Book Review: His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

I've had His Majesty's Dragon, the first of the Temeraire series, by Naomi Novik on my to-read list for quite some time. Having dragons in the Napoleonic wars sounded like an excellent plot point: fantasy combined with history. After being reminded about the series by a colleague at work, I decided to go ahead and read it and find out what it was all about.

Read on for my full review.

Book Review: Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Hyperion by Dan Simmons is a Hugo Award-winning novel that has been on my radar for quite some time. It was described to me as Geoffery Chaucer's Cantenbury Tales in Space and it certainly has similar elements to it. The story revolves around a band of 7 pilgrims as they travel on the world of Hyperion in the brink of war. Each has their own personal motives and one of them is a traitor, but all were selected for this special pilgrimage. They resort to telling their stories to each other to figure out why they are here and what makes them, and Hyperion, special.

Read on for my full review.

Data Science: Republican & Democratic Conventions

In the past few weeks, the two major political parties in the United States of America held their national conventions. While I couldn't listen to all the speeches, I followed the news and paid attention to the overall scene. After they were done, I decided to grab the speeches of the major speakers and see if I could find any obvious trends in their word choices, similar to what I did with my Twitter project. In this blog post, I'll discuss what I can see in the data. You can find my data and all my scripts at this GitHub repo.