Books for Christmas

I got most of the books I wanted the most for Christmas this year. It was a great haul that will keep me busy for a while. Among them were:

• Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
• Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology
• Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment
• Introduction to Evolutionary Computing (Natural Computing Series)

The books on string and tree algorithms and collective intelligence should be self-explanatory. The book on data visualization I wanted because it was an overlooked skill in my education. I appreciate great data visualizations and taking some steps to improve my understanding and increase my skills in that area is worth doing. Finally the book on evolutionary computing is for personal enrichment. I’ve been playing around with genetic algorithms since 1994, even before I got out of high school. It’s always been playing, though, and I wanted a bit of a more rigorous introduction to them.

With any luck, I’ll be posting some thoughts on these books in the coming months.

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My Christmas Wishlist

Just a few books and stuff I wouldn’t mind getting for Christmas.  Just sayin’.

Note:  sort by priority.

Dunder and Bliksem

Among the several online comics I read on a regular basis is the Saturday Bulletin.  It’s a great comic that takes an old-timey picture and reinterprets the content.  So today’s comic is of Santa tromping off over a hill in the snow, saying “mmm… venison.”  Blitzen isn’t feeling so good about it.

The thing that struck me was that it referred to the reindeer “Donner” as “Donder”.  Donner is the German word for thunder and Blitzen is lightning.  I knew this from my time learning German so it made complete sense and seeing “Donder” struck me as a mistake.  I have heard children say “Donder” before, so I thought this was a production mistake bleeding over into adulthood.  Lo and behold, Donder is the older version of Donner’s name (Donder being an older spelling of the German word).  Originally the pair of reindeer were the Dutch forms Dunder and Bliksem.  Check out the Wikipedia entry and the Donder home page, an amusing campaign to restore the name of Donder.

New Camera

One of the things my mother got me was a nice, little digital camera. I didn’t want something super-high quality that would cost a fortune, but I wanted something good, small and that I wouldn’t have a heart attack if I broke. I wanted something that would slip in my pocket that I can (hopefully) use for photowalking. My cell phone has been what I’ve been using lately, but while it’s decent for a phone, it’s just not that great. So my new 8 MP Kodak EasyShare M883 will do the trick. I took some pictures of a bouqet of roses to play around with it.  To continue the lightweight theme, I used Picasa 2 from Google for the editing. The end product is kinda cool I think.

I also got Battlestar Galactica: Razor and Scene It? 2nd Edition as well as a few other things. Good times.

Merry Christmas Tree Fractal

Courtesy of Chaotic Utopia:

Christmas Tree 2007

Donna decorated the apartment a couple days ago and it is looking quite festive. I personally love it. I think she managed to incorporate our current colors and furniture quite well and the tree is beautiful. I’m definitely in the Christmas spirit now. :)

Old Christmas Tree

Donna just had me dig up a pic of our Christmas tree 2 years ago, so I figured why not post it. I think it was beautiful. That was the Christmas we got Daedalus.  Be sure to scroll down to see the little boy.