A site devoted mostly to everything related to Information Technology under the sun - among other things.

Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Friday, July 3, 2026

Popular Book on AI by Robert Wright

Interesting ruminations on the potentialities inherent in AI technologies as well as their perils & larger meanings with useful ideas & promising paths.

The exploration of 'cognitive sovereignty' alone is also interesting as well as other hazardous arenas...

Find it @ Amazon.com: Customer reviews: The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning

Sunday, April 19, 2026

Thoughts on "The Nature of Form" Book

The book "Nature of Form for Designers" by Bhagvanji Sonagra, Bhavin R Dabhi & Susmita Rao contains 432 geometric forms, 231 patterns, and 793 colors mostly abstracted from plant and animal forms as well as a few from ice crystals and flows of water for creative industries such as Graphic Design, Product/Industrial Design, and Interior Design as well as such ancillary areas as Fabric Design.

It may be viewed as a database of 150 plus of natural elements (1454 plus entities: forms, patterns, colors).  These elements could be combined to create new elements; one can look at them as an alphabet for forming Design "Words" and "Design Sentences" (requiring a Design Grammar).

This opens up the possibility of applying algorithmic techniques to these elements.

Let us say we have two existing Designs - irrespective of the way they are realized, e.g. two different patterns for vases, for articles of clothing which combine a number of the elements in the database.  Treating each Desing as a parent, we can apply Genetic Algorithms to evolve new Design Patterns that are based on the initial parents.  

In this parlance, Design Patterns based on the book's elements are Design Words and we would be creating new Words.  These words may or may not be useful for attractive, in this case, the Human sense of Beauty would be the acceptance criteria for the Genetic Algorithm.

Another path for exploring more forms is by applying coordinate transformations—such as shearing, bending, or stretching, e.g. the skull of a chimpanzee can be mapped onto that of a human.  A computational process could extract these elements from the database and apply various transformations to them and leave it to human beings to determine if the resulting shape is useful or not.

In order to form Design Sentences with these Design Words, one has to have a Design Grammar.  Joan L. Kirsch and Russell A. Kirsch have demonstrated a shape-only grammar for the styles of Richard Diebenkorn  and Joan Miró.  There has also been similar idea in architecture, please see: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series): Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel: 8601404694998: Amazon.com: Books which influenced the software development community with the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, Grady Booch: 9780201633610: Amazon.com: Books.

So, in principle, multiple Design Grammars could be developed; either in an ab initio manner or based on the study and analysis of designs produced by others.  Each grammar may contain a number of production rules, most of which offer options for how to subdivide regions of the Design Pattern. Some of these rules may be recursive and/or self-similar (fractal) insofar as they produce subdivisions that, in turn, re-invoke the original rules. Such recursion enables the grammar to account for an infinite number of distinct compositions.

I also think it possible that an attempt could be made into takings existing Design Patterns and decomposing them into more elementary Design Words that are in this database.  What could not be mapped, could be treated as new elements and added to the database.

Lastly, this database contains color elements as well, which means that any design that contains colors could be customized to the color preferences of different MBTI personalities; please see: The Best Home Color Palette for Each MBTI Personality Type.

I am sure that a lot more can be done with this database, basically it provides an initial set upon to which many different mappings and transformations could be applied.

Friday, January 9, 2026

The Innovator's Toolkit

This is a good book on various techniques and approaches to innovation & problem-solving.  Its chapters are brief surveys of different techniques and approaches to innovation and problem solving, such as TRIZ, with references to more in-depth resources.  (Each chapter, in my opinion, could be expanded into a book in itself.)

This book could be useful to inventors, business analysts, requirements analysts, system builders, product owners and others in creative fields.

The Innovator's Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth: Silverstein, David, Samuel, Philip, DeCarlo, Neil: 8601410465605: Amazon.com: Books 

Sunday, December 14, 2025

Singing Books -II

I am pleased to learn of a company that makes singing books, something I had been interested in for many years (please see: https://crimsonreason.blogspot.com/2007/02/singing-book.html)

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

List of Good Books on Electromagnetic Theory

  1. Balanis Advanced Engineering Electromagnetics
  1. Brillouin Wave Propagation and Group Velocity
  1. Cheng Field and Wave Electromagnetics (2nd Edition)
  1. Collin Field Theory of Guided Waves
  1. Durand Electrostatique I, II, & III (Vol I: Les distributions, Vol II: Problèmes généraux, conducteurs, Vol III: Méthodes de calculs, Diélectriques)
  1. E. Weber Electromagnetic Fields theory and Applications Volume I - Mapping of Fields
  1. Felsen and Marcuvitz Radiation and Scattering of Waves (IEEE Press Series on Electromagnetic Wave Theory)
  1. Foppel Electromagnetic Fields and Interactions (Blaisdell Book in the Pure and Applied Sciences)
  1. Hallen Electromagnetic Theory
  1. Hansen and Yaghjian Plane-Wave Theory of Time-Domain Fields: Near-Field Scanning Applications
  1. Harrington Time-Harmonic Electromagnetic Fields
  1. Heald and Marion Classical Electromagnetic Radiation, Third Edition (Dover Books on Physics)
  1. Ishimaru Electromagnetic Wave Propagation, Radiation, and Scattering: From Fundamentals to Applications (IEEE Press Series on Electromagnetic Wave Theory)
  1. Iskander Electromagnetic Fields and Waves
  1. Jackson Classical Electrodynamics Third Edition
  1. Jeans Mathematical Theory of Electricity and Magnetism (Cambridge Library Collection - Physical Sciences)
  2. Jefimenko Electricity and Magnetism: An Introduction to the Theory of Electric and Magnetic Fields
  1. King Fundamental electromagnetic theory
  1. Kong Electromagnetic Wave Theory
  1. Landau, Pitaevskii, Lifshitz Electrodynamics of Continuous Media
  2. Mason and Weaver The Electromagnetic Field
  1. Orfanidis Electromagnetic Waves and Antennas
  1. Panofsky and Philips Classical Electricity and Magnetism: Second Edition (Dover Books on Physics)
  1. Papas Theory of Electromagnetic Wave Propagation (Dover Books on Physics)
  1. Purcell Electricity and Magnetism
  1. Ramo, Whinnery and Van Duzar Fields and Waves in Communication Electronics
  1. Rojansky Electromagnetic Fields and Waves (Dover Books on Physics)
  1. Rothwell and Cloud Electromagnetics, Third Edition
  1. Schelkunoff Electromagnetic waves,
  1. Schott Electromagnetic radiation and the mechanical reactions arising from it: being an Adams prize essay in the University of Cambridge
  1. Shadowitz The Electromagnetic Field (Dover Books on Physics)
  1. Shen & Kong By Liang C. Shen - Applied Electromagnetism: 3rd (third) Edition
  1. Smythe Static And Dynamic Electricity
  1. Someda Electromagnetic Waves, Second Edition
  1. Sommerfeld Electrodynamics (Lectures on Theoretical Physics, Vol. 3) (Volume 3)
  1. Staelin Morgenthaler Kong Electromagnetic Waves
  1. Stratton Electromagnetic Theory
  1. Van Bladel Electromagnetic Fields
  1. Wangsness Electromagnetic Fields, 2nd Edition
  1. Webster The theory of electricity and magnetism
  1. Zangwill Modern Electrodynamics

Friday, January 17, 2025

Reposting Problem-Solving Heuristics Mind-Map with Source Files

I am reposting Problem-Solving Heuristics Mind-Map; based on the ideas of the book, "How to solve it" by G. Polya (please see https://lnkd.in/gBxNnZY)


Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Tutorial Book on AI

This is the first-edition of a hands-on machine learning book:


with its Jupyter Notebooks here at GitHub:


There is a second edition as well.  (Neither edition uses PyTorch.)

Saturday, January 9, 2021

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Free Kindle Books


As of today - 05/12/2020 - the Kindle editions of these books are priced at $0.00.
The Everyday Life of an Algorithm
C Programming: Language: A Step by Step Beginner's Guide to Learn C Programming in 7 Days Kindle Edition
PYTHON: PROGRAMMING: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO LEARN PYTHON IN 7 DAYS Kindle Edition
Python Programming For Beginners: Learn The Basics Of Python Programming (Python Crash Course, Programming for Dummies) Kindle Edition
Python: Programming: Your Step By Step Guide To Easily Learn Python in 7 Days (Python for Beginners, Python Programming for Beginners, Learn Python, Python Language) Kindle Edition
Python for Informatics: Exploring Information: Exploring Information Kindle Edition
Programming for Computations - Python: A Gentle Introduction to Numerical Simulations with Python 3.6 (Texts in Computational Science and Engineering Book 15) 2nd Edition, Kindle Edition
Solving PDEs in Python: The FEniCS Tutorial I (Simula SpringerBriefs on Computing Book 3) 1st ed. 2016 Edition, Kindle Edition

Friday, November 8, 2019

Free eBook on AI

Free eBook on Artificial Intelligence by my former colleague, Phil Jackson:

https://pure.uvt.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/2895885/Jackson_toward_22_04_2014.pdf

I think this is an earlier version of his recent book (2019): Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, 3rd edition - available at Amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Artificial-Intelligence-Philip-Jackson/dp/0486832864/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=Philip+C+Jackson&qid=1573237880&sr=8-3

Monday, May 20, 2019

Problem-Solving Heuristics Mind-Map

Problem-Solving Heuristics Mind-Map; based on the ideas of the book, "How to solve it" by G. Polya (please see https://lnkd.in/gBxNnZY):



Monday, March 26, 2018

The Mythical Man-month

Full Text of The Mythical Man-month (downloadable from the University of Michigan):

https://umich.instructure.com/files/884126/download?download_frd=1

Thursday, March 22, 2018

About Me

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I had been a senior software developer working for HP and GM. I am interested in intelligent and scientific computing. I am passionate about computers as enablers for human imagination. The contents of this site are not in any way, shape, or form endorsed, approved, or otherwise authorized by HP, its subsidiaries, or its officers and shareholders.

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