Looking Out To Sea

There’s a book list that does the rounds on the internet, whose provenance I forget now (BBC viewers? Guardian readers?) — either way I’ve been working my way through it for a couple of years. Not with any great conviction, but if I’m not sure where to turn next for a book I’m open to selecting something from the list.

I thought I’d list my currently completed for now, to provide some kind of status update. I’m currently working on Wuthering Heights, which is proving much more enjoyable than I thought it might. Frankenstein on the other hand, which isn’t actually on the list anyway, was really boring and I gave up.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte — Really great, and now The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde) makes more sense
4. Harry Potter series, JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee — Not as good as I thought it might be
6. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
7. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
8. Catch-22, Joseph Heller — Fantastic and endlessly fertile source of cultural references
9. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien — Looking forward to the film!
10. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
11. Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
12. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, CS Lewis — Yeah, I don’t know who compiled this list. This is cheating!
13. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernières
14. Animal Farm, George Orwell
15. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown — I’m ashamed; but it was awful
16. Lord of the Flies, William Golding — Forced to hate it at school? Yes
17. Atonement, Ian McEwan — Brilliant, and the film’s not bad either
18. Life of Pi, Yann Martel — Don’t bother
19. Dune, Frank Herbert — Weird. For some reason I even read one of the sequels, though I didn’t even particularly enjoy the first book.
20. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
21. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
22. Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas — A huge, creeping inexorable powerhouse of a book.
23. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
24. Dracula, Bram Stoker — Great fun and surprisingly creepy at times.
25. Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson
26. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
27. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro — Quiet, reserved, evocative and restrained. Emotionally draining too.
28. Charlotte’s Web, EB White
29. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
30. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
31. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas — More whimsical than Monte Cristo, and a good sight shorter too!
32. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

Help, trapped in a cycle of not blogging that won’t stop. So many things that I have been enjoying that I want to mention, but that I can’t really bring to mind right now, and certainly not in an interesting fashion. Which means, a list!

• I bought myself a Kindle (third generation, but just wifi, not 3G) for reading stuff. In the first couple of weeks I was commuting by train and reading academic stuff. Since then I’ve been getting a lift and just reading for pleasure — which means a sub-list!

  • Bram Stoker’s Dracula: It’s strange reading a book that basically started a literary and cultural genre. I mean everything from Hammer Horror to Buffy, Twilight to Anne Rice has sprouted out of this book. It wasn’t the origin but it is by a long way the most famous Victorian vampire novel and it was interesting to see how much has been around from the start. The book is told in diary form, using snippets from the journals of Jonathan Harker, Abraham van Helsing as well as newspaper reports and other sources to “piece together” the story for the reader. It’s very effective and remarkably tense. My favourite scene is definitely the arrival in England of Count Dracula, told via newspaper clippings and the log kept by the captain of the ship that carried him. Sadly the part of Van Helsing, which gets more prominent as the book continues, is really badly written. I have never seen a worse depiction of a foreign speaker of English, it’s at least as bad as any Hammer Horror Dracula!
  • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped: I remember reading Treasure Island when I was younger (and I think I’ll re-read it soon) but couldn’t recall if I’d ever done this one. It was really enjoyable and the kind of thing I would have definitely enjoyed as a child. Non-stop adventure from the start.
  • Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: There have been so many awkward adaptations of this (or at least the Lilliput part) that it’s another strange one to read in its entirety. I quite liked the Ted Danson adaptation and from what I can remember it was fairly faithful to the parts Swift wrote, while including a lot of other stuff about Gulliver’s struggles to adapt to English society on his return. The first half you can read without much awareness of the political/satirical nature but it reaches a point where suddenly the author starts putting the boot in to “civilised society” and doesn’t really let up until the end of the book. Eminently readable, though if you find a copy riddled with footnotes I would abandon it immediately. The first copy I tried to read seemed to have more superscript letters than normal ones, and that really makes it a chore.

  As you can see I’m working my way through all the free stuff available, of which there is a substantial chunk on Project Gutenberg. Recommendations for classics are always welcome. Some authors are obviously well-represented but it would be nice to know if there are any books in particular that people think I should investigate.

• Capoeira is continuing — I’m even beginning to enjoy the roda on Sunday, which I’m trying to attend as often as I can. I’ve started going to the training twice a week most weeks. Getting a job really put paid to the amount of effort I can devote to training/exercise in my own time. But it’s getting much warmer these days so maybe I can get the grass cut outside so we can practise in the garden. Last week I was even practising on the Meadows. Who knows whether people were laughing or just didn’t notice/care… most probably the latter.
• I made a big batch of baguettes the other day, for a sandwich-based birthday party, and was complimented from many quarters. But then people will sell you their children if you provide fresh bread sandwiches!
• I haven’t done any SICP study since I started working again but I’ve just got in touch with my co-conspirators and we’ve agreed a meeting date, which might just be a chance to catch up socially but will hopefully lead back to studying and learning again.
• Of course now I’ve started a list I’m obliged to add enough entries to make it worthwhile, but I can’t think of anything else. How have you been?

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote in this little box. My new job continues to form and my commute has been easier lately, since I’ve been getting a lift from a colleague who also lives in Edinburgh. I get back home in the evening much earlier, which is nice, though the start is still as early as ever (the alarm goes off at 5.30).

But I didn’t break this hiatus to talk about commuting, I promise. Last week was PyWeek, a twice-yearly programming challenge to write a computer game in the Python programming language. Nick was keen to give it a go, so between me, him and Mat we concocted an idea which was just interesting enough that it might be worth playing.

Due to some unforeseen problems we didn’t get much time to write code, so the game didn’t really come together in time for the deadline. I think, in fact, that the code was broken as zero-hour ticked over. Oh well.

Having started we decided to finish, so we all met on Monday night (for the first time since the challenge started…) and got large chunks of the game completed. It’s now playable, I think, though outrageously taxing and quite awkward for one person to play against themselves. The plan, then, is to iron out some of the kinks and see if we can pitch the difficulty at just the right level to make it addictive. Maybe we’ll get it transferred to an Android/iPhone app in the future?

I’ve known these guys for years but we’ve never actually sat down and written a program together for the fun of it. It was really interesting, especially since we were all basically learning Python from scratch for the purpose, and I was trying to remember what all this OO stuff is supposed to be about. Maybe we’ll tackle it again for the autumn PyWeek with a new game idea, more experience and maybe a bit more time scheduled to the task.

I’m in a new job. I’ve done one week, so my life has mostly been on hold while I work out how things will fit together. I’m working for Honeywell Security writing embedded software. Similar to before but in alarm systems instead of networking.

The job requires a hefty commute — at least two hours each way if things go well, but between delayed trains and poor weather it’s sometimes an extra half hour on top of that. Which means I get up at 5.30, leave the house before 6.30 and get home in the evening around 7 o’clock. You can see why the rest of my life has been a bit quiet. I’m having to rethink how I look at the week. The arrival of the weekend is important and precious!

I’m still learning the ins and outs of work but the people are all very friendly and helpful, which makes the travelling more bearable. Spending hours travelling to and from a hateful job would be horrible. I spend an hour on the train each way which has given me more time for other things. I’ve been splitting my travelling activities, so that in the morning I read the freebie Metro for a bit and then do some “thinking” to limber up for the day. Recently I’ve been doing simple program calculation exercises, deriving the fusion rules for fold/unfold or map/map and so on. I’m really interested in the idea of deriving correct and efficient programs from executable specification.

(Just to show you what I’m talking about, this is the fold/unfold fusion rule. Let us say there are two functions, foldr and unfoldr defined as follows:

foldr f z     [] = z
foldr f z (x:xs) = f (foldr f z xs)
 
unfoldr g s = case g s of
                Nothing     -> []
                Just (x,s') -> x : unfoldr g s'

The function foldr combines a list of elements according to the function f and unfoldr creates a list of elements from the seed s. We might use foldr to define a product function which combines the elements of the list by multiplying them together:

product = foldr (*) 1

And we might create a list of elements from 1 to n with an unfold.

enumTo n = unfoldr step 1
  where step s = if s>n then Nothing else Just (s, s+1)

The observant reader will have noticed that combining these two separate functions will give us factorial, the product of numbers from 1 to n — first we create the numbers 1 to n, then we multiply them all together.

factorial = product . enumTo

The inefficiency is that enumTo works on producing a list which is consumed by product. The elements are inserted into a list only to be removed straight away. Can we omit the redundant list production? It turns out we can, and we can do it for all cases where foldr operates on the result of unfoldr. The product and enumTo are specific instances of a general method which we can use to fuse production and consumption of values.

This fusion rule can be demonstrated by algebraic manipulation of the programs we’ve defined so far. We’ll call the unfoldr and then foldr by the name hylo, with the naive implementation shown:

hylo f z g = foldr f z . unfoldr g

The equational style here facilitates some nice rearrangements which help to assert their correctness from step to step. Let’s see how this works — each line will be justified by some comment in braces:

  hylo f z g s
= { definition from above }
  foldr f z (unfoldr g s)
= { definition of unfoldr }
  foldr f z (case g s of
                  Nothing     -> []
                  Just (x,s') -> x : unfoldr g s')
= { push foldr into result }
  case g s of
       Nothing     -> foldr f z []
       Just (x,s') -> foldr f z (x : unfoldr g s')
= { foldr on empty lists }
  case g s of
       Nothing     -> z
       Just (x,s') -> foldr f z (x : unfoldr g s')
= { foldr on non-empty lists }
  case g s of
       Nothing     -> z
       Just (x,s') -> f x (foldr f z (unfoldr g s'))
= { definition of hylo }
  case g s of
       Nothing     -> z
       Just (x,s') -> f x (hylo f z g s')

Each step should be clearly equivalent to the one before and the one after, but by the end we have a definition for hylo which doesn’t construct a useless list.

hylo f z g s = case g s of
                 Nothing     -> z
                 Just (x,s') -> f x (hylo f z g s')

Naturally we can use the original definitions of product and enumTo to create an optimised factorial using this logic. The result is that factorial doesn’t create a redundant list either:

factorial n = hylo (*) 1 step
  where step s = if s > n then Nothing else Just (s,s+1)

I think this is beautiful result despite its obvious simplicity. However this has been a long digression, so I’ll stop now. But if you found it interesting I encourage you to check out work on “program calculation”, “program derivation”, “algebra of programming”, “origami programming” and so on.)

My evening journeys have been spent unwinding with a book, though the evening trains are noisier. I’m reading Brighton Rock right now and it’s good though the story makes me feel quite uncomfortable at times. One of the characters seems close to doing something wild and dangerous and it’s a fight between “must find out what happens” and “can’t bear to read any more” on a daily basis.

I hope week two will be easier and I will start to feel like my routine is falling into place. Watch this space.

For about six months now I (and then Helen) have been going to Capoeira Angola classes run by Mão no Chão group. Suffice it to say we are neither of the people in this photograph in fact, it’s just one I found on Flickr.

Continue Reading »

Right now I’m reading The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. It’s really enjoyable so far — whimsical and witty like a 19th-century The Princess Bride (not inconceivable). I’ve got a big ol’ pile of things to get through after that. I still have a book from my birthday in June and a bunch from Christmas too. I came away from last night’s book group with two more — Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili. I’d been swithering over this one until I noticed the author. He has produced some great science television so I thought his book might be worth it. And Under Milk Wood, a play I associate strongly with my father though I’ve never heard or read it. But I’ve been quoted it a lot!

I took along Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf but no-one was interested. I think a lot of people had book overload and weren’t taking new ones to read. We’re not having our next meeting until March so there will be plenty of time for people to finish the books they’ve got. Hopefully I can deplete my to-read pile slightly by then.

I finished The Picture of Dorian Gray at least a week ago and I’ve been struggling to put into words what I thought about it ever since. It’s a pretty slim novel but it took me a few weeks to get through so it obviously wasn’t enthralling.

My main problem, I think, was that it had a plot but no story. I felt no desire to read on other than to find out how the plot resolved. The characters were bland at best, and often both hateful and boring. Dorian Gray wishes that his portrait would get older instead of him, which seems to stop him maturing at all. The book was originally much shorter, and it shows — I felt there was a lot of filler which expanded it from a short story to a novel.

I got a lot more enjoyment from the introduction which placed the book in a historical context and recounted some of the reactions to its publication. It’s strange how some books are more fun to read about than they are to read.

Incidentally, I object to the inclusion of an introduction which serves to give away large segments of the plot. So much so that they required a pre-introduction to tell you not to read the introduction until you’d read the book. Wouldn’t it just be more appropriate to put the spoilers at the end and call it something else?

Several years ago I bought some stuff in HMV and was given a free sampler CD to promote a number of artists’ new releases. This CD has turned out to be a fantastic resource and I’ve not yet mined all of the possibilities.

The disc included Death Cab for Cutie, Skin and Bell X1 — I now have at least one album by all of these artists. OK Go were also there, and they’ve since become heavily played on YouTube for their great music videos. I intend to look more into their music too.

More things to look into: Ladyfuzz, Nightmare of You, Stellastar, Josh Rouse. The lesson learned is that if HMV give you a sampler CD you really should take it. It will probably be incredibly well curated and highlight a whole bunch of interesting artists. It worked for me.

Severely snowed out today so SICP study group was cancelled. I’m using the time in the house to make stock with the bag full of lamb bones and bits that have been sitting in the freezer for many months. I think I will make some kind of soup with it later, preferably one with lots of chunky vegetables and other interesting bits. I’ve also got a bunch of beetroot in the fridge which I intend to make into beetroot and chocolate cake, because it was so tasty last time I made it. (And I want to do it in a cooler oven since 190°C blackened the outside without cooking through when I made it before. That was the only occasion when the skewer test has been useful to me.)

Back to the topic of the study group. Reading SICP is deceptively easy at times. Each step is a simple progression from the last, such that each idea seems obvious and trivial. Then suddenly some trivial new concept makes no sense at all and you find yourself backtracking through pages of explanation to find some firm handhold from which to start moving forward again. Most of the time I feel that I’m not learning anything but I realised today that some things which were not intuitive in the past are now familiar and natural. I was reading The Arrow Calculus and realised that I could understand all of the notation and type rules for lambda calculus and arrows given. It was the environment stuff in particular that felt “obvious” in the way that it wouldn’t have in the past, and I’ve been doing a lot of interpreter writing and environment-jigging in recent weeks with SICP. It’s all coming together.

US-made film and television use the 555 telephone prefix for fake telephone numbers. According to the IMDb trivia page for Fight Club:

Marla Singer’s phone number, 555-0134, is the same as Teddy’s number in Memento (2000). It is also the same as the Hong Kong Restaurant in Harriet the Spy (1996), Eddie Alden’s in Animal Attraction (2001) and a Mental institution in an episode of “Millennium” (1996/I).

In fact there are only a hundred telephone numbers sanctioned for fictional use in this way — 555-0100 to 555-0199. There must be an awful lot of overlap. So which are the most common fictional telephone numbers? Which ones have never been used? Well, this is the internet so someone has compiled a list of numbers and the films they appear in, for your personal delight and instruction.