"Stay focused, and ignore the points you don't understand"- one golden rule that I derived after many times of failures while reading papers. Quite often - it is such an easy matter to be carried away with references and small points that i don't understand. So the maths goes exponential - one paper lead to 3 references; 6 question points and another further 3x6 references! Being drifted away is so easy! When is the loop gonna end? At the end of the tiring "rat racing" tracing after a single concept - the original flow of knowledge is already lost. Needless to say about the in-accessibility of NUS libraries. yeah - i am under the so called "multi-disciplinary" faculty - that's why even the references books are scattered around!
What an irony! References from a common source have to be collected from Science library, Medical library, and Central library separately..To further elaborate, journal of microscopy in Med, optics book from Science, and re-activating of my library card at central library (because that I own them 2.5 bucks for late returning). Oh did I forget to mention that these libraries are "kind of" far from each other? (med and Sci are ok - about 10 mins walking, but Sci to central is a half an hour round trip by shuttle bus, not including a walking time of 10-15mins walking uphill...
These ultimate frustration is due to reason that stingy NUS library only subscribes to the latest issues of e-journals (often from 1990 onwards). Those 60s to 90s are oldies that preserved in hard copy format in the "folks home", with first grade dust-free care of librarians from three libraries mentioned above. By the way it is not easy to visit these "old folks" - a stack number has to be presented and a waiting time of one day is necessary.
So - in conclusion, stay focused and ignore side points that are unclear from a paper, just try to get the main meaning of the present paper. That's my piece of advice for the day.
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