C[omp]ute

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2015 22:23:51 -0300

Week 10 was in San Francisco w parents:

* Read Thoma Ross's "Briarpatch"
  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312290314
  Great - everything you'd expect from Thomas (entertaining thriller).

Week 11:

* Spray-painted my bike frame.  Pretty easy, but time-consuming (multiple
  coats that need a day's wait between them).

* Read Ann Leckie's "Ancillar Justice"
  http://www.amazon.com/Ancillary-Justice-Imperial-Radch-Leckie/dp/031624662X
  The details were better than the story as a whole, but the whole was pretty
  good anyway.  The character telling the story is a spaceship, reduced to
  controlling a single human automataton.  There's a detail where the default
  pronouns is feminine (so everyone is "she").  But character development was
  a bit odd (not clear what the motivations of the second character were, to
  me at least) and the question of whether to support the lesser of two evils,
  or try anarchy, which looked like it would be an interesting conundrum,
  never found any real depth.  But fun and decently well written.

* Skimmed "Cultural Evolution"
  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262019752
  Some interesting ideas, but nothing terribly gripping and a lot of
  hand-waving and guesswork.

* Read Cesar Hodalgo's "Why Information Grows"
  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465048994
  Decent, but not much more than his talk (previously linked here).  Could
  have had more maths / detail.

* Read Bing Xu's "Book From The Ground"
  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262027089
  Disappointing.  See review at Amazon link.

* Read Banana Yoshimoto's "Hardboiled & Hard Luck"
  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802142621
  Two novelas.  I enjoyed Hardboiled - Murikamiesque, but with more emotional
  depth.  Hard Luck, however, went too far for me, with little more than a
  discussion of emotions and (bland?) statements about "life".

* Read about 2/5 of Steve Helm's book on Neumann and Wiener.  More on that
  when I finish it.

* Cleaned up the code for Drawing.jl, added an extra example, and released.

* Made a small contribution to ColorTypes.jl

Pretty lazy week in all honesty.  Not sure why.

Andrew