(identity 'myron)

Sat, 29 Apr 2006

LibraryThing [/books]

Here I was thinking I'd write this long post about the books I've read recently but then I stumbled on to LibraryThing. So screw all the typing for a blog entry, here's my bookshelf, at least as many books as I could think of without calling home to ask what's in my room in Vancouver too.... And on the side-panel to the left, what I've read recently or are reading now.

Incidentally, the order they're shown right now kind of shows how they're related too. The two books touching Plato's Republic are also the books that lead the way to it. By some strange coincidence I bought both books at the same time looking for something to read, neither related to the other at first, but it turns out they both open with a quote from the Republic and end with direct references to it too. Shit happens.

Oh and if there's any other José Saramago fans out there, I just noticed a sequel to Blindness is out, Seeing... which I'm on my way to pick up now :)

// posted at 13:21. permalink   comments

Sun, 24 Jul 2005

The Da Vinci Code [/books]

It took me two sittings to get through this book, not because it's good, quite the opposite—it's so unengaging that I never found myself pausing to think about what I was reading. This book isn't a book at all, it's more like a manuscript for a bad Hollywood movie complete with shallow and stereotypical characters and even product placements from the likes of Range Rover, Coke and SmartCar. The characters routinely devolve into cheap mouthpieces for the author expounding ideas from a fictitious history while seemingly trying to pass it all off as historical fiction. But this is really just a symptom of the greater problem with this book, that it's really the author's attempt to showcase his clever ideas in the guise of a thriller with characters and plot as mere afterthoughts. The result is like an extended episode of Duck Tales centered around the Bible Code, except that even Scrooge McDuck has more depth than The Da Vinci Code's antagonists.

A colossal waste of time: two stars out of ten.

// posted at 12:30. permalink   comments

Tue, 03 May 2005

Loot A Burning House [/books]

Stumbled on Wengu, a really interesting site with some Chinese classics online along with their translations in English and in French. Among them is the Three Character Classic, a book whose three character couplets are like "strands of cultural DNA which are passed on from generation to generation". I believe it's fallen into disuse in the modern day, but it provides an interesting window into what imperial China thought all learned people should know. It first outlines the importance of learning and then the Confucian ethic of hard work, it then goes on to list the areas of learning that every child should seek to master from numbers to the classics to dynastic history. The latter has a passage that faintly resembles the begot sequence of Genesis:

The Hsia dynasty has Yu
and the Shang dynasty has T'ang.
The Chou dynasty had Wen and Wu;
these are called the Three Kings.
Under the Hsia dynasty the throne was transmitted from father to son,
making a family possession of the empire.
After four hundred years,
the imperial sacrifice passed from the house of Hsia.

I found the reasons behind studying dynastic history especially poetic, though the French translation sounds better to me than the English version:

The Seventeen Dynastic Histories,
are all embraced in the above.
They contain examples of good and bad government,
whence may be learnt the principles of prosperity and decay.
Ye who read history
must study the Annals,
whereby you will understand ancient and modern events,
as though having seen them with your own eyes.

Les dix-sept Histoires Dynastiques sont toutes dans ce qui précède.
Elles renferment des exemples
de bon et de mauvais gouvernement.
On en tirera les causes de l'ascension et du déclin (des dynasties).
Celui qui étudie les Histoires Dynastiques
et qui compulse les documents authentiques
comprendra le passé et le présent
comme s'il en avait été le témoin.

Even more interesting than this book is the one titled, Thirty-six Strategies. Unlike the more famous Art of War, this book is a collection of proverbs more suited to being applied in the fields of "politics, diplomacy, and espionage". Some of these scream Asian to me, but they obviously have their forms in other cultures too.

Fool the Emperor to Cross the Sea

Moving about in the darkness and shadows, occupying isolated places, or hiding behind screens will only attract suspicious attention. To lower an enemy's guard you must act in the open hiding your true intentions under the guise of common every day activities.

Loot a Burning House

When a country is beset by internal conflicts, when disease and famine ravage the population, when corruption and crime are rampant, then it will be unable to deal with an outside threat. This is the time to attack.

I've read more than a few that I've seen almost used implicitly by myself and other Chinese people I know, despite the fact that none of us have ever learned them formally from a source like this.... Interesting stuff.

// posted at 10:10. permalink   comments

Wed, 20 Apr 2005

Books [/books]

Finally finished The Gospel According To Jesus Christ by José Saramago a few days ago. It's a pretty good skeptic's retelling of the gospel stories. The entire book explores the what-if's and why's that a lot of people have reading the Bible and answers them with enough humour to almost be a parody at times, at other times very sharp and witty criticism. Though much of the book's criticism about the concept of God could be waived if you believe in an incomprehensible abstract notion of God. I don't think this is the case for a lot of Christians, so the criticism is spot on.

There's quite a few good quotes from this book, but I'll only include two because those were the only ones I remembered to bookmark. The first is from a conversation between Jesus and God, which forms some of the best and funniest dialogue in the book:

For the last four thousand and four years I have been the God of the Jews, a quarrelsome and difficult race by nature, but on the whole I have got along fairly well with them, they now take Me seriously and are likely to go on doing so for the foreseeable future. So, You are satisfied, said Jesus. I am and I am not, or rather, I would be were it not for this restless heart of Mine, which is forever telling Me, Well now, a fine destiny you've arranged after four thousand years of trial and tribulation that no amount of sacrifice on altars will ever be able to repay, for You continue to be the god of a tiny population that occupies a minute part of this world You created with everything that's on it, so tell Me, My son, if I should be satisfied with this depressing situation. Never having created a world, I'm in no position to judge, replied Jesus. True, you cannot judge, but you could help. Help in what way. To spread My word, to help Me become the god of more people.

The second quote is one of many that plays on the duality of good and evil and how it's too simplistic to characterize anything as some "battle" between good and evil:

All men, replied God, as if imparting wisdom, whoever and wherever they may be and whatever they may do, are sinners, for sin is as inseparable from man as man from sin, man is like a coin, turn it over and what you see is sin.

// posted at 08:36. permalink   comments

Thu, 13 Jan 2005

Chapters.ca vs Amazon.ca [/books]

Just a heads up for people that buy a lot of books. I hadn't noticed it so much before, but some books vary wildly in price between chapters.ca and amazon.ca. I bought Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming from chapters.ca last night for $68.35 (membership price, normal is $71.95) while it's listed at $93.95 on amazon.ca. That's a pretty big difference.... I'm starting to wonder if it's a mistake on Chapters' part since Amazon.com lists it at $66.95 USD. I'm buying almost at par.

Anyway, the lesson here is always to check both sites before buying. And of course, there's Half Price Computer Books, but they never have any of the books I want since they seem to cater mostly to Joe Linux, generic IT guy or the Bill Gates worshippers of the world. Although it's where I happened upon the Scheme book that got me back into the language.... A freak accident, I think, considering it's not even listed on their online catalogue.

// posted at 17:11. permalink   comments

Thu, 10 Jun 2004

OOP: An evolutionary approach [/books]

I picked up this book by Brad Cox, the inventor of Objective-C, as a kind of reprieve from all the functional programming I've been doing lately. I figured it's also a nice way of finding out why he made the choices he did when he designed obj-c.

So far it's been quite enlightening. Written in the 80s well before the advent of Java, it argues for practicality more than anything through multi-paradigm programming and also "late binding". The latter is really interesting because he points out quite a few times that "dynamic binding is intrinsic to the very essence of a loosely coupled collection". And collections, as we know, is something Java got pretty wrong and is still in the middle of fixing with the addition of C++ style generics.

He also points out that even if a language doesn't have dynamic binding, then it's bound to be done manually by the programmer. What he probably didn't foresee was something like templates in C++ which essentially generates that kind of code for you....

Here's some good quotes I've pulled from the book so far:

Object-oriented programming can be added to nearly any conventional programming language by grafting a small number of new syntactic features alongside the existing capabilities of the language. [...] The hybrid retains both programming styles as tools to be picked up or laid aside according to the problem at hand.

The real value of an object-oriented language is not in the language, but in the libraries that become feasible once the language makes reusability possible.

Systems can be made malleable by retaining some elasticity into run-time. This involves relaxing the usual demand that everything be accomplished at compile-time. Dynamic binding, described later, is a move in this direction.

These technologies are tools, not panaceas. Each of them has their place, and none replace the others. I'd no more relinquish Smalltalk-style late binding for C-style early binding than I'd relinquish subroutines for pipes and filters. They are each different solutions for different jobs, and they all deserve their place on a programmer's workbench. They each have a specialized purpose for which they are the best tool for the job. Whether early binding or late binding is better or worse cannot be discussed in the abstract, but only in relation to how well it serves a specific task.

That last quote is my favourite. Yet more wisdom totally lost when Java came into vogue.

One thing I didn't expect from this book was Cox's mentions of Lisp. Not only was he versed in Lisp, he acknowledged it at the front of his book for "pioneering object-oriented programming" alongside Smalltalk-80 and Simula. It's this lineage that separates his language from C++ so much even though they're both C-based OO languages.

// posted at 23:23. permalink   comments