Sections 2.1-2.3

Ok, so I'm trying to get an early start on this semester, and hence I'm making a blog post about the reading due this wednesday :) I think I'm getting how we're defining the stress tensor; it seems to me to be pretty close qualitatively to the
Maxwell stress tensor from E&M; as then, it seems like the most concise way to put it is that the {ij} component of the stress tensor is the force in the i direction on a unit area normal to the j direction. I'm not sure I'm visualizing the "make a cut in the medium" explanation though. Am I getting this right, or do should I think about the problem setup some more?

Also, in response to Steven Ning wanting to get more fancy LaTeX than the online image converter offers - they cite the script they use as being available at http://www.nought.de/tex2im.html ; it's a bash script which uses "latex" and "convert" to make the images. If you have a unix system with bash available, it seems like it should be a pretty simple matter to stick '\include{amsmath}' into the script and use it, though I haven't tried it myself yet.