March 2006

These are the Pulitzer prize winning non-fiction books. I’ve read only two: Godel, Escher, Bach and Guns, Germs and Steel. These were the very best books I have EVER read. If that’s any indication to go by, I want to finish this whole list. 1962: The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore H White 1963: The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman 1964: Anti-intellectualism in America by Richard Hofstadter 1965: O Strange New World by Howard M Jones 1966: Wandering Through Winter by Edwin Way Teale 1967: The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture by David Brion Davis 1968: Rousseau & Revolution Story of CIV Volume 10 by Will Durant 1969: Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer 1970: Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence by Erik H Erikson 1971: The Rising Sun by John Toland 1972: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 by Barbara W. Tuchman 1973: Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald 1974: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker 1975: Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard 1976: Why Survive?: Being Old in America by Robert N Butler 1977: Beautiful Swimmers by William W Warner 1978: Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan 1979: On Human Nature by Edward Osborne Wilson 1980: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter 1981: Fin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl Schorske 1982: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder 1983: Is There No Place on Earth for Me? by Susan Sheehan 1984: The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr 1985: The Good War: An Oral History of World War II by Studs Terkel 1986: Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas 1987: Arab and Jew by David K Shipler 1988: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes 1989: A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan 1990: And Their Children After Them by Michael Williamson 1991: Ants by Bert Holldobler 1992: Prize by Daniel Yergin 1993: Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America by Garry Wills 1994: Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick 1995: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner 1996: The Haunted Land by Tina Rosenberg 1997: Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger 1998: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond 1999: The Annals of the Former World by John McPhee 2000: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower 2001: Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix 2002: Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter 2003: A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power 2004: Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum 2005: Ghost Wars by Steve Coll Comments Jayant 30 Mar 2006 2:12 pm: Thanks a ton for the list. Pulitzer books in non-fiction are just gems! Arun 31 Mar 2006 8:08 am: Ouch, haven’t read even one of these. And i thought i read more non-fiction than most!!! S Anand 31 Mar 2006 9:45 am: Next on my reading list are Ants (don’t be fooled: though it’s really about ants, it’s apparantly a fascinating read), Annals of the Former World (which I developed a liking for since I read A Short History of Everything), and Carl Sagan’s Dragons of Eden. Sanchaari 31 Mar 2006 2:14 pm: Hi Anand, I liked your Bolg style, can I take some ideas from here? Which blogging site you are using? S Anand 31 Mar 2006 4:47 pm: Feel free to pull ideas. But I don’t use any blogging software. I write entries in Excel, and my Perl program converts that to HTML, which I then I FTP. Not much help, I’m afraid…

Videos of talks at Google. Long, but informative. Includes talks by John Batelle, Seth Godin, and Guido von Rossum.

Why you too should cancel cable.

What will Google release on April 1st? Google Calendar seems to be the popular demand. Comments Gautam 30 Mar 2006 6:38 am: I hope it’s GDrive

Job openings at Google on Google Base. Comments Gautam 30 Mar 2006 6:39 am: Yeah, naukri, Monster and Recruitment Management Systems need to spruce up their offerings

Software that builds on hunches. … is a filter for images that allows a naive user to improve digital photos without understanding complex tools like Adobe Photoshop, by choosing from mutations of the picture to make it better. “My grandmother doesn’t know anything about improving pictures,” says Bonabeau, “but she knows which pictures of her grandchildren she likes.” Wired News tried out the photo selector. After loading the photograph you want to improve, the application shows you nine mutant versions. In the case of a dark photo, it’s easy enough to pick a lighter version and move it to the seed area so that it becomes the foundation of the next crop of mutation pictures. You can keep selecting and mutating indefinitely. When you find the version you like, you save it. In a photo of a dark house and a moon, seven iterations were enough to lighten the photograph adequately. ...

I'm a cautious gadget freak. I love buying gadgets, but think a lot before buying them. Invariably, I use spreadsheets to help me decide. I try to buy only those gadgets that are right for me at the cheapest possible price, and I look at two things: features based on usage and breakeven. Usage-driven buying I pick the features I want based on my usage. For example, when I bought my first mobile, I listed the my most likely uses for the phone: ...

Advice from Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches a Harvard class “Positive Psychology”, or how to get happy. 1. Give yourself permission to be human. When we accept emotions – such as fear, sadness, or anxiety – as natural, we are more likely to overcome them. Rejecting our emotions, positive or negative, leads to frustration and unhappiness. 2. Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable. When this is not feasible, make sure you have happiness boosters, moments throughout the week that provide you with both pleasure and meaning. ...

Hilarious articles from Ramesh Mahadevan, including the exploits of Ajay Palvayanteeswaran.

My Calvin and Hobbes index is current up to June 1993. Two-and-a-half years left to complete.

Calvin and Hobbes in Chennai. The posts between 10-13 March 2006 have (pretty good) doodles of Calvin & Hobbes eating idli and visiting the Marina beach. Comments Doodler 1 Apr 2006 5:11 pm: :) hi anand..great blog with something new everyday!well am frm infy too..do u blog in the infy blog? S Anand 1 Apr 2006 7:20 pm: Wow, you’re from Infy? Amazing cartoons you had there. My Infy ID is subramanian_anand. Drop me a line, if you can?

I had declared 30th May 2005 as my longest day. Air India proved me wrong. My longest day was 18 Feb 2006. I didn’t plan to fly Air India to Chennai in the first place. British Airways had more convenient timings and a similar fare. But I clicked on the wrong button, and didn’t realise until a few days before the flight that I was on the Air India, and that the flight left at 8:45am. ...

A software services firm once asked us, “How come we are not able to staff projects quickly, even though we have a lot of people on the bench?” There were a bunch of reasons, but among those, we found something interesting. They were implementing two policies that were logical on their own, but disastrous together. (The bench is where programmers sit when they are not on a project.) Here’s how they work. When a project starts, the project manager requests resources (people) for the project. HR passes on matching CVs to the project manager, who approves or rejects them, in consultation with the client. ...

New from Google: Google Finance, and Google Mars. Comments Sathya 22 Mar 2006 8:30 am: Welcome Back !

Good guidelines on improving pagerank. via LazyGeek

Once, we were looking at whether banks made money on demand drafts (DDs). DDs are costly. 90% of a bank’s costs are people-related, and it takes a fair bit of time (hence people) to process DDs. If you pay for DDs in cash, it costs even more because the teller has to count the notes. To recover this cost, banks charge a fee. The fee increases with the size of the DD. A DD for Rs 10,000 may cost Rs 50, while one for Rs 100,000 may cost Rs 200. ...