What I'm reading

I thought it might be nice to keep track of things I'm reading. I'm compulsive about a lot of things, one of which is archiving my life for fear of forgetting. This fear was recently reinforced by the crash of my computer's hard drive. Thankfully, I had backed up a few days earlier. Unfortunately, I'd mistaken the structure of my data, and while I thought I'd backed up everything, I'd in fact not included photos from the last 2 months and various other things. Also, my mac's hard drive was partitioned into a smaller windows hard drive, and I lost everything on my windows side. Nathan and I went out the next day and bought two external hard drives, and I've now cloned my hard drive. Let's hope that keeps my fear/stress demons at bay.

But the point of this post is books:

Palmer, S.E.(1999), Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology, MIT Press. I'm reading this book because I'm teaching with Steve Palmer this semester. In order to get my tuition and fees paid for by the school, Berkeley requires that a graduate student either be hired as a GSI (graduate student instructor) or GSR (graduate student research). If you or your advisor has funding, then GSR is the way to go. Unfortunately, my advisor, Bill Prinzmetal, and I are severly lacking in monetary bulk as of late. Therefore, I've been teaching as a GSI for the past 2, and now 3, semesters. Anyway, it's a pretty good book. Steve is a world famous vision researcher, so it's really an honor to get to teach with him and whatnot. But it's also a pain in the ass to be a GSI and take classes of your own and try to run research and try to keep your RA busy with research and try to make time with your husband and try to not have a panic attack. But, that's a day in the life of a graduate student.

Huettel, S.A., Song, A.W., McCarthy, G. (2004). Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Sinauer. This book is for a class I'm taking on fMRI from Mark D'Esposito. I learned how to run EEG over the summer, but the future of cognitive psychology involves neuroscience, so I'm bolstering my neuroscience chops by taking this class. Plus, it's a requirement if at some point I want to use one of Mark's scanners for a project. It's a good class, but jam packed with knowledge which is covered at a lightning pace (how I long for a medium pace). So I'm hoping reading the book at my own speed will complement my weekly mental barage of info.

Luck, S.J. (2005). An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique, MIT Press. I'd intended to read this book over the summer while I was learning EEG. I started out strong, but didn't get anywhere near the finish. So, I'm trying to plug on through.

"The Red Wyvern" by Katharine Kerr. This I'm reading entirely for enjoyment. Usually, I'll get through a couple pages a day when waiting for the bus or a class to start. It's part of a cheesy (but delicious) fantasy series that I've read a couple of times in the past, complete with magic, elves, dragons, and geeks (when you count the readers). I'm hoping the author finishes the series soon, because it's already something like 11 books. When I finish this, I think I'm going to re-read Harry Potter again. I re-read of the Ender's Game books over the summer, which are also great, more sci-fi than fantasy.