Viewing posts by christian
Disasters in Great Britain and Ireland over time
Posted by: christian on 7 Mar 2017
Wikipedia has an interesting (if somewhat morbid) list of disasters in Great Britain and Ireland. This blog post will show how to scrape it and plot a chart of the deaths due to these disasters over time.
How many MPs have degrees in STEM subjects?
Posted by: christian on 3 Mar 2017
Not many:
What is the average age of an MP in each party?
Posted by: christian on 2 Mar 2017
Exploring the Schottky anomaly in hydrogen
Posted by: christian on 24 Feb 2017
The temperature-dependence of the rotational contribution to the heat capacity of gaseous molecular hydrogen shows a Schottky anomaly: whereas for many systems the heat capacity can be expected to increase with increasing temperature, for $\mathrm{H_2}$ there is an temperature range within which it reaches a maximum before decreasing. Only at higher temperatures does it revert to "conventional" behaviour.
Calculating the heat capacity from the partition sum
Posted by: christian on 24 Feb 2017
It is a standard result of statistical thermodynamics that the molar heat capacity at constant volume, $C_{V,\mathrm{m}}$, is related to the molecular partition sum, $q$, through the relation $$ C_{V,\mathrm{m}} = R\beta^2\left[\frac{\ddot{q}}{q} - \left( \frac{\dot{q}}{q}\right)^2\right], $$ where $\dot{q}$ and $\ddot{q}$ represent the first and second derivative of $q$ with respect to the "thermodynamic beta", $\beta = \frac{1}{k_\mathrm{B}T}$: