text: ## Thursday, December 13, 2012
  
  ### Waiting for NumPy Cookbook
  
  Also this year the Packt Publishing gives me the opportunity to review an interesting book about scientific computing in Python. The last year I had the pleasure to review Numpy 1.5 Beginner's Guide from Ivan Idris and I was surprised about the number of code examples and the straightforward approach to the explanation of the topics. Now I am waiting for Numpy Cookbook, which is from the same author and I can't wait to write the review. Stay tuned ;)
  
  ## Thursday, December 6, 2012
  
  ### 3D stem plot
  
  A two-dimensional stem plot displays data as lines extending from a baseline along the x axis. In the following snippet we will see how to make a three-dimensional stem plot using the mplot3d toolkit. In this case we have that data is displayed as lines extending from the x-y plane along the z direction.Let's go with the code:
  from numpy import linspace, sin, cos
  from pylab import figure, show
  from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
  
  # generating some data
  x = linspace(-10,10,100);
  y = sin(x);
  z = cos(x);
  
  fig = figure()
  
  ax = Axes3D(fig)
  
  # plotting the stems
  for i in range(len(x)):
  ax.plot([x[i], x[i]], [y[i], y[i]], [0, z[i]],
  '--', linewidth=2, color='b', alpha=.5)
  
  # plotting a circle on the top of each stem
  ax.plot(x, y, z, 'o', markersize=8,
  markerfacecolor='none', color='b',label='ib')
  
  ax.set_xlabel('x')
  ax.set_ylabel('y')
  ax.set_zlabel('z')
  
  show()
  And this is the result