Thursday, June 26, 2008

What I did today

As you may have gathered, the Dubai work has hit a pause and while waiting for events, I have been catching up with other stuff.

1. I spent the morning working through superconductivity in my OU course SMT359 Electromagnetism (penultimate chapter of book 2). The final chapter covers the treatment of Maxwell's equations in special relativity, then I get to do the third course assignment (cut-off date July 25th).

2. Having re-installed Windows XP on my old Toshiba laptop (which I have now 'given' to Clare), I spent time this afternoon helping to move the OS from its 2003 reincarnation to current. This involved repeated invocations of Microsoft Update + restarts via XP Service Packs 2 and 3.

3. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon getting the Interweave Consulting books up to date. In particular breaking my expenses out from multiple invoices into the categories required by the Inland Revenue.

4. I read the latest Scientific American, which has a really interesting article called "Using Causality to Solve the Puzzle of Quantum Spacetime". This describes causal dynamical triangulation - Wikipedia summary here. I guess you could probably run their spacetime simulations on your laptop, assuming it was faster than Clare's Toshiba.

5. Tomorrow it's back to superconductivity again.