G vs E

Gas vs. Electricity, that is.

I understand that, for a stovetop, electricity has advantages over gas. There are the obvious safety issues (though, of course, electricity isn't completely safe either); also, at least at present, gas is considerably more expensive than electricity.

Still, I occasionally wish for a gas range. The big advantage of gas over electricity, here, is fineness of control. With an electric burner, you do not control the temperature directly; you control the rate of energy flow into the burner, which (over time) affects its temperature, which (over time) affects the temperature of the thing being cooked. With a gas burner, your control over the temperature is more direct, and more immediately visible. I miss that kind of control.

But there's another issue. If you have a gas stove, and you decide to make scrambled eggs and cheese for lunch, and you put the skillet on the front burner, and you put a lump of butter into the skillet, and you turn on the back burner...

you will not spend five minutes waiting for the butter to melt before realizing your mistake.

Ratznfratzl stove.

Yes, I know it was my fault.
Yes, I know I'm grumbling a lot lately.
I'll get over it eventually.

Eek!

Does anybody know what's going on with A Miracle of Science? I'm getting a "domain name lapsed" message.

Addendum: Never mind! Problem fixed! Happy happy!

Further: Eek! Gone again!

DG, Part 2: Twist and, Well, Not *Shout* Exactly...

The story so far:

Any reasonably nice curve has, at each point, three quantities associated with it: the tangent vector, the principal normal vector, and the curvature. These describe the direction the curve is headed, the direction in which the curve is bending, and the speed with which it is bending. There are two more bits that need discussion.

( Frame Up )

For the next post, I'll turn my attention from curves to surfaces.

Addendum: Erk. There are a couple of other details about curves that I should probably talk about, and maybe do an example. Surfaces after that.