May's Reading List

I've been reading books by and about awesome women this month! One's set in modern times, the other is set at the beginning of the last century. Both tell the tales of women who built extraordinary media empires. One was born into privilege, the other into homeschooling in the South. They both did things the way they wanted to!

You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)

What a fun book to read! I found out about Felicia Day first when my future wife told me about Dr. Horrible and later, on Eureka. This book details Day's experiences through the present day: what it was like to be home schooled, how she started started a successful internet company, and what it's like to be a fan icon. The stories are entertaining and funny even when they deal with serious subjects like depression and creative burnout.

I approached the book from a curious perspective. What does it take to be an internet sensation? This book was remarkably clear on just how much work it takes. It didn't shy away from descriptions of the massive amounts of effort expended by Day and others as some biographies/memoirs do. An awesome read with plenty of detail!

The Huntress: The Adventures, Escapades, and Triumphs of Alicia Patterson: Aviatrix, Sportswoman, Journalist, Publisher

Alicia Patterson founded Newsday. Before that, she was a wild game hunter, accomplished equestrienne, wild game hunter, and aviatrix. Born into privilege as the black sheep daughter of the family that owned the Chicago Tribune Ms. Patterson lived a life full of adventure and journalistic accomplishment. The book entertains while it educates by detailing the fascinating historical backdrop of Patterson's life.

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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...

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 ...

More Cowbell! Record Production using Google Forms and Charts

First, the what : This article shows how to embed a new Google Form into any web page. To demonstrate ths, a chart and form that allow blog readers to control the recording levels of each instrument in Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" is used. HTML code from the Google version of the form included on this page is shown and the parts that need to be modified are highlighted. Next, the why : Google recently released an e-mail form feature that allows users of Google Documents to create an e-mail a form that automatically places each user's input into an associated spreadsheet. As it turns out, with a little bit of work, the forms that are created by Google Docs can be embedded into any web page. Now, The Goods: Click on the instrument you want turned up, click the submit button and then refresh the page. Through the magic of Google Forms as soon as you click on submit and refresh this web page, the data chart will update immediately. Turn up the:...

Copasetic Flow

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