Studying in the Catacombs

Just as a small note, here's a picture of the underground mathematics stacks in Altgeld Hall -- it's been my favorite study area for the summer, not only because it's cool and desolate, but also because it is downright unearthly.

The Library was the greatest assemblage of magical texts anywhere in the multiverse. Thousands of volumes of occult lore weighted its shelves.

It was said that, since vast amounts of magic can seriously distort the mundane world, the Library did not obey the normal rules of space and time. It was said that it went on forever. It was said that you could wander for days among the distant shelves, that there were lost tribes of research students somewhere in there, that strange things lurked in forgotten alcoves and were preyed on by other things that were even stranger. [1]

Wise students in search of more distant volumes took care to leave chalk marks on the shelves as they roamed deeper into the fusty darkness, and told friends to come looking for them if they weren't back by supper.

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[1] The truth is that big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. [Terry Pratchett: Guards! Guards!]

Anyway, on the med-boards-studying side, I churned through cardio physiology for nearly ten hours straight (w00t) -- now onto Trinity Blood! :D