Reading 2.10

Linearization in sight! Mathematicians delight! Wow, there are way to many syllables to sing that accurately.

To sum up, the acoustic approximation rocks. It makes it so that convection drops out and so that the continuity equation is decoupled from the field equation. Pretty neat. I'd like to explore, eventually, real life situations where this approximation breaks down, but I'm pretty sure that we have only seen the tip of iceberg when it comes to the plethora of real life things that do fall into this approximation.

Reading 2.4-2.6

So I'm trying to get ahead a bit since I have my first papers and presentations due next week. Luckily I can choose to get ahead in a course that doesn't give me any credit!

Section 2.4 really was great. Even though I've seen the continuity equation derived before, this was done in such a blatantly analogous way to the derivation of any kind mass conservation equation...I wonder what I must have been paying attention to instead of this the last time I saw it.

I find the argument used to enforce the symmetry of &Pi_ij in section 2.5 very interesting, and it's motivation comes from making sure that the thing that we derived from physical examples makes physical sense. Additionally, the 3D conic section representation of the information in a symmetric rank-2 tensor is awesome, and completely new to me. Sweet!

Strain in 2.6 is great, but it is nothing needed without the equation of state in 2.7. That's some good stuff.