Books for Spring 2009

Sat, Mar 21, 2009

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley : Re-reading but not from any paradise-engineering paranoia perspective. Simply insightful, focused and a great style. First covered this in high school decades ago. It’s ironic and deviously cool that this was actually course mandated at my high school ! (Have yet to finish Island.)
Pugetopolis – Knute Berger : The Seattle analog of Palahniuk’s A Walk in Portland, Oregon.
Useful because apparently Seattle is one of America’s most difficult cities to grok.
Aesthetic Computing (MIT Press) – Paul A. Fishwick :
“… key scholars and practitioners from art, design, computer science, and mathematics lay the foundations for a discipline that applies the theory and practice of art to computing. Aesthetic computing explores the way art and aesthetics can play a role in different areas of computer science. One of its goals is to modify computer science by the application of the wide range of definitions and categories normally associated with making art. …”
In the domain of Gabriel’s Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community (scroll down after link).

Maypole dancing circa 1950, somewhere in America