ode to new textbooks

so my advisor is teaching a class this semester out of this book (an introduction to bioinformatics algorithms).

besides some programming, which i did yesterday, our homework was to read chapters 1 & 2 by monday, chapter 3 optional.

the book gets credit for humor points. chapter 1 is all of 5 pages and serves as an intro story of why the book might potentially be interesting.

chapter 2 is "computer science notions" for bio people -- i.e. stuff i learned much more in depth as an undergrad computer science major, but at least humorously put.
my favorite quote from that chapter was the following footnote:
"Fibonacci faced the challenge of adequately formulating the problem he was studying, one of the more difficult parts of bioinformatics research. The Fibonacci view of rabbit life is overly simplistic and inadequate: in particular, rabbits never die in his model. As a result, after just a few generations, the number of rabbits will be larger than the number of atoms in the universe."
(heh)

now, chapter 3 is entitled "molecular biology primer". as i read the first page, i am 100% confident that any biology person would laugh their way through it as the "baby version" of things, as i did with the CS chapter.

indeed, the first serious sentence of the chapter reads, "Biology at the microscopic level began in 1665 when a maverick and virtuoso performer of public animal dissections, Robert Hooke, discovered that organisms are composed of individual compartments called cells."

but hey, it's a math algorithms class, and learn algorithms with outside-of-math applications we shall... in the meantime, even if it is just the "baby version" it's kinda fun to read some non-math for a class for the first time in years, and still have it related to my work.

i wonder if it's possible to write chapters 2 and 3 at a deeper level and not loose half your audience... i'm guessing the bio people really would get scrambled with a more hardcore intro to CS, and i'm guessing that, having not studied bio since 10th grade, i wouldn't do well with a deeper treatment of molecular bio on the spot either. bioinformatics is a mystery to me as it's a synthesis of two fields that i don't normally picture as hand in hand -- i know it's out there, but most of the CS people i know aren't as into bio/chem/physics, and most bio/chem people i know aren't as in to math/CS (although there are notable exceptions to the rule).

summary:
(1) while i'm in the "baby chapters" it's a humorous read for a graduate class
(2) it'll be an interesting semester branching out a little from the purely abstract algorithms i normally consider... instead of just counting permutations, we'll be playing with virtual DNA, or something of that sort... go figure.

the end.