After a little more than a year of retirement from the Division of Applied Math at Brown University, I have come to realize that the idea of putting all of my creative energy into music and skiing isn't going to work after all. Evidently, I still need that regular dosage of math and computational physics. What I don't need is to write papers about it -- one of the best features of being a retired warrior.

For want of a better word, the contributions on this page will be called projects. My intent is that they will be aggregations of ideas, suggestions, explanations, algorithms, implementations and whatever else may apply to certain topics that continue to be interesting to me. It is my plan that these projects will include some of the following departures from traditional scienific papers:

• Not much effort will be devoted to finding the right way or the best way to do anything at all. The topics are pretty big, this is science, and I mean to leave the value judgements for other, unretired warriors. Naturally I hope not to make suggestions that are wrong, so a telling of where some ideas come from will be necessary, but that's all you get.

• References to individual papers will not generally be included, except where there is a necessary result that cannot be argued or explained in a paragraph or two. References to some books and review articles may be included. Any suggestions that are offered by colleagues and incorporated here will be gratefully acknowledged.

• Even those pieces that could be structured as IMRAD (Intro- Method- Result- And- Discuss, consult Robert A. Day) will not be done that way. The central documents (the hubs?) will contain general descriptions and annotated tables of contents with links to relatively independent collections (subhubs?) of subsections. Wheels in wheels? - of course. (For more, look below.)

• The precept (Robert A. Day again) that the writer should always be considerate of the intended reader will be adopted. I'll try to follow my own advice to students: Help your reader to decide, as soon as possible, whether to read on or pitch it in the trash barrel.

• This is myself, Fred, talking here, and I'll use the appropriate pronouns whenever it amuses me to do so.

Enough bloviation - here is the annotated list of projects. For links without notes, go home.

• A surface generator.
  Well, in the first place, not really a project yet, but it will become one.

• Atmospheric circulation models.
  At present this is a list of the subtopics. More links will appear soon.

• Some shallow water theories.
  The beginnings of a discussion of many different ones.

• Visualization of 2-D and 3-D, unsteady flows.
  This will come later.

Note:

As intriguing as it may be to write documents that have arbitrary topologies, it is still inconvenient to do so when they contain math typesetting. At present HTML has the anchors that facilitate the mastery of topology and make the imbedding of most graphics easy, but the treatment of equations and most inline math symbols as graphics is pretty inconvenient. Anyone who has used TeX or a derivative of it can be forgiven for wishing HTML had something like LaTeX in it. Indeed, prototypes have been suggested, and even implemented, but not supported for long. (My theory is that any computer scientist who likes and does math too is far too busy to find the time to fix HTML, and the rest, as we have observed, hate math. Just kidding - we really need this, and I don't want to offend anybody who might be inclined to help. And besides, maybe it is TeX that needs to be fixed.) For the present, I'll move the math as far from the hubs as possible and put detailed descriptions of it in DVI, PDF or PS files. (back).