Owls Count

Somehow I managed to read 134 books in 2011. I guess this may be related to how little running I did, especially in the second half of the year. I signed up for a Goodreads account recently and I am putting ratings there at this time. (I may start adding reviews at some point.)

Favourite Book of the Year
I was about to follow my usual tradition and select several books in this section and then I realised that from my favourites I could pick one.

• The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan: Percy returns. I have liked Riordan’s other books, but there was just that something extra special when Percy returned in the second part of this new series.

Other Really Good Books

• City of Thieves by David Benioff. Set during the siege of Leningrad. Lev and Kolya are arrested and given an alternative to being executed: Find a dozen eggs.
• Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld. Steampunk and engineered animals creations combine in an impressive alternate story of the start of WWI.
• Snuff by Terry Pratchett. New Discworld!

Surprises of the year
These are not the best books I read this year, but impressive when I did not expect it.

• Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick. Steven’s little brother is diagnosed with leukaemia. The author takes this and makes a really funny book, that still pays respect to the horror of having a seriously ill relative.
• Room by by Emma Donoghue. Told from the PoV of five year old Jack, as his mum tells him that the room he has lived in his whole life is a prison.

Favourite Cover
My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher.
Half Brother, by Kenneth Oppel, would have been the best if they had taken a hint from Michael Grant’s Gone series and had much less text on the cover.

Twicrap Award for Worst Book
Honored Enemy by Raymond E. Feist. Magacian was really good; the author kept writing and this was where I gave up on reading his work.

Question I will be pondering for a while
Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry. Aka the zombie book. Only I cannot work out why this is being marketed this way, as the zombies are reasonably unimportant and must be putting off a lot of potential readers.

I watched the BBC’s Frozen Planet recently and it reminded me just how good the BBC are at making such programmes. The seven episodes took the viewer on a tour of the polar regions. The team went to great lengths in the filming and the episodes showed some of the methods they used to film in such remote locations.

In the lab we now have OU Frozen Planet Poster on display.

A couple of related links:

• David Attenborough: Going to extremes – DA talks about the Frozen Planet filming and about the polar regions.
• Antarctic’s hidden world revealed – is about BEDMAP, which is the project mapping the rock bed of Antarctica.

Between March 2009 and January 2010, I worked in the Boundary Layer Meteorology group, in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading, and researched wind flow and dispersion in urban areas. Earlier this year I mentioned that we had published a paper on that work. Now, in collaboration with researchers in the School of Engineering Sciences at the University of Southampton, we have had a second paper published in Boundary-Layer Meteorology.

Wind-Direction Effects on Urban-Type Flows

Jean Claus, O. Coceal, T. Glyn Thomas, S. Branford, S. E. Belcher and Ian P. Castro
Boundary-Layer Meteorology

Abstract

Practically all extant work on flows over obstacle arrays, whether laboratory experiments or numerical modelling, is for cases where the oncoming wind is normal to salient faces of the obstacles. In the field, however, this is rarely the case. Here, simulations of flows at various directions over arrays of cubes representing typical urban canopy regions are presented and discussed. The computations are of both direct numerical simulation and large-eddy simulation type. Attention is concentrated on the differences in the mean flow within the canopy region arising from the different wind directions and the consequent effects on global properties such as the total surface drag, which can change very significantly—by up to a factor of three in some circumstances. It is shown that for a given Reynolds number the typical viscous forces are generally a rather larger fraction of the pressure forces (principally the drag) for non-normal than for normal wind directions and that, dependent on the surface morphology, the average flow direction deep within the canopy can be largely independent of the oncoming wind direction. Even for regular arrays of regular obstacles, a wind direction not normal to the obstacle faces can in general generate a lateral lift force (in the direction normal to the oncoming flow). The results demonstrate this and it is shown how computations in a finite domain with the oncoming flow generated by an appropriate forcing term (e.g. a pressure gradient) then lead inevitably to an oncoming wind direction aloft that is not aligned with the forcing term vector.