Categories
Austria

Sonntag

So, last Sunday1 Alyssa and I ventured around the Ringstraße a bit. I’ve got a whole list of things to go see on the Ring, and we wanted to check a couple of them off.2
A historical note: the Ring was constructed under Emperor Franz Joseph II, following the lines of what used to be the city walls. As part of that construction, quite a few other notable buildings were put up, at a scale that makes me assume that Franz Joseph II had figured out the cheat codes for whichever version of Civilization it is that our world is running on.3
Now, without further ado, the pictures:

Categories
Austria

Zentralfriedhof

Austria,1 in case you’re not aware, has a bit of a reputation for being the center of music culture. There’s a reason it’s referred to as the Viennese School, after all. So it’s a bit understandable that I, being a music major, wound up doing my study abroad program here.
What does that have to do with the title?
Nothing, yet. See, the title is the name of the biggest cemetery in the city – it translates literally as “Central Cemetery.”
Now, one thing about the Great Composers of History is that they were… in history. As in, a long time ago. And since we have yet to invent a cure for death, they’re all. Well. Dead. What’s a music major to do if they want to see the greats?
You go to a cemetery, of course. And, being the camera-toting sort, you take pictures of some of the rather impressive graves.

Categories
Austria

Aquarium

I promised another post, and here it is. I’m hoping once we get down into the pictures1 you’ll see why I broke it into its own thing.
We went to the aquarium.
It wasn’t really a planned thing – we were trying to find a shop somewhere and got a bit lost, and when we were looking for distinctive landmarks the aquarium was the biggest thing we could see. It’s rather noticeable:2
Still of the Night
I’d previously mentioned the flak towers of Vienna, and even made a reference to the fact that one had been converted into an aquarium. This is the one.3 And I’ll say right now, before I get into actually showing you what all there was to see, that this is has become the absolute top of my “things to do in Vienna” list.4 Seriously, it’s an incredible aquarium/zoo, with a fascinating history and some stellar views. If you’re ever in Vienna, I cannot recommend it enough.
Now, pictures:

Categories
Austria

Romans

All three of our history/politics classes are now in session, the first of the other study abroad groups1 have arrived, and our weekly field trips around Vienna have begun – school is well and truly in session now, folks.
As an aside, the blog post for this week will arrive in two parts – this, the first, showing a bit of our academic exploration of Vienna, and the second will show up sometime soon. I had a lot of pictures from my own explorations this week, so it’s going to take me a while to get them all in order.
But now, on to the photos:

Categories
Austria

Schönbrunn

Once again, we’ve had quite a busy week. If I’m remembering the schedule properly,1 we’re now done with the ‘Conversation’ component of our Survival German classes and are moving into the Grammar unit. I’m excited – historically, I do better with a language by learning the grammatical structures than I do trying to memorize specific instances of those rules.
The other big thing we did this week was our district presentations – something that faithful readers have already seen a hint of. To be honest, there wasn’t much more to the presentations than what you can see in the aforelinked2 blog post, but for the presentations we had a more captive audience than anyone here reading is.
That said, once the weekend hit, we split up a bit: I know that there’s a group, as I write this, hopping on a bus back from Bratislava, and Paris, Sierra, and I headed over to Schönbrunn3 to explore the park.

Categories
Playlist

Playlist of the Month: August 2016

I really should’ve written this up over the weekend when I had more time, but oh well, here we are.
5AM – Amber Run
I Need My Girl – The National
Your Hand in Mine – Explosions in the Sky
Team (Lorde Cover) – Matthew Mayfield
Midnight – Lane 81
Smoke Filled Room (Acoustic) – Mako
SWORD – ΔUGUST
Home (Tim Palmer Mix) – Blue October
Jericho – Westerman
Thursday – LostBoyCrow
Lou Lou – Albin Lee Meldau
Sight – Sleeping At Last
Hearing – Sleeping At Last2
Let Me Go – Albin Lee Meldau
Touch – Sleeping At Last
All I Want – Kodaline
Half Light – BANNERS
Be Somebody – Kings of Leon
Withdrawn – White Morning
Big Jet Plane – Angus & Julia Stone
Atlas – Coldplay3
Ghosts – BANNERS
Shadow and a Dancer – The Fray
White Square (Demo) – Rebecca McDade
9 Crimes – Damien Rice
Wake the Dead – Nassau
 Remains (Bastille Vs. Rag N Bone Man Vs. Skunk Anansie) (Crossfaded Version) – Bastille4
When The World Sleeps – Lowland Hum
The Fault In Our Stars (MMXIV) – Troye Sivan
Fly Away For A Summer (Achtaban Remix) – FLAUSEN feat. Ben Cocks
I Love You (Quintet Version) – Woodkid
Control – Mountains Like Wax
Sunlight (Jody Wisternoff Remix) – Lane 8
Monster – Mumford & Sons5
Thinkin Bout You (Frank Ocean Cover) – Midnight Pool Party
Better Man (Feat. Peter Gregson & Iskra String Quartet) – FYFE
Shots Fired – House of Heroes
Kill V. Maim – Grimes
Kusanagi – ODESZA
Roma Fade – Andrew Bird
The Box – Damien Rice6
Running Up That Hill – Track & Field
Fever – Roosevelt
Live in This Moment – Kakou
Stop Us (Radio Edit) – SIYYU
Little Higher ft. Xavier Dunn – Terace
Ghost, Teacher, Girl, and I – White Violet7
Second Wind – White Violet
Since You’ve Gone (Original Mix) – Loframes feat. Anoraak
Postcards feat. Sam Island – Equal8
Folding Hills feat. Xavier Dunn – FØRD
Gold in the Dirt – DANAE
Stay High – One Room
Love’s Song – KIDS
Summer Heat – Solidisco
 Years & Years – King (Røse Summer Edit) – Røse
Outside – Tender
That’s Not Me – CONDITIONER
Something More – RALPH
All4You – The Palms
Find You – BAYNK
Golden Grave – Leo Islo
Don’t Panic – Coldplay
Antichrist – The 1975
The Attic | Demo – Rebecca McDade
Division – Tycho
Gods in Heat – Tobacco9
Mothers – Daughter


  1. I call these first five songs “the steadfast” in my head. 
  2. At least once a week throughout all of August I had a conversation with someone about how amazing Sleeping At Last is. 
  3. People dissing Coldplay is the number one cause of me saying “fight me” in public. 
  4. I haven’t typed this name in a while, I just copy/paste it out of iTunes. 
  5. Fun story: I’ve got a Mumford & Sons poster on my wall right now. Turns out my host family is full of people who like their music. 
  6. Now that I’m copying over links from previous posts, instead of just searching Amazon for them each time, you wind up with little blobs of songs like this. Mostly because, if I like it enough to link to it, I also like it enough to keep it in the next month’s playlist. 
  7. Even if I didn’t like this song I think I would’ve had to include just because the name is cool. 
  8. This one gets stuck in my head, but in a good way, y’know? 
  9. “Not the best thing to listen to with a hangover” – the friend I sent this to 
Categories
Education Travel

“Neural Audio,” or, “What I Did This Summer”

I’ve had a few people1 ask me what, exactly, I was doing all summer, off in Louisiana. As a programmer, being efficient is sort of the goal of everything I do; as such, doing a single write-up here and then sending that link to people makes more sense than answer the question over and over.2
I spent the summer working at a National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates at the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University.3 It’s a pretty cool setup they’ve got at the CCT4 – it’s not an academic unit, it’s a research group only. The building has all sorts of handy resources – all of us in the program had access to both a shared workspace for the REU students and our own individual workrooms, which varied depending on our project.5 The exciting new thing for me was the server room, which I had access to.6 There were a few machines of interest in there – HIVE, a cluster-in-progress that was devoted entirely towards art that required high-powered computation, and Titan, a machine designed for use with neural networks.
This is where I lead in to my specific research program, which wound up being titled “Neural Audio,” as above.7 The goal was basically an exploration of the use of deep neural networks for music information retrieval.
Whoops, went a bit jargon-heavy. Let’s break it down.

Deep Neural Networks

You may have heard about this one before – neural networks are the current big thing in artificial intelligence. Google uses them to power a lot of things, but the big one people have heard about is Google Photos, where deep neural networks provide the incredible search features.8 As you might guess from the name, they’re based off the structure of the human brain:9 a bunch of nodes, connected by weighted edges, which are the neurons and synapses of the artificial brain.10 Now, what’s cool about machine learning is the training: instead of sitting down and writing an algorithm to perform a task, you just build up a big data set of questions and their paired answers. Then you feed it into the system, and it learns11 how to answer the questions.
Of course, it’s not that open-ended- you can’t drop the works of Shakespeare in there and expect it to write a paper analyzing his writing style.12 They work best with categorization – you give them a set number of categories, and the network can tell you either which category something belongs to, or the percentage chance that thing falls into each category.13
Beyond that, there’s nothing fancy about neural networks – they’re just a software construct used to do a heck of a lot of math, the end result of which is an algorithm that no human could’ve designed. Cool stuff.

Music Information Retrieval

The field of MIR isn’t new, they’ve been around for a while doing cool things. It really does what it says on the tin: the idea is to be able to feed a piece of music into the software and receive useful information about the music out. Software that can recognize the key of a song being played or identify the speed at which the piece is being performed are good examples of this.14

Combining Them

My work was basically looking into combining these two fields. Machine learning can do some cool stuff, the idea went, so why not try applying it to music?
This took two forms: trying to identify the genre of a piece, and trying to identify the instruments playing in a piece.
It’s here that I’m going to hand off the explanation to another thing I was working on this summer, though as a test subject rather than a researcher: the digital poster. One of the other research groups at the CCT was working on a system to modernize the poster presentation, a staple of scientific conferences. I had the opportunity to be one of the trial-run students for the digital poster, and wound up putting together an online version as my way of wireframing what the final product would look like. Being me, I made my wireframe look just as good as the ‘official’ one, and wound up posting the whole thing online and providing a QR code on the paper poster15 that linked to the online site.

Wrap-Up

While the summer, and thus the time I had at LSU, came to an end, the work didn’t. I’m still16 trading emails with my mentor, and I’m hopefully going to be attending another conference at some point to talk about my work. In the interim, I hope to be able to get some additional work done, maybe get some more interesting data out of the machines. It’s a goal, and time will tell how well I’m able to accomplish it.
That’s about all I’m going to write here – if you want to know more, you can check out the digital poster, and if that doesn’t get you enough information, you can fire me an email, it’s grey (at) this site.17


  1. Reasonably 
  2. If I were teaching a computer science course, the first thing I’d say would be along the lines of “‘efficiency’ is just a codeword for ‘laziness that won’t get you fired.’” 
  3. Or “LSU CCT NSF REU” for out-of-order short. 
  4. I hope you read the last footnote, because I’m going to be using these short-forms of the names throughout. Efficiency! 
  5. One person had a few offices shared with graduate students working on the same program; another had a Mac lab to themselves; I was given the key to a media lab on another floor. 
  6. I found this oddly entertaining after I had to let one of the IT staff in there to reboot a server following a power failure. 
  7. I kept trying to make it “neural audio,” because I’m a millenial and thus hate capital letters, but I was overruled by my mentor. Probably for the best. 
  8. Seriously, the fact that I can search for someone’s name and have it accurately spit out a list of every photo I’ve taken with them in it is seriously impressive. The fact that I can ask for stuff like “mountain” or “car” and also get accurate results? Mind-blowing. 
  9. Though, it’s important to note that they’re not based off an accurate/current idea of how the human brain works; we’re computer scientists, not biologists. 
  10. The weighting of the edges is important, as that’s where all the magic happens. Each node, simplified down, is performing an averaging operation over all of its inputs. The output is then passed along the edges, and transformed by the weight of that edge, creating the new input for the next node. 
  11. Using a system called Stochastic Gradient Descent, which I find to be a very elegant solution the problem. (I recommend reading the previous footnote before this one.) Learning, via training goes like this: you feed the network an input, and the randomized initial weights do the processing and spit out an answer. That’s probably not the right answer, so the network will change the weights in a random ‘direction,’ and then try again. If it’s closer to the right answer, the network will change the weights in that direction again; if it was further away, it’ll try a different direction. The process of training is just repeating that operation over and over and over again. 
  12. Although, entertainingly, you can drop the entire works of Shakespeare into a neural network and have it make a spirited attempt at creating a new work in the style of Shakespeare. 
  13. That’s called softmax, and it’s pretty handy. I looked at using changing softmax results over time as a way of extracting metadata from music. 
  14. Entertainingly, some of the best examples of MIR arguably aren’t MIR at all: Gracenote, for example, the system that allows the ‘smart’ stereo systems in cars to figure out what CD you’ve just put in, is based on a ‘CD fingerprint’ that looks at the length of the tracks and when each one starts. It is possible, with a lot of effort, to design a CD that will show up as being something entirely different than it actually is. 
  15. We were all required to make traditional paper posters, regardless of our use of digital posters. 
  16. Infrequently, because time zones. 
  17. I’m not dumb enough to put my email address up on the open web, c’mon. I already get way too much spam email. 
Categories
Austria

Flakturm

I have done a lot of German class this week. Can the human brain overflow? I think mine is going to overflow.1 We also started our Regular Classes, which was pretty fun – we’ve got the Austrian Cultural History one that I believe I’ve mentioned previously2 and another one – Politics of European Integration – that I find fascinating. There’s been a lot of talk about what the European Union is and how it’s all structured.3 It’s very cool.
Basically, they’ve been keeping us very busy learning enough of the language to (hopefully) survive. I think it’s been a bit of a success – Paris and I managed to successfully order food at a restaurant today, and what more do you really need?4
That doesn’t mean I haven’t had a chance to get out a little bit; yesterday, Alyssa walked down the street and yelled at me to go outside, and we wound up going by the big park right by where we live. And today, she and I went up and made a spirited attempt to walk around the Ringstraße5 that ended up with us wandering around the Kunsthistorisches Museum,6 and then somehow meeting Paris and Sierra for lunch in the Second District. Fun was had, and pictures were taken:

Categories
Austria

Donau

It’s been, like, three whole days since my last post. This probably seems like a long stretch to people who’ve gotten used to my post a day thing, but I can’t exactly keep that pace up now that I’m back in the Real World.1 If I were to hazard a guess, one a week is going to be more realistic an expectation to have.2
Administrative stuff out of the way, though, because it’s time to see some of Vienna. It’s a pretty city, folks! I saw a really cool library the other day, but no pictures for you because I didn’t plan on going there and thus didn’t bring my camera.3
Okay, I’m done teasing you. Today, Anna and I headed out towards the end of the U14 to explore the parks around the Danube.5
It actually took us a while to get started – we were planning to meet at the Donau Zentrum which we were assuming was a park – “Danube Center,” right? But no, it was actually a sprawling mall complex like half a mile from the river. Whoops. Next time we’re meeting at the metro station.
But once we got to the river, hoo boy, was it pretty.

Categories
Austria

Salzburg

Today was the last day of our ‘around Austria’ orientation program.1 We had an early breakfast2 and then hopped aboard a train to Salzburg.
We were met at the platform by our tour guide, who gave us a few minutes to find some lockers to leave our luggage in before we were off. The tour was… I’d say interesting, but to be honest the man had a gift for finding the least interesting thing about all the locations we visited. And while he tried to crack some jokes, they ranged from falling flat to downright cringe-inducing.3 I suspect the tour company is going to be getting some unhappy phone calls tomorrow.
But hey, that aside, Salzburg is a pretty city, and we managed to see a good amount of it despite how tired we all are.4 Have some pictures:

Categories
Austria

Altitude

Today was a trip up almost as far as yesterday, though this time the climb was done by bus instead of suspended gondola.1 We wound up in Sportgastein, the far end of the Gastein valley, in an area that’s set up for a mix of skiing and farming with no actual permanent residents. It’s an interesting shared space – any of the farmers of the valley can bring their livestock there to graze.
Of course, being a mountain valley in Austria, it’s pretty like you wouldn’t believe. Seriously, the first picture I’m going to show you is titled “Hobbiton” because it kinda makes me feel like I’m in a movie scene.

Categories
Austria

Mass on the Mountain

We had German class in the morning today1 and then hopped aboard a suspended gondola2 that carried us a couple thousand feet up the side of the mountains over Dorfgastein.3 (For this trip, I just brought my whole backpack, which I wound up pretty happy about as I kept switching out lenses on my camera.4)
The goal of the trip was to attend the Mass on the Mountain, something which I believe takes place once a year and is basically exactly what it sounds like: a Catholic Mass, held on the side of the mountain. It’s a bit of a hike from the gondola station,5 but it was a really cool experience. Have some pictures:

Categories
Austria

Liechtensteinklamm

Somehow I’m already writing another blog post, which feels a bit excessive, but everything happens so much. And hey, I’m a Professional Blogger at the moment, so why not?1
Anyhow, today was a trip up to a nearby park, about half an hour’s drive away,2 because if we’ve got nice weather, may as well take advantage of it, right?
And once again, I remembered my camera. Have a look at the pictures I liked:3

Categories
Austria

Arrival

After a rather grueling amount of flying, we’re here in Austria! I’m taking advantage of my body’s confused circadian rhythm to write this at a nice 6:30 in the morning, having already been up for almost an hour.

We landed at about 8:30 in the morning what feels like a couple of weeks ago, but looking at my calendar1 was actually only a couple days ago. From the airport, we went by the hotel we’d be staying at to drop off our bags – the rooms wouldn’t be ready until later in the day – and then took Vienna’s impressive public transit system to the Austro-American Institute of Education for our initial orientation. Getting there was fun – it’s just a couple of trams away, but because Vienna is Vienna, there’s a lot of stuff to see on the way.2

After the orientation, we wandered around a market for a bit to get lunch3 and then made our way back to the hotel.4 I took a bit of an unplanned nap, and then we were off to dinner at an Italian restaurant a short walk away.5

The next morning we were up, bright and early, and off into a longer trek through Vienna’s public transit system. It’s an impressive system, with a lot of well-developed infrastructure.6 And then we were on the train to Dorfgastein, where I finally got my camera out and started taking pictures, because good lord, look at this.

Categories
Review

The Long Cosmos

Normally I let the spoiler warnings for these be implicit, but this is the fifth (and final) book in a series, so I’ll go ahead and put it here again, to be clear: spoiler warning.
Good? Good.
So, I was a little bit sad to find that, as I’m writing this, I only have a single post tagged ‘Terry Pratchett’ on here. Which makes sense, I suppose – my love of his writing predates my writing book reviews. A bit of a shame, really, because that would be more than 60 reviews – he was a rather prodigious writer.
Now, I mentioned in my previous Pratchett review that it was his last book. That wasn’t entirely accurate – it was his last Discworld book, but the Long Earth series hadn’t wrapped up yet, either. And for this, he had a coauthor – Stephen Baxter.1 I’m going to drop in a chunk of the foreword, written by Baxter, here:

The books have been published annually, but we worked faster than that; time was not on our side, and Terry had other projects he wanted to pursue. Volumes 1 and 2 of the series were published in 2012 and 2013 respectively. But by August 2013 we had presented our publishers with drafts of the final three volumes of the series, including the present book. We did continue to work on the books subsequently. The last time I saw Terry was in the autumn of 2014, when we worked on, among other things, the ‘big trees’ passages of The Long Cosmos (chapter 39 onwards). It has been my duty to see this book through its editorial and publishing stages.

Having just finished reading the book, I know now what the ‘big trees’ passages he references are, and it makes me happy in a quiet, sad way to know that Pratchett had his hands on those directly. My first experience with Terry Pratchett was the Nomes trilogy.2 I’ve no idea where I got them – it was long enough ago that that memory is entirely gone – but I know that it captured my imagination in a wonderful way. The books were silly and sweet, and the characters even more so. But they didn’t quite capture my interest the way the Discworld books would later. I do distinctly remember how I found my way into that series – the Kindle had just come out, and I really wanted one. While we were on vacation, a family friend who had one offered to let me play around with it to see what I thought.
I’ll interrupt this story to reference the fact that I tend to be reading a lot of books at once – one or two paperbacks, something on my Kindle, and something else in the Kindle app on my phone.3 On this vacation, I hadn’t brought the paperback I was reading, but I remembered the title – Dark Watch. Except I didn’t quite remember the title, and put in Night Watch instead. I’m sure the Kindle Store tried to show me the cover, but low-resolution grayscale images aren’t super helpful, so I wound up downloading the sample of the wrong book.
But hey, never look a gift horse in the mouth – I figured I’d read the sample, it’d work just as well for figuring out if I liked the Kindle or not.
And I did – I’ve mentioned before that the original Kindle was, in my opinion, the Best Kindle, and the fact that when it (sadly) died, I replaced it immediately. When I got mine, the first book I downloaded4 was Night Watch. I finished reading it, and I’ve loved Terry Pratchett ever since then.5
Finding out that he was working on a science fiction series? I was intrigued. I’ve read The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata6 They were both characteristically hilarious, but more importantly, interesting takes on the genre.
The Long Earth series is quite a bit more serious than those, but it’s nothing the less for it. It’s also lacking in those characteristic footnotes, which makes it feel less like a Pratchett work than any of his other stuff, but it’s still deeply fascinating. The world building throughout is marvelous, and the degree to which they extend it is, I think, my favorite thing about the series.
It basically starts off with a single premise: stepping. A device is invented, the blueprints published online for all to see, that allows the user to step, moving from one Earth to another in an apparently-infinite chain of Earths. Only ours, referred to as the Datum Earth, has a human population: the rest are pristine, untouched natural wilds. From there, it’s extended: each of these Earths is something akin to a quantum probability mesh, and the further out from the Datum you go, the stranger things can get. One step away, the only difference is that there’s no industrialization-aftereffects from humanity. Go ten million steps away, and you hit worlds where life as we know it never evolved, and instead there are slime colonies the size of small buildings wandering around. Ten million steps in the other direction, and you can climb a tree five miles high and fight giant lizards in the forest of its canopy.
Of course, this does Bad Things to the governments of the world – who’s going to stick around and work a 9-to-5 when they can hop over a couple worlds and have a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Who’s going to pay taxes if they live on a homestead ten thousand steps West7 that doesn’t see a dime of government services?
And Pratchett and Baxter play with that – as the series goes on, and by the end it’s spanned nearly 400 years of history,8 you can see the way the United States reacts to the paradigm shift that is stepping. It’s fascinating.
And then you get to Book Three, and explore the Long Mars. Because somewhere along the infinite chain of Earths, there’s one where the asteroid impact that formed the moon hit at a different angle and the Earth never formed. Which is a terrifying way to die – you think you’re going to step normally into another world, but instead find yourself suddenly in interplanetary space. But people are creative, and it’s possible to bring materials with you, so the Long Earth’s equivalent to SpaceX forms up on the world just this side of what becomes known as the Gap. Forget about expensive rockets – just hold onto your spacecraft, and then step right out of the gravity well. Once you’re free-floating, step back, and you’re suddenly in orbit, at about a billionth the energy cost. Space exploration is suddenly a lot easier.
And then a bonus twist on the concept: Mars is Long too, but in a different direction. Sure, it’s still stepping East and West, but a step West from Mars gets you to a different reality than a step West from Earth.
Book four is where things get spooky. (Spoiler warning again, because what I’m talking about now is from closer to the end of that book, rather than early-on reveals as above.)
Given a multiply-infinite series of worlds, certain things become inevitable. Von Neumann machines are one of these – somewhere out there along that infinity, there’s going to be a sentient lifeform. Given that it’s truly infinite, there’s probably going to be an infinite number of those. And at least one of them will have been smart enough to come up with the idea of a von Neumann probe, and dumb enough to actually build it. And then the problem with von Neumann probes shows up, one that we here on our Earth have been dealing with for centuries: self-replicating systems will eventually have a problem. For humans, with our self-replicating cells, we call it cancer. A von Neumann probe system will similarly eventually become cancerous, which makes it a massive threat to the entire galaxy.
And that’s all I’m going to say about The Long Utopia. I’m 1,500 words in, I should probably start talking about the book in the title.
The Long Cosmos takes another spin on that “given an infinite universe, there will be sentient life” thing. With the von Neumann probes, we never actually saw their creators, nor even any evidence that they’re still alive. In The Long Cosmos, though, we get proof of life: a signal that blows SETI’s “Wow!” signal out of the water.
“Join us.”
And that’s all I’m going to say about the story, I think. Suffice it to say it’s in the same vein of the rest of the Long Earth books – a delightful look at a truly large-scale world, and the people who inhabit it. It’s those characters who really make the story, and it’s a nice way to check in with all of them again.
Overall, it’s a wonderful book. Each one gets larger in scale than the last, and that’s what I like about them – it’s such a huge world to play around in, and the underlying concept is simple and understandable. It’s a veritable playground for the imagination.
As with every single other Terry Pratchett book out there, I highly recommend it. Start with the first, of course, but when you’ve read the rest of the series, read this one too.


  1. There’s nothing tagged under his name, as of yet, but I figure I’ll link to it anyways. Might read more of his work in the future, you never know! 
  2. I’ve actually still not read the first one in the series, but once I’m home and have access to my library I might go back and reread the second and third. 
  3. And yes, Amazon’s WhisperSync service does function to keep me in one place in the book if I read it on both devices, but I like this way better. 
  4. Aside from a bunch of free stuff from Project Gutenberg 
  5. And been heavily influenced in how I write – I like to say my use of footnotes has a lot to do with David Foster Wallace, and there’s some of him in there, but it’s a lot closer in style to Sir Terry Pratchett’s. 
  6. And I want to get a copy of Strata for myself, but it’s still hard to get in the United States. Ooh, maybe I’ll find a used book store while I’m abroad… 
  7. As opposed to East – knowing which is which is apparently an instinctive sort of thing for people when they step. 
  8. From the actual start point to the end point, it’s closer to 80 years, but there’s a good bit of prequel-type action in the earlier books.