Work of the last two weeks

Hello everyone. I have been working hard on the book with Leonard Susskind over the last two weeks. We are about two weeks away from presenting the final manuscript to the publishers at basic Books. It is scheduled for release in January 2013.

Last week I published, on the MAST web site, a paper on the Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations. These can be found here.

During the Saturday meeting we had a lot of fun writing a program to calculate the arc length of a curve and then tested lots of different curves. This work can be found here.

New Material from MAST

New Post on the MAST Web Site
We have several Mathematica-based documents on our web site.
http://www.madscitech.org/mathematica/consulting/consulting.html

Book Review: Advanced University Physics

Time for another book review, this time Mircea Rogalski and Stuart Palmer, Advanced University Physics. This book is for sale in the book store below.

This is the second edition of a book that I long found useful as a reference, but not as a textbook as there were no practice problems. In the second edition, this has been fixed and there are now ample problems, so I can recommend it as a textbook.

Goodbye to a Dear Friend

I learned today that a dear friend passed away. Hakki Ogelman was not just a colleague, he was a dear friend.  A world-renowned astrophysicist, he was responsible for my first poster presentation at a professional conference; an analysis of the time series data from a gamma-ray burst. That was way back in 1995. Hakki was in charge of the research group Compact Objects at Wisconsin (COW). Hakki suffered a debilitating stroke in the mid 1990's, but perservered. He lost a months-long battle to cancer on 4 September 2011. He passed quietly, for which I am grateful. Goodbye, old friend, I will miss you...