The Fractal Geometry of Nature


Benoît B. Mandelbrot - 1977
    The complexity of nature's shapes differs in kind, not merely degree, from that of the shapes of ordinary geometry, the geometry of fractal shapes.Now that the field has expanded greatly with many active researchers, Mandelbrot presents the definitive overview of the origins of his ideas and their new applications. The Fractal Geometry of Nature is based on his highly acclaimed earlier work, but has much broader and deeper coverage and more extensive illustrations.

Saucer Wisdom


Rudy Rucker - 1999
    That's an odd way to begin a work of popular science . . . . but amusing.Please heed the warning from the Introduction by Bruce Sterling: "If you are examining Saucer Wisdom imagining that Rudy (or some fictional 'Frank Shook') has been actually logging a lot of on board saucer time, well, you can knock that off right now. Rudy Rucker made up the flying saucer part. There is no actual flying saucer. The saucer is not an interplanetary faster-than-light device. Its what we professional authors like to call a narrative device."I'm going to spill the beans as directly as I can here: Saucer Wisdom is a work of popular science speculation. Its a nonfiction book in which Prof. Rucker takes a few quirky grains of modern scientific fact, drops them into the colorful tide pool of his own imagination, and harvests a major swarm of abalones, jellyfish, and giant anemones."Pop-science writers didn't used to treat 'science' in this boisterous way, but there might well be a trend here, there may be a real future in this. Saucer Wisdom is a book by a well-qualified mathematician and computer scientist, a veteran pop science writer, in which 'science' is treated, not as some distant and rarefied quest for absolute knowledge, but as naturally great source material for a really long, cool rant."Rucker, in character, describes, and illustrates with delightful cartoon sketches (the way he would use chalk and a blackboard while talking science), the world of the progressively more distant future as it is transformed by computer technology, biotechnology, and human evolution. He also describes a hell of a party in Berkeley. Popular science writing will never be the same.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs


Harold Abelson - 1984
    This long-awaited revision contains changes throughout the text. There are new implementations of most of the major programming systems in the book, including the interpreters and compilers, and the authors have incorporated many small changes that reflect their experience teaching the course at MIT since the first edition was published. A new theme has been introduced that emphasizes the central role played by different approaches to dealing with time in computational models: objects with state, concurrent programming, functional programming and lazy evaluation, and nondeterministic programming. There are new example sections on higher-order procedures in graphics and on applications of stream processing in numerical programming, and many new exercises. In addition, all the programs have been reworked to run in any Scheme implementation that adheres to the IEEE standard.

The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction


Trevor Hastie - 2001
    With it has come vast amounts of data in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, finance, and marketing. The challenge of understanding these data has led to the development of new tools in the field of statistics, and spawned new areas such as data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Many of these tools have common underpinnings but are often expressed with different terminology. This book describes the important ideas in these areas in a common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis is on concepts rather than mathematics. Many examples are given, with a liberal use of color graphics. It should be a valuable resource for statisticians and anyone interested in data mining in science or industry. The book's coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning. The many topics include neural networks, support vector machines, classification trees and boosting—the first comprehensive treatment of this topic in any book. Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman are professors of statistics at Stanford University. They are prominent researchers in this area: Hastie and Tibshirani developed generalized additive models and wrote a popular book of that title. Hastie wrote much of the statistical modeling software in S-PLUS and invented principal curves and surfaces. Tibshirani proposed the Lasso and is co-author of the very successful An Introduction to the Bootstrap. Friedman is the co-inventor of many data-mining tools including CART, MARS, and projection pursuit.

5 Ingredient 15 Minute Cookbook


Cooking Light Magazine - 1999
    The "Cooking Light 5-Ingredient 15-Minute Cookbook" meets those needs and delivers-with big flavor "and" nutritious dishes. And instead of just giving you recipes, we're giving you meals-94 in all! Each meal features a main-dish recipe and either a short recipe to go with it or suggestions for commercial side items. Plus there's a photograph of every meal! Grocery Shopping SolutionsWith each meal plan, you get a grocery list of everything you need to complete the meal. Stock up on the ingredients from the Stress-Free Grocery List, and you can make one-third of the recipes in this book. No WorriesThe nutrient analysis with every recipe gives you values for calories, fat, protein, carbohydrate, fiber, cholesterol, and sodium. You can use the exchange values to fit the recipes into your meal plan.All This with Only 5 Ingredients?You'll be surprised at all the recipes you can make using only 5 ingredients: Chicken Alfredo Pasta, Deep-Dish Pizza Casserole, Speedy Chicken Cacciatore, Teriyaki Roast Chicken, Barbecue Pork Chops ...just to name a few.Avoid the Rush HourWhen you have only 15 minutes to get dinner on the table, try these recipes: Cajun-Style Swordfish, Fresh Tomato Pizza, Ground Beef Stroganoff, Chili Bacon Burgers, Teriyaki-Ginger Pork Tenderloin, Zesty Fettuccine and Shrimp.Added ValueCreate 5 different desserts or salads from different combinations of the same 5 ingredients. Start with easy-to-make recipes in the Mix & Match chapter like Three-Bean Salad, Tex-Mex Salad, StrawberryShortcakes, and Brownie Sundaes.Slow Down to Speed UpLearn how to let a slow cooker do the work for you. All with 5 ingredients or less, these recipes are worth coming home to: Chili Grande, Chicken Pepper Pot, Italian Pot Roast, Glazed Turkey.