of what’s going on, is this treatment accurate, and provides tips and tricks for solving various problems.

This got me to thinking in general of how easy it is for your enthusiasm for something to be crushed by the process of actually having to study it - sometimes you read about things the great scientists of the past discovered and you wonder how they could bring themselves to work on anything quite so dull!

Makes me wonder if perhaps we get our knowledge too easy; the things which were the life’s work of some of our greatest minds, taught in a lazy afternoon.

Obliquely, this led me on to thinking about Lost. I’ve just seen the 4th season finale, so it’s on my mind, but I’m going to avoid spoilers here! I realised they’d got their characterisations of the characters completely and utterly wrong!

Jack is the man of faith, and Locke is the man of science! Jack believes so thoroughly in “reason” that he totally ignores the things he can see with his own two eyes - like giant columns of black smoke that can kill people. Locke has the use of his legs restored, and immediately comes to the conclusion that something awfully odd is going on. Locke’s attitude is clearly the more scientific. The writers obviously have no idea what they’re talking about.

This could be just because I’m feeling a tad hostile towards them right now - anyone who’s seen the finale can probably guess why!

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.

I noticed a while back that when the escalators at Green Park  tube weren’t working, when I stepped on and off I felt this weird "jolt", like the escalator was moving, even though it was stationary.

The reason is fairly obvious - I use the two escalators at Green Park twice a day every week day, so with the constant repetition has caused me to develop what I can only describe as an unconscious adaptation to my walking response which smoothes over the transition between the moving escalator and the stationary ground. This is really pretty interesting I think, and makes me wonder how many other automatic adaptations my brain has developed without me noticing. Do I walk differently on surfaces I know to be slippery? Have the years I’ve spent in education subtlety altered my thought patterns?

I heard of one experiment where you wear mirrored glasses that make everything appear upside-down; your brain corrects for this after a few hours and makes the image appear the correct way up. I guess it’s another example of how bafflingly complex and impressive the brain is. The visual and audio processing of the raw information coming in from our senses alone is just unbelievably complex, automatically correlating the inputs from each of your ears and eyes to perform spatialisation.

Guess that’s my thought for the day!

“A Pig. In a cage. On antibiotics”

So I’ve know they’ve been around for a while, and I’ve got a copy of The Bends, and I’ve heard a few songs here and there, and saw them at V a couple of years back, but I haven’t really got into them especially much.

Then I bought In Rainbows the other day (I thought, I’ll pay about £5, how can it go wrong?) and it’s one of the albums I’ve enjoyed most recently. Reckoner and Nude are two of the most brilliantly beautiful songs.

So when I saw OK Computer for £4 at Zavvi (Virgin Megastore, until they decided on path of Southern Comfort-style brand suicide) and again thought, what the heck, at least I’m not out much if I hate it.

But no, I’ve been listening to it more or less non-stop for the last few weeks. I think I may actually be slightly in love with it, which is slightly worrying. I’m not a music expert or journalist, so I’ll try and refrain from using phrases like “soaring soundscapes” and “constructed melodious noise”  because I have very little idea what they actually mean.

What I do know is that possibly my favourite track is the breathtakingly experimental track Fitter Happier where a computer voice recites 90s-era motivational era statements at you, getting causually and effortlessly more surreal & disturbing. The feel is bleak and Orwellian - it’s wonderful.

(This was written yesterday and posted into the Future)

I haven’t posted anything in just forever. Really it’s just symptomatic of my complete failure to have any discipline in any whatsoever. I really had grand plans for this blog, like learning XHTML/CSS and making it pretty and the like - all of which have been utter failures.

So, I think I’ll try and write either every day or on a M/W/F schedule. See how it goes.

Anyways, in summary:

Buy the Orange Box, you fools! If you have a gaming bone in your body, or even if you don’t, go get it.

Quantum Mechanics is both hard and intellectually satisfying simultaneously.

God still doesn’t exist.

The TV spots for The Golden Compass make me angry: "Legend tells that the last Golden Compass - whoever can read it has the power to rule the universe… The quest for the compass begins". I’m… urgh. The book (which is actually called Northern Lights) is one of my absolute favourite books of all time, and it makes me angry to see it mutilated so. I hope that this trailer is only aimed at incredibly stupid obese Americans, able only deal with plots shallower than the pools of hideous drool collecting underneath their slack, lifeless mouths.

I want to see a documentary about Tony Blair on TV on Sunday, but I’m probably going to forget.

Going swimming by yourself is about 15 different kinds of dull.

I waste a frightening number of hours every single day.

I got the new Buffy Season 8 comic, it’s awesome, one of the best yet. I also picked up the "Tales of the Slayer" graphic novel, which is a collection of stories about slayers in the past, written by some of the people who wrote Buffy for TV. And it has more Fray, and Fray is just brilliant-fantastic.

I’m sure some other things’ll come to me later. There are so many things I want to tell people that I only think of while I’m by myself. It’s an annoying paradox is what it is.

Andy out.

So I’m sure you’ll have heard about Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. It’s exceptional not only because it’s been earning some pretty good reviews, but for their unique method of getting it out to the masses. You head over to their website, and choose to pay however much or little as you like, including paying nothing at all.

This is possibly one of the cleverest things to hit the music industry in years; let’s face it, with the innovation of digital music, most people have a lot of music on their computers which they haven’t strictly paid for. The record companies have adapted to this by grudgingly admitting their music to the likes of iTunes and Napster, and by suing the pants off anyone they can find downloading music.

Inherently, it’s a broken model. Rather than trying to move with the times the labels are trying to whack the brakes on and stuff the genie back into the bottle. There are a multitude of reasons as to why the big music label model is broken, too many to go into here, and that’s only partly because my cold fingers are making typing difficult.

Radiohead’s new model is likely to make them a really big bundle of cash. I’ve never bought a Radiohead album before, and I’ve just laid down £5 on their new album, just because that’s an amount of cash I feel comfortable semi-casually parting with. No doubt there are a lot of people like me who will make similar purchases. This translates into new fans, more bodies in their gigs, and gig ticket sales are a lot more profitable for the artist than the release of an album through a traditional retailer and label, both creaming off their profits.

Ok, so I lied. It’s a little about games. Games are in some ways having the same growing pains - where the big business is trying to hold on to world where their business models make sense, when the world is actually making them more irrelevant as time goes on. Both these media need pioneers in the digital space to sell direct to consumers without the middlemen.

They need to key into making the legitimate experience positive enough to outweigh the free-ness of the pirates. This is why all DRM schemes are inherently futile - they penalise the legitimate purchaser but don’t prevent the wide-scale distribution of music as CDs are still trivial to rip. Even with "protection" added to CD the work-arounds are nearly trivial.

Most people, when given the option, will choose "good" behaviour, like paying for music, over "bad" choices, like piracy, even with a slight disincentive to the good side. See games which offer you moral choices, like Black & White. If you offer them a service like Radiohead’s is, a lot of people will pay, even if it’s a fairly nominal amount. The key point is: as long as you’re covering your costs to keep the servers running, nominal payment is better than people just stealing it! The fans will still pay more, because they’re fans, and they will buy at full price anyway.

The logical thing to do is to provide (optional?) Bittorrent downloads, reducing the costs of distribution to an absolute minimum. Bittorrenting is already a valuable tool in the arsenal of the pirate - it would be wonderful for it also to be put towards more virtuous ends.

So my last couple of entries have more or less been about games. I would apologise for not writing about what’s happening in my life, but you probably don’t want to hear about the trivial minutiae anyways. Needless to say, the following entry will hold no value for you if you don’t play games.

So Halo 3 is already receding over the horizon - the Zero Punctuation review is up, and it’s spot-on accurate. The people throwing it perfect scores are indeed rather misguided.

This is a rather disturbing trend - two of the games which made my list of most anticipated games of the year were good, beautiful and well-crafted adventures, but lacking that crucial spark that sets the great apart from the merely good.

With any luck I can rely on Valve to buck this trend. As the tantalising countdown in Steam tells me, Episode Two and Portal will be released in about 7 and a half hours as I write this. By the time anyone actually reads it, it’ll probably be out. Their companion game, Team Fortress 2, is already out in beta and it’s The Shit.

It’s a finely-honed brilliant game, and on top of that it’s probably one of the best looking games of the year. It’s scary that the graphics shown in the “Meet the…” series of videos (which are very worth watching, incidentally) are actually representative of the in-game experience - the art style is simply breathtaking. It’s the perfect antidote to the “realism” dross that’s been infecting the genre for years. None of this annoying burst-fire-to-control-recoil nonsense, just the unashamed, glorious spin-up of the Heavy’s chaingun, his wondrous bullet-hose, the ever widening grin on his face as enemies are chewed up by the pain-stream. It’s good. Really good.

A reminder of why Valve is probably the best developer in the world - they understand a worrying wealth of things that most developers just don’t, like the importance of excellent writing and pacing, of using art to tell a story, or push an effect you’re going for. They excel in almost every area of game design, and they’ve got it down almost to a science rather than an art. You play something Valve’s done, and you know that almost every design decision they’ve taken is based on experimental evidence. It’s like that because they know that is the most fun.

Anyways, I’m kinda gutted that I have to be in lab tomorrow morning. I’m getting back here asap after lab finishes to play. The only question is which of the games to hit first, Portal or Episode Two.

PS. I’ve got a copy of each of HL2 and Ep1 to give away! So please ask if you want.