My Bookshelf
admin | January 22, 2007On the basis that you can learn a lot about someone from their bookshelf I thought to myself: why not put together a couple of annotated photo’s of my bookshelf to share with anyone who cares to look?
So from the top shelf…
- The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and the Places that Scare You both gifts from my mother, both books that I’ve been meaning to read but never got around to it.
- The Path to Enlightenment by Geshe Loden. Given to me by Geshe Loden. It and the previous two Buddhist texts are kept on the top shelf out of respect.
- The sheet music I’ve gotten around to bringing down from sydney: Half cello, half guitar. My piano music and complete works of The Beatles are still in sydney because I don’t have a piano (which is, incidentally, driving me crazy).
- A whole bunch of diet books because I’m great at reading diet books and useless at following them.
- The Coming Plague a really cool book which chronicles the worst diseases in recent human history and how they came about.
- Biological Psychology. A very cool textbook which talks about the neurological side of psychology.
- Clinical Medicine. A medical textbook I devoured a couple of years ago when I wanted to study medicine.
- My Harry Potter books in French. I’ve only read the first one the whole way through. I need to brush up on my french a little bit and get back to reading them. Its a good mental exercise.
- Suicide Girls. Birthday present from Colin.
- My uni textbooks
Obviously there are other books on the shelf but if you want to stickybeak further you’ll just have to look at the larger photo and figure out what they are 
Ha! I don’t think that this is a true representation of who you are… Your bookshelf is never that tidy normally!
Have you seen these podcasts?
Under the science category at the following URL there is an MIT joint lecture/conferance on robotics and fMRI brain imaging. One of the speakers is the founder of irobot, I can’t remember his name. Probably because I am artificial neural network orientated, and roboticists (until more recently) have been predominantly procedural programing orientated.
http://www.wgbh.org/forum/
Also there are some biology of neuro science related mp3 lectures sub categorised under cog sci or general psychology at Berkley and Harvard Universities. I found them at lecturefox, a listing of Public Domain lectures.
I think the cross faculty faculty is the most interesting.
Below are the URLs specifically.
My internet connection was terrible yesturday, and I was having trouble resolving them, as I had not bookmarked them properly.
Transrobotism (Human-Robot Bonds)
Rodney Brooks, cofounder, iRobot Corporation
Joy Hirsch, director, fMRI Research Center, Columbia University
Sherry Turkle, director, MIT Initiative on Technology & Self
Peter Galison, professor, history of science, Harvard
David Rodowick, professor, environmental studies, Harvard
Pia Lindman, artist in residence, MIT AI lab
http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3413
http://www.lecturefox.com/mix/
I mention these things in the context of your book shelf, as I guess they are vaguely related in that they might both regard some sort of pursuit of knowledge.