Jazz
Ahhhh....
I played for a good 5 hours today with a small group of about seven people from PYJO at a farmers market out in some suburb. That's about at utterly exhausting as it gets, but incredibly fun.
After learning that FreeGeek gave me the wrong timeslot for my appointment, I got rather annoyed and walked across the river to the Powell's Technical Bookstore. I was killing time before I needed to meet up with my mom to eat some food, and I started reading an interesting section on electricity and relativity from an electrodynamics textbook. Although I forget a few of the exact details of the derivation, the section basically derived the electric field for a charge moving in an ideal, conducting cylinder of charge density = 0. By then using certain information about the time dilation and transverse momentum, it is possible to derive the existence of the magnetic field. While I have long known of the interconnectedness of electric and magnetic fields, this derivation was particularly elegant and gave mathematical illumination to this sometimes nebulous connection. I think it may have even restored my flagging interest in physics. At least I can glimpse a faint mirage of light at the end of the tunnel, while I monotonously recapitulate basic electrostatics yet again in class.
Congratulations?
You should get into electrical circuits. If you ever liked playing with Legos then building stuff is just a big step up. That's what got me more interested in EE versus physics and I think I'll have more fun in that area.
How do you have wars with electrical circuits???
Adam, if you authored a math textbook, would you dedicate it?
My new book for applied linear algebra has a dedication by each author and I think it's utterly meaningless. Who would even want a textbook dedicated to her?
Now I actually have a relevant question: have any of you found colleges that waive the application fee or don't have one? I have discovered a few colleges that waive the fee if applied to by December 1st. However, none have required essays; I'm guessing they just plug and chug statistics.
Carleton and Lewis and Clark waive the application fee when one applys online, and it doesn't have to be by Dec. 1. They do require essays though. I think they are just trying to encourage the online app.