Norman's blog

Assorted brief essays, better out of my head than in (RSS feed atom feed). I also have some stuff on Twitter, as @normangray.

2022 April 20 (modified 2022 April 24)

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.

2021 September 2 (modified 2021 September 14)

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.

2021 May 16

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.

2021 May 1

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.

Older posts

Norman