I really, really dislike revision. It’s not so bad when it’s something that’s reasonably interesting, like Quantum Mechanics or something, but trying to bludgeon my brain into learning Thermodynamics in this kind of heat is frankly just horrific and painful, and I want it to go away and leave me alone.

My exams are:

• Thermodynamics & Statistical Physics
• Quantum Mechanics
• Applications of Quantum Mechanics & Electrons in Solids
• Fourier Methods, Differential Equations, & Statistics of Meausurement
• Mathematical Methods
• Electromagnetism & Optics

I’ve done one past paper each for the first two, and overall I’m fairly confident, although there are some pretty major gaps in my Thermodynamic knowledge (how do you work out entropy change again?!), which I’m desperately trying to plug. I’ve done some revision in the other areas too, so I’m feeling fairly alright with differential equations, and statistics is just a retread of A Level stats anyway, for the most part.

First exam is on the 28th, so things are moving on.

Went camping last weekend, may or may not do a writeup on that at some point, possibly when I run out of ways to continue procrastinating. Should have struck while the iron was hot.

Utter madness.

With thanks to New Scientist for publishing this!

The best part is going through the formulae, as it’s patently obvious that they make no sense at all.

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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