{"id":148,"date":"2010-08-16T22:13:55","date_gmt":"2010-08-16T13:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lookingatnothing.com\/?p=148"},"modified":"2011-01-04T16:58:59","modified_gmt":"2011-01-04T07:58:59","slug":"read-ruland-and-more-free-reading-textbooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lookingatnothing.com\/index.php\/archives\/148","title":{"rendered":"Read Ruland and more free reading (textbooks!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Catching up to current affairs, I stumbled across this beauty<\/a>. Now, I find this paper starts a little bit chaotic, but very quickly we come across some very useful equations indeed, and a link between the used equation for their analysis of phase transitions in fluids, and various other equations such as the Ornstein-Zernike structure factor and the Debye-Bueche equation. The equations published in this paper appear ready to be applied to a wide variety of amorphous scattering patterns, capable of extracting quite a few physical parameters! There will likely be much more on this topic as I get to apply these. To top it all off, the data used in the paper has been “extracted” from published graphics by Ms. A. H\u00f6hle. I can see her sitting there now with a ruler and a paper, meticulously noting down her estimates for the q and S values for each datapoint…. Perhaps it would be a good starting point for publishing some of our best data online so others can have a go at analysing it?<\/p>\n

On another note, I want to point you towards the horror of textbooks. How fitting then, that the next special issue of the J. of Appl. Cryst. is about teaching<\/a>! As you may have read on Slashdot a few weeks ago<\/a>, textbooks are still very expensive, even for topics as stagnant as elementary mathematics. prof. Feynman also had a few words to say on the topic of textbooks<\/a>. And there are now some alternatives popping up allowing your students an alternative to ridiculous and expensive textbooks: Free textbooks.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.curriki.org\/xwiki\/bin\/view\/Main\/WebHome<\/p>\n

http:\/\/about.ck12.org\/<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.lightandmatter.com\/<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.wikibooks.org\/<\/p>\n

If you know more, let me know and I will add them to the list!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Catching up to current affairs, I stumbled across this beauty. Now, I find this paper starts a little bit chaotic, but very quickly we come […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,52,54],"tags":[237,238],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-lit","category-review","tag-lit","tag-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gZ2v-2o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lookingatnothing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lookingatnothing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lookingatnothing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lookingatnothing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lookingatnothing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lookingatnothing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":253,"href":"https:\/\/lookingatnothing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lookingatnothing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lookingatnothing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lookingatnothing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}