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...
Sunday, 31 March 2013
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...
Wednesday, 20 March 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); The class 8.06 — Quantum Physics III requires a final paper, written essentially like a review article of a certain area of physics that uses quantum mechanics and that is written for the level of 8.06 (and not much higher). At the same time, I have also been looking into other possible UROP projects because while I am quite happy with my photonic crystals UROP and would be pleased to continue with it, that project is the only one I have done at MIT thus far, and I would...
Monday, 18 March 2013
MathJax.Hub.Config({tex2jax: {inlineMath: [['$','$'], ['\\(','\\)']]}}); Many people learn in basic physics classes that angular momentum is a scalar quantity that describes the magnitude and direction of rotation, such that its rate of change is equal to the sum of all torques $\tau = \dot{L}$, akin to Newton's equation of motion $\vec{F} = \dot{\vec{p}}$. People who take more advanced physics classes, such as 8.012 — Physics I, learn that in fact angular momentum and torque are vectors; in the case of fixed-axis rotation, the moment of inertia...
Saturday, 16 March 2013
One of the things I learned in my high school AP Microeconomics class was that a tax causes the supply curve to shift to the left, making the equilibrium quantity decrease and price increase. Consumer and producer surplus both decrease, but while government revenue can account for some of the loss in total welfare, some part of total welfare gets fully lost, and this is what is known as deadweight loss. I didn't have a very good intuition for how this worked at the time (though I was able to get through it on homework, quizzes, tests, and the AP...
Wednesday, 6 March 2013
Last semester, I was taking 8.05, 8.13, 8.231, and 14.04, along with continuing my UROP. I was busy and stressed basically all the time. Now I think I know why: it turns out that the classes I was taking were much closer to graduate classes in material, yet they came with all the trappings of an undergraduate class, like exams (that were not intentionally easy). Let me explain a little more.8.05 — Quantum Physics II is where the linear algebra formalism and bra-ket notation of quantum mechanics are introduced and thoroughly investigated. Topics...
Friday, 1 March 2013
In my post at the end of the summer, I talked a bit about what I actually did in that UROP. Upon rereading it, I have come to realize that it is a little jumbled and technical. I'd like to basically rephrase it in less technical terms, along with providing more context on what I did in the 2011 fall semester. Follow the jump to see more.Read more...
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