Only one day into the past, which doesn’t even call for the time machine, really. Just a time jump. Oh, you don’t know how to do that? Pity. *wahoo!*
This morning started out great with the first half of the chapter on Partial Differentiation. I’ve always liked partial derivatives. They almost feel like cheating, right? Like you have this whole mess of an equation with a million variables but…we’ll just ignore them all and only deal with one! Mwahaha. So it was a genuine pleasure to work through these sections. Even the one on changing variables that took me three pages of looseleaf and numerous cross-outs to work through.
The afternoon was not quite so great. For one, I didn’t get started until pretty late. You wouldn’t think I’d be so busy, being unemployed and all, but the days really do get away from me. By the time I went for a run and made lunch and washed dishes and so on and so on, it was already late afternoon. And my boyfriend and I were planning to go to a baseball game (free tickets since it was Military Appreciation Night, and we got vouchers for free hot dogs), so I had to knuckle down and get to work. And of course I had given myself three chapters that totaled over 90 pages: Magnetic Induction, Alternating-Current Circuits, and Maxwell’s Equations and Electromagnetic Waves. The magnetic induction material was especially long and took me a lot of effort to power through. I get frustrated sometimes trying to think through these problems. One moving charge creates a magnetic field which changes and induces an electric field which causes charges to move and create magnetic fields…okay, I know it’s really not that hard, but it just takes a lot of focus. By the time I got to poor Maxwell I couldn’t even be properly excited about him putting everything together!
But luckily I finished just in time to head out for the baseball game. (The Riverdogs won!)
Today’s fun “new” fact: Flux is quantized, and the small unit of flux is called a fluxon. That just sounds like some mad-scientist shit right there.