Sludge.

So I spent 3 hours yesterday trying to figure out the concentration of sludge in a given lake and the rate of change of the sludge at a given time. Worked out a formula for the amount of water in the lake, the rate of change of flow of water, a formula for the concentration of the sludge, and all I needed was a formula for the amount of sludge in terms of time. I spent a good part of the morning on that, and felt really stupid until my TA told me I could just substitute the value of the sludge itself instead of a formula in terms of time.

That probably made no sense to you, but that's okay because it didn't to me either. But now I can officially figure out the rate of change of sludge, and the total amount of sludge flowing out of a lake at any given time. Yay me. The things you can do with calculus. They probably call this 'practical application'.

It'll be over soon though, the final is in an hour. That of course will be followed by the CS final where I'll spend three hours trying to work binary search trees, hash tables, queues (British for 'lines' apparently), heaps, maps, graphs and who knows what else.

Today is going to be fun.


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