Review of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution by Priya Satia

Review of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution by Priya Satia

Book review: Ted Grant: the permanent revolutionary

"Ted Grant: The Permanent Revolutionary." Alan Woods. Wellred Publishing. April 2013. --- This work aims to cover the life and ideas of Ted Grant, one of the most well known figures in the international Marxist movement. Author Alan Woods aims to outlines Grant’s important theoretical contribution to Marxism and provide insights into a subject that remains a closed book to most political analysts even now. Gordon Bannerman feels that the book fails to fully engage with its subject, but Woods’ account does have some value in its often gritty portrayal of extra-parliamentary political movements

“Privateering: Patriots and Profits in the War of 1812 (Book Review)” by Faye M. Kert

Review of Privateering: Patriots and Profits in the War of 1812 by Faye M. Ker

Structure and stability of helices in square-well homopolymers

Recently, it has been demonstrated [Magee et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 207802 (2006)] that isolated, square-well homopolymers can spontaneously break chiral symmetry and freeze into helical structures at sufficiently low temperatures. This behavior is interesting because the square-well homopolymer is itself achiral. In this work, we use event-driven molecular dynamics, combined with an optimized parallel tempering scheme, to study this polymer model over a wide range of parameters. We examine the conditions where the helix structure is stable and determine how the interaction parameters of the polymer govern the details of the helix structure. The width of the square well (proportional to lambda) is found to control the radius of the helix, which decreases with increasing well width until the polymer forms a coiled sphere for sufficiently large wells. The helices are found to be stable for only a window of molecular weights. If the polymer is too short, the helix will not form. If the polymer is too long, the helix is no longer the minimum energy structure, and other folded structures will form. The size of this window is governed by the chain stiffness, which in this model is a function of the ratio of the monomer size to the bond length. Outside this window, the polymer still freezes into a locked structure at low temperature, however, unless the chain is sufficiently stiff, this structure will not be unique and is similar to a glassy state.Comment: Submitted to Physical Review

DynamO: A free O(N) general event-driven molecular-dynamics simulator

Molecular-dynamics algorithms for systems of particles interacting through discrete or "hard" potentials are fundamentally different to the methods for continuous or "soft" potential systems. Although many software packages have been developed for continuous potential systems, software for discrete potential systems based on event-driven algorithms are relatively scarce and specialized. We present DynamO, a general event-driven simulation package which displays the optimal O(N) asymptotic scaling of the computational cost with the number of particles N, rather than the O(N log(N)) scaling found in most standard algorithms. DynamO provides reference implementations of the best available event-driven algorithms. These techniques allow the rapid simulation of both complex and large (>10^6 particles) systems for long times. The performance of the program is benchmarked for elastic hard sphere systems, homogeneous cooling and sheared inelastic hard spheres, and equilibrium Lennard-Jones fluids. This software and its documentation are distributed under the GNU General Public license and can be freely downloaded from http://marcusbannerman.co.uk/dynamo

One-dimensional steady-state thermal model for rotary kilns used in the manufacture of cement

Peer reviewedPostprin

Book review: Harold Wilson: the unprincipled Prime Minister? Reappraising Harold Wilson edited by Andrew S. Crines and Kevin Hickson

2016 marks the centenary of Harold Wilson’s birth, the fiftieth anniversary of his most emphatic election victory and forty years since his resignation as British Prime Minister. In this new volume, Harold Wilson: The Unprincipled Prime Minister? Reappraising Harold Wilson, editors Andrew S. Crines and Kevin Hickson bring together contributors to reflect on Wilson’s legacy within twentieth-century politics. This book offers a robust counter-narrative to existing appraisals of Wilson’s governments and his influence on British politics, writes Gordon Bannerman