There was one post that got one comment this past week, so I'll repost that one.Featured Comments: Week of 2013 September 1Reader Kaf Shiel said, "I tried Luna 2 last night but the desktop is dead (no point in clicking it at all) and the configuration of everything is not available (unless you really want to waste a few hours) also Planck is of no use at all as it is, since is just too basic and you can't configure anything on this OS without resorting to dConf and tons of work that don't really pay off... As for the comment that 'spend less...
Sunday, 15 September 2013
Sunday, 8 September 2013
There was one post this week that got two comments, so I'll repost both of those.Review: Elementary OS 2 "Luna"Reader sgreen said, "and we need Elementary for ??. I know the developer just wants to keep busy. If there's anything that will ruin Linux it's this kind of crap. How many are in its user-base??"An anonymous commenter disagreed: "I think the Elementary team are doing a great job. I find eOS to be very distraction-free. I spend less time in making it look and feel like I want to, because the developers have done that for me. Keep it up,...
Tuesday, 3 September 2013
How did I become a senior? It doesn't feel like orientation and freshman year happened that long ago.Tomorrow is the first day of class for the 2013 fall semester. I'll be taking 8.07 — Electromagnetism II, 8.09 — Classical Mechanics III, 8.333 — Statistical Mechanics I (a graduate class), and 14.12 — Economic Applications of Game Theory. I'm looking forward to all of these classes along with continuing my UROP (which may transition sooner or later into a new project as I wrap up my current one). The bigger things I have to deal with though are...
Monday, 2 September 2013
Main Screen + Slingshot MenuAbout 9 months ago, I checked out the first beta release of Elementary OS 2 "Luna". Since then, the final release has been put out for everyone to see and try, so I am trying it now. I tested this as a live USB made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it's like. Also note that I will not go over all the same things as I did last time, but I will take note of any changes.Read more...
Tuesday, 27 August 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); The last thing I discussed in the last post was about the energy eigenstates of the continuous field. The ground state $|0\rangle$ classically corresponds to there being no displacement in the chain at any spatial index $x$ and quantum mechanically corresponds to each oscillator for each normal mode index $k$ being in its ground state, while the first excited state $|k\rangle = a^{\dagger} (k)|0\rangle$ for a given $k$ classically corresponds...
Monday, 26 August 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); In my last post about intuiting and visualizing quantum field theory, I discussed the diagonalization of the Hamiltonian and overall momentum and how they become operators. In this post I'm going to discuss more the meanings of the operators and associated quantum states of this field. Follow the jump to see more.Read more...
Sunday, 25 August 2013
There was one post this past week that got a few comments, so I'll repost one of those.Cap and Trade and SodaAfter an odd irritable initial pair of ranting comments, an anonymous reader followed up with this: "i apologize for my snide remarks before. i was just irritated. okay, so maybe there are a few other ingredients (like oils). it might be worth your while to check out OpenCola, which (or so i've heard online) tastes pretty close to Coke. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink)".Thanks to that commenter for that (and especially also...
Saturday, 24 August 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); In my previous post I discussed the intuition behind the classical acoustic field in one dimension. Now I'm going to talk about diagonalizing the Hamiltonian and making the step into quantum field theory. Follow the jump to see what it's like.Read more...
Friday, 23 August 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); I've been reading various documents about quantum field theory over the last several weeks, specifically about the canonical quantization of quantum fields. In doing so, I've come to realize that quantum mechanics has a lot of crazy math and even crazier physical interpretations, and I just took that for granted, but now those things are coming back to haunt me in quantum field theory. It is very hard for me to wrap my head around, and I...
Thursday, 22 August 2013
A few days ago, my family and I went on vacation. On the way back, my family and I were discussing various things including some matters of politics. One thing that came up was some of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's recent actions. I expressed the view that the ban on soft drinks larger than 16 ounces seemed rather heavy-handed. (After reading a little more about the exceptions for fruit drinks along with sales at grocery stores, I'm a little more happy to see that, but I still feel the ban was heavy-handed.) I then heard the argument...
Friday, 16 August 2013
Wow. This summer has been incredibly busy, productive, and fun all at once. I can't believe it's already over!So what did I do this summer?My primary concern this summer was my UROP. I have been able to bring it very close to an end point; I wasn't able to finish it up completely, but I guess that was an unrealistic expectation because that's just not how science works. It doesn't wrap up cleanly; it's an ongoing process. I learned a whole lot more about Scheme and MEEP in the process, though, which was great.On a related note, another UROP project...
Sunday, 11 August 2013
There was one post this past week that got one comment, so I will repost that one.Review: Linux Mint 15 "Olivia" KDE + XfceAn anonymous reader said, "Looking at your screenshots from the KDE spin I don´t see them looking different from oxygen. Did you change them before taking the screenshots? Also a general thank you for reviewing distros."Thanks to that person for leaving that comment. This coming week, I'm going to be taking the GRE, so I definitely can't post anything until after Tuesday. After that, I may really only have time to put out...
Tuesday, 6 August 2013
I realize that I haven't posted anything in the last 2.5 weeks. That's because in that time I got quite busy with a combination of UROP work, video making for the MIT-K12 project, and studying for the General and Physics GREs. Given that I will be taking the General GRE in just over a week, and given that I will be going home for vacation shortly thereafter, I won't be able to post much after this for this month aside from a probable post reflecting...
Wednesday, 17 July 2013
I've mentioned here on several occasions that I've been doing a UROP regarding nanophotonics/photonic crystals. Specifically, my first project was in determining whether particular types of photonic structures might enhance absorptivity of light, which would help solar cells that convert that light into electricity. The goal is that the absorptivity enhancement (versus no texturing over the solar cell) should be over as broad of a frequency band as possible, because it is difficult to manufacture many different kinds of photonic structures just...
Sunday, 14 July 2013
I didn't post anything in the two weeks before this past one because I didn't really have much to post (not because I was particularly busy). This past week, there was one post that got a handful of comments, so I'll repost some of those.Review: Korora 19 "Bruce" GNOMEReader Barnaby said, "Skype works fine with Debian and Slackware 32-bit systems, probably Redhat based ones as well. I wouldn't blame errors with software installation in a live session on the distribution though, some things need a proper install, like the force switch to ignore...
Tuesday, 9 July 2013
Activities screenIn the comments of my review of Korora 18 "Flo" KDE, a bunch of people asked me to review Korora 19 "Bruce" GNOME. Now that this new version is out, I'm going to review it. It hasn't been too long since my last review of Korora, so I'll skip the introduction and get right to the main stuff. I reviewed the 64-bit edition (usually I review the 32-bit versions of distributions essentially by default, but this time the 32-bit edition...
Sunday, 23 June 2013
There was one post that got a couple of comments this past week, so I'll repost all of those.Review: Zorin OS 7 CoreReader arindam sen said, "Thanks for the good review. I agree with you - it is sad the Ubuntu 13.04 derivatives are only supported till Oct'13. Like what Fuduntu did with Fedora, some Ubuntu derivative should target of creating a rolling release distro. Anyway, Ubuntu developers were also debating over a rolling release distro last year. I am not sure what is the present status now."Commenter Eddie had this to say: "Zorin does...
Tuesday, 18 June 2013
It has been almost exactly a year since I reviewed Zorin OS 6 Core, which was based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin". The new version is based on Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail", so I'm reviewing that now.Main Screen + Zorin OS MenuWhat is Zorin OS? It is based on Ubuntu, uses a heavily customized GNOME 3 environment with Compiz as the WM and AWN as a panel. It also aims to look as close to Microsoft Windows as possible; at the moment, the target...
Sunday, 16 June 2013
There was one post that got a handful of comments this past week, so I'll repost some of those.Review: Linux Mint 15 "Olivia" Cinnamon + MATE Reader Mechatotoro said, "Thank you for the time to write about Mint; your review is very useful and enlightening. I really appreciate your objective observations! Again, thank you and good luck with your studies."An anonymous commenter had a different experience: "I have been using Mint 15 since the RC release and it has been rock solid for me as well."Reader Bernard Victor had a similar counter: "I am...
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
It's that time of the year again. Linux Mint has just released the latest version of its distribution, and I'm going to review it.Cinnamon: Main Screen + Cinnamon MenuWhat has changed since the previous version? Cinnamon has gotten more bug fixes as usual. More importantly, its settings have been consolidated into one program, and it has become less immediately dependent on GNOME than before. Meanwhile, MATE has also been moving away from old libraries...
Sunday, 9 June 2013
There was one post this past week that got a handful of comments, so I will repost most of those.How-To: Make Xfce Like UnityReader Mike Frett shared, "That's why I use XFCE, very customizable. I don't particularly like Unity, but I enjoyed the article. Incidentally, you could have turned the Opacity down a bit on your Dock to match Unity's. I use Xubuntu, when I do I always delete the Dock on the bottom and drag the top bar down to the bottom. I add some spacers and launchers and such till it looks like *that* classic OS from around '98....
Friday, 7 June 2013
This is more or less the sequel to this post. It came about because I wanted to see if it would be easy to make Xfce look like Apple's Mac OS X; I figured that Unity looks similar enough, so I might as well write about that. Follow the jump to see how to do it. I would have added more pictures if I had more time, but I'm heading back to campus tomorrow, so I can only make this a quick post in the meantime.Read more...
Thursday, 6 June 2013
A couple of people have asked in comments (especially of my review of #! 11 "Waldorf") that I review Semplice. I took a look at its website and was pretty intrigued, so here is the review.Main Screen + Openbox MenuWhat is Semplice? Much like #! (which I may end up referencing frequently whether I want to or not), it is based on Debian and uses Openbox as its default WM. Unlike #!, which is based on Debian Stable (and issues preview releases based...
Monday, 3 June 2013
Somehow a few months ago, my family discovered the existence of this blog, and the first post they read was this one, for which this post is a follow-up. They then bought the aforementioned book for me so that I could read it and perhaps understand the criticisms laid out in the New York Times article that I rebutted.Well, I read the book. It was a fairly interesting read. Having taken the class 8.033 — Relativity, I would say that everything up to around the middle of the book is stuff I've seen before in the context of general relativity. After...
Sunday, 2 June 2013
There was one post this past week that got one comment, so I'll repost that one.Review: SolydXK 2013.04.06Reader Mechatotoro said, "Thanks for the useful review. I had not heard about SolydXK, so I will give it a try. Have you tried Mint Olivia yet? I'd like to hear your opinion since you are a Mint user and can therefore assess the system's general performance as compared to other versions of Mint... I'm also curious about the new themable login screen."Thanks to him for leaving that comment. This coming week, I will have at least one review...
Thursday, 30 May 2013
I originally wanted to do this one before final exams, but other hiccups in this review pushed that to now. Anyway, here it is.Main Screen + KDE Kickoff MenuWhat is SolydXK? Debian-based Linux Mint never had a KDE edition, so SolydK was born out of the unofficial project featuring KDE in Debian-based Linux Mint. Then, Linux Mint pushed its Xfce edition back to an Ubuntu base, necessitating the emergence of SolydX. Together they form SolydXK, based...
Monday, 27 May 2013
I was out of town over the long weekend, so I couldn't post this yesterday. There was one post that got a couple of comments last week, so I will repost both of those.Review: Korora 18 "Flo" KDEAn anonymous reader asked, "do you have a review for gnome edition"?Another anonymous commenter shared, "I've been running Korora 18 for a few weeks now. It's extremely polished and I had none of the errors you encountered setting it up. Everything just works for me."Thanks to both of those people for commenting on that post. This coming week, I will have...
Friday, 24 May 2013
I'm done with junior year! The spring semester was a bit more manageable than the fall semester, but was still challenging nevertheless. I intentionally chose to take only 3 classes: 8.06 — Quantum Physics III, 8.14 — Experimental Physics II, and 14.03 — Microeconomic Theory and Public Policy. I did this so that I could spend more time on each of those classes (especially 8.14 — Experimental Physics II) as well as on my UROP. Speaking of my UROP, things were progressing rather slowly in the beginning of the semester and only slowed further from...
Thursday, 23 May 2013
Main Screen + Kickoff MenuIn the last week of classes, since finished all of my assignments, I have had a little time to do some distribution reviews before starting to prepare for final exams. The second such review is of the KDE edition of Korora 18 "Flo".I have reviewed Korora before. Back then it was called Kororaa (with an extra 'a'), so I guess the name was shortened in a manner similar to that of Facebook (from "TheFacebook"). It's a distribution...
Sunday, 19 May 2013
There was one post this past week that got a handful of comments, so I will repost most of those. Also, I should mention that despite that post being a very short review-esque update, it somehow managed to get several thousands of views more quickly than any other post. I'd be curious to know where a lot of those views came from.Review: CrunchBang ("#!") Linux 11 "Waldorf"Reader DarkDuck shared, "I would not recommend #! to newbies. It's still to rough. But as soon as you become comfortable with the Linux system architecture and approach, #!...
Wednesday, 15 May 2013
Main Screen + Openbox MenuThis is the last week of classes for me. I have turned in all my assignments and a handful of days until finals, so I can take today and tomorrow to write a couple of reviews at my leisure. The first will be #!.#! should be familiar to many readers here. It is a lightweight Debian-based distribution that uses Openbox. While it is not technically a rolling-release distribution because it is pinned to the stable release, there...
Monday, 6 May 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); Last semester, 14.04 — Intermediate Microeconomic Theory covered choice theory under uncertainty; at the same time, I was taking 8.05 — Quantum Physics II, where we had talked about 2-state systems and the formalism of quantum states being complex vectors in a Hilbert space, and as choice under uncertainty discusses how consumers make choices based on states of the world, I thought it would be cool to extend it to quantum states, but I wasn't sure how to do that at that...
Sunday, 28 April 2013
There was one post that got a handful of comments this past week, so I'll repost most of those.Review: Fuduntu 2013.2Reader Tran Mere asked, "Was there ever really big community behind Fuduntu or was it mostly just one man show?"Commenter Andrew Wyatt, who created Fuduntu and is soon to retire from the project, replied, "There is a team of 20 people working on Fuduntu from developers to support to marketing, and we estimated having close to 150K users until we announced the project being EOL in September."An anonymous reader clarified, "New...
Friday, 26 April 2013
In 2012 IAP, I taught myself how to use LaTeX by typesetting the 8.033 — Relativity lecture notes. I also did this so that the lecturer I had that semester and the lecturer for the following semester would both have these notes at their disposal; for the record, the former is on sabbatical this academic year, while the latter did indeed use it when he taught the class this past fall. I needed to teach myself LaTeX because I was going to be taking 8.13, which I did this past fall, and that requires LaTeX use for papers (and recommends Beamer for...
Thursday, 25 April 2013
Wednesday, 24 April 2013
I haven't checked out Fuduntu in over a year. I wasn't particularly planning to do so either, because I wasn't exactly expecting huge changes. But then I saw some news that changed my mind.Welcome Screen + Main MenuFuduntu, as regular readers know, is an independent distribution that maintains GNOME 2 essentially as-is and uses the RPM package format, so it can sometimes use third-party packages developed for Fedora. Recently, though, there was a...
Sunday, 21 April 2013
There were two posts this past week that got a couple comments between them, so I will repost comments from one of those.Review: Manjaro Linux 0.8.5 XfceReader crabdog said, "Thanks for the write up. I'm a long time Manjaro fan and have been using it since its early days. I previously always had a full install of it on my laptop alongside windows 7 and usually another linux distro but I had some problems with 0.8.4 and ended up with Netrunner and Zorin OS on the laptop. I'm waiting for one of those to break so I have an excuse to put Manjaro...
Tuesday, 16 April 2013
Main Screen + Xfce MenuIt has been a while since I have reviewed Manjaro Linux. It has also been a while since I have done a normal distribution review, and I have a long weekend now, so this seems like the ideal time.Manjaro Linux used to basically be a dressed-up version of Arch. It has since matured a bit, in that now it depends only on its own repositories, though it does allow access to the Arch User Repository (AUR). One of the big new features...
Monday, 15 April 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); I finally started writing my paper for 8.06 yesterday. Before that, though, I had asked a couple questions about the topic to my UROP supervisor, whose primary area of expertise is actually in QED and Casimir problems. I was asking him why the book The Quantum Vacuum by Peter Milonni uses the magnetic potential $\vec{A}$ instead of the electromagnetic fields $\vec{E}$ and $\vec{B}$ to expand in Fourier modes and derive the harmonic oscillator...
Sunday, 14 April 2013
There was one post this past week that got one comment, so I will repost that.Long-Term Review: Chakra 2013.02 "Benz"An anonymous reader asked, "Is there any reason not to use pacman -Syyu instead of pacman -Syy followed by pacman -Syu (or even instead of pacman -Syy followed by pacman -Su)?"Thanks to that person for posting that. This coming week, I have holidays on Monday and Tuesday, giving me time to relax and perhaps post a distribution review. Other than that, I will probably post another thing about physics as well. Anyway, if you like...
Tuesday, 9 April 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); As a follow-up (sort of, but not exactly) to my previous post on the matter, I would like to post a few updates and new questions, using Einstein summation throughout for convenience. The first has to do with why $p^{\mu} = \int T^{(0, \mu)} d^3 x$ is a Lorentz-contravariant vector. Apparently Noether's theorem says that if some Noether current $J^{\mu}$ generates a symmetry and satisfies \[ \partial_{\mu} J^{\mu} = 0 \] then the quantity \[ q = \int J^{(0)} d^3 x \]...
Monday, 8 April 2013
I did this long-term review on my normal UROP desktop computer with the 64-bit edition of the OS. Follow the jump to see how it fared. Also do note that there are more days logged because I intend to use it for about 60-80 full hours of work, which is the equivalent of 7-10 full days in the summer, though now I am working on a part-time basis as classes have started.Read more...
Sunday, 31 March 2013
There were two posts that got a few comments each, so I will repost most of those.Review: Linux Mint MATE 201303Reader Gary Newell said, "This is a good in depth review. I am currently using the Mint 14 Cinnamon release (Ubuntu base). If you have a powerful enough PC then Cinnamon is the best desktop as far as I can tell. I prefer the Consort desktop used by SolusOS to the MATE desktop and if I have an older PC I actually overall prefer to use XFCE and so tend to run Xubuntu."Commenter Juan Carlos García Ramírez had this to say: "I still prefer...
Friday, 29 March 2013
My spring break is coming to an end (I only have 1.5 more days), so I figured it might be nice to do another review while I still can. Today I'm reviewing Pardus 2013.Main Screen + KDE Kickoff MenuPardus is a distribution developed at least in part by the Turkish military. It used to not be based on any other distribution and used its unique PISI package management system, which featured delta upgrades (meaning that only the differences between package...
Wednesday, 27 March 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); As an update to a previous post about my adventures in QED-land for 8.06, I emailed my recitation leader about whether my intuition about the meaning of the Fourier components of the electromagnetic potential solving the wave equation (and being quantized to the ladder operators) was correct. He said it basically is correct, although there are a few things that, while I kept in mind at that time, I still need to keep in mind throughout. The first is that the canonical...
Tuesday, 26 March 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); There were two things that I would like to post here today. The first is something I have been mulling over for a while. The second is something that I thought about more recently.Time evolution in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics occurs according to the [time-dependent] Schrödinger equation \[ H|\Psi\rangle = i\hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial t} |\Psi\rangle .\] While this at first may seem intractable, the trick is that typically the Hamiltonian is not time-dependent,...
Monday, 25 March 2013
For those of you who have been waiting for a review, I think I may have said before that my writing would shift more to science-y stuff and away from distribution reviews. However, that does not mean that reviews will stop entirely. I'm on spring break now and have a little more time to do these reviews, so today I am reviewing Linux Mint MATE 201303, which came out earlier this week.Main Screen + Linux Mint MenuThis is the version of Linux Mint...
Thursday, 21 March 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); In a post from a few days ago, I briefly mentioned the notion of imaginary time with regard to angular momentum. I'd like to go into that a little further in this post.In 3 spatial dimensions, the flat (Euclidean) metric is $\eta_{ij} = \delta_{ij}$, which is quite convenient, as lengths are given by $(\Delta s)^2 = (\Delta x)^2 + (\Delta y)^2 + (\Delta z)^2$ which is just the usual Pythagorean theorem. When a temporal dimension is added, as in special relativity, the...
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