Some Pysics Insights

Site Updates

welcome
Proof by Picture
Miscellany
basic stuff
Physics
Books
Links
Glossary
Update Log
About

Significant updates to the site, most recent first:

24 March 2018 -- Added the circular versus hyperbolic functions page.  Not deep but it was entertaining to write.

22 March 2018 -- Added the Gold page for no particularly good reason.  It had been sitting in the Drafts folder of my email gathering dust since ... um ... a long time ago.

16 March 2018 -- Added the product rule page to the calculus pages.  This one's been floating around in concept since the beginning; finally, it has seen the light of day.
For those wondering about it (hahah), Volume 2 of the Iemy Papers is in progress but is starting life as an Open Office document.  Not clear what its future path will be.

16 Apr 2017 -- Has it really been over year?  Added Episode 11 of the Iemy Papers.  It's been sitting here, typed in but in need of final editing, for ... well, years.  Several.

22 Feb 2016 -- Got my FTP access to the site back, which I'd lost by overlooking an update notice from my ISP.  To celebrate, I uploaded the first draft of How the Internet Makes People Stupid, which might actually be an interesting essay on the truth and confusion if it were edited down to a sensible length.

5 June 2014 -- Added a link to the prologue to Captain Rant and the Waterspout on the Iemy Papers page. It's been sitting on the site since early 2012 with nothing linking to it because it's supposed to occur later in the sequence, but it really makes very little difference where it appears, so...

4 June 2014 -- Added three episodes of the Iemy Papers starting with Episode 8 (which had been mouldering in notebooks for the last two years), and did some light updating on the About page, which hadn't been touched in the last 7 or 8 years and was showing its age rather badly.

1/4/2014 -- Put up Sue's eulogy.  It is not linked to from anywhere else on the site at present.

9/25/2013 -- Added the Irrational Roots page, after finally stumbling over a simple (well, simpler) way of plugging the "stray zeros" hole in the proof.  (The incomplete page had been sitting in my directory since 2007.)

9/22/2013 -- Added the derivatives of sine and cosine page.  (Just five years after figuring out the pictures.)
This was much easier than the derivatives of powers of x page, since it's all "flat" (no 3d drawings).
I sometimes wonder how widely known these visualizations for derivatives and integrals are.  I find it (very) hard to believe they're original with me, but I cannot recall ever seeing any of them in print.

9/19/2013 -- Added the derivatives of powers of x page ... just five years after the rest of the calculus section went live.  Who knows, maybe I'll actually finish the calculus section before the end of the decade!

4/28/2013 -- Major updates to Sudoku pages.  Corrections, changes, addition of several scripts (now in their own directory), and addition of a number of puzzles.

3/8/2013 (over a year later) -- Put up the Sudoku page

2/10/2012 -- Episode 7 of the Iemy Papers.  This was committed to paper over a year ago; getting stuff onto the computer is really lagging...

1/9/12 -- Put up the Iemyscript page, currently linked to only through the Iemy papers index page.

1/6/12 -- Changed to using BlueGriffon.  It's got a working spell checker, and it's got a saner view of character encodings!  As a result, made minor corrections in several Iemy pages, including fixes so the funky characters (like y-umlaut) come out looking right, instead of showing up as question marks in diamonds.  Also made minor corrections to a number of the pages in the "main site" (but there are still a number of pages with broken encodings, unfortunately -- I think my ISP updated their server out from under my obsolete HTML.)

1/3/11 -- Episode 6 of the Iemy Papers.

1/2/11 -- Episode 5 of the Iemy Papers...   Two pages in two days -- we cookin'!

1/1/11 -- Episode 4 of the Iemy Papers... my, but this is going slowly.  In fact, there's lots more text already written, but it's not in a form that can be easily uploaded, and conversion is taking a while.

4/26/10 -- Episode 3 of the Iemy Papers...

2/21/10 -- Updates to the Iemy papers; added Episode 2.  Oh, well, it's fun, even if it's not exactly physics.

1/28/10 -- Added the Iemy papers.  Sigh... this is getting 'way off topic...

9/22/09 -- Added a couple more illustrations on the Blackbodies page.  And in other news, Google still has not indexed the biography of Felix Resilleserre, for reasons which escape me, despite indexing all the pages which point to it.  Too bad.

8/18/09 -- Updated Blackbodies page with some minor corrections, and added a handful of illustrations.  It still could do with a few more; maybe later.

8/6/09 -- Added Blackbodies page.  Still missing nearly all its illustrations; don't know when I'll have time to draw them.

6/21/09 -- Added the Book of Iem, along with a bio of Felix Resilleserre, and added a link to it from the Misc page.

2/1/09 -- Added section on curvature of the field of a symmetric lens to Tiny Lenses page.

One little wrong turn in the derivation...
Ran off the road
1/27/09 -- Major corrections to the discussion of half-lenses on the Tiny Lenses page, which turned out to have some algebra errors.  (That's what I get for not back-checking all the results.)   Completed derivation of the curvature of the central focal surface, and added some brief comments on the focal surface of a human eye.

1/25/09 -- Added some comments on what changed to the oil price model page.

1/21/09 -- Added discussion of half-lenses and ideal scaling lenses to the tiny lenses page.

1/18/09 -- Added the Tiny Lenses page and moved some material over to it from Spherical Lenses, then added the section on off-axis behavior of tiny lenses.

1/15/09 -- Added several pages to the Simple Optics section:  added Snell's Law, Ideal Lenses part II, Diopters, and Spherical Lenses pages.  Still need to correct some things in the rest of that section -- doing the new pages was educational.

4/25/08 -- Added Oil Price Model page, in the misc section

2/26/08 -- Added Volume of a Sphere page, in the basic math and physics section

2/20/08 -- Added Pi page to the basic math and physics section

2/16/08 -- Added Aha! Proof version 2 to the proof by picture section.

2/15/08 -- Added Stars in Apollo Photographs page to the misc section.  (Page has actually been on the site for a few days but had not been previously linked to.)

2/14/08 -- Added Poincaré 1900 translation, in the misc section

1/20/08 -- Added the rust page

11/23/07 -- Added the cardinality page to the numbers section

11/19/07 -- Added the numbers section, which is still rather incomplete.  The basics are there, but a number of theorems are missing, there are no explanatory notes on the notation, and the commentary on cardinality hasn' t been written yet.

11/04/07 -- Added the calculus section, which is still very incomplete -- about half of the planned pages are present.  Creating the illustrations has proven to be time consuming.

9/26/07 -- Updated simple optics section.  Added proof that simple systems of lenses and mirrors can't enhance visual image brightness.

9/23/07 -- Added simple optics section.  Still incomplete, but the main proof is taking a while and I wanted to get the rest up in the mean time.  Also added solid angles page, which was needed by the optics pages.

9/7/07 -- Added casual interference patterns page

2/7/07 -- Added speed of light page

2/5/07 -- Added speed of sound page

1/17/07 -- Added moving charge page

1/8/07 -- Added magnetism index page along with two-charge dipoles and the derivation of the dipole field.  Moved the dipole force page under magnetism.

12/22/06 -- Added permanent magnet motors and force on a dipole pages.

12/1/06 -- Updated Lagrangian page a bit, and added a few more simple examples.

11/24/06 -- Flipped sign of constant K on the orbit shapes page.  Had to reset most of the equations, but I found it confusing with a negative K.  Negative K had seemed like a good idea for about the first five lines of the derivation.

11/20/06 -- Minor corrections to Lagrangians page, and added a few missing illustrations on the orbit shapes page.

11/18/06 -- Added the orbit shapes page, which still needs some pictures.

11/16/06 -- Reorganized the site, giving it a little more of a tree structure.  It was becoming impossible to find anything and hard to see what was present.

11/15/06 -- Added a trivial proof that the hyperbolic angle is the area above the hyperbola.  (Even the trivial ones take time, though, 'cause of the illustrations.)

11/13/06 -- Added the Lagrangian mechanics page.

11/10/06 -- Added the conic sections page, which probably shouldn't be on the front page.  Oh, well, the whole site could use reorganizing ... someday.

11/7/06 -- Added the hyperbola focus page under proof-by-picture.

11/6/06 -- Added the ellipse focus page under proof-by-picture.  I expect to add a handful of additional "elementary" items to the proof-by-picture page in the coming weeks.

11/2/06 -- Added the parabola focus page under proof-by-picture, and reorganized the proof-by-picture page a little.

10/31/06 -- Added the shortest path condition derivations, both visual and symbolic.

10/25/06 -- Added the Pythagoras page.  Has it really been a year?  Oh dear.  Lie derivatives still nowhere near done.

10/6/05 -- Added the "forward" porthole view page.  Lie derivatives still stuck in a holding pattern...

9/6/05 -- Added and then corrected the Swing page.  The Lie derivatives page is proving awkward -- some of the images are a bit awkward and it takes a lot of background explanation...

8/16/05 -- Added Alexander's horse.

8/15/05 -- Added SETI page, cleaned up equation formating on linear twins page.

8/9/05 -- Added the Horse of a Different Color.

8/8/05 -- Added Lorentz transform derivation page.  Also updated my links page -- should do that more often; several of the links had gone bad or moved.

8/5/05 -- Rewrote comments regarding classical explanations of the Sagnac effect.  The comments are on their own page.

7/25/05 -- Added a page on the Sagnac effect.

7/4/05 -- Corrections to French version of the CCentipede story, courtesy of Bernard Chaverondier; remaining errors on that page are entirely mine.

6/22/05 -- Translated the CCentipede story into French.

12/3/04 -- Rewrote the 1996 statistical analysis section on the Florida page. It was wrong.

12/2/04 -- Further updates to the Florida page, including a statistical analysis of 1996 data and a reanalysis of the 2000 and 2004 data.  Gotta get back to adding physics and math items, one of these days...

11/8/04 -- Added "miscellaneous" page, and added Florida election data analysis under it.

8/23/04 -- Completed addition of covariant derivatives pages for vectors and 1-forms, under the proof-by-picture page.  Could still use some work but it's a start.

8/13/04 -- Added a books page

8/11/04 -- Cleaned up the 1-form page a bit (flipped the diagrams, renamed dual vectors to covectors), added some terms to the glossary, and added the nascent "proof-by-picture" page to the table of contents.

8/9/04 -- Added a (very brief!) glossary, after some feedback indicating I left a lot of things undefined

7/15/2004 -- Corrected a minor error on Revolving Astronaut page and added an explanatory comment

7/10/2004 -- Added Superluminal Shells and Rigid Rods pages

5/27/2004 -- Added the Distant Revolving Astronaut

5/25/2004 -- Added porthole view from Earth and some graphs to "accelerating twins" page

5/19/2004 -- Added "accelerating twins" page, sans graphs and part of the porthole view section

5/8/2004 -- Site went "live"

Page created on 11/16/06