Summer internship

Following a 2,500 mile motorcycle trip from Austin to the Bay Area with my friend Paul, I'll be starting a summer internship at Lawrence Livermore National Labs tomorrow morning.

Instead of my usual my thesis work, I'll be looking at RANS turbulence models/numerics for Rayleigh-Taylor problems. As preparation, over the past couple of months, I've been spending some time staring at conservation law numerics classics like LeVeque's book as well as lecture notes from Caltech's AE 232 course. On the odd chance it is useful to anyone, I've put my toy code up at http://github.com/RhysU/codefour.

The Fortran 90 code solves inviscid or viscid 1D scalar conservation laws of the form u_t + f(u)_x = 0 or u_t + f(u)_x = \nu u_{xx} using WENO reconstruction and a Lax-Friedrichs flux.

It is based heavily on one provided through Caltech's AE 232 course. Compared to the course's code, the following changes have been made:

1. Adding 3rd-order WENO reconstruction
2. Adding 2nd and 4th order viscous capabilities
3. Adding HDF5-based result output
4. Adding Doxygen-based documentation
5. Adding Mathematica-based error analysis against Hopf-Cole-based analytic solutions of the viscid Burger's equation

Made GSL Committer

I was just added as a committer for the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) over on Savannah.

New Toy

Courtesy of the employer, my new Lenovo W510 came in on Thursday.

make -j8 on a laptop is fun:

Gram's Gob Recipe

My grandmother recently mailed me her gob recipe. Hands down, my Gram's are better than Yost's, your neighbor's, your mother's, or even your grandmother's. As a public service, I'm sharing this jewel.

Gram's Gobs

Cookies

Cream together

• 2 cups sugar,
• ½ cup crisco,
• 2 eggs, and
• 1 cup sour cream.

Then add 1 cup boiling water. Sift and add to the above

• 4 cups flour,
• 2 teaspoons baking soda,
• ½ teaspoon baking powder,
• ½ teaspoon salt, and
• ½ cup cocoa.

Drop by tablespoons onto an ungreased baking sheet. Bake at 450° Fahrenheit for exactly 5 minutes. Remove from the sheet at once.

Filling

First, mix together

• 5 tablespoons flour and
• 1 cup milk.

Cook the mixture until very thick and then let it cool. Separately, use a mixer to mix until light and fluffy

• 1 cup crisco or oleo,
• 1 cup powdered sugar,
• ¼ teaspoon salt, and
• 1 teaspoon vanilla.

Add the first mixture to the second mixture and mix well.

Assembly

Spread the filling between two cookies wrapping each one separately. Gram adds...