Tenth Anniversary of this Blog About Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology

Intermediate Physics for
Medicine and Biology.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of this blog dedicated to the textbook Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology. I posted the first entry on Tuesday, August 21, 2007. Soon, I started posting weekly on Friday mornings, and I have been doing so now for ten years.

The blog began shortly after the publication of the 4th edition of IPMB, and continued through the 5th edition. Although the initial posts were brief, they soon become longer essays. If you look at the blog website under “labels” you will find several generic types of posts, such as book reviews, obituaries, and new homework problems. My personal favorites are called…er…“personal favorites.” These include Trivial Pursuit IPMB (a great game for a hot August night with nothing to do), Strat-O-Matic Baseball (because I love to write about myself), Physics of Phoxhounds (I’m a dog lover), The Amazing World of Auger Electrons (I think my cannon-ball/double-canister artillery analogy is clever), My Ideal Bookshelf (which provided the cover picture for the IPMB’s Facebook page), Aliasing (containing a lame joke based on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), IPMB Tourist (to help with your vacation plans), The leibniz (a quixotic attempt by John Wikswo and me to introduce a new unit equal to a mole of differential equations), The Rest of the Story (Paul Harvey!), and Myopia (because I love that quote from Mornings on Horseback).

I want this blog to be useful to instructors and students using IPMB in their classes. Although I sometimes drift off topic, they all are my target audience. If you look at posts labeled “Useful for Instructors” you’ll find tips about teaching at the intersection of physics and biology. Instructors should also visit the book’s website, which includes useful information such as the errata and downloadable game cards for Trivial Pursuit IPMB. Instructors can email Russ Hobbie or me about getting a copy of the IPMB solution manual (sorry students; we send it to instructors only).

How much longer will I keep writing the blog? I don’t know, but I don’t expect to stop any time soon. I enjoy it, and I suspect the blog is helpful for instructors and students. I know the blog has only a handful of readers, but their quality more than makes up for the quantity.

Enjoy!