Thanks for your interest!

More than 20 years ago, I built a radio reciever using a superconducting device for my thesis. It was the most sensitive radio in the world for a while, in the 300 GHz to 500 GHz range. My one and only wikipedia article is about that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductor-insulator-superconductor_tunnel_junction

I designed a data compression scheme for information about GPS satellite orbits. As dull as that sounds, the exciting part is that millions of downloads of the data are done a day. That jazzed me good.

Books:

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein Blindsight by Peter Watts A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone Genome by Matt Ridley Freakonomics (and super, the sequel)

That list is weighted towards more recent, and I left out my "stock porn" books like "The Big Short" and "Too Big To Fail." But the bio of Buffett is incredible in my opinion.