Upon reflection

One would think that 3 women with college degrees could hang 4 mirrors on a wall. And they could . . . after 2 hours and no thanks to my input.

As usual, I’d gotten a ridiculous and ambitious idea: this one was that we ought to decorate our living room using some square mirrors I’d found lying around the house.

But we didn’t want them in any boring pattern. Only something exciting would do. Our solution? A diamond shape.

I’m usually more of an eyeballer sort of person, but I wanted this to be exact, so I was in there with a tape measure and a broom handle for a straightedge and a notepad and calculator for dimensions and distances and a glass of water acting as a rudimentary level. Disaster waiting to happen.

My housemates came in, took one look at the mess, and took over. Simple solution: tie a nail to a thread and use it as a level, pencil in where the mirrors will go, check for accuracy, and mount mirrors to the wall.

We felt quite triumphant about our success—nearly as proud as the day the 4 of us managed to hoist our futon over a wall and burst into spontaneous cheering when we succeeded. I think the mirrors look quite professional, and they brighten the room, but best of all is when Skippyjon Jones comes to visit and looks in the mirror to see, not a Siamese Cat, but a 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?”

Atul Gawande

I've spent the weekend at ALA, which has been fabulous. This morning I went to Atul Gawande's sunrise presentation (fortunately not exactly at sunrise).

I first encountered Gawande's work two years ago when I read Complications, which gave me lots to think about and, in concert with some of my rhetoric readings, changed my ideas about human logic, reason, and intuition.

Today he talked about his latest book, The Checklist Manifesto. Here's the short version of his fascinating presentation: About half of deaths that occur in surgery are preventable. He was on a WHO committee looking for ways to prevent those preventable deaths, and they thought of airpline flights, which like surgery are extremely complicated procedures but that nearly always work. So he went to the Boeing Checklist Factory (he said the Boeing guys didn't like it when he called them that) and asked them to train him in the art of checklisting. Then he made a checklist for surgery that included things like have an extra bag of blood around and some antibiotics and also things like make sure everyone in the room knows everyone else's name and also knows why you're doing the surgery. Then they sent the checklist to a bunch of pilot hospitals around the world, from the best research hospitals to struggling refugee hospitals.

At first everyone looked at the list and said, We already do all this. But it turns out that when they measured it, even though everyone meant to do all those steps every time, 2 out of 3 times they forgot a step. So the checklist made a big difference, and they saw a huge reduction in the number of complications. So at the end of the study he asked the doctors, Are you all going to keep using the checklist? Only 80% said yes--the others said it was a waste of time. But 93% of them said they would want someone doing surgery on them to use a checklist.

So, Gawande said, Why is that if we had a medicine that would drastically decrease fatalities everyone would prescribe it, but when we have a piece of paper that does exactly the same thing, not everyone is willing to use it?

He theorized that the problem is our idea of being experts and heroes. We think heroes act all by themselves, like superman. But in real life, they have to work in concert with other people, especially as we face increasingly complex problems. So he said the checklist itself is merely a representation of a set of values, chief among which is humility: recognition that we are fallible humans and even our experts need checking. He said the checklist also embodies ambition: the hope that we really can combat extremely complicated problems like diseases and that we really can strive for perfection every time.

The presentation reminded me very much of Paul Woodruff's excellent book Reverence. The basic premise is that, ironically, when people begin thinking they are gods, they begin acting like beasts. Instead, people are at their best when they have a sense of reverence: a glimpse of being part of something larger than themselves.

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.

Presses Large and Small

Last week my roommate Camber (also an editor) and I walked all over Manhattan looking at publishing houses. Well, peering in the front windows really. We set out to find Simon & Schuster, Random House, and HarperCollins, and along the way also saw a number of the non-trade publishers—Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and half a dozen news corporations, and walked past the so-influential New York Public Library. I knew publishing was all in New York (which had the historical good fortune of a great harbor that gave quick access to book shipments from England), but I had no idea they were so close together. We gazed at the impressive book display in the lobby at Random House and for lunch chose a café with windows that looked directly onto HarperCollins.

Last week I glimpsed this most impressive collection of corporate trade publishing; yesterday I stopped in at the Harvard Book Store (no affiliation with Harvard except proximity, I’m told) to admire their brand new Paige M. Gutenborg: a print on demand machine that Jason Epstein predicts will be the future face of book publishing. This enhanced laser printer prints from electronic files (at this point mostly scanned books on GoogleBooks) and wraps them up in a quick perfectbind to create your paperback in a matter of minutes. I watched one print job go through the process and paged through some others on display. The binding is sure to fall apart as any cheap paperback will, and the print quality varied widely, depending on the quality of the electronic file, from very fuzzy to nearly indistinguishable from offset. This emerging technology is the book equivalent of an iPod: instead of choosing from among the CDs offered at your local music store or ordering one you especially like, you can choose the music you like most, even songs performed by groups who sing to such niche markets it wouldn’t be profitable to print CDs, and download it immediately. The technology is going to take some refining, but I won’t be surprised to see many more of these sorts of printers rising to supplement the large print runs of books coming out of the New York houses.