Advent calendar, day 1

Sooooo I still have to show you this year's "big" advent calendar! Stylishly, it's all in black. (It makes a nice contrast with my bright yellow carpet. LOL)



Look what I received today!



Apparently, the nice person responsible for my calendar has recently toured East Asia, and the items I received today reflect that. There's Japanese cookies with... cocoa and green tea? (I can only judge by the picture; I can't actually read the package.) And also, there's a lovely notebook that she wrote she picked up in a small shop in Korea. It's A6 size, bound in dark blue linen with sparkly gold and silver celestial bodies (yay sparkle!!!) and the paper actually looks to be suitable for fountain pen... I haven't actually written anything in there yet but I'm looking forward to it!

Also in the picture: a pad of black watercolor paper I received from my boyfriend. YAY.

Divination algorithm <3

So, this is basically... a math-y reading recommendation? Prompted by something mostly unrelated in a Discord chat that reminded me of all the ways divination and computer modelling can interconnect. (And not just in the way I use runes and tarot cards for math-y brainstorming; that's not divination at all.) Anyway. One of my favorite publications in recent years is this one:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7387702
It's called "I-Ching Divination Evolutionary Algorithm and its Convergence Analysis" and it's a perfectly serious paper, and one that I want to cite in my own work very badly; I just can't find a justification (yet) for doing so. (The topic is close enough to what I work on, just this type of algorithm I've never implemented, nor will I do so in the foreseeable future. Too bad.) The authors developed their lovely algorithm based on the traditional Chinese divination system of I-Ching which I unfortunately don't know enough about to make any intelligent comments... Just: this is not only creative and fun, but actually good (from the algorithmic side of things).