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“dilogarithms”


Solar Cycle 24

Below I've tried to post math in a style that would work on WordPress - well, it does not work here. I don't know how to do math on BlogSpot!

Look at the document source to see how to strike out text, how to use different colors, and how to link to URLs with snapshot preview and how to link to URLs without snapshot preview.

There is a command which is ignored by pdflatex and which defines where to cut the post in the version displayed on the main page

Merry Christmas

Check out our dance:

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Good luck, America!

We'll need it. We just elected a man with little experience, a shady past, Socialistic ideas, and promises to tax us hard-working people out of existence. He threatens to bankrupt the coal industry.

I believe he thinks himself to be much wiser than he really is.

Have a great four years,

Tom

Testing Math

All I want to do here is to see if I can enter an equation and have it look OK:

∫ dx cos(x) = sin(x) + C

∑_k=1,...n 1/k ≈ log(n) + γ + 1/(2n)

Well, it's not great but it could be worse.

For hints on how to do this (as well as more info on HTML in general) see here and here.


Here's some stuff I copied from another page, to keep around for reference. This obviously needs work - I need to learn some more HTML!!

√(a² + b²)



√(a² + b²)

square root of ( a^2 + b^2 )

---

lim n→∞

an

lim n→∞

an

{ limit n -> infinity } a_n

---

∞ ∑ n = 0

an

∞ ∑ n = 0

an

{ sum from n = 0 to infinity } a_n

---

∆u  =  Δu  =

n ∑ i = 1

∂2u/∂xi2

∆u  =  Δu  =

n ∑ i = 1

∂2u/∂xi2

Laplacian of u = Delta u = { sum from i = 1 to n } d^2u / dx_i^2

---

b ∫ a

f(x) dx

b ∫ a

f(x) dx

{ integral from a to b } f(x) dx

---

Electricity is Good

All,

We've been without power since Ike, until a few hours ago. That made a little over two weeks.

The worst part was that we never had a real clue when it might come back. Centerpoint Energy published very vague maps about when certain zip codes would have their power restored. Going by zip code is too coarse; most of ours had power a week ago, but not us!

More later,

Tom

Ike approaches

The latest forecast for Hurricane Ike is discussed in an interesting note at
Jeff Master's blog. He notes that the storm is very much stronger than the indicated intensity of 2, due to its vast size. The storm surge will rival that of Carla.

He notes that a good measure of the total strength of a hurricane is its Integrated Kinetic Energy (IKE!). For Ike, this is around 149 Terajoules. For comparison, Katrina was rated at 122 Terajoules.

Sadly, I've seen several news reports about people refusing to leave Galveston Island and other low-lying areas. They face almost certain death. In fact, the police are asking them to put identifying marks on themselves, so they can be more easily identified when they are found. I can't believe it.

Time to get back to work!

Tom

This doesn't look too promising

I'm talking about Hurricane Ike; here are the latest computer models, which have it going pretty close to us in Houston:



On a more positive note, the LHC is still scheduled to start up on Wednesday. Also, experimenters at Fermilab have discovered a new type of baryon, the Ω_b, which contains two strange quarks (along with a single bottom quark). (In contrast, the proton is composed of two up quarks and one down.) It mass is about 6 times that of the proton, just as expected from lattice gauge theory calculations.