And now we have only a short hop back to Tuesday, June 13. That’s practically today. Tuesday, Thursday, who can keep track of all the T days? *doo-doot doo-doot*
Today I took a break from the mind-bending math but continued with good ol’ Tipler and Mosca. After the lengthy chapters on Monday, I ended up with a short pair of chapters today on The Magnetic Field and Sources of the Magnetic Field. I probably could have balanced this out better when I was making my schedule for the week, but I was just going based off a chapter list. In any case, these were interesting chapters. I especially liked that there was a good section about some practical applications of very basic magnetism concepts—velocity selectors, mass spectrometers, etc. Also I got a chance to look like an idiot at my desk by constantly doing the right-hand rule as I followed along with examples in the text. Good thing I study at home alone!
After the magnetic chapters on magnetism, I picked up with my Codecademy course on Python. Progress has been slower here than I like, but as the lessons are getting a little more complex, they take more time and brainpower, hence slower progress. Still, the end is in sight. I got to play around with creating mathematical functions, which actually felt useful (even though these are actually built in to Python), and got to start on “advanced” topics. Nothing too crazy, but it’s starting to feel a little more natural to get the code down. I also spent five minutes debugging something that turned out to be a single misplaced indent. Oops!
Today’s fun “new” fact: Two straight wires carrying parallel currents will attract each other due to their generated magnetic fields. And in fact, this attractive force is how the SI unit ampere is (currently) defined! The coulomb is then reverse-defined from the ampere.
Photo by Guy vandegrift / CC BY-SA 3.0