Assignments, Tests and Lectures

It is starting to get busy with assignments and lab reports due as well as tests, all within this couple of weeks. The weather was pretty dreary today, with overcast skies the whole day and intermittent rain. The only highlight of the day was probably the 2 lectures I attended this evening. The first one was by Prof Tom O'Rourke of Cornell University where he lectured on infrastructure resilience, touching on his experiences in 911 and hurricane katrina. I was speaking to the person next to me and she was telling me Prof O'Rourke is a "guru" in his field. I think he is the same guy whom Prof Harry Tan was raving about in CE3115 last semester. Presently I can't remember what we used the O'Rourke method to find, although I think it was something to do with basal heave. Later in the evening, some guy called Craig gave a lecture on risk assessment and retrofitting of UC berkeley campus because it was in a seismically active area (in fact UC sits on several fault lines).