"doing physics homework. each homework assignment these circuits get uglier and uglier."

I hear you. Have you started throwing the special relativity into the E&M yet? What a mess.

no, not yet thankfully.

You may luck and not have to deal with it then... The way my professor teaches the subject, we start thinking about what will happen if we look at electric fields and charges in relativistic frames (with time dilation, Lorentz distance distortions, and all that stuff from a couple terms ago) and we ultimately realize that there's an extra mystery force at work if we look at the system in certain frames. This force turns out to be magnetism and we go on to derive how it works.

Apparently most teachers take an easier route and just say "okay, now we're going to stop with electricity and start talking about magnetism" and then mention briefly that the two are actually different views of the same thing at the very end of the course. If your teacher uses the second approach, consider yourself very lucky.

Yeah, we did the easy route ... but he told us right away they were related and how, but without the details.

php 4 with the zend optimizer ;P

thought you said you aren't making any money...