Russell's Blog

I recently noticed this billboard near my house. I didn't know whether to cry, scream, or buy a Hot 8 Brass Band CD. I guess that was the intended effect. RIP, Dinerral Shavers.

Couldn't Bush have at least spared a few empty platitudes for New Orleans in his State of the Union Address?

Today's lecture was mostly review. We started off by going over perturbation theory again in much more detail (and without the long diversion about degeneracy). Then we worked an example, again using the Stark effect. We calculated the upper and lower bounds of the error from truncating infinite series in the second-order estimate. Fun was had by all.

Then, we looked at the Zeeman effect (neglecting spin effects) using perturbation theory. I think perturbation theory is becoming less perturbing to me.

In other news, someone crashed into Abers' car while it was parked. Evidently, the person who hit his car also hit a couple of other parked cars, and then abandoned their vehicle. I saw something like this happen once a few years ago. The police thought the guy was drunk, but he came up negative on the breath test, and he looked more surprised than inebriated. It turned out that the driver had undiagnosed diabetes, and had passed out at the wheel.