Long Time No Post

It's been quite a while since I posted anything, so a brief update is in order.

I've been studying. We're coming down to the wire -- finals are next week -- and I'm trying to get things wrapped up. For fluids and physical oceanography, all my work is done except studying for finals. For Scientific Computing, on the other hand, I still have tons to do (imagine my surprise). In particular we're supposed to do a write-up on a couple of important papers of our choice in applied math. We have to do both forward and backward literature searches and summarize all that too.

So one of the papers I'm doing ("Group Velocity in Finite Difference Schemes")is old (1982) and all the papers it references are older (obviously, the author not being psychic). That means none of them are in electronic form, and I have to physically hunt them down. That might not be too bad, except that UNC subscribes to the theory that if one library is good, a dozen would be better. Despite having three main libraries (the main main one, Davis, 8 stories and also known as the graduate library; the undergraduate library; and the old main library, Wilson, mostly used for historical archives these days) nearly everything I'm looking for is spread among other, smaller libraries, namely the math/physics library, the geosciences library and the chemistry library. So today is a day to expend shoe leather.

On top of that, I have another homework set in SciComp due tomorrow, and yet another due next week, finals week. Incredibly, the second one is a double set, worth 8% of my final grade. This instructor justitifies this attrocity by claiming that it's review for the final. Thanks!