2008 in Books

Books

The following is a list of all the books I read in 2008. They are listed chronologically by completion. I’m collecting better data for 2009, but for now I only have the titles and authors.

  • Decoding the Universe, Charles Seife
  • Postsingular, Rudy Rucker
  • I’m Just Here for the Food, Alton Brown
  • Blankets, Craig Thompson
  • The Constant Gardener, John le Carre
  • A Cook’s Tour, Anthony Bourdain
  • The Practice of Programming, Brain Kernighan and Rob Pike
  • Glut, Alex Wright
  • Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge
  • Deep Economy, Bill McKibben
  • Mistress of the Art of Death, Ariana Franklin
  • Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson
  • Oath of Fealty, Larry Niven and Jack Pournelle
  • Farewell my Subaru, Doug Fine
  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
  • Suburban Nation, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
  • Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks
  • The Architecture of Happiness, Alan de Botton
  • Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins
  • Player of Games, Iain M. Banks
  • The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson
  • Black Hole, Charles Burns
  • Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, eds.
  • Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
  • Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
  • The Most Beautiful House in the World, Witold Rybczynski
  • Saturn’s Children, Charles Stross
  • WorldChanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century, Alex Steffen ed.
  • A Place of My Own, Michael Pollan
  • The Poisonwod Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Edifice Complex, Deyan Sudjic
  • Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks
  • Anathem, Neal Stephenson
  • The Option of Urbanism, Christopher Leinberger
  • The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri, David Bajo
  • The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross
  • The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie
  • Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Live of a Critic in Discuise, Ruth Reichl
  • The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought the Down, Colin Woodard

2008 in Places

Travel, ,

Just like last year. I spent at least one night in each of the cities listed, and I visited cities with a * multiple times on non-consecutive days. The list is roughly chronological, but it’s entirely from memory.

  • Omaha, NE*
  • Ithaca, NY*
  • Fairfax, VA*
  • Vancouver, BC, Canada
  • Niagara Falls, ON, Canada
  • Toronto, ON, Canada
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • New York, NY
  • Memphis, TN

Dragon Day 2008

Cornell, ,

Dragon
I encountered a Cornell tradition today. The Friday before spring break is “Dragon Day”. Freshmen from the College of Architecture design and build a dragon, which they parade around and burn. It’s quite a spectacle.  Apparently there used to be rivalry between the architecture and engineering students, so the engineers build a phoenix every year to compete with the dragon. Dragon and Phoenix The event dates back to the early 1900s, and there are some pretty neat pictures on the Wikipedia page  The Inferno 

Trials and Tribulations of Research

Cornell, CS, , ,

We decided not to submit our research paper again (the deadline is Friday). We’ve got a few useful results, but they don’t cohere well, and none of us think that they would make a good conference paper. I think we’re all getting kind of sick of this particular topic, and the best thing may just be to move on. It’s too bad, but I guess that’s how research goes. We are planning on submitting a few of the results to a games oriented conference – it won’t carry as much weight research wise, but at least we will have something to show for ourselves.

Good News

Cornell, CS,

Our demo paper got accepted to SIGMOD, the largest database conference. A demonstration paper is a three page description of a system that you then demonstrate at the conference. It’s not as big a deal as a research paper, which is longer and contains more original (and generally theoretical) work, but it’s still great that we got in.