Transferring to new blog

Just a quick note in case anyone visits here. I'm thinking about doing some more blogging but have transferred to http://sandrao1962.blogspot.com/ so my blog will be linked to my current Gmail account.

Another New Year

So, it’s been over a year since I posted anything on this blog and much to my amazement, I got an email the other day from someone enquiring whether I was going to post any more. The answer is a definite “maybe” ;).

A lot has happened since my last post – I’ve moved house and sort of settled in (I still have stuff in boxes which need unpacking, but that’s the story of my life). I’ve also gone from being a somewhat resigned single person to being a very happy partnered person :). My health has deteriorated somewhat, but my dad is still plodding on, much to his doctors’ surprise. He has been on weekly treatment in the “big smoke” for the last year, which means mum, dad and I all share the driving there and back each Friday – very tiring for all of us and I’m hoping to be able to get the odd week off now that they’ve found a local community group which can provide a driver sometimes.

Unfortunately, one of the casualties of these changes has been any sort of formal studies. My enrolment in Physics lapsed in the first half of last year and for the first time in my life, I actually have a piece of paper with a Fail grade against my name, due to the fact that I didn’t complete it :(.

However, as the year 12 students were finishing high school last year and applying for university studies, my “itch” to study resurfaced and I started investigating what was available at the local university – I’m now just a 30 minute highway drive from a regional university. To my surprise, they have a Tertiary Preparation Program which is available free of charge to potential students. So, I’ve applied for and been offered a position in their Bioscience unit – it’s a mix of chemistry and cell biology which provides the background needed for their undergraduate courses in chemistry and cell biology (surprise, surprise!!). It requires attendance at a 3 hour weekly workshop for the semester, so it should be a good test of whether I can actual study by attending a university or not. I’m hopeful that I will be able to, but not at all confident given how much I’ve been struggling health-wise recently – we shall see.

One of the other changes that has happened, partly as a consequence of moving further away and partly for other reasons, is that I have stopped attending the church I had been a part of for some years. In recent weeks, my partner and I have been investigating Quakerism and tomorrow will attend our second meeting – also a 30 minute or so highway drive away. The older I get, the less I’m liking any sort of formal religion or strict “set of beliefs” and the more questions about what I believe I have. For a few years now, I’ve been comfortably living with very few answers, so the Quaker line of “come visit us, we have questions for all your answers” is very appealing.

So, will I post again before next year – well, I’m planning to – I’m hoping to keep a record of the books I read this year and also to try and document my studies once they start – and, as before, to write about interesting things I discover as I journey through life – no promises, though …

The Twin Towers

The story was told in church this morning of how the Twin Towers used to be the first sign that ships' captains saw as they approached New York. They provided direction which was comforting (though scarcely necessary in these days of plentiful navigational instruments and charts). Now, the towers are no more and that man-built source of security is forever gone.

Maybe I’m stretching the analogy a bit but somehow that seems a picture of my life and it provides me with a hard-to-learn lesson. Very few things in this world can provide a true sense of security, certainly not those things that are man-made. Wealth, possessions, family, friends, health, etc, etc – all can be gone in the blink of an eye (just ask Job of Biblical fame). The only things that can’t be taken away are those things I carry inside me that endure regardless of circumstances.

So, I wrestle with the Christian message of a God who is love, yet whose presence I rarely feel – and I struggle somehow to connect with the sense of hope that would allow me to say with Job “though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him” (Job 13:15, KJV). All the time knowing that the answer is simply to “cease striving and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10a, NASB).

Poor neglected blog .... again ....

Once again it's been ages since I've posted anything here. This time I have what I consider to be a good excuse - in the last six weeks I have gone from vaguely thinking that it's time I moved house to somewhere less isolated (ie which doesn't require a 30 minute drive to get to any social contact I'm interested in), all the way to having signed a contract on a house elsewhere, packed a whole heap of stuff and being set to move in about three weeks time. It's been quite a journey for both me and my parents starting with the day when one of us mooted the idea that it might be better if we were geographically closer.

So now I'm tired from packing, both excited and apprehensive about moving and nervous about trying to sell this place - believe me when I say moving house and chronic fatigue syndrome do not go well together. Thus today is a rest day, when apart from a few necessary chores I have allowed myself to "waste" time surfing the Net, watching television, etc - this is distinct from those days when such activities provide necessary breaks between packing boxes, cleaning rooms or organising the myriad of things involved with a move.

Unfortunately one of the first casualties of all this extra activity has been my Physics studies which haven't been looked at for over a month. I had almost finished the first half of the course and was just getting set to register to sit the exam in November when all this started - now I am very grateful I don't have to be trying to study for an exam on top of everything else. But the physics books have not yet been packed and will be taken up to the new place in my car so they are readily accessible once I'm feeling up to it again.

Natural selection and cosmology

I’ve just finished reading a book called “COSM” by Gregory Benford. The story is about a universe which is created by accident in a particle accelerator and which manifests in our universe as a small shiny ball – COSM is a truncation of cosmos. Benford is a physicist and the ideas that he has in the book are based on ideas which have actually appeared in physics papers.

Apart from the whole concept that it might be possible to create a universe by smashing together particles at high energy, which is fascinating in itself, he also briefly mentions the idea that if universes can effectively create other universes then the evolutionary concept of natural selection may apply to them. So, the reason that our universe seems to be so finely tuned for life is that those universes which are favourable for the existence of intelligent life are more likely to “reproduce” (since said intelligence may create other universes by design or accident), similar to the Darwinian concept of biological evolution – I guess that could make our “God” a physicist in another universe !!!

Of course, it still doesn’t address the question of how the first universe happened, which seems to “mirror” the problem in biology of how the first living thing appeared.

The relevant articles are “Is it possible to create a universe in the laboratory by quantum tunneling?” by Alan Guth and co which appeared in Nuclear Physics, B 339, p 417 in 1990 (I can only find the abstract online) and one by Edward Harrison which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 36, pages 193-203 (which I can’t even find the title of). There is however a Popular Science article on the whole idea written by Marcus Chown here.

Geostationary satellites

I just completed one of the questions in the physics assignment I’m working on and was convinced I must have the wrong answer. The question involved finding the height at which a geostationary satellite orbits – ie one which orbits the earth in 24 hours thus effectively remaining stationary above a point on earth.

Now I’ve see heaps of diagrams of satellites in orbit where the earth covers most of the diagram and the satellite orbits are circles seemingly just above the earth’s surface, so I was expecting an answer which was small in comparison to earth’s radius. What I got was an answer that is some five and a half times the earth’s radius – so I drew a rough scale diagram and it looked nothing like what I expected.

After some research on the Internet I discovered that those diagrams I was used to seeing were of satellites in Low Earth Orbit (just above most of the earth’s atmosphere at between 300 to 1000 kms) and that a geostationary satellite really does orbit at nearly 40,000 kilometres above the earth’s surface.

Somehow it annoys me to realise I have reached my early forties without knowing this – almost as much as it did when I learnt a year or so ago that the earth’s magnetic field is produced by the rotation of its molten core, but that’s another story.

Google Earth

Having read about it a couple of times, I finally decided to download Google Earth today - you need a broadband connection, Windows XP and a computer that's not too old (my two and a half year old laptop managed just fine). Unfortunately I live too far outside the main metropolitan area to get much detail of my place at this stage, but I spent a couple of interesting hours sight-seeing - try Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa. I'm sure there's a lot more to the program than I've found just through trial and error and it will be interesting to explore it further next time I feel like "travelling".

New physics blog

Sean Carroll of Preposterous Universe fame has started a new group blog at Cosmic Variance with 4 other physicists - 2 of whom I am pleased to say are women - another one to add to my regular reading list, I think.

And while I’m mentioning regular reading, it has been remiss of me not to mention Quantum Hobby, a blog by an amateur scientist looking to teach himself graduate level quantum mechanics – an ambitious and admirable goal that I wish him all the best with.

125th anniversary of Science magazine

The 125th anniversary issue of Science magazine includes a special section called "What we don't know" which details 25 of the big questions facing science at the moment and also briefly touches on 100 other questions. Full PDFs are available (at the moment, anyway) from here - just scroll down the page. Now, is it too ambitious for me to want to reach a point in my knowledge of science where I can at least understand all these questions???

The Gaia Hypothesis … and the start of physics

The following quote is from page 177 of Janna Levin’s “How the universe got its spots”:

“… Lee Smolin and … artist Marc Quinn … were discussing how a conscious entity can be made up of living cells, like blood cells, which themselves are not conscious. Our blood cells, skin cells, heart tissue, are not individually self-aware even if they are alive by certain criteria. Somehow these living cells collectively form a sentient being – a person. Lee suggested that maybe the entire planet with its individual living cultures and ecologies is one giant organism and we’d be no more aware of its consciousness than blood cells are of ours. … Imagine millions of conscious little blood cells trying belligerently to understand the body that they float through. Here we are, little and futile, trying to understand things that very well could be beyond us.”

Sounds a bit like (what I know of) the whole “earth as Gaia” concept – an intriguing idea with I suspect no basis in scientific fact at this stage. A quick Google reveals this page which provides more info on the Gaia Hypothesis (disclaimer: I have only skimmed through so have no idea whether this is good info or not). Only a short leap then of course to the universe being one conscious entity of which we are all a part.

Now to get back to reality … my physics notes finally arrived on Wednesday. I have quickly gone through the first chapter which is a review of maths stuff including trigonometry. For some reason, I was surprised to find no mention of calculus so this is obviously not a calculus-based physics course – in retrospect, I really don’t know why I thought it might be since from memory high school physics didn’t use calculus.

Next I’ll move on to the usual SI units and measurement chapter which ends with a practical on pendulums which has to be written up and sent in for assessment (now where am I going to find something lying around the house which will support an 80cm long pendulum?). And I’ll have to deal with my dread of all things practical – I developed what is probably an irrational dislike for laboratory work while I was at university all those years ago – I think it is based on the fear of not getting the “right” results …

Hubble's 15th anniversary

NASA has released two new images to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope - they are images of the Eagle Nebula and the Whirlpool Galaxy and are simply stunning - try having a look at the largest version that will fit on your screen. The resolution is so good that they can be enlarged to 3-foot by 6-foot and 4-foot by 6-foot respectively.

And according to this New Scientist story, once the Space Shuttle successfully returns to flight (scheduled for 22 May), the new chief of NASA is going to reconsider his predecessor's decision to cancel plans to do any more repairs to the telescope - so just maybe we will continue to be wowed by images of the universe beyond the expected failure date of 2007 or 2008.

Physics, here I come ...

So, today I posted my final maths test which leaves me with just an exam to sit and I’ll be finished the maths. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to nominate for the exam till I’ve got the marked test back and then it must be for a date in the following month, so it looks like I won’t get to sit the exam till June – in the meantime, I need to do some revision notes to make the process of studying for an exam easier – not one of my favourite jobs (either the notes or the exam).

But, in the same envelope as the maths test went my enrolment for physics, so some time in the next week or so I should get a nice big parcel of physics notes for my perusal – I’ve just got my fingers crossed that they have fewer typos than the maths notes as this time there is no textbook for any of the course – although I do have a couple of physics textbooks that I can use if I get confused. I’m also hoping the tutor is someone different – I really didn’t find the maths tutor very helpful and I kept getting the feeling that I knew more than he did – maybe there is some residual effect from having done two years of university maths many years ago, after all.

I’ve also started working through old versions of the year 11 and 12 Maths C books – the other half of maths which Queensland high school students do – so far, it’s been fun, and I hope I can keep going with it alongside the physics once it arrives. If I understand correctly, Maths C is aimed more at students who are likely to continue with maths at university level – it introduces groups, matrices and vectors, complex numbers and extends the calculus I’ve (re-) learnt in Maths B.

Also today, I finally took a trip across to the University of Queensland – over an hour’s drive from home even on a fairly quiet traffic day like today was. They had a book sale on which was part of the attraction, plus I’ve been promising myself I’d go have a look around for ages. So, I picked up a few books at the sale – Spivak’s Calculus for three dollars being the highlight but I also picked up Goldstein’s Classical Mechanics (I know, I’m a long way off being able to use that, but it is a classic), Abell’s Exploration of the Universe, an old 1979 Schaum’s Outline of College Physics and the 3rd edition of Zumdahl’s Chemistry complete with solutions guide – not to mention a few popular science books.

I didn’t bother getting any of the early university level physics and maths books since I’m still hoping to be able to enrol in a university course one day – probably by distance education again unless my health improves dramatically – and then I’ll need to buy up-to-date textbooks. There is one university in Australia (Murdoch Uni in Perth) that offers a minor in Physics by distance education with no attendance requirements which I could combine with a major in Philosophy so that’s one possibility. Other than that, I’ll have to see how I go with self-studying Maths C, then try and buy university textbooks and work through them by myself – still, that’s all in the future – for now, high school physics beckons at last.

While I was over at UQ, I had a bit of a wander around – checked out the bookshop, the physical sciences library and walked around the Great Court which is magnificent – it has that really old-fashioned “halls of learning” type feel that I imagine Cambridge or Oxford in England would have. The thing that struck me most is how huge the campus is – I’ve only really spent time at Adelaide Uni before which I used to find large and confusing (I remember having a friend walk me around from building to building in the order of my week’s lectures and tutorials when I first went there) – and later at Canberra Uni which was fairly small. I can only imagine what UQ would be like during the week with a full complement of students in attendance - and dream of maybe one day being one of those students.

Transcending

I read the following poem in Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman, and for some reason I can’t quite explain, I really like it. I’ve always enjoyed Escher’s art and my current interest in things astronomical means I appreciate the references to galaxies and stars, but somehow it also conveys (to me, anyway) a sense of hope and purpose.


Transcending

Escher got it right.
Men step down and yet rise up,
the hand is drawn by the hand it draws,
and a woman is poised
on her very own shoulders.

Without you and me this universe is simple,
run with the regularity of a prison.
Galaxies spin along stipulated arcs,
stars collapse at the specified hour,
crows u-turn south and monkeys rut on schedule.

But we, whom the cosmos shaped for a billion years
to fit this place, we know it failed.
For we can reshape,
reach an arm through the bars
and, Escher-like, pull ourselves out.

And while whales feeding on mackerel
are confined forever in the sea,
we climb the waves,
look down from the clouds.

From Look Down from Clouds (Marvin Levine, 1997)

How the universe got its spots …

… is the name of a book I’m reading, written by Janna Levin and subtitled “Diary of a finite time in a finite space”. The book is written as a series of (unsent) letters addressed to her mother which, as the jacket cover says, relate “her own personal and intellectual journey through space and time”, while covering such topics as relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes and the big bang.

Until I reached the sections which start talking about topology, I was doing quite well and mostly understanding things. I did understand the difference between geometry and topology, “geometry is about curves and smooth changes in curvature … topology is any aspect of the shape that does not change when curvature is varied” – hence a donut and a coffee cup are topologically equivalent (in simplistic terms, they both have one “hole”) whilst a sphere and a donut aren’t. And eventually I managed to “get” that the spherical surface of the earth is two dimensional – you only need two co-ordinates (eg latitude and longitude) to locate a point on the surface. But when she started talking about tiling – particularly in 3 dimensions – I must confess I got a bit lost.

However, I’m going to take comfort in the fact that this is the first time (other than simply hearing the word) that I have come across topological concepts, in contrast to the stuff I was understanding which I have mostly encountered many times before. In the past, this lack of immediate comprehension would have bothered me greatly, but when I found the following in a blog entry written by a PhD student last year, I realised that it’s OK to have to revisit concepts before understanding finally dawns:

“From past experience, I've found that if you just immerse yourself in a subject for long enough, the terms and ideas gradually seep into your system.” (Thanks to Gooseania, a blog which I read regularly and sometimes understand)

As far as my maths studies go, I’ve finished the year 12 textbook (Maths B) and just have a tutorial, a competency test and an exam to go. So I’m almost ready to send in my enrolment for Physics which I’m really looking forward to getting started on. I’ve also bought old editions of the Queensland Maths C year 11 and 12 textbooks which I plan on going through by myself over the next year or so – it will be interesting to see whether I have the motivation to self-study them without the imposed discipline of having assignments to hand in regularly.

Choices

Sometimes when you have limited energy you have to make some really tough choices on how to spend it - this past weekend I had to choose between visiting my parents who had friends staying who owned a telescope and going to "Einstein at the pub". Well, the telescope won out and I have now seen Saturn and it's rings with my very own eyes - at about 50 times magnification, so it was still quite small, but the rings and their separation from the planet was clearly visible - my father and the owner of the telescope (which was actually for birdwatching and hadn't been pointed upwards at night before) were very impressed and I have another tick against an item on my "things I want to do someday" list. We also managed to find Jupiter, which was surprisingly impressive, too - it was quite clearly not just another star, but looked more like a miniature moon - I think I could really get very interested in star-gazing.

For Internet addicts ...

Thanks to the Feedback column in the 26 February 2005 issue of New Scientist, I have found this. At the bottom of the page is a series of links under the heading "I'm tired and I wanna go back to:" - try clicking "The Real World". Now, if only there was a way of making that page appear automatically after a certain set time of Internet surfing .....

Updates on previous post

Monty Hall problem: see this post on Illuminating Science for more details on this problem.

Tutorial questions: No hints needed - I've just rung my tutor and there are misprints in both the problems (cos x should be cot x in number 1 and tan x should be cos x in number 2 - grrrrrrrrrrrrr), so now they both reduce to quadratics which are easy to solve.

The Monty Hall problem, etc

I just came across this problem again in my web surfing - this is one of the many links that Google gives that provides an explanation of the problem and the counter-intuitive solution. I must admit it is making my head hurt a little bit.

So, now I should go back to somehow trying to algebraically solve these two questions from my latest tutorial exercise:

1. 2*tan x + cos x = 3 for x between 0 and 360 degrees

2. (sin x)^2 + tan x = (cos x)^2

I've solved them using graphing software, but we're supposed to be able to solve them algebraically, and I just keep getting in a huge tangle and ending up with cubics or quartics which don't give me the right solutions. Either I'm doing something dumb, missing something easy, or there's a misprint in the questions - unfortunately my tutor isn't available till Tuesday, so meantime I keep going back to them and trying again. Hints always welcome.

Science, philosophy and religion

Yesterday, while surfing the net, I found this book called “Galileo, Darwin and Hawking: The Interplay of Science, Reason and Religion” by Phil Dowe – now at the University of Queensland (UQ). This is the publicity blurb for it from Dove Booksellers :

The history of the interaction of science and religion is fraught with tension rather than harmony. Only recently have philosophers like Phil Dowe begun to seriously relate these two pillars of human civilization. This fascinating book discusses with insight and verve the relationship between science, reason, and religion, giving special attention to the most conflicted topics - cosmology, evolution, and miracles.

Providing a concise introduction to the philosophy of science suitable for all readers, Dowe's “Galileo, Darwin, and Hawking” shows that there are basically four ways to relate science and religion. Two of them, "naturalism" and "religious science," present these endeavours as antagonistic. By contrast, the "independence view" understands them as wholly unrelated. Finally, the "interaction view" sees religion and science as complementary. Dowe defends this last perspective as most truthful and helpful to our time, arguing his case by exploring the history of science, highlighting the life and work of three giants of science: Galileo Galilei, Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking.

I’ve added it to my “must buy” list – this is exactly the sort of “interplay” I’m interested in. Part of the reason I want to study physics is so that I understand enough about it to start to ponder what it all means. I’m mindful of the admonition from John Baez in his “How to learn maths and physics”:

Warning: there's no way to understand the interpretation of quantum mechanics without also being able to solve quantum mechanics problems - to understand the theory, you need to be able to use it (and vice versa). If you don't heed this advice, you'll fall prey to all sorts of nonsense that's floating around out there.

Whilst I am very much attracted to the idea that modern physics is starting to confirm some very old spiritual ideas – eg everyone and everything is connected – I really don’t want to take such ideas on board unless there is a solid basis for them – and if that means I have to understand quantum mechanics in order to evaluate these ideas, then that is one of my aims.

Now if only I was healthy enough to actually attend UQ and study physics, philosophy and religion properly.

Maths - exam number one

On Saturday, I sat the first of two exams for the maths subject I’m studying (effectively the exam was a year 11 one). It went well – I finished nearly an hour early (it was a three hour exam) and decided to leave so I didn’t “fix” an answer that didn’t need fixing – I’d already checked everything twice.

I found it quite difficult to prepare for, though – my usual exam preparation technique consists of doing revision notes, re-working any problems that I had noted on the way through as being particularly difficult, memorising notes to the best of my ability, then doing a series of past exam papers as practice exams under exam conditions. This gives me a good idea of where my weak points are (the things I need to cram into my head just before I walk in and get down on paper the minute I’m allowed to write) and also some idea of whether the time provided for the exam is likely to be enough for me to do it in.

This time, there were no previous exam papers available – not only that, but there was no information on what percentage of the overall marks the exam contributes – nor, when I got the exam, was there any indication of what marks each individual question was worth.

Now, normally when I first get into an exam room, and I’m allowed to pick up a writing implement (and after writing down those easily forgettable things I mentioned earlier), I work out roughly how many minutes per mark I have and draw up a quick list of how long that translates to for each question – that way I find I’m not spending way too much time on a question that is not worth many marks – I also usually try to allow for 10 minutes review time at the end to find and fix the inevitable “stupid” mistakes that I always seem to make (like the 2 + 2 = 5 that slipped through the net in my final year at high school).

So I found myself constantly checking the time as I finished each question and wondering whether I was on track or not – I was continually fighting the temptation to just rush through questions, because until the first hour or so had elapsed, I really didn’t know whether I would finish in the allotted time or not.

Anyway, hopefully I passed, and if I can do exams under these conditions, maybe I can manage university exams – which is one of the questions this studying is meant to answer for me. My next maths exam will probably be in a few months time once I get through the rest of the year 12 book – at the moment I’m a bit stuck on some questions which require drawing graphs by hand – I can’t help wondering why I should bother to learn to do this by hand when I would assume that nowadays graphs are drawn using computer software.

Still, the sooner I get through the maths, the sooner I can enrol in physics, then chemistry, then biology – and then I can seriously look at university options – still around 2 years away, methinks.

What do you believe that you can’t prove?

OK, so this is a couple of weeks late - this time I did have it written and sitting in Microsoft Word, just didn't get around to posting it - so I'm improving on just composing posts in my head.

The Edge Foundation is an informal group of “some of the most interesting minds in the world.” Its mandate is to “promote inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.” Their annual question for 2005 to which they have 119 responses up on their website is: “what do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”. The responses come from (amongst others) physicists, mathematicians, biologists, psychologists and writers – people like Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard Dawkins, Paul Davies and Lee Smolin just to pick a few names I recognized – and cover a wide range of topics including consciousness, cosmology, computing and evolution.

I have only just skimmed through them at this stage, but this one from Kai Krause is an interesting challenge to the widely held belief that we should always strive to “live in the present”. Here’s his summary of his belief that we should live in the future and the past rather than the present:

“Bluntly put: spend your life in the eternal bliss of always having something to hope for, something to wait for, plans not realized, dreams not come true.... Make sure you have new points on the horizon, that you purposely create. And at the same time, relive your memories, uphold and cherish them, keep them alive and share them, talk about them.”

And, as he rightly points out, life then is not a mainly humdrum existence punctuated by the occasional “high” moment, but it is about “the anticipation of the moment and the memory of the moment.” An interesting concept.

New Year’s resolution?

OK, so it is already most of the way through January and probably too late to be thinking about making New Year’s resolutions, but I’ve been pondering the relentless “busy-ness” of my life lately, and maybe with the season of Lent just around the corner it is not such a bad time to look at what I am doing with the limited time and energy that I have. I strongly believe that the way I spend my time reflects my real priorities in life – for example, if I say that my parents are an important part of my life and then don’t spend any time with them, to me that says they aren’t really important to me – my actions speak much louder (and more truthfully) than my words – didn’t someone once say “don’t tell me you love me, show me” or something like that.

Sadly the way I’m spending my time at the moment says that aimless Internet surfing and watching sport and dramas on TV are the most important things in my life. Now some of that is merely a way of making sure I get the rest I need so my body doesn’t give up on me – any exertion, physical or mental, has an impact on the chronic fatigue / fibromyalgia – but some of it is probably not a good use of my time.

I read on someone’s blog the other day – and no, I don’t remember which one at the moment – that if you can read 50 books a year and have, say, 30 years left to live, that’s 1500 books that you can read. I’ve never thought of it like that before – I’ve often said “so many books, so little time”, but never really come to the stark realisation that there is a finite amount of time left in life and therefore a finite number of books that can be read – not to mention a finite number of TV programs that can be watched, Internet sites that can be surfed, etc, etc. So, I should spend a significant portion of that finite time doing those things that are important to me.

So my “resolution” is to gradually change the way I am using my time to more accurately reflect what is important to me – to spend my time a little more thoughtfully each day, to question what I am doing and to reassess what is important. I see this as a gradual process not as a task that I will ever really complete – there will be times when I fall back into habits developed over many years, but as long as there are also times when I make a little progress, that is OK. And maybe having this blog post to remind me will help me make that progress.

Was God in this disaster?

I just read this article after having seen it on a group I’m in – it rings true for me – the disaster just is – we see God in the response of people to it.

Poor neglected blog

I think it must be something about starting a blog – now this one looks like a lot of others, with an initial burst of enthusiastic posting followed by a long quiet period of neglect. Not that I haven’t had anything to write about – I have – but the posts that I compose in my mind when I’m under the shower in the morning just haven’t been finding their way onto the Internet – I remember having the same problem years ago with letters to my grandparents. In the absence of a waterproof laptop, I need to find a way to translate all those wonderful ideas into words on “paper” – which, of course, is part of the reason I started a blog – to get my thoughts out of my head and recorded in some coherent way. I suspect the answer lies in the concept of self-discipline – and trying to form new habits – all of which takes time.

The maths has also suffered a period of neglect leading up to Christmas as I was saving my energy for driving to and from the hospital / apartments where my parents spent almost five weeks as Dad underwent a stem cell transplant (similar to a bone marrow transplant only using the patient’s own stem cells which have previously been harvested). It’s not a pleasant process but they were able to go back home just before Christmas, and he seems to be slowly recovering his appetite and energy levels. Prior to that, I also expended more energy than I could afford trying to mulch various garden beds – with considerable help from the local Apex club. The worst beds have been done, but there’s still a pile of mulch awaiting my further attention – for the time being, weed-killer is keeping things under control.

I’ve returned to the maths recently – I have to finish within 40 weeks of the day I started it (ie the end of April) and the schedule is starting to get a bit tight. The year 11 stuff is all finished – just the exam to go, which will be in February. I’ve started on the year 12 textbook and have got as far as drafting the first of 4 tutorials – on the first 2 chapters (out of a total of 12). Now I’m working on the 3rd chapter in between watching the Test cricket on TV.

My thoughts over the past week or so have been very much with those people affected by the Asian tsunami – I’d already gotten the strong impression after the Christmas Eve service at church that I needed to keep the events of my life in perspective –that I actually have a lot to be grateful for. Now, I realise more than ever just how lucky I am – in fact, how lucky most of us in Australia are. The challenge for me is to retain a sense of perspective – after all, I have a roof over my head, plenty of food, running hot water, car, electricity, phone, internet, all sorts of “toys” (tv, computer, books, music) – the fact that I have a chronic illness and that my fridge decided it wasn’t going to join me in 2005 is really not such a big deal ….

Mathematics Corner …

… is the name of a regular mathematics column published online as part of The Citizen Scientist, which is a bi-weekly publication of the Society for Amateur Scientists. As part of my regular web-surfing today, I found the 15th October issue which is a new beginning for the column (after around six months of silence) and sounds like it might be worth following for those of us who are keen to learn maths.

This issue contains details of the various areas of maths and includes substantial lists of recommended books in those areas – some of which are freely available online. It concludes with a promise to start exploring the Riemann hypothesis with an assumed background of only high school algebra and geometry.

Heroes

Who are your heroes? The people you look up to, admire from a distance or aspire to be like. Do you have heroes? If so, are they famous people or “normal” people? These are some of the questions that have been running through my mind since listening to a Toastmaster’s speech given by my father on the weekend.

The first names that came to my mind were mainly sportsmen and women – cricketers, footballers, Olympians. I love watching sport, and I get the greatest enjoyment out of watching how people of similar skill levels perform quite differently in pressure situations. I believe sport at an elite level is a mental game – most elite sportspeople have the skills required – it’s just a question of who has the mental toughness to produce those skills when needed. Watching people produce their very best under extreme pressure encourages me to think that I, too, can do it – not in the sporting arena, but in life in general – I just need the right mental attitude.

Then I thought of my grandad – and particularly of comments mum had made after she spent some time in his hometown just before and after his death. She was surprised at the number of people who had stories to tell of how he’d helped them out – mainly just little things, but they’d been greatly appreciated. He was someone who shared himself with other people – his resources, abilities and time.

There is another group of people who have my admiration – they are those folk who are able to take everything life has thrown at them, and still come up with a smile and a positive attitude to life. The people who when they are diagnosed with a serious illness don’t say “why me?”, but say “why not me?” and get on with fighting it. Those elderly folk at church who, although they have many struggles with health, finances, etc, are always ready with a smile or a hug. People who can find the silver lining in any cloud.

There is a danger in having heroes, though, that was mentioned in a sermon a few weeks ago. Someone went up to Dorothy Day (a Catholic activist) and said how much they admired her, that they considered her to be a saint. Her response was quite blunt and challenging – basically she said that you consider me to be a saint and by doing so, excuse yourself from doing the things I am doing. If we regard our heroes as in some way superhuman and put them on too high a pedestal, then their actions no longer inspire us to be the best that we can be, but excuse us from making the effort.

Maths, finally

So, this week I finally got back to the Maths – I did a deal with myself that if I at least started on finishing off the Year 11 stuff, I could also start on the Year 12 book. So I have now sent in the final two tutorials for Year 11, and done revision notes for one of the four chapters I still have to do – then there is an assessable assignment and an exam to finish it all off.

The revision notes I have done were on the chapter introducing limits and differentiation. An interesting thing is mentioned which also struck me when I first read it – did you know that the rate of change of the area of a circle with respect to its radius is the circle’s circumference (A = πr² and dA/dr = 2πr) – and also that the rate of change of the volume of a sphere with respect to its radius is the sphere’s surface area (V = 4/3πr³ and dV/dr = 4πr²). I have no idea whether that has any real significance but it struck me as interesting (and a really good way of remembering the formula for the surface area of a sphere).

And, after all my hopes that at least now I’m working out of an official textbook, I wouldn’t have to contend with all the bugs, the answer given in the back of the book for the third part of the very first question in chapter one is - you guessed it - WRONG. Luckily the question is so simple that it’s very obviously a wrong answer, but it’s still a bit annoying. Once again, I ponder a career as a proofreader ….

Philosophy Gym

Tonight is the third meeting of the Philosophy Gym discussion group that we (the pastor with prompting from me) started recently at my church. The meetings are loosely based on selected chapters from the book “The Philosophy Gym – 25 Short Adventures in Thinking” by Stephen Law.

So far, we’ve looked at ‘Where did the universe come from?’ and ‘But is it art?’ – tonight we tackle ‘Is morality like a pair of spectacles?’.

According to the book, there are four options available to answer the question ‘what is the ultimate cause or origin of the universe?’:

1. Identify a cause;
2. Say it has a cause, but we can’t or don’t know what it is;
3. Say it doesn’t have a cause, it just is; or
4. Claim that the question doesn’t make sense (like asking ‘what is north of the North Pole?’).

All of these options have their faults from a philosophical viewpoint. I guess one of the reasons I have for wanting to study physics is to delve into questions like this from a scientific viewpoint.

The second session on art was quite interesting, too – with questions discussed like ‘does art require a human creator?’, ‘does art have to be appreciated by a human in order to be art?’, ‘is computer-generated art / music really art?’, ‘can there be a universally accepted definition of art?’.

Tonight we talk about whether things or actions are good/right or bad/wrong in and of themselves, or whether ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ is something we impose on them from outside. My initial instincts are that we impose morality from the outside according to the inbuilt morals we have each absorbed from the culture we are part of. How else can we explain the different ideas of morality that exist within different cultures?

Broken promise

On Friday, I promised myself I would go back to the maths – it’s now Tuesday and I haven’t done it yet. I’ve really been struggling with my health for the last few weeks (I have CFS/Fibro) and my body has decided that it's time to rest for a while, and much as I might like to argue the point with it, that is one argument which I always lose in the end.

So, I’ll be spending some time doing a bit of web surfing, TV watching and generally lazing around trying to relax and not get stressed out by all the things I think I should be doing.

As part of the web surfing, I now have quite a few blogs which I visit regularly. Having found Electron Blue, which I mentioned earlier, I started checking out the blogs on her “other people” list, then following their links to other blogs, etc.

I found two blogs being written by people in the physics area at the University of Queensland, which would be my university of choice if I ever get healthy enough to attend a university. Michael Nielsen is a physicist working in quantum information science, and Joel Gilmore who writes Illuminating Science is a postgraduate student in the physics department. If you’re at all interested in physics or science in general, check them out.

Bookshops and procrastination

Each month, I allow myself one visit to a "significant" bookshop - ie one where I am seriously likely to spend money. Lately it has been the charity bookshop which sells the books that the Brisbane City Council library has removed from their collection - from which I have obtained some great books at awesome prices (like the 1994 edition of the McGraw-Hill Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology for A$2.50).

Today I found a new (to me) secondhand bookshop, which will no doubt be re-visited. I found it after making half a dozen phone calls to bookshops this morning looking for one which sold Analog Science Fiction / Science Fact magazines - it seems that most Brisbane used bookshops don't bother stocking secondhand magazines of any sort nowadays. I now have 11 magazines from the 1980s full of "hard" science fiction stories to peruse (and the knowledge that there are dozens more which are even older still sitting on their shelves).

I also found a book called The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics, which is an anthology of modern science writing, including authors such as Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Isaac Asimov, Bertrand Russell, Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, Edwin Hubble, Steven Weinberg, Benoit Mandelbrot, James Gleick, Alan Turing, John Archibald Wheeler, Paul Dirac, C P Snow, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, etc, etc, etc (ie lots of people that I've heard of). As well as the expected articles on physics, astronomy and maths, it includes articles on philosophy and science, and also about the scientists' lives and works. I'm hoping that dipping into it occasionally will help renew my flagging morale and energy when I get stuck in my maths and physics studies, and remind me why I'm doing this.

And yes, in case you were wondering, as of today, I have spent the last two weeks actively avoiding trying to write summary notes of the last maths book I completed - it's the last of four that were written in-house by the college through which I'm studying, and it's so riddled with mistakes (especially the chapter on statistics) that I'm really going to struggle to make enough sense of it to write useful notes. Once that's done and I've sent off the tutorial assignments, I have a test to do and then, assuming all that goes OK, I need to register for the first exam. Then I will have completed the equivalent of Year 11 Maths B in Queensland (we have 12 years of high school here).

Luckily the Year 12 Maths B is done using one of the textbooks that the schools use, so I should no longer be tripping over mistakes in the book all the time - although I admit to some fears over the Physics course, which I hope to enrol in sometime in December or January, which is written completely in-house.

Tomorrow, I will go back to the maths, I promise – that is, unless I find something else more interesting to do, or I’m too tired, or I get distracted, or ………….

Conceptis logic puzzles

They say confession is good for the soul – and also that the first step in overcoming an addiction is to admit you have a problem. Well, I have an addiction to Conceptis picture-forming logic puzzles (Warning: click through to their site and you, too, may become addicted) - although I’m not at all sure I want to do anything about it.

Each week they post 12 free puzzles for registered members (registration is free) which can be completed online or downloaded and printed. The puzzles are of three types – pic-a-pix (otherwise known as nonograms or paint-by-numbers puzzles), link-a-pix (the easiest of them, I think) and fill-a-pix (which are my most serious addiction). There is also an active forum community and a weekly puzzle to download and review, with one of the reviewers each week receiving a free t-shirt (look under Puzzler’s Place once you’ve logged in).

For more months now than I care to admit (or should it really be counted in years?), one of my high priority tasks for the week has been to complete all 12 puzzles. I often put my computer on standby overnight so that I don’t have to close a partially completed puzzle and lose it all. Just a hint for anyone who does try them – you don’t have to be online to complete them – log in to the Conceptis site, open a puzzle and then just make sure you keep the web browser window with the Conceptis site on it open, as well as the puzzle window.

Just don’t say that I didn’t warn you that they’re addictive ………

What our leaders believe

That was the title of the latest episode of Compass which aired on ABC television in Australia last Sunday. Compass is a series “devoted to faith, values, ethics, and the religious impulse in today's world” to quote from their home page. This episode consisted of interviews with the leaders of the major political parties in Australia about their values and belief systems, done in the lead-up to the Australian federal election this Saturday (for a complete transcript see here).

I find these (potentially) less formal, less political interviews to be far more useful in uncovering the real men (and yes, they are all male at the moment) behind the media “mask” than any other means.

A few years ago, prior to a previous election, Ray Martin did what were intended to be personal interviews with John Howard and Kim Beazley, the two contenders for Prime Minister at the time. I remember being struck by how “real” Mr Beazley seemed – just “a bloke having a chat”. In contrast, Mr Howard was still very much the “politician” – every word seemed measured and designed to fit in with the “image” his PR people wanted him to portray.

This time, five leaders were interviewed, and again, Mr Howard stood out as the only one who was, to some extent, still being the politician – that was my impression, anyway - he seems to be a very private person when it comes to his personal beliefs and values.

The others were very interesting. One thing that really struck a chord with me was John Anderson saying that one of the things we lack in Australian society is a “story”. I came across this concept of a story or meta-narrative earlier this year – a story which tells us who we are, what our role is, what the universe is and how we should act. The obvious examples come from organised religions such as the Christian story of the creator God.

But as society moves into the post-modern era and tends to shun organised religion, we also leave behind our story. So we find people who feel lost in the world, who don’t know who they are, why they are here or what the world is all about. I wonder whether science can provide us with a story that helps – that goes beyond the Big Bang, evolution from apes, etc, and somehow helps us find our place in the world. I believe that we need a story that incorporates scientific knowledge as well as spirituality in some way.

An inquiring mind?

I pondered long and hard over naming this blog – I wanted something that somehow reflected who I was, but that left plenty of scope for exploring my wide and varied interests.

As a young child, rumour has it that one of my first words was “what?”, closely followed by “why?” – mum tells stories about me following her around asking “what you just doing now, mum?”, “why you just doing that?” and “what are you just going to do next?” (and no, I don’t have any idea where the “just” came from).

Starting school was something I eagerly anticipated – somewhere to find out the answers to all my questions. But, that wasn’t how it worked out, as I quickly became caught up in the quest for better and better test and exam results. The insatiable drive to understand things was consumed by a need to be perfect, to know everything I was supposed to know, or at least to know it well enough to be able to perform when tested.

There were glimpses of my former self – the chance as a primary school student to spend half a day a week at a high school learning (among other things) to build a crystal radio and to program a computer (using punch cards – ok, so I’m in my forties, and it was a while ago) – and a high school maths teacher willing to spend some of his spare time teaching me some of the interesting maths and physics that wasn’t in the curriculum – and who gave me a large book called “Physics for the Inquiring Mind”.

But I found myself going fairly thoughtlessly from high school on to university, just as everyone expected me to – studying maths, computing and science subjects – but still only really motivated by the need to excel at the exams. So, when I got married at the end of second year university and started struggling to combine married life and study in third year I found it relatively easy to drop out and leave the academic world behind me.

And so I went on, through a divorce, getting myself a government office job, a computing qualification, a better government job, a move to sunny Queensland and yet another government job. Then, in late 1997, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome and had to stop working (I was later retrenched from my job and I haven’t worked since).

I found I had lots of time to think, to ponder my life, and one day, several years ago, to pull Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” out of my bookshelf where it had sat unread for years and actually read it. And I remembered that part of me that wants to know why things are the way they are, how things work, the “me” who just has to ask “why?”. So now, I have a slightly larger collection of (as yet mostly unread) popular science books, and I’m enrolled in a self-paced distance education course revisiting high school maths and science. And one day, the dream is to understand modern physics – and all the maths involved – to be able to read the newsgroup sci.physics.research and have at least some of it make sense.

The dreaded first post ...

... and this time for real - cos I've deleted the test one that's been sitting there for a few days while I fiddled with adding comments, trackbacks, permalinks and a site counter - some of the stuff the "experts" say you should have - which hopefully all works ok. But now it's time to stop wasting precious hours trying to figure out how to edit the HTML code to put an extra space or two between the time and the "LINK" in the "POSTED BY" line below (suggestions for fixing it welcomed by this HTML novice) - and get on with actually writing something.

I've also spent some time reading all those lists of do's and don'ts for beginning bloggers, so hopefully my blunders won't be too big - although I am a firm believer in the premise that the best way to learn is by making mistakes, even if it is scary.

So ... why am I doing this? I started reading a couple of blogs a month or so ago - I'd heard about the whole blogosphere thing before but never explored it properly. At the time, I was curious to see if there were any other "laypeople" who were trying to learn maths and physics (in particular) by themselves, and my search revealed Electron Blue - Pyracantha's weblog, subtitled "an artist studies mathematics and physics". I read that from start to finish and followed lots of links to other webpages and blogs - and I was hooked.

I spend a lot of time exploring ideas, gathering information, reading books and surfing the web. I've always liked the idea of keeping a journal or record of life in general and my "thought life" in particular but have never been disciplined enough to stick with it. My hope is that by blogging in a public forum I will develop the habit of crystallising some of my random wanderings and retaining more of the lessons I have learned - and who knows, someone out there might find some of it worth reading and even learn something, too.