As summer winds down, I have reached yet another round number on this Electron Weblog. This is post number 300. That's a lot of posts, over a period of two and a half years. As I do when I reach a round number, I will present a progress report.

I started ELECTRON BLUE in February of 2004. Back then, I was slogging my way through trigonometry. I finished, or rather gave up on, trigonometry later in 2004, when I studied logarithms for a few months. Finally, in late 2004, I turned my attention to introductory physics, that is, classical mechanics. I spent all of 2005 working on first year physics. This meant mass, weight, gravity, Newton's laws, falling objects, rolling objects, sliding blocks, acceleration, friction, torque, tension, vectors, acceleration, orbits, and all those other things which make up the heavy world which we must struggle through. By the end of 2005, I had more or less covered what a high school sophomore or junior might study. It was 35 years late, but at least I did it.

At the beginning of 2006 I finally started what I had been promising to do for two years: calculus. I began with a review of functions, which was helpful because I never quite understood them or their notation. Then I moved into instantaneous velocity, and after that, limits. I am doing well on limits, so soon I will move to the next chapter of the book, and start on derivatives. I am pleased that so far I have not hit the proverbial "wall" which drove other math students away from calculus. Either I am not there yet, or there is no wall, or I have recognized it and found my way through or over it. I will continue with calculus all through 2006, and probably well into 2007.

So far, I'm enjoying calculus, even though I have not yet been told what it is good for in the "real" (engineering, physics) world. I expect to find out more not only through my books but through the calculus course on DVD, taught by Professor Starbird (more on this later). The good thing about Professor Starbird is that he can teach me any time of day or night, since he is only a "virtual" presence on a DVD. But the bad thing about the virtual professor is that I can't ask him any questions.

I don't know how many of my "Friendly Scientists" and "Friendly Mathematicians" are still reading this Weblog. After a period of self-promoting enthusiasm when I tried to alert various Real Physicists to my presence on the Electron Weblog and my quest to learn physics, I have given up trying to contact them, other than the ones I already know. Physicists and their world continue to be, for me, a society as distant and enchanted as "Harry Potter"s author J.K. Rowling's "Wizarding World," a universe where people who know and do amazing things travel around the globe the way I go to the Starbucks around the corner. These enchanted folk gather in impressive places and share their arcane knowledge, while I am off gazing at herds of cows in Pennsylvania. It is not my business to try to crash their party.

I find super-competence fascinating, even compelling. The physicists and mathematicians whose Weblogs or books I read are heroes to me, not just because they are dealing with fundamental realities and looking into the secrets of the universe, but because they have mastered something which I am just beginning. I really appreciate mastery. Not the "power over" type of mastery, the "power to do" type. It is almost 6 whole years since I went to the cathedral of physics, Fermilab, on September 7, 2000. That was where my current journey began, with, as it were, a "baptism of particles." I don't know how far I will get. Relativity? Quantum mechanics? Particle physics theory? M-theory? I'm just doing this on my own, so I have no idea how I would learn any of these. But I will find a way if I can.

Some things about my life have improved since Electron 200. In my art work, I have figured out what the focus of my efforts should be, that is, fine art to be shown in galleries. I have to start on a small scale, but I have been told that there is a market for "fine art" of a realistic sort in local, small-town galleries, including my own Falls Church. I am doing two "lines," to use marketing language, of art. One is the geometric space abstractions you have been seeing on this Weblog so far. Now, I am starting another line of paintings of idealized countryside scenes. I probably won't show the two types together, which would confuse collectors. But as an artist with a commercial illustration background, I am not much into "self-expression" or any political or social message. I just want to create good-looking pictures which will appeal to people and be bought. The fun for me is solving the problems in making the image: how to render things in paint or pencil, how to get the perspective right, how to duplicate just the right color of light on trees.

Another thing that has improved is my ongoing health situation in regard to, uh, the female "change of life." I have been tormented by hot flashes, as longterm Electron readers know. But recently, I have had success with a combination of soy extract and a prescription drug, which suppresses the hot flashes (except, unfortunately, on very hot days such as we have had this August). In moderate weather, the regime works great and I am hot flash-free, at least for now. With biological systems, you can never tell. The combination tends to upset my stomach, but I can keep this under control by eating judiciously and not taking the pills without food.

I continue to enjoy my day job at Trader Joe's, which has allowed me to do all this non-paying "fine art." Though I still exhibit at some science fiction conventions, this isn't my main focus any more. That culture, in my view, has lost a lot of its creativity and excitement anyway, as much of it has been outsourced to Japan and books have given way to film and video games. I still continue on my own "sequential art" project, when I have the time.

When I first started ELECTRON BLUE, there were a few other bloggers and private contacts who were trying to do things similar to my project. There was an engineer guy in New Jersey who was trying to learn quantum mechanics in his middle years. There was a lady in Australia who was actually going back to school in her middle years, trying to get a degree in mathematics. There were others, too. But I regret that I have not heard anything from these people in a long while, and their Weblogs have been discontinued. I cannot possibly be the only older math and physics student in the world, but it often feels that way. I have learned, or rather, re-affirmed one thing about myself during the six years I have been working on the Physics Project and the three hundred postings at ELECTRON BLUE. Which is, that I may not be super-competent, but I am super-persistent. I don't give up. And I hope that I never will. Therefore I stay in the driver's seat of my Electron Car and the road lies ahead.

Posted at 3:06 am | link