Poetry at the Goat and Superhero Outfit Changes

This place is so cool!

I was sitting at the Hungry Goat tonight working on another tech book during the weekly poetry reading. I'm not sure if that's a cognitive dissonance or an oxymoron, but that's what I was doing. Actually it's probably neither, but I've always wanted to use the word dissonance.

Anyway! I was sitting at the front door working away. OK, I wasn't working. The trial version of Microsoft Office had expired and I was installing the new version, which was taking forever, so, umm... yeah... I was actually doing what I do best down here: watching the world go by.

So, getting back to the story, as I'm watching the world go by, (accompanied by ranting poetry in the background), a woman pulls up on a classic Vespa and parks on the sidewalk. She's got a bob haircut, and she's wearing a white leather jacket, pink tights, and a pair of white go-go boots. For all the world, she looked like she was going to do an interpretive dance to one of the poems. I smiled and got back to my very intense installation work, (watching the little green bar go across the screen).

About two minutes later, she comes back out. Except now, she's wearing heels, a sleek dress, and the white leather jacket. Apparently, the Goat is her Boulder phone booth. She laid the boots on the floor of the Vespa, (conclusively proving that yes, there is no crime in Boulder), and off she went to whatever it is you can do down the street with a nice dress, but not with pink tights.

Always something new here. And to think, I almost bought a TV!

Comments

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

The Alcubierre Warp Drive Tophat Function and Open Science with Sage

I transferred yesterday's Mathematica file with the Alcubierre warp drive[2] line element and space curvature calculations to the +Sage Mathematical Software System today, (the files been added to the public repository [3]). If you haven't used Sage before, it's a Python based software package that's similar in functionality to Mathematica. Oh, and it' free. I also worked a little more on understanding the theory, but frankly, I made far more progress with the software than the theory. What follows will be a little more of the Alcubierre theory, plus, a cool Sage interactive demo of one of the Alcubierre functions[1], as well as a bit about my first experience with using Sage. Theory The theory is fun, but it's moving slowly. Here's the chalk board from this morning's discussion Alcubierre setup the derivation using something called the 3+1 formalism which means we consider space to be flat, (in this case), slices that are labelled ...

The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in...

Copasetic Flow

Search This Blog