Late intro for Sisyphus

Textkit Community Open Board
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Ahem, well, unaccustomed as i am … Hello, my name is Sisyphus, and … i’m a knowledge junkie (well, “philomath” just sounded too pretentious). i simply find so many things to be fascinating.

Trouble is, i’ve no staying power. i’ve a mind like butterfly. Always had. i’m seduced by the initial learning curve you see; large returns for little effort. So as soon as it gets hard i’m offski.

i came here to learn a little Latin, since language has fascinated me from my earliest years. Ever since i heard people speaking differently from me, i suppose. Sadly i’ve never been any good at foreign languages at all, and i’ve never had any education in grammar. i thought Latin might be a bit more practical than something a bit closer to my cultural roots, like Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse or Old English. And a damned sight easier, of course.

When i arrived here i was lucky enough to pick D’Ooge’s introduction to Latin as my source. i’ve been so encouraged by my progress that i’ve actually stuck with it (OK, i’m only up to lesson XXXII out of LXXIX, but as Episcopus was so kind to point out, nobody said it would be easy).

Don’t know what else to say really, i started with the honest bit. i live in England’s green and pleasant, try to reconcile my urge to wander by visiting bits of Blighty i haven’t already seen (my girlfriend doesn’t travel), have tats, have bikes, have attitude (my manager tells me), have garden with a varied line in herbs which our cats like to dig up, worked in factories, shops and on farms, and finally gave up astrophysics research to program for a living (sold out to The Man there i’m afraid). i think i’ve come to terms with the fact that against expectations i’ve entered (mathematically, at least) middle age and i think my recent zest is some kind of middle age desperation setting in. HELP ME, PLEASE! Nah, just joshing.

i’ve already received invaluable help from the nice people who meet at Textkit, so if you’re a newcomer i encourage you to engage in the fray.

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Hello there!

Hehe, “knowledge junkie” - I like that! You’ll find several of us here: the sort you never want to ask to look something up in a dictionary or encyclopaedia, because one entry leads to looking up another entry which leads to looking up another… :wink:

Might I ask more about the astrophysics research were you doing?

Anyway, glad to have you on board, and glad that you chose to introduce yourself late rather than never!

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Hi, welcome, however it may be late to welcome you. :wink:

What kind of an alien did you see to leave astrophysics?

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You mean there are others like me? My school friends used to think i was weird.

Well, if you’re sure. It’s a bit long winded.

Last thing i was doing was work on a small class of binary stars known as AM Her. In common with other Cataclysmic Variables you’ve got a small, hot, white, dense star orbited by a large, cool, red, low density star. Material falls away from the red component and falls onto the white dwarf. Normally it does this by gradually spiralling in, forming a disk with (largely) uninteresting infra-red emissions.

What makes AM Hers more interesting is that the white dwarf has a strong magnetic field. Strong enough to channel the influx directly onto the surface of the star, near the magnetic pole. This gives you highly polarised relativistic cyclotron radiation where the plasma spirals around the field, X-rays from the impact site and infra-red from the nearby heated surface of the star.

i’ve just had a look around i’m a little surprised to find some of my old papers actually on the web (here’s one). To get hold of these you used to have to have access to a library that paid thousands of pounds for a journal subscription or write to the author in person (you know, with a pen, envelope and a stamp).

It all sounds terribly exciting, but the alien that finally drove me away, Mingshey, was spending two weeks with a table of twelve numbers trying to prove a significant observable result. Just to rub it in the things i was trying to prove had been IBO (Intuitively Bloomin’ Obvious) for years, it was just that nobody had tried to prove them. The glamour wore off. Even the occassional observing trips to telescopes in Australia, Tenerife and Hawaii didn’t compensate in the end.

i have to say, if i’d known then what i now know about planning and managing a project, things would have been different. And if i’d had what we now consider the trivialities of Word and Excel life would have been so much easier. Just look at the graphs in that paper - i had to write a new program for nearly every graph i wanted to create.

That’s quite enough of that for the moment - back to my Latin i think.

Thankyou for your welcome. Cheers all.