Okay, so here's the dillio.
1: Don't buy me any Christmas presents. I'm not too concerned about this, because all my so called 'friends' are just as cheap as me. Except Reuben. That crazy bastard who made me feel awkward after he felt the need to purchase me a $6 Gundam model which is still perched on top of my computer since last year.
2: I have a final exam in approximately 12.5 hours. Which I haven't studied for. Which is E&M. Which is the class that ate Reuben alive and desecrated his corpse (after it pooped him out) last year. That is, it is the class that is equivalent to his slacker engineering one, but full of complicated theory and crazy calculations.
3: After that final, I have my "hardest" final 21.5 hours after that (or 34 hours for htose of you keeping track at home, from now). Which is quantum mechanics, which I absolutely need to do extremely well on or all the other physicists will make fun of me.
4: Blackbody Radiation (for Vicki)
Link to an image, yo!This is an example of blackbody radiation curves at various temperatures. The equation that determines the shape of the curve is quite complicated, but I'm sure is readily avaliable to anyone who wants to know on such websites such as
Wolfram's Science World or
Wikipedia (Try searching for either "blackbody radiation" or "Planck's Law"
The important this is to qualitatively understand it. As the temperature rises, the overal shape of the graph is to increase in overall area (it is a bitch to integrate, by the way, for those of a calculus persuasion). Also as tempreature increases the peak moves towards the blue end of the spectrum. This lambda-max term is easy to calculate using Wien's Law:
Lambda-max = 2.9*10^-3 K-m / T
Where T is tempreature in Kelvin and it gives you the maximum of the curve in meters.
Also as a little collory, for those of you who don't want to deal with Riemann zeta functions, total energy flux (over all wavelengths) of a blackbody at a given temperature is given by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law which is simply:
L = sigma * T^4
Where sigma is is the appropriately named Stefan-Boltzmann constant. Which is just something you look up.
That's all I can think of about blackbody radiation you might need Vicki. If you need anything else, drop me a line, and I'll hopefully get back to you before your final. But probably not until Wednesday.
