2008-06-05 “Loaned soul”, IBB

by Vasil Kolev

I went to the presentation of “Loaned soul” by Tisho – it was nice, especially the reading of a part of the book (I also met a lot of people, who I hadn’t seen in a long time). I bought the book and I’m reading it now…
The Bulgarian authors have one specific style of story-telling, I have the feeling that it comes from the language. Tisho hasn’t ran away from it, but he’s readable and not overblown (even Georgi Markov can be seen in that style (although he’s incredible), except in the “Reports”, maybe just Ivan Popov was able to write in a completely different style). The book is nice (at least the part I’ve read), I just have this bad feeling that in a book so short such a story can’t be developed, I hope I’m wrong :)
(A request from the crocodile to the Bulgarian authors: “Please write more, I don’t want the book to be over shortly after I start it…”)

At IBB Guninski gave us a pretty interesting problem (which brought a few hours of fun calculations to me, chervarium and Stefan) – there’s a system of N equations with K variables (N>k), find a solution that is workable for the maximal number of equations. It mostly falls to finding the biggest K groups of linearly-dependent equations, but that looks like a NP-complete problem.
(or at least it seems like this to us, does anyone have a better idea? :) )
That wasn’t the only fun thing, I met a friend I haven’t seen in 4-5 years (there was a minute when we were looking at each other and were wondering if we know the other person), the usual stuff was spoken, and Mariela brought me the Diablo Swing Orchestra CD.

The big project is starting to materialize in the distance. We’ve designed the database, then today decided to change it, but I hope to have that done until the end of the week and to start coding, so we would have something to play with.

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