In this section I will place things that strike my fancy. There will be sayings I have heard or altered that sum up some key idea, short stories for the same purpose, things I like and want to share and so forth. Most of the sayings and stories are not my invention. If I remember the source, I will give it, if...
A Few Sayings
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A powerful tool is like a sharp knife, make sure you know which end to grab when you pick it up to use it.
- Hint - consider using the registry editor to wander about on your windows system. Easy to make programs, and the whole operating system unusable.
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Better is the arch enemy of good enough.
- Hint - consider closure on a project with an endless list of new good ideas, or with "specification creep".
The thought here is elegantly summed up in my favorite science fiction short story, Arthur C. Clarke's "Superiority" . First published in 1951 it is in several collections, including The Collected works of Arthur C. Clarke, 2000, and Expedition to Earth.
The same satirical tone on a related subject - government bureaucracy - is in another of my favorite stories, "ALLAMOGOOSA" by Eric C. Russell. This won the first Hugo for a short story in 1955. It is collected in The Hugo Winners, 1962, edited by Isaac Asimov. If you have ever worked for the government or been in the military you will find it hilarious and true to life. (Hint, its an acronym, but for what?)
Why?
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Why does the simple harmonic oscillator occur so frequently in physics and engineering? (A pendulum, a mass on a spring, etc.)
- Consider that most of the world is near an equilibrium. That means the forces are about balanced, and the potential energy is near a minimum. So if you expand the potential in a power series in position, the linear term is missing and you have a quadratic - which leads to Simple Harmonic Oscillator.
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Levels of Hardness - Why don't I fall through the floor to the center of the earth?
- Well the floor is a solid, but why is it solid? Atoms don't want to occupy the same space at the same time, or more specifically the electrons on the outside of atoms. But we have electrons together inside atoms. Well consider the Pauli Exclusion Principle, no two particles can be in the same place in the same state. ... and deeper explanations of that ...
A Beautiful Equation:
We have e, the base of the natural logarithms, the only base where
And we have pi,
, the
ratio of the circle circumference to the diameter,The “unit” item in the complex number system,
,The addition function,
The additive identity ( zero) , a + 0 = a,
The multiplicative identity ( one ), a*1 = a,
All tied together with the equivalence sign (=).
And to those familiar with complex variables, the standard polar notation for a complex variable and much more.