New Favorite Place

Another interesting change in American to British way of life is the numbering of floors. More measurements here are recorded under the metric system, so it would also make sense that number their floors starting with 0.

That's right, a zero-based numbering system in common life. So therefore the first floor here would be known as the second floor in the states.

Upon discovering this fact, I also discovered my new favorite place at Kingston University. It is the second floor of the library.

Why the library?

Because the second floor is the Science and Technology portion of the library. It literally has the largest section of Computer Science books over web design, artificial intelligence, parallel algorithms, data structures, computational mathematics, and more.

If I had to guess the number of books that relate to the realm of computation it would have to be in the thousands. With the majority of the books available to check out for an entire month and the newest editions able to check out for a week.

As a result of the wealth of knowledge, I now have checked out "AI for Game Developers", "Linear Algebra and its Applications", "Algorithms in Java, Graph Algorithms", "Discovering Wavelets", "Object-Oriented PHP", and "The Big Bang". All free, and I have them for a month...

I've always been interested in game development and AI. Not really as a career purpose but more of to understand the mathematical basis behind everyday games. That is why I chose to get AI for Game Developers, so it may give me an introduction to the topic.

Another intriguing book is Discovering Wavelets. Wavelets are very advanced mathematics which combines calculus, linear algebra, and discrete mathematics. Its main purpose is to analyze fingerprints and other image related material. For example, using wavelets it would be possible to pass an image of an airport and have the computer program highlight all of the airplanes automatically. Alternatively, image recognition would also give the ability to break CAPTCHAs. For those who don't know a CAPTCHA is an image on a website that has text which prompts the user to input so that a computer may not fill out the form, it requires an actual human. Since I don't know linear algebra, that is why I picked up the Linear Algebra and its Applications book.

The Object-Oriented PHP is to give me some ideas to better create the site into an expandable basis. Right now the coding for this isn't my best, and it was mainly just put together so I was able to post a blog. I'm hoping to change that soon :).

And finally, the Big Bang book is, obviously, over the theory of The Big Bang. Since my evolution class last semester I have often scoffed at the notion that matter just combined and then "created" the universe. Often times denying something is true is accompanied by ignorance. So for me to have a solid faith and understanding, I figured I'd do some research on the subject.


Thank you for the knowledge Kingston!