This morning I bid farewell to my boyfriend, as he is off on the Navy’s bidding for a few weeks. I also dealt with a malfunctioning air conditioner (a lizard fried himself on a capacitor, poor guy) in 90F+, extremely humid weather, a morass of bug bites on all my limbs, and the cavalcade of documents that go along with a mortgage. I also had to talk on the phone multiple times, which for me is super unfun. All in all, it was A Day, and I could be forgiven for letting my first day back at studying slide.
But! I did not! I guess I’m just stubborn enough. Or scared enough. Or I actually enjoy doing this enough. Well, a little bit of all of it, I suppose. In any case, once the internal temperature settled back down into the 70s, I was able to focus on learning more about matrices. In today’s sections, I got to the key part about determinants. No wonder I was having trouble remembering how to do this—they are, like many matrix-related things, supremely annoying to calculate. I am not sure if it the spatial element of it (if I am not careful I will get my rows and columns mixed up halfway through) or something else, but I have to go slow and frequently use my finger to point at the numbers I am trying to work with within a matrix. However, they are useful little beasties, and doing these sorts of calculations by hand is only for the theory of it and so a little painstaking is fine.
I read through another chapter in Bob today as well, this one on light and the electromagnetic spectrum. After having gone through this at least a little rigorously in my physics text, it was nice to get the astrophysics perspective here. A lot of focus on blackbodies, magnitude, and luminosity, which are key to our observations of the universe. Surface temperatures in the thousands of Kelvin! Distances in parsecs! I also re-learned some interesting info about color indices and getting a little bit into the practical side of things, with at least some attention given to correcting for instruments, atmospheric effects, etc.
One thing popped up that illustrates the downsides of using my old college textbooks for studying. For the most part, it’s quite adequate, as the things I am reviewing have been settled science for many decades, but sometimes the time gap rears its head. In this case, the text referenced an upcoming NASA mission called SIM PlanetQuest. It sounded quite interesting, and I was intrigued about a mission I had never heard of. So I pulled out my phone, googled it…aaaand it was canceled in 2010. Well damn. Better luck next time!