If you thought Dungeons and Desktops sounded interesting . . .

The big news in our office this week was an unexpected award given to one of our books.

The award? The Diagram Prize for oddest title of the year. Established in 1978 “as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair,” and maintained by Bookseller.com.

The title? Crocheting Adventures in Hyperbolic Planes

When we first heard about the nomination, we couldn’t decide whether we were supposed to be excited. But it turns out winning was exciting: we got calls from the Associated Press and the award has drawn attention to the book from newspapers and blogs all over the country.

And while the award itself may be goofy, it represents something serious: that freedom of the press, of expression, and of creativity is thriving and that wild books can get published. Horace Bent, custodian of the award, said:

[Given the economic downturn,] I feared for the future of this most prestigious of literary awards. Surely oddly-titled books would suffer in a climate that was prompting publishers to focus on more bankable works. . . . But I am delighted that I was being overly pessimistic and that oddly-titled books proved recession-resistant.

Recession or no, the publishing industry has turned out some truly incredible books, including these other winners and nominees (highlights listed at Bookstove):

• Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter
• All Dogs Have ADHD
• Bombproof Your Horse
• Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw
• Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers
• Highlights in the History of Concrete
• How to Avoid Huge Ships
• Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings
• People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
• Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
• Reusing Old Graves
• The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais
• The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today
• The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
• Versailles: The View From Sweden
• What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua?

First Business Trip

What I learned on my first business trip (working at a booth at SIGCSE):

1. A K Peters holds a small but prestigious niche in the world of computer science publishing: we have some of the best and most advanced reference books available on graphics and games.
2. Even though Miss Gill, one of my all-time favorite teachers (2^nd grade) was from Wisconsin, Milwaukee is not a particularly magical place.
3. In the early days of computers, the focus was developing hardware, which was done by men, and all the software was written by very bright women (who were doing “just typing stuff”; see, e.g., the famous Ada Lovelace, the ENIAC programmers, etc.). So women in computer science are mystified as to why there aren’t more females in programming. They didn’t buy my “stop making first-person shooter games and make more Tetris” solution.
4. If your flight gets canceled, it’s OK. You can get another one.
5. The people with Jones and Bartlett (there sharing their computer textbooks), ETS (there to advertise AP tests), and Franklin, Beedle, & Associates (there showing computer languages books) are very kind. They all helped me a lot.
6. In the ancient world, among the Jews women wore eye makeup, but among the Romans the men wore eye makeup (courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum very impressive Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit).
7. I prefer models of live triceratops to models of mauled triceratops (also courtesy of the Milwaukee Public Museum).
8. Computer people have strange tastes. They bought Practical Linear Algebra but not Dungeons and Desktops.
   

And, most importantly, even though it was helpful for this particular weekend, I learned why you should not stay in a fancy hotel

1. You get the opportunity to pay for a nice sit-down breakfast instead of grabbing a muffin and ice water from the continental breakfast spread
2. You get to stare through the locked doors of the reservations-only indoor waterpark instead of swimming in the unheated pool
3. You can choose from among a wide array of 5 channels all showing news on a large flatscreen instead of watching old Star Trek reruns on an old tilting TV set
4. You get to tip people for doing things like getting you a cab, instead of getting a cab yourself

Fluid Simulation

This evening I went with my coworkers to a lecture at the Boston Museum of Science given by Doug Roble, editor of A K Peters’ JGT.

Don’t worry: this was much more lively than it sounds.

Doug Roble has won two Scientific and Technical Academy Awards for his work with Digital Domain, which does CG effects for movies.

He’s got a PhD in computers and has developed all sorts of software—this is one smart guy. But rather than abstract and complex his presentation (which focused on fluid simulation) was clear, engaging, and hilarious.

The basic facts I came away with:

In the eighteenth century Leonhard Euler developed equations to describe the motion of moving water, which we now use to help us generate computer models of water. CG water is much cooler (though less thirst-quenching) than real water because it can do things (like pile up or form shapes) that you could never do with real water, even in a model. Even if you just want a regular flood, it’s often better to use CG water because sets with water can be no smaller than 1/3 scale of actual before it looks cheesy. Artists can make things look like water, but they can’t make it move like water, and vice versa for computer engineers, so the two team up.

Doug took us through a series of movies: from Dante’s Peak, which used a 680,000-gallon tank of water to model a flood (the biggest—and last—dump tank in film history); to Lord of the Rings, where the Ford of Rivendell used his fluid simulator to flush out the black riders; to The Day after Tomorrow, where his fluid simulator created the director’s impossible vision of a plough-shaped wall of water hurtling through New York; to Pirates of the Caribbean, where his fluid simulator sent the ship over the edge of the world while a smoothed particle hydrodynamics function sent mist swirling up to greet it; to 2012, where his fluid simulator created wave, fire, smoke, and dust effects and tossed his own company into the ocean with the rest of LA; to Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, where the latest in fluid simulation created both the hydra’s flames and the towering wall of water Percy used to fight them.

Of course the modeling was even more interesting because those are all movies I love, partly because they shamelessly, as Doug said, “throw reality to the winds and make something really cool.” My favorite moment of the night: Speaking of the destruction of LA in 2012, an incredible scene in a really silly movie: “If only we worked on better movies . . . but can you a imagine a good movie with that scene in it?”

First Day

Just completed my first day as an editorial assistant at A K Peters. It was a good day with good people, and I think I’m going to learn a lot here. I expect to get good experience with the entire publishing process and gain a broad perspective of editing. I also expect I'll learn a lot more discipline doing the nitty gritty hands-on of editing.

The day started with 3 meetings:

1. Editorial meeting, where we discussed all the projects currently in editing and made assignments. I was assigned to my first three projects.
2. Company meeting, where every department discussed status updates on their work. Because the company is so small, I got to hear from acquisitions, production, design, marketing, and sales, which was fascinating. I’m looking forward to learning through experience about every stage of publishing.
3. Covers meeting, where we discussed some cover possibilities for a new publication. No surprise, this was much more subdued than the Candlewick covers meeting I attended.

I spent most of the rest of the day starting to learn LaTex (“tech”), the math-oriented typesetting program we use, which involves quite a bit of coding. It will take some work, but I think I’ll really like having so much direct control over the text, as I did while editing in WordPerfect for a professor years ago.

Camber and I celebrated the day with dinner at Not Your Average Joe’s where we had a delicious dinner that made up for the terrible one she had at Joe’s American Food during her first week at A K Peters.

First Real* Job!

I just accepted my first real job, to start January 4. Hooray!

I'll be working as an editor with A K Peters, a small publisher of college textbooks. They publish a lot of mathematics and physics books and are the leading publisher of computer game designing books. Don't worry: I don't have to check the math. Scholars do that. So you can all rest assured that none of your computer games will start spouting staticky Shakespeare anytime soon.

I am really excited about the job. In a numbered list, here's why:

1. It's in Natick. I get to stay in Boston!
2. It will be an editing position! What could be better?
3. I like everyone in the company. (It's quite small.) They are some of the nicest people I've met.
   
4. Because the company is small, I'll get to have a broad range of experience. When I was choosing a major a zillion years ago (that's an exact mathematical quantity) two specific things tipped the scale in my choice to go into English and editing. One was the day I spent job shadowing the editor of a radiology journal. She was working at a very small company where she got to work with manuscripts at all stages of publication. Her work sounded fantastic. And she had a very cool pantsuit. Ever since I've been hoping for a similar sort of opportunity: to lend my writing expertise to those who are experts in their subject matter, and to get to be involved in all parts of a project.

So I'm having a very merry Christmas looking forward to a working new year.

*By "real" job I mean no offense to any of my previous jobs, which have turned out to be really good experience (even if they didn't seem like it at the time) but really short term and really not a real career. Dion's, nannying, Sandia internships, research assistant, teaching assistant, data enterer, freelance editor, Friend intern, teacher. And of course all the really good experiences (too many to list) that were really valuable and that really didn't pay me so they didn't count as real careers either.