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.