The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma

[venta]

At the weekend, I spent a lot of time clearing out old files of work and notes from school and university.

In a way, I'm sad to see them go. The approximately two-foot high pile of A4 waiting to go out and give our recycling collectors a grave risk of industrial injury represents such a huge investment of my time and energy. I'm not honestly sure I would ever look at the stuff again, though - even the university lecture notes I keep intending to re-visit could probably be more usefully imbibed from books.

In particular, I lament the passing of my A-level physics notes. Writing notes in class was not as fraught as university lecture note-taking. I had the time and the inclination to take proper care over each page. My handwriting is even, the lines are neatly ruled, the diagrams carefully drawn in pencil and labelled.

Worse, it seems that almost the entire physics course has now fallen out of my head. "Using a Tangent Magnetometer to Investigate the Horizontal Component of the Earth's Magnetic Field" reads one tidily (double-)underlined heading. I did that? Yikes. Right now, I don't even know what a tangent magnetometer looks like. Or what it measures. Yet apparently I wielded one, shortly before I learned to use a cathode ray oscilloscope.

Flipping through the pages... what is the Hall Effect, anyway? Judging from the mark of 32/38 on the piece of work entitled "Comprehension of the Hall Effect", I only had a fairly hazy idea at the time. Shortly afterwards, I was using a Hall probe to measure the C. C. C. Inexplicably, the entire lab report fails to mention what C. C. C. actually stands for.

It feels wrong to be throwing away such a huge chunk of my life. But, ultimately, not quite as wrong as it feels to be giving up so much storage space to things I fundamentally don't need :)

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

What is the Hall Effect, anyway?

Hehe - that one I remember because we wasted an entire lesson debating whether or not the Hall Effect was a bizarre exception to the "right hand rule" and, indeed, whether our textbook had the sign of it wrong (!).

The answers, predictably, were "no" and "no" respectively.

Well, I say we "wasted" a lesson. That's one of only half a dozen or so lessons I actually remember. Draw your own conclusions!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, despite your A-levels being slightly longer ago than mine you remembered it, so I think you'll have to count that lesson as a success!

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Well done for getting on with this task. I empathise in fact as I'm doing something quite similar. The best bit is seeing the tidiness afterwards, isn't it?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I'll let you know when I get there! I'm currently in the everything-spread-out-everywhere middle phase, where it all looks worse than when you started!

Plus parts of my tidying have been going like this:

- Shelves full! Oh no!
- Clear two giant piles of books to go to nearby booksale. Hurrah! Feel virtuous, have beautifully spacious shelves.
- Find box of books hiding under spare bed. Panic.
- Squeeze them all onto shelves. Breathe sigh of relief. Shelves no longer beautifully spacious.
- Recall that new furniture plan in different room implies loss of a bookshelf. Panic some
more.
- Remove bookshelf.
- Squeeeeze books onto remaining shelves. Realise shelves now look worse than they did at the start of this process.
- Sob into cup of tea.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

- Consider new room arrangement again
- Long hard look at Killer Whale?!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Although I concede that Monty both takes up a lot of space and isn't strictly necessary, dispatching him wouldn't really help. I consider it acceptable to leave a killer whale on the sofa in the spare room, but not acceptable to leave, say, a large pile of lever arch binders on the sofa :)

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Electrons are free!

...I did A-level physics. I feel I ought to know what the Hall Effect is. Or at least, y'know, have a bell ring somewhere at the name.

But it doesn't. Ah well.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

But the bao woll not never ring!

(Sorry, your comment made me flash back to Physics at school: my extremely Oxfordshire friend D trying to explain to our very Geordie Physics teacher Dr B why the circuit he'd drawn on the board was not a complete circuit. He was mystified for a full five minutes, while she continued to repeat it - slower, louder - and finally gave up with a theatrical sigh.)

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

I should probably get round to doing this one of these years.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Possibly you have one of them there attics, which allows such decisions to be put off indefinitely :)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Is that a rhetorical question or not? I can answer it if you like. CCC is...probably concentration of charge carriers.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh. Well, it was kind of rhetorical, but I thought (having browsed about the CCC page on Wikipedia) that it was current-carrying capacity. So either I'm wrong and you're right (really quite likely), or they are both things one might measure with a Hall probe (which sounds possible, as they sound related to me).

Apparently current-carrying capacity is called ampacity these days, says Wikipedia.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Hmm, they're both quite similar things. I have never heard anything called ampacity. it sounds like something you would take for indigestion.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Now you see I thought ampacity sounded like a measure of arsedness:

"Did you take the rubbish out this morning?"
"No, I just didn't have the ampacity to wrestle with all those bin bags..."

[ladylizbet.livejournal.com]

Our bearwich making materials arrived today. Thank you!!

xx

[pm215]

I managed to compress my A level notes (for four A levels) down to fit in five of those "reporter's notebooks". This is good in that I still have them, and bad in that I was so terse I no longer have much idea what I was actually on about...

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

I've lost count of the number of times I've culled my high school and university notes down to "just the useful/nostalgic bits."

There's a small removal box glowering at me from the balcony as I type.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think the notes that went out this weekend were the remainder of several previous culls.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I cleared out some old A level revision index cards the other day - I knew a lot more physics then.

The Hall Effect - isn't that the weird quantum superposition of states that means that when the gameshow host asks you if you want to switch to the other door, the donkey is behind the first door chosen if you don't switch but the second if you do?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think the gameshow/door/donkey combo comes to us courtesy of Hall's younger and more obstreperous brother, Monty Hall.

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

Is there room for the four boxes still lurking up in the North-East? I still have all my economics notes which don't seem to agree with events of the last few years. Maybe I should sling those as obsolete.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I said on Sunday that I was willing to accept another box consignment! You said I'd have to wait til April :)

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

I do not get a kudo today. Despite thinking that the line would fit perfectly to the Galaxy Song (which I shamefully do not know word perfectly), googling tells me I am wrong. However, I now have another song to go download from iTunes equivalent.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Which one did you download?

The story goes... They Might Be Giants covered a song called Why Does The Sun Shine? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JdWlSF195Y) which began "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees."

Unfortunately, TMBG have an above-average number of geeky fans, who helpfully pointed out that the sun is not really anything of the sort, thank you very much.

So TMBG recorded Why Does The Sun Really Shine? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA) which begins "The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma, the sun's not simply made out of gas."

[venta.livejournal.com]

Also, the world is already desperately overcrowded with people who are word-perfect on chunks of Monty Python (and overwilling to demonstrate this), so I applaud you for not knowing the Galaxy Song :)

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

It feels wrong to be throwing away such a huge chunk of my life. But, ultimately, not quite as wrong as it feels to be giving up so much storage space to things I fundamentally don't need

Best of both worlds: scan and bin.

I destroyed vast quanties of similar things about 15 years ago, and sometimes wish I'd have had scanning facilities then. These days vast swathes of stuff goes to the shredder via the scanner.