• Applied Mechanics of Solids Example Problems by Allan Bower
  (tags: science physics engineering mechanics books)
• Introduction To Continuum Mechanics by Ray Bowen
  "This textbook is intended to introduce engineering graduate students to the essentials of
  modern Continuum Mechanics. This understanding should include an appreciation for the status of the classical theories as special cases of general nonlinear continuum models. The relationship of the classical theories to nonlinear models is essential in light of the increasing reliance, by engineering designers and researchers, on prepackaged computer codes. These codes are based upon models which have a specific and limited range of validity. Given the danger associated with the use of these computer codes in circumstances where the model is not valid, engineers have a need for an in depth understanding of continuum mechanics and the continuum models which can be formulated by use of continuum mechanics techniques."
  (tags: science engineering physics books mechanics)

Imagine finding yourself in a town outside Frankfurt at a nippy, late-September 8AM, and all you want to do is crawl into the nearest bed because it’s 2AM back home. What fresh hell?  Your concerned friend, on the other hand, wants to keep you awake as long as possible so you can have a post-lunch nap. So, he drives you around this town, his town of Darmstadt, happily chattering on about its history which include an artists’ colony and a wedding tower.

And then he makes you walk up a hill to this:

Ok, nice hallucination, I’m leaving to go sleep in the car now. Come find me after you climb back out the rabbit hole again. See, all I was expecting from Darmstadt was an industrial suburb with one very pre-glasnost building called the Fraunhofer Institute.  We’d hang out there for the duration of my conference and then leave for the rest of Germany and Austria.  As I said in my last post, Darmstadt pleasantly surprised the wind out of me.

Check the crest of the city of Darmstadt, replete with Gothic lion and fleur de lis, as it should be!

Then, there’s this bewildering non sequitur of a Russian chapel which sits right next door.

The chapel is actually older than the Wedding Tower. Turns out local Princess Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt married a certain Russian Tsar Nicholas II in 1894. As a married couple, Nicholas and Alix traveled back to Darmstadt a number of times, when Nicholas refused to pray at any of the local churches. The story goes that, in order to attend proper church services while on vacation, he had this orthodox chapel constructed between 1897 and 1899 and had it underlain with soil brought in via train from Russia. Crazy? Yes. If you have that kind of money, however, and the art-loving locals bless your venture, who are future generations to question it?

Fat lot of good all that gilded pomp and prayer did. You may know Princess Alix better as Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, close friend of mystic Grigori Rasputin, and mother of the infamous Anastasia. She was also the last Empress of Russia, executed along with Nicholas in 1918 by Bolshevik firing squad.

That, ladies and gents, is way too much mind-blowing history and context to take in on one chilly, jetlagged morning. C’est la vie in Europe.

After some technical difficulties (wherein neither my motivation nor my laptop cooperated for a while), I’ve begun to upload the 350 pictures from our trip to Germany and Austria.

First, Darmstadt, Germany. You’re wondering “Where?” The quaint, little town of Darmstadt sits around 30km south of Frankfurt, but there’s nothing intellectually and architecturally quaint or little about it. Home to three technical universities, it houses the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, where a number of seminal works of computer visualization were researched and written, and where element Darmstadtium (atomic number 110) was created in 1994. Darmstadt is also home to more jazz clubs and musicians than Frankfurt, the Jazz-Institut Darmstadt (Europe’s largest public jazz archive) and Mathildenhoehe, an artists’ colony founded by Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig in 1899.

Stories of the crazy architecture of this area, especially the Hochzeitsturm (Wedding Tower) and adjacent Russian chapel, in my next.

How far we have come from 2005. Have we? The fate of Charity hospital is still unknown. New Orleans is still at risk of flooding because of inadequate levees.

How far we have come from 2005. Our first desi president. Keeping the harmony. Our Nobel-prize-winning president. Keeping the peace? Our president in New Orleans today. Please keep the promise. Please let the idea of you be you. Tim says:

Think about how much is said with those two small words.

Never again.

Not, Next time the city is decimated. Not, Things are better, but it’s still very dangerous. Not, Let’s hope our luck holds out.

Never again is a vision for action. It is a vision for prosperity and purpose. It is the vision we need in New Orleans, in coastal Louisiana, and in a nation with so many basic needs that are ignored for convenience.

No, Mr. Obama will not grab a shovel and start digging the clay to fortify our levees. He will not pull the levers on the pile-driving rig to push sheet pile into the ground. He won’t even pull out his Diner’s Club card and pay for the astounding amount of work that needs to be done to protect our great city.

What I would hope to hear from the president today when he visits New Orleans is a clear statement of his vision.

Update: Full text of Obama’s speech. Again with the words “hurricane” and “100-year flood.” One of these days, they will get the vocabulary correct in order to understand the urgency of the problem. Sigh.