Assorted brief essays, better out of my head than in
( atom feed).
I also have some stuff on Twitter, as @normangray
.
Energy and powerI was talking to a friend recently – well-informed and technical, though not a physicist or engineer – who asked me if I could clarify the subtle differences between ‘energy’ and ‘power’. ‘Subtle?! You mean you don't know?...’ is what I managed not to say. But why would someone know? The distinction is one that most folk need only a vague understanding of; and those who do have to care – the physicists and engineers – have the fundamentals drilled into them so early in their education, that they forget ever not knowing.
Approaches to accessible mathematical textThe following are notes on various approaches to the problem of producing mathematical text online, in a way which is accessible to folk with one or other visual impairment. The motivating use-case is that of getting maths-heavy lecture notes online, and the discussion is addressed to people with at least some familiarity with LaTeX.
Producing screen-friendly output from LaTeXI want to produce screen-friendly output from LaTeX, with an auxiliary but important goal being that that screen-friendly output be ‘accessible’. This turns out not to be trivial. But I've managed to get a solution that I, at least, am happy with.
Geometry: space, spacetime, gravity and gravitational wavesClearly, what the world needs is another explanation of where gravity comes from. This one comes at it from a slightly unusual direction – geometry all the way. We cover quite a lot of ground, here, and some bits are rather hand-waving, because you can pick up further details elsewhere: we could potentially have book-length footnotes all the way through this; the point I want to make is that there is a very direct story which can be uncovered.