Confessions of a researchaholic

This is an excellent practical guide to information visualization, with three main parts: a theoretical background including a brief history, perceptual mechanisms, and types of visualizations; a workflow part of chart design and prototype; and finally how to present and read charts. The book concludes with the observation of upcoming interactive visualizations enabled by computer programs beyond traditional static charts for print mediums.

In addition to the technical content, the book has beautiful layout and examples, with pointers for further readings.

This is an excellent book about the principles for drawing secondary dynamic effects, including fluid, fire, smoke, steam, explosion, magic, and solid props.
A hierarchical, coarse-to-fine process applies not only to static drawings but also dynamic animations in the form of coarse energy flows controlling fine visual details.
However, this is not a tutorial book, and one will need (a lot of) practice to really learn (I am currently following this).

The book touches upon digital assistance for manual animation, an exciting and important research direction that also fits my hobby.

Gist: the author, with a journalism and psychology background, decided to pick-up poker from scratch as a way to learn how to deal with randomness in life and focus on what we can control. The poker part serves as the training platform and medium of investigation for the author, and even without knowing anything about poker, I found this participatory journalism highly entertaining and yet educational at the same time.

At the end of the book, the author said that she plan to continue with poker instead of ending it after completing the journalism project.
I wonder if this is the best use of one’s time and talent; poker is a zero-sum game and contributes even less to the world than finance, which also moves things around but at leas can claim to increase market efficiency.
As a research scientist and product engineer, I would much prefer to be able to create things and solve problems, with even more opportunities (and necessities) to deal with external randomness and internal control.

This is a fascinating collection of short articles about how people build and interact with our environments. Initially I wondered why the book used illustrations instead of photographs, but as I read on I realized that this choice better fits with the design of the book, set in beautiful yellow-black color scheme and typography.

This is a social media post to force myself to wrap-up all these books that I am half-way through. Complete by the year end: the 99% invisible city; seven nights; elemental magic; trees, maps, and theorems. https://t.co/0tK1mnrJz6

— Li-Yi Wei (@liyiwei) December 26, 2020

A Facebook friend nominated me to a 7-day book challenge.
I took it but without nominating the next person so that I would not offend or spam anyone.

I am glad that I could include a diverse set of topics (computer science, finance, sci-fi, physics, history, math, art) without any serious technical/textbooks.

This quote describes me quite well, at least the first part. 🙂

Highly recommend; whether you like his methodology can reflect what kind of person you are. I suspect his people are either very rational or have tools to help control emotions.