Please send us your questions. (Put Phys3310 in the subject line of your email!) They may be about anything - this week's homework assignment, course content, course administration, or whatever. If appropriate, we will email an answer to you directly. Or, in many cases (where we think the question might be of general interest), we will instead post an anonymized version of the q+a on this page instead. (we'll chop your name off the posting). Please email us your questions at Steven.Pollock at colorado.edu
check out some of the concept maps from the first class.
LHC cartoon, pointed out by Erin:
QUESTION ABOUT HW 9:
Dr. Pollock,
Problem 4)d) of the homework due Wednesday does not list a charge distribution
for the sphere. Is this intentional?
My bad. I meant for it to be uniform volume charge - so the problem should read "A sphere (radius R, total charge Q uniformly distributed throughout the volume) is spinning..." Thanks for pointing this out.
In honor of pi-day, the joy of pi. (or, check out http://3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097.org/)
17 is the most random number? "If you have to ask, you just won't understand?
From http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=618753:
Seventeen and the Yellow Pigs
There's a running gag in his books that started somewhere in a bar near Princeton university in the sixties when he was getting his PhD. It involves the number 17 and the Yellow Pigs. It seems that Mike Spivak (as he was known back then) and his friend David Kelly decided to start a Cult of 17, where they would list interesting properties of the number 17, in a frenzy of tongue-in-cheek numerology (e.g. the most famous mathematical constant π is the 17th letter of the Greek alphabet, or the sum of the squares of the first primes up to 17 adds up to the number of the beast, etc.) . In the beginning, rival factions would spring up with mystical numbers of their and special properties of their own, but Kelly and Spivak would counter with two special properties of 17 for every property that their rivals could produce. Eventually, Kelly and Spivak won this competition and declared that 17 is a most special number indeed.
I don't quite understand what Yellow Pigs have to do with it, although there is a bit of an explanation at this webpage. The thing is that this was turned into quite a long-running joke. There is even a certain Sara Smollett who runs a personal website called yellowpigs.net, although I doubt that she is a direct acquaintance of Michael Spivak; perhaps just a fan. Michael Spivak since then has hidden at least one reference to the Yellow Pigs in all of his books or the number 17, often both. It's a small bit of inside humour for those who know to look for it.
The Yellow Pigs and 17 highlight another aspect of the Spivak Style: don't take it all too seriously. Have fun writing your mathematics. Put little jokes here and there, even if you're sticking to deadly serious business such as mathematics. Enjoy
Methods of proofs (not recommended for this course)
Some web comics:
This one seems appropriate for me - http://xkcd.com/298/
This one is for Markus - http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000359.html
_____________________________________
Dear Steven,
I thought you might like this. Video-game music being played with Tesla Coils.
Super Mario Bros.
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1788200
Tetris
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1787715
This one is AC/DC on electric guitar.
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1801708