Book Reviews


[Day Permalink] Tuesday, November 26, 2002

[Item Permalink] Per Bak and self-organized criticality -- Comment()
Seb's Open Research writes about self-organization: "A nice introduction to self-organization by a physicist, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi." Incidentally, I just noticed today in Nature that Per Bak, one of the most cited physicists, died on October 16, 2002. In 1991, I organized a workshop on cellular automata, and Per Bak was one of the invited speakers. His work on self-organized criticality is well-known today, and influences current physics research.


[Item Permalink] Can't stomach Microsoft? -- Comment()
If you can't stomach Microsoft, the help is near: LIINUS (the text is in Finnish) will help your stomach to cope with the daily stress. LIINUS is a dietary supplement (functional food), marketed by Orion Pharma, for making your stomach behave. It may also prevent you from getting cancer. My food-related English vocabulary is a bit rusty, but I believe FLAXSEED as Functional Food for People tells of the same benefits as the Finnish discription of LIINUS.

Here is a slogan for the product: "Can't Stomach Microsoft? Use LIINUS!" Could I make a career in advertising?


[Item Permalink]  -- Comment()
A Shallow Introduction to the K Programming Language: "K is an exceptional language for dealing with mathematical analysis, financial prediction, or anything that handles bulk data. I have used it for a document search engine and other computational linguistic tasks. K doesn't work very well when the problem is not vectorizable and scalars are the largest datum to operate on." [Lambda the Ultimate]