Recent content by DavidWhitbeck

Torque is a physical quantity. Net force only changes the motion of the center-of-mass of a system. You need something else to impart changes to rotational motion. Just because forces cause torques does not make it a piece of mathematical trickery, or a definition for convenience. As...

Do you want to do all of that because you are actually interested in the interface between the two approaches or this is a delusion of grandeur thing? You could be working on the most gloriously famous research problems the world has known but it will still boil down to a grind once you get...

Why don't you buy it used off of amazon if money is an issue? If you have a tight budget you can't be so picky. The MSRP is actually significantly higher than amazon's price so I don't see you finding a better bargain. If your budget is tight then your choices are to (a) buy a lower model...

Would you mind posting the article then so that we are not hearing it second hand?

I am going to try one very last time to state my points. (1) Doing elementary integrals is not a routine aspect of physical science and engineering at the research level. (2) However all of that tedious drilling in calculus does help students shore up their ability to think and reason...

If you can find an analytic solution you're done. Coming up with and using a numerical scheme involves (a) the functions involved satisfy all the properties needed for the algorithm to work, (b) the method needs to be not only convergent, but efficient, how do you find the balance? (c) how do...

Well Jackson is not a good example of what grad is like, except for in the sense of hazing and useless work (*cough* edit: of course there is a lot of useful work, but there is drudgery just as there is with any job). Most of the textbooks I had in grad school were actually insightful, well...

So what? You were debating the value of analytic solutions vs numerical solutions. What, did you actually think that I would reply to your strawman fallacy? Let me requote the thesis of your argument to remind you-- Now that we've taken care of that let's move right along. I was doing...

Iblis, in physics you choose your model as the simplest one that incorporates only the necessary features. Gravitational force is so much weaker than electrical force (by many orders of magnitude) that you do not include it in your model. You may be technically correct to say that gravity is...

You automatically background commands by adding & behind it. So for example "emacs foo.txt &" Also if you suspend a program, you can resume it in the background with the command bg. Example would be "jobs -l" outputs 512 for your emacs program, so then you run "bg %512".

Summer classes suck! The pace is fast, the amount of work insane... I pity the people that take summer classes. I remember taking a summer C++ class once and we had like 40 hours of homework a week. Well I hope things go well for you Shackleford.

If you get accepted to a grad school, they will probably stick you in undergrad classes for awhile. Grad schools accept students that don't have an excellent background all the time though, so go for it!

I watch cable tv, but I always record the shows on the dvr box and watch them later so that I can zap the commercials. Commercials are annoying.

And the last one is optional.

Alright Pete it looks like you are dealing with defining a derivative operator such that it parallel transports vectors, and then you prove that the metric is constant with respect to that operator. Wald defines derivative operators by five rules on page 31, and then on page 35 he proves that...