Rejab 1442

We are now in the month of Rejab, 1442 of the Hijri calendar. I will be exactly 60 years old within the month of Rejab according to lunar years; slightly older than my age in the Gregorian calendar. I would be retiring this month, had the Public Services Department uses the lunar calendar. It is said that the rough lifetime of 'ummat Muhammad (pbuh)' is around 60+ years of age. The world average of human lifespan as of 2019 (see https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy) is 72.6 years. With the current pandemic, I guess the average lifespan will certainly be lowered but I do not know to what degree. It is said that during the 1918 pandemic, life expectancy dropped by 11 years. There is already a study for Covid-19 pandemic here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0238678 - I have not read it as yet. Note that this is a PLOS One article and with the current wake of criticism of open access journals, this journal is open access and one can read about the journal here (including criticisms). There is no intent of discredit here as many established publishers, they are usually serious with respect to peer review. 

With the above, in a way, I am trying to be ready for my departure. That is why I am trying to give as much as I can of what I know for now, hoping it will benefit somebody and passed as good deeds. I was hoping, in fact, to restart my technical and Malay blogs earlier this year. I had schemed in my head about writing Planck's discovery and its 120th anniversary on 14 December last year for Acu Frekuensi. However, I was bogged down with teaching the past few months, particularly with respect to the subject of Statistical Mechanics, which I don't have my own set of notes. Had used a difficult book (my bad) but it gave me new perspectives of how Boltzmann's great contribution to the subject. Did detailed derivations of many equations, some of which took me time for me to figure them out. In fact, I'm now detailing a particular solution to an assignment I gave that gave me problems with the factors in the expression. The general idea is ok but as they say, the devil is in the details. One lesson: Never simply trust a given equation from anywhere (books, lecture notes and even papers); eventually one finds mistakes.

At this age too, I can no longer work long hours like I've used to. In fact, yesterday I was physically down. Luckily it was the Chinese New Year public holiday. I had to postpone an appointment and stayed in bed for most of the day. So let us see if I can keep my blogs active and hopefully less rants on the social media.