Below is an updated list of the books I have for sale. If you want to buy them in bulk, let me know and I can make you a deal.

Andersen, J Bach. Metallic and dielectric antennas. Polyteknisk Forlag, (DEK), 1971.

 

Balanis, Constantine A. Antenna Theory: Analysis and Design, 2nd Edition. Wiley, 1996.

 

Barlow, H. M. Radio surface waves. Clarendon Press, 1962.

 

Petr, and Andre Spizzichino Beckmann. The Scattering of Electromagnetic Waves from Rough Surfaces.. Pergamon Press, 1963.

 

Spizzichino, Andre Beckmann Petr;. The Scattering of Electromagnetic Waves From Rough Surfaces. Macmillan Company, 1963.

 

Van Bladel, Jean G. Electromagnetic Fields. McGraw Hill Book Company, 1964.

 

Bode, Hendrik. Network Analysis and Feedback Amplifier Design. Van Nostrand, 1953.

 

Bond, Donald S. Radio Direction Finders. McGraw Hill Book Company, 1944.

 

Brillouin, Leon. Wave Propagation in Periodic Structures. Dover Publications Inc., 1946.

 

Budden, K. G. Radio Waves in the Ionosphere. Cambridge University Press, 1961.

 

Cairo, Laurent, and Theo Kahan. Variational Techniques in Electromagnetism. Gordon and Breach, 1965.

 

Chatterjee, Rajeswari. Antenna Theory and Practice. John Wiley & Sons Inc, 1988.

 

Collin, Robert E., and Francis J. Zucker. Antenna Theory Part 1. McGraw-Hill Inc.,US, 1969.

 

Collin, Robert E., and Francis J. Zucker. Antenna Theory Part II. McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1969.

 

Crispin, J.w. Methods of Radar Cross Section Analysis. ACADEMIC PRESS INC, 1968.

 

Dorf, Richard C. The Electrical Engineering Handbook. CRC-Press, 1993.

 

Dudley, Donald G. Mathematical Foundations for Electromagnetic Theory. Wiley-IEEE Press, 1994.

 

Fox, Jerome. Modern Advances in Microwave Techniques. Polytechnic Press of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, 1955.

 

Francis, Gordon. IONIZATION PHENOMENA IN GASES. Butterworths Scientific Publ., 1960.

 

Galejs, Janis. Antennas in inhomogeneous media. Pergamon Press, 1969.

 

Ginzburg, V. L. Propogation of Electromagnetic Waves in Plasma. Gordon and Breach, 1961.

 

Hamilton, Donald R., Julian K. Knipp, and J. B. Horner Kuper. Klystrons and Microwave Triodes. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory Series: 7. 1948, 1948.

 

Hansen, R. C. Microwave Scanning Antennas. 3 volume set. V I: Apertures. V II: Array Theory and Practice. V III: Array Systems.. Academic Press, 1966.

 

Hansen, R. C. Geometric Theory of Diffraction. Ieee, 1981.

 

Hansen, Thorkild B., and Arthur D. Yaghjian. Plane-Wave Theory of Time-Domain Fields: Near-Field Scanning Applications. Wiley-IEEE Press, 1999.

 

Harrington, Roger F. Field Computation by Moment Methods. MacMillan Company, 1968.

 

Hildebrand, Francis B. Finite-Difference Equations and Simulations, 1st Ed.. Prentice Hall, 1968.

 

Horner, F. Monograph on Radio Noise of Terrestrial Origin. Elsevier Publishing Company, 1962.

 

IEEE, Edmund K. Miller, and Edward Newman. Computational Electromagnetics. Institute of Electrical & Electronics Enginee, 1992.

 

Jackson, Willis. High frequency transmission lines. J. Wiley, 1951.

 

Kelby, Scott. Photoshop 7 Down and Dirty Tricks. New Riders Press, 2002.

 

Kerr, Donald E. Propagation of Short Radio Waves. Radiation Laboratory Series 13. McGraw-Hill, 1951.

 

King, Ronold W. P. Transmission-line Theory. McGraw Hill, 1955.

 

King, Ronold W. P. The Theory of Linear Antennas: With Charts and Tables for Practical Applications. Harvard University Press, 1956.

 

Mittra, R., and S. W. Lee. Analytical Techniques in the Theory of Guided Waves. The Macmillan Company, 1971.

 

Lewin, Leon. Advanced theory of waveguides. Published for Wireless Engineer by Iliffe, 1951.

 

Llewellyn-Jones, F. Ionization and breakdown in gases. Wiley, 1957.

 

Marcuvitz, N. Waveguide Handbook. McGraw Hill, 1951.

 

Henry, With William Watson And C. G. Montgomery; Margenau. Physics Principles and Applications. 1953, 1949.

 

Matsumoto, A. Microwave Filters and Circuits: Contributions from Japan. Academic Press Inc.,U.S., 1970.

 

McLachlan, N. W. COMPLEX VARIABLE THEORY AND TRANSFORM CALCULUS WITH TECHNICAL APPLICATIONS. Cambridge University Press, 1953.

 

Dicke, R.H.; Purcell E.M. Montgomery C.G.;. Principles of Microwave Circuits. Dover Publications, Inc., 1965.

 

Parry, and Domina Eberle Spencer Moon. Field Theory Handbook including Coordinate Systems, Differential Equations and Their Solutions. Springer Verlag, 1961.

 

Moon, Parry Hiram, and D.E. Spencer. Field Theory for Engineers. Van Nostrand Reinhold Inc.,U.S., 1961.

 

Moon, Parry Hiram, and D.E. Spencer. Field Theory for Engineers. Van Nostrand Reinhold Inc.,U.S., 1961.

 

Moreno, Theodore. Microwave Transmission Design Data. Artech Print on Demand, 1948.

 

Morse, Philip McCord, and Herman Feshbach. Methods of Theoretical Physics, Part I. McGraw-Hill Science/Engineering/Math, 1953.

 

Oden, J.T., and J.N. Reddy. An Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Finite Elements. John Wiley & Sons Inc, 1976.

 

Pierce, John Robinson. Traveling-wave tubes. Van Nostrand, 1950.

 

Ratcliffe, J. A. The Magneto Ionic Theory and its Applications to the Ionosphere: A Monograph. Cambridge University Press, 1959.

 

Samuelson, Paul, and William Nordhaus. Economics. McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 1951.

 

Saxton, John A. Advances in Radio Research: v. 1. Academic Press Inc, 1964.

 

Schelkunoff, S. A. Advanced antenna theory. Wiley, 1952.

 

Schiff, Leonard I. Quantum Mechanics. McGraw-Hill Education, 1955.

 

Sherman, R. Emp Engineering and Design Principles. Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1975.

 

Smythe, William. Static and Dynamic Electricity. Mc Graw Hill, 1939.

 

Steele, Charles W. Numerical Computation of Electric and Magnetic Fields. Springer, 1987.

 

Stratton, Julius Adams. Electromagnetic Theory. McGraw Hill Book Company, 1941.

 

Sunde, Erling Ditlef. Earth conduction effects in transmission systems. D. Van Nostrand Co, 1949.

 

Sunde, Erling Ditlef. Earth conduction effects in transmission systems,. Dover Publications, 1968.

 

Tai, Chen-to. Dyadic Green’s functions in electromagnetic theory. Intext Educational Publishers, 1971.

 

Wait, James R. Electromagnetics and Plasmas. Holt, R & W, 1969.

 

Wait, James R. Electromagnetic Waves in Stratified Media. (=Intern. Series of Monographs on Electromagnetic Waves; Vol. 3).. Pergamon Press Oxford., 1962.

 

Wildi, Theodore. Units and conversion charts: A handbook for engineers and scientists. Sperika Enterprises, 1988.

 

Wolff, Edward A. Antenna Analysis. John Wiley & Sons Inc, 1966.

Apparently T-Mobile isn’t going to be able to officially sell the iPhone for its network anytime soon. You don’t need the rumor mills to tell you that as the sour grapes tone of this letter from T-Mobile executive makes it pretty clear.

The Boeing 787 is three years later and billions of dollars over budget, if only we left this kind of stuff to the private sector it’d be on time and within the budget. Oh wait.

I have about 30 technical books for sale at Amazon and will be adding more soon. These are physics, primarily related to antenna theory in particular, and electromagnetic wave propagation in general. If you need a deal, let me know.

Julie and I rode 35 miles on the Centennial Trail in Snohomish County this afternoon—damn was it awesome to be back on the bikes again. Tevian spent the night with his great aunt and uncle and so we had an evening to go out and even time for this ride the next day.

We’ve ridden the Burke-Gilman into Seattle on a sunny weekend and found it frustratingly congested. Going the opposite direction, along the Sammamish River Trail, is definitely better, but still gets quite a bit of traffic. The Centennail Trail was still *busy*, there was always someone in sight, but it wasn’t nearly as crazy. It amazes me how difficult it is to get bike/pedestrian infrastructure like this created (compared to car infrastructure) and yet how well utilized it is.

We started at the southern end of the trail in the town of Snohomish and ended a few miles short of Arlington at the start of a section known as “the gap.” The gap is actually in the process of being finished and, in fact, in its current state the gravel is rideable, but they were actively doing construction today, so we decided not to interfere and turned around. Apparently it’ll be open in just two weeks!

I’m finally releasing both the application and the source code of Image2Movie, a simple little Mac OS X application to take a series of still images and create a high quality H.264 movie.

I created this program because I needed a way to create high quality movies from my numerical simulations, and Matlab’s moving making functions just weren’t cutting the mustard. Scroll to the bottom of the Quasigeostrophic ocean eddies page and check out the fluid transport and potential vorticity movies for examples.

I will follow up with a post on my Matlab workflow at some point soon here.

The source code is remarkably small—it’s only about 200 lines of actual code, but there’s almost no error checking.

Heard this yesterday on the drive home — here’s the NYTimes version,

The president rejected a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency that would have significantly reduced emissions of smog-causing chemicals, saying that it would impose too severe a burden on industry and local governments at a time of economic distress.

Please people, if you start an argument by calling Obama a liberal or a socialist, you’ve already discredited yourself.

A paper I wrote with Roger Samelson and Dudley Chelton on the propagation of quasigeostrophic eddies was published in final (or near final) form today. You can download the preprint, or, even better, checkout some of the supplemental material.

This feel like good science to me because the paper clearly states a hypothesis and then sets out to disprove it. In this case we tested the hypothesis that linear Rossby wave theory can explain the sea-surface height observations (check out the movie). A number of metrics are used to show that the linear theory is inadequate.  We then go on to show that nonlinear quasigeostrophic theory does actually explain most of the observed sea-surface features.

The second part of the paper considers the dynamics of individual eddies in the nonlinear quasigeostrophic equation, including propagation speed, vorticity dynamics, and fluid trapping properties. There’s some great stuff here and you should definitely watch the movies of the tracer transport.

One cool part of this study was the intersection of theory and observations. While I was looking at my model output from the data, Dudley was also looking at observation data. Together with Roger, the three of us devised various ways of testing the model output to disprove the hypothesis resulting in most of what you see in the first part of the paper. I learned a lot from doing this.

One neat anecdote: in one case a theoretical prediction was found first, and then compared with observations. Specifically, after we found the relationship between propagation speed and amplitude of individual eddies, I remember Dudley running back up stairs and checking the observational data to see if the same trend existed. Some time later (a day? a month?) he found a way to show that, indeed, such a pattern did exist (even if the exact trend couldn’t be confirmed).

Anyway, this was a fun study.

The evidence is very strong that the Keynesian economic model is really quite good and had the federal government poured money into the economy in order to maintain pre-recession level production, we might be out of this slump by now. However, one big issue that people (politicians included, they are people too!) can’t seem to get over, is “the magic of zero,” as Matt Yglesias puts it. Pouring money into the economy required the federal government to rack up debt, a politically unsavory move. However, if the federal government had had big pile of cash sitting around, then that same amount of stimulus would have simply depleted existing reserves. These two scenarios cost the same amount and differ only by whether we’re above zero or not, yet appear to have very different psychological effects.

The solution seems simple, right? If it is far more politically tractable to deplete a cash reserve than it is to run a deficit, then all we have to do is build up a cash reserve, right? That is actually one of the principals of Keynesian economics as I understand it: when times are good, we need to build a surplus. Well, the U.S. was in exactly this situation in the late 1990s with a budget surplus before Bush came to office and decided to kill the surplus in the form of tax relief. Uh-oh. So everything was fine and all we had to do was stick to the plan, then some conservatives came along and ruined the plan. That’s certainly a typical liberal take on the situation, but unless that particular interpretation can be used to convince voters not to elect people who don’t believe in Keynesian economics, it isn’t particularly useful.

In a practical sense, any economic policy must also make for feasible political policy. So is it possible that the Keynesian economic model, as good as it is, isn’t ever going to be politically tractable?  Maybe our imperfect political system will always ruin our ability to successfully implement Keynesian economics.

This idea is exemplified in paper I wrote about Marxism more than 10 years while in college. You see, Marxism is actually a really good idea—the political and economic models make for a really good looking and happy society. Unfortunately, any actual attempt to implement Marxist ideas seem to result in governments that are quite totalitarian, suppress freedom of citizens, and so on. The details for its failures don’t matter, the point is just that even if the model is good, the implementation may not actually be possible.

That said, Keynesian economics as implemented by our representative democracy seems to do pretty well (certainly compared to Marxism!!!). On the other hand, if the model can never be applied to its full potential due to realistic political constraints, maybe there’s a better model, one that can actually work better within those constraints.

(I’m not an economist, so feel free to correct my lingo or gross misunderstandings.)

Update (20 minutes later): I realized that I’m simplifying things a bit. On the most basic level, Keynesian economics is just really good at diagnosing what has happened and what will happen under certain conditions. In that sense you can’t “implement” the model, it either fits with what’s happening, or not. What I mean by “implement,” is then to use the model assess the value of particular policies and decide how to move forward.

Ooooh, I really like this Krugman blog post called The Cracked Conservative Mirror,

whenever you read conservatives trying to critique what they think the other side believes, you find them assuming that their opponents must be mirror images of themselves. The right believes that less government spending is always good, regardless of circumstances, so it assumes that the other side must always favor more government spending. The right says that deficits are always evil (unless they’re caused by tax cuts), so they assume that the center-left must favor deficits in all conditions.

Krugman’s assumption is that the conservatives are actually naive and not listening to the arguments of their opponents, whereas the more cynical assumption would be that they intentionally setup straw man arguments to mislead their constituents. Following Hanlon’s razor, Krugman’s probably right.