OT: excellent book on information theory

[Tim Peters]

[Paul Rubin]
...
>>     David J.C. MacKay
>>     Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms
>>
>>     Full text online:
>>     http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/
...
>> The printed version is somewhat expensive, but according to the
>> following analysis it's a better bargain than "Harry Potter and the
>> Philosopher's Stone":
>>
>> http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/Potter.html

[Grant Edwards]
> That made me smile on a Monday morning (not an insignificant
> accomplishment).  I noticed in the one footnote that the H.P.
> book had been "translated into American".  I've always wondered
> about that.  I noticed several spots in the H.P. books where
> the dialog seemed "wrong": the kids were using American rather
> than British English.  I thought it rather jarring.

You should enjoy:

   http://www.hp-lexicon.org/about/books/differences.html

and especially the links near the bottom to try-to-be-exhaustive
listings of all differences between the Bloomsbury (UK) and Scholastic
(US) editions.  More "Britishisms" are surviving in the Scholastic
editions as the series goes on, but as the list for Half-Blood Prince
shows the editors still make an amazing number of seemingly pointless
changes:

   http://www.hp-lexicon.org/about/books/hbp/differences-hbp.html

like:

   UK:    Harry smiled vaguely back
   US:    Harry smiled back vaguely

Non-English translations have real challenges, and because this series
is more popular than the Python Reference Manual these days, there's a
lot of fascinating info to be found.  For example, I think the
Japanese translator deserves a Major Award for their heroic attempt to
translate Ron's "Uranus" pun:

   http://www.cjvlang.com/Hpotter/wordplay/uranus.html