GUI programming with Matplotlib, Tkinter and threads

This is probably old hat for most python programmers, but it just never became important enough for me until now. I'm currently writing a script for calculating A WHOLE BUNCH of radiative transfer models, and needed a way to visualize my results right away so I could tune my experiment at run-time. (For those who have some idea on model calculations, I'm searching a HUGE parameter space, and needed some quick-n-dirty methods to find my way around)

Eventually I ended up building a GUI frontend using Tkinter (because it's available with all Python distributions) and Matplotlib. Naturally I also had to figure out how threading is used in Python. Check out my Matplotlib wiki page for some recipes.

Covariant derivatives, contravariant tensors, affine connections... argh!

All the posts on MathWorld (here, here and others) written with fancy symbol generation and truckload of ads weren't as much help as the single article on MathPages written in plain HTML with goofed up inline symbols (and no ads!).

But I know what I really need is a good textbook.

Modern physics course at Stanford

Apparently Stanford University has published a series of modern physics lecture videos (taught by Prof. Leonard Susskind) on Youtube. Although this is a continuing studies course, it is definitely graduate level, but taught in a very friendly manner -- a very good supplement for even graduate students of physics.

The rest of the videos are available via this link.

SI vs. Gaussian units

This is a major source of confusion for many physics students, including me. The following link is an article that explains the differences quite clearly, citing some of the historical reasons for having two popular unit systems in use at the same time.

S.I. versus c.g.s. Units by Jason Harlow