This, my friends, is POST NUMBER 50. In celebration I shall do exactly nothing more than mention the semi-historic event. Well, actually I think I'll post Wikipedia's article on the number 50, just because its articles about random numbers are generally hilarious.

Fifty: when ordering the natural numbers by magnitude, it comes before 51 and after 49 according to Wikipedia 

Classes go well and continue to consume more time than Augustus Gloop does chocolate. My current bill of fare is special relativity and radiation in Electricity and Magnetism, quantum statistics in Statistical Mechanics and the dreaded second quantization in Quantum Mechanics. Also, I'm teaching about electric fields in my introductory class. Fields are a very interesting physical formulation; the thought that an object's very presence alters the universe around it is still quite jarring. And then there's gravity that is even more weird. Why is mass only positive? Why should inertial mass be the same as gravitational mass? Our universe has some strange rules...

I plan to discuss birefringence as soon as we get to the polarization of light waves, which should be shortly. Good times right?

I've been factoring integer terms in some of my many equations lately. It began because of integrals like this, and it remains entertaining to juggle physics all the while knowing that you have precisely 17 two's and eight 3's and two 5's in your mathematical arsenal. I've been doing a lot with counting lately too. In energy space, phase space, real space and sometimes with Multinomial coefficients. I just found out that you can use geometric series to find the area of fractals, for example the Koch Snowflake, created by the intimidating mathematician below.

Helge Von Kosh; he makes delicate crystals of infinite ice

In reading about finding the area of fractals, I stumbled across Archimedes' Quadrature of the Parabola, a work in which he found the area under the famous shape by the method of a geometric series. I can't even begin to understand how ridiculously intelligent this guy must have been.

Enough about such things! The Orioles continue to play decent baseball. Certainly they could (and should) hit a little better, and the pitching should likewise step up, but overall this assembladge of humans actually looks like it could plausibly be called a team. Vlad sadly got his first walk of the season, so his streak of 115 a bats without one came to an end. The record was just 150 or so, so he did pretty well, all things considered. We've lost the first two to the Rays this weekend, but I think we will be redeemed tomorrow. Mother's Day bats ahoy!

I've stalled in my EarthBound playing due to classes and Portal 2 coming out. I'll talk more about that next time, which will hopefully be pretty soon. Other negligible news items include planned camping and baseball trips (separately of course).

Last week and this week exposed me to my first Bollywood movie: Lagaan (the title refers to some kind of harvest tax, not that other Lagann). It's about ragtag band of dancing villagers who have to set aside their differences to fight against their true enemy: the crumpet-scoffing, doily-using, tax-taxing Brits! Of course, fighting them physically is out of the question, and so the movie is all about playing a game of cricket with the province's taxes on the line! One of the songs serves as the training montage too. It's pretty good actually (I really want to try playing cricket now), but quite long. Anyway, today's villain is the Captain of the British cricket team and the troops in the area: Captain Russell!

Captain Russell is a pompous blowhard, racist elitist and morally bankrupt human being. In short, the perfect villain. He struts about the British cantonment with his pristine uniform and daggerlike sideburns ordering his lackeys to and fro, sneering superior smiles with his puckered lips at any who dare look his way. He's actually also pretty clever, but he uses his cunning only to be even more underhanded and bastardly than otherwise possible. Even when playing a game of cricket he doesn't hesitate to send spies into the enemy ranks, order his players to cause deliberate injuries and trick children into making mistakes. To recap, Throughout the movie Russell is trying, for the sake of his own ego, to starve to death an entire province of villages, and he goes about it by the most British, unscrupulous and downright deceitful ways imaginable. Truly a man to be remembered.