Coronado PST by Meade Inc.

This is one of several telescopes that I owned, all bought on line. PST stands for Personal Solar Telescope. Yes, you use it to look at the sun. Won't you damage your eyes looking at the sun ?

You won't because this gadget here reduces the sun's light by over a hundred thousand times and only allow light emitted by excited hydrogen atoms (H-alpha) to go through. What you see is a reddish orb, big enough to show the mottled surface of the sun, sunspots, filaments etc.

The surface of the sun is not static but changes over a matter of hours as it rotates and the hot plasma that it is made up of rises and falls. So what is the big deal.

The sun is 93 million miles away, so far that if it should shut down, we won't notice it until 8 minutes later because the last particles of light will take 8 minutes to reach us. The reddish orb that you see in the PST is so huge that the earth looks like a dot when compared with it on the same scale. And some say going from Changi to Jurong is far...... The energy from the sun drives everything on earth and has been doing so for the last couple of billion years.

When is the best time to look at our nearest star ? On a sunny day, preferably cloudless of course and you know what that will do to your skin. Drink plenty of water and have some nearby shade to duck into when it becomes unbearable. A wide straw hat will come in handy too.

Am I nuts or what to torture myself this way ? Well no if your interest is astronomy. The truth is out there.

Mathematica ver. 6 by Wolfram Research Inc.

In case you are wondering, this is not a book. Mathematica is the name of a computer software developed by Wolfram Research. This software is huge and contains within it all the mathematics that anyone will ever need.

I came across this software years back when Windows was still in version 2 or 3 when I chanced upon the Mathematica Book in MPH Stamford. This Book was meant to be the "bible", user guide and reference manual for the software. Mathematica was ver 1 then but I was amazed that you can use it to solve complex problems in maths and then plot the output in colour in both 2D and 3D. So out plonk my dole (it ain't cheap, but I was young) and I have upgraded all the way to ver 6 now.

Of course you can use it as a high end calculator - you enter the equation and it solves it for you but that's only the tip of the ice berg. You see you are supposed to use it to write programmes to solve extremely complex mathematical, physical problems and Wolfram has a whole web site of such programmes and functions developed by users.

Having said that, Mathematica does have a fairly steep learning curve before one is conversant enough to use it to solve real world problems. Believe me I am still trying. But I have seen maths books written entirely in Mathematica. Now that's something. I have dabbled with MathCad, MathLab etc but I think Mathematica is by far the "chimmest" (I mean deep).

One thing though, I never did manage to get Mathematica to explain and show me how come 1 + 1 is equal to 2 though. I am also wondering if any schools or universities here use it to teach mathematics or physical sciences.