
Notes on Quantum Mechanics - elektropionir
http://graybits.biz/notes/quantum_mechanics/preface
======
graycat
Okay, would like to read it.

However, on my screen, called 14", about 12.5" wide, the text is about 100
characters per line in about 7.5" for about 13.33 characters per inch
horizontally.

Then with two pair of strong reading glasses and my nose 5" from the screen, I
can barely read the text.

A shame because about half the width of the screen is given over to just a
table of contents with mostly blank space.

Maybe if I had a video screen 4 feet wide?

More generally, yes, I know, there is a lot of careful, sophisticated, deep
work in _user interface_ , but for the OP pages I'd like to see only about 60
characters per line and about 6 characters per inch horizontally. About 8
characters per inch is my upper limit.

Sure if my screen were twice as wide, then I could get the present 13
characters per inch down to 7.5, but these days with laptops and tables,
screens 25" inches wide are not near the 'median'.

13 characters per inch I just can't read without a lot of effort.

Generally, in Web screens, we are free to use about all the length we want but
should be very careful about using up screen width.

In my start-up, each screen is just 800 pixels wide with high contrast and
large fonts, about 25 pixels high on lines 35 pixels high.

Here I'd like to encourage Web page designers to use larger fonts, narrower
pages, and fewer characters per line.

~~~
cbd1984
> larger fonts, narrower pages, and fewer characters per line.

And I prefer the exact opposite, and neither of us are wrong.

I just thought I'd get that out of the way before the usual flame war erupts,
and the "your preference is objectively bad" brigade comes out citing "laws"
and "studies" and "You must be just like the small group we tested on, you
just don't know what you like" and so on.

~~~
trurl42
The page is unusable at lower resolutions.

[http://i.snag.gy/O9Abg.jpg](http://i.snag.gy/O9Abg.jpg)

It's pretty bad.

~~~
cbd1984
Ah, the sign of a graphical designer:

"No. It doesn't wrap or flow. Wrapping and flowing messes up the _design_ I
created. Everything should be pixel-perfect with how it is on my Mac."

~~~
ineedtosleep
> I just thought I'd get that out of the way before the usual flame war
> erupts,

Then you post an ad-hominem and ignore any evidence that this site breaks the
web. Bravo.

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orangea
I look forward to reading this!

However, I am reading the first part of the first section (explaining the
basis vectors of a linear space), and see this:

[http://i.imgur.com/Qizuw0K.png](http://i.imgur.com/Qizuw0K.png)

That makes no sense to me, shouldn't it be more like this?

[http://i.imgur.com/iKpKgSa.png](http://i.imgur.com/iKpKgSa.png)

Maybe I am just not familiar with the notation, though...

~~~
elektropionir
You're right, it's a typo, the sum was on the wrong side. I fixed the
equation. Thanks for catching it. Please let me know if you find any other
issues. I wrote the original notes a while ago and I had to do some
adjustments to make the LaTeX source work with MathJax so there might be other
typos.

BTW, |u> = u_i |e_i> would be the correct equation in Einstein notation where
the u_i |e_i> would be a contraction in which the summation along repeated
indices is implicit. When you're dealing with a lot of tensor multiplication
this notation is very useful because of its clarity and compactness.

------
elektropionir
Submitter here. Sorry about the layout problems. I hate usability issues like
these and I just did some quick fixes. Should work a bit better on narrower
screens.

I was more excited about the content and getting that right that I just didn't
test the layout before posting (I have large monitors so my defaults were not
geared toward small screen sizes). I had an eye exam today so I could
literally only now see these comments since my pupils were dilated.

I hope you can now get to some of the quantum mechanics stuff.

