I realized just now that since I set a midterm exam on Monday for the graduate electromagnetism class, and since there’s only one midterm for the class, it really is… midterm. The semester is sort of half over already. And indeed, a glance at my calendar shows this to be more or less true. I’ve mixed feelings about this since on the one hand it is a busy and tiring semester and I’m glad to have it go by, but on the other hand… slow down life! What’s the rush!? Yes, I definitely keep wanting to make sure I stop to smell the flowers, or what’s the point?
The midterm itself (Monday, in class) was fun. Or at least, I found it fun to put together on the weekend. There were no complaints from the students, so I hope that means I got the balance about right. We shall see during class tomorrow, when I try to expand a bit here and there on how it all worked. In addition to a fairly standard treatment of properties of the Drude formula for conductivity (always good to give away some easy points) and a treatment of radiation pressure, I had a new example appear, this time (in disguise) a topological insulator. (I got the idea to do this from the excellent text by Zangwill, which led me back to the literature, and brought back memories of the lovely talk I saw by Andreas Karch some years ago, and his cute PRL on the SL(2,Z) properties of certain measurements like the Faraday rotation.) Like last year, I thought it would be fun to have the students compute with a material for which the constitutive relations are very far from the simple linear stuff of most E+M examples. (Last year it was Born-Infeld, in the final.) I did not go too far (no SL(2,Z), for sure), as it was just an in-class midterm, remember.
I think I might start collecting some more nice examples that open up nice (exactly solvable) avenues of investigation. Suggestions welcome.
Speaking of smelling the flowers, I continue to enjoy sketching faces on the subway, when I’ve got a moment to spare and the opportunity presents itself, and encountering interesting people. I ought to scan a few and share them with you at some point. (The ink scribblings above are from some experiments I did on a plane a couple of weeks ago, based on some faces in a magazine.) By the way, it is Big Draw month*, so look out for events in your area celebrating drawing. I hope I can visit with a local group at some point to show support.
Yesterday, based on seeing me start work on the nose of someone on the red line, a woman on the subway decided that I was the one to commission to do a portrait of her and her “sweetie”, to hang in their home. I thanked her for her kindness and faith in me but suggested she find a professional. She kept insisting, and I kept declining, and the exchange ended in me giving her an email address to get in touch with some pictures that I might look at as potential sources. I am quite sure I don’t have time for this, but I suppose there is a small chance that their faces interest me enough to do something as a useful exercise for myself, and as a bonus they’d get a portrait. Small chance. Not because their faces aren’t going to be great, and not because it isn’t something doable and interesting, but simply because there just aren’t enough hours in the day, sadly.
-cvj
* Thanks aef!
