Modeling Reality

Happy new year everyone!
My first 2005 post is about something that I hold very dear, a computer science book titled “Modeling Reality“.
I’ve seen pretty much all phases of its building happening at about 1 mt from me: following the geek couple pattern by the book, she spent her evenings on her laptop at her side of the bed while I dug Gartner reports on web services and similar activities on mine. Ah forgot to mention: the book is the English version of the title Modelowanie Rzeczywistości, written by my girlfriend and her father from a cycle of lectures.
I haven’t exactly read the book from cover to cover, though I recall various passionate discussions with the authors: the topics are very interesting (graph theory, social networks, statistical linguistics, evergreen fractals, chaotic systems, game theory, etc etc etc), and they are explained in a very straightforward fashion. What is really remarkable, though, is the accompanying CDROM with the software collection that was written in order to experience the concepts in the book: there is a Maldebrot explorer based on DirectX9 which delivers astounding performances, allowing zoom-in practically in real time. I haven’t managed to talk her into writing things in managed code (I even bought her a copy of Visual Studio .NET some Christmas ago, playing havoc with the traditionalist mindsets in my family since it’s not considered a suitable present for a girl :-)), she was really an old fashion C++ developer…
Curious fact: the cover image was modeled and rendered with POVray, and the high resolution version took to her machine (a modern P4 1.2 Gz with a respectable 512 Mb RAM) something like a night and a day to render!