Jack's Blog

I haven't listened to audiobooks for a while. We are unable to listen using headphones when on voyage (for safety reasons - to avoid missing alarms and so on) and I haven't been doing much walking/running when ashore. I just finished listening to Ten Days in a Madhouse, and it was one of the most horrifying things that I have listened to. It's fairly short, and I was able to listen to it in a single session.

The work is based on an investigative journalist called Nellie Bly, who in 1887 arranges to get herself committed to a mental asylum in order to describe life on the inside. The audiobook format makes the story more personal and gives it greater impact.

Nellie initially feared that she wouldn't be able to convincingly act insane, but it turned out to be all too easy for her to gain admission. Once inside, her treatment at the hospital was horrific. Patients were not given enough food, sleep or warm clothing while the staff had ample food and wore heavy jackets. They were bathed in unheated water and sent to bed without a chance to dry. Many nurses seemed to enjoy bullying, beating or otherwise abusing patients and the doctors gave patients little attention.

Fortunately for Nellie, she had friends outside who vouched for her sanity and we able to seccure her release. She wasn't the only sane patient caught up in the asylum. The others, having no chance of being released, began to break down.

When she was freed and had a chance to tell her story, a grand jury investigated conditions at the asylum, resulting in a budget increase and some improvements in process. It makes me wonder about mental health diagnosis, though. Even as recently as 1973, the Rosenhan experiment showed how easily incorrect diagnoses can occur, both calling the sane insane and calling the insane sane.

Well, I'm back in port again, having spent eight days sailing up and down the coast with another school crew. I have no new photos and no real new stories this time (though I missed some great shots of a fat yellow full moon as it was rising). We took the kids out, everyone got seasick, then they got better. Everyone cleaned the ship each morning and stood watch through the day. By the end of it we had a great crew who helped navigate the ship through the final two days of its voyage.

Someone needs to patch the tubes, because the internet leaked into the real world with this crew. When they were off watch, they were sitting around talking about rage comics and other internet culture and one of them even asked me "when does the narwhal bacon?". This seems silly to me. These people are on a literal once-in-a-lifetime experience and yet they're still online in their head? One of the best things about these trips is the chance to take a break from the online world.

The other strange thing about this trip was how compressed their culture appears to have become. The kids from the internet were singing the Pokemon theme song at one point, the same one that was on TV when I was in high school. Some of the kids still talked fondly about their N64 and SNES when I'm pretty sure they weren't even born when the SNES was released.

I'm not sure whether to be happy that people continue to play the games I consider classics or disappointed that things appear to have advanced so little.

There are some books where you get a sense that the author had an enormous amount of fun writing them. Douglas Hofstadter's Goedel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is one. Neal Stephenson's Anathem is another. Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World is a third and as it's the most recent book I've read, it's the subject of this post.

The book is basically a lightning tour of Western philosophy packaged into a fairly thin story. The narrative centres around a 14-year-old girl called Sophie. In the weeks leading up to her 15th birthday, she starts receiving letters from a mysterious philosophy teacher: some are notes with a few thought-provoking questions, some are parcels that containing a few pages on a thinker or school of thought and some are proper letters directly addressed to Sophie.

The story has an interesting twist or two that prevent it from just being a series of lecture notes strung together. Sophie doesn't talk at all like a child, which is jarring at first but quickly becomes insignificant. The main attraction of the book is the lectures delivered by the philosopher, first on paper and later in person. Sophie's role is to receive the letters and ask questions to keep the lectures moving.

The lectures cover a range of thinkers from the pre-Socratics through to Sarte, and helped clarify my thinking in a few areas. I was a little disappointed that Nietzsche had about one sentence allocated to him, but that's only because he's the philosopher whose works I have read the most.

I think this is one of those books that I'll need to come back to and reread in a year in order to get the most out of it. The book was loaned to me by a friend onshore, and I read it on voyage. I was forced to read small chunks (because of the sea routine) at a fast pace (in order to return it when we came alongside), and that's probably the least effective way to absorb a book.

This was probably the toughest voyage I've done so far, for several reasons. It was the longest voyage yet at eleven days and ten nights, plus we had an unusual voyage crew. The voyage was an exercise in integration, so we had eight recent migrants and eight young Australians who had applied through Rotary. To make things even more challenging, some of the migrants came from the same background and even the same schools, meaning they stuck together on board for a good chunk of the voyage.

Everything ended well, as it always does. The trainees all opened up and formed a crew, and on the final night we had a variety show at anchor. Each watch entered a skit and individuals or small groups could enter extra skits as well. For ours, I had to impersonate the first mate, so I "stole" his pea-coat and hat:

We had a few great sails on the voyage, including a 44-hour run from Coles Bay to Recherche Bay (sailing all the way). Our new 3-yard red ensign is looking much better than the old one.

I never get tired of the sunsets at sea, so here's another one. Those interested in reading more about why sunsets look so cool should check out David Morgan-Mar's annotation on the topic.

It's not all beautiful sunsets and fair winds, though. We took some time to fix some reefing points on the mains'l, and about halfway through the voyage the sullage pump gave up. That meant no showers and no using the lower head (toilet) until it was fixed, a job that took the engineer, captain, first mate and our smallest deckhand twelve hours. The old pump's housing had finally corroded through and the spare pump's housing didn't fit. That meant pulling the pump out of the engine room and putting a new one in. Not a fun job in the cramped engine room.

Like I said before, everything worked out fine and we're heading out again in a few days. It's been an unusually hectic voyage season (so I've been told) but it's nearly finished. Then it's back to day sails and maintenance.

Despite finishing the previous voyage a while ago, I still haven't got around to writing about the latest book I have read: Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it. The basic premise of the setting isn't unique; that gods are created by and survive on the worship and sacrifice of their followers. The interesting take on the idea is that as various migrants came to America, they brought their gods with them. In modern times, these gods and other beings of folklore (leprechauns and djinni, for example) are reduced to living in run-down apartments, driving taxis and living on the streets.

It's a pretty neat idea, but the telling needed some work. There are a number of short interludes that don't really go anywhere. The main character doesn't really have any impact on anything throughout the story. Things happen to him and around him, but he doesn't seem to do anything. The unfolding of the main plot up to the big reveal is decent, but I just think it could have been told better.

Would I suggest you read it? Sure, but probably put it halfway down the stack, below all the things you promised to read but haven't quite got around to yet.

Well, I suppose this was inevitable. I found a three-story collection of Hornblower novels on a virtual garage sale.

The Hornblower novels remind me of Ender's Game more than anything else. Hornblower reminds me of Ender Wiggin: both are introspective leaders, isolated by their position. Both are analytical but can understand and manage their underlings extremely well. Both have a habit of pulling surprising victories out of dire situations, as well.

Having constant access to Hornblower's thoughts means you can see how he constructs the persona of a fearless naval captain, despite fighting his fears, controlling his seasickness and maintaining his crew's morale. Unfortunately, most of his thoughts are him berating himself for cowardice, stupidity or some other perceived flaw. The contradiction between his outward success as a leader and his internal self-flagellation is fascinating in small doses but becomes tiresome.

Even so, I enjoyed the three stories: Hornblower salvages British gold from the bottom of a Turkish harbour, sails halfway around the world on orders kept secret from his crew, handles the scheduling of Nelson's funeral and manages to do it all while satisfying his personal morals and his duty to the Royal Navy.

Another programming book. I picked up Clocksin and Mellish's Programming in Prolog after the former second mate encouraged me to learn more about Prolog. Before this, my only exposure to the language was a single lecture at the end of COMP2600 and that old joke ("How many prolog programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? No.").

The first thing that struck me about the book is how honest it is. The authors are very careful to always use the correct terms for everything (predicates, facts and so on) and not hand-wave away things by analogy to more conventional languages.

The main idea behind Prolog is that instead of writing a detailed procedure to compute a result, the programmer needs only to describe the solution and perhaps guide the backtracking algorithm a little bit to keep the search space manageable. An interesting consequence is that the standard library can be a lot smaller. Instead of needing six functions to slice lists six different ways, many of them can be described in terms of "append".

The problem with this is that because of the size of the search space, Prolog has to provide a "cut" operator that commits the search to choices made so far. The trouble with cut is that it can prevent the rules from generating correct (or all of the correct) results when called in reverse. Not only that, but it's not often obvious how a predicate works: it's hard to see which parts will be called forwards and which will be called backwards depending on which way the matcher is trying to instantiate a given rule.

The standard library is also a bit quirky: input and output (as described in the text) can only be done by temporarily redirecting standard input and standard output. Being a bit old, the naming of some of its predicates are a bit odd: files are "consult"ed instead of loaded, input is "see"n instead of read and so on. "assert" isn't used to catch bugs but instead adds new facts and rules to the database.

Even so, Prolog's a pretty elegant language. The basic structure of atoms and functors continues all the way down to the rule definition (:-) and interrogation (?-) operators, and this enables the authors to present a small metacircular evaluator midway through the book.

I'm glad I took the time to learn about Prolog. As a declarative language I've only really seen it lumped alongside make in "lists of languages you should at least read about", but that's a poor comparison. Sure, both are declarative, but their underlying models and methods for determining what work to do are completely different. Even if you grok "make", set aside a few hours to read about Prolog.

Randall Hyde's The Art of Assembly Language is one of the works often recommended to new x86 assembly language programmers. It comes in three flavours: two 32-bit versions, one for Windows, one for GNU/Linux and a 16-bit version for DOS. The 32-bit versions use a custom language that adds high-level constructs to assembly language, but the 16-bit version has to deal with DOS. The high-level assembly language in the 32-bit versions put me off, but I was quite happy to read the 16-bit version, being a fan of that crusty old "operating system".

The exhaustive listing of the x86 instruction set (at least, up to the 486) isn't until chapter 6 (mov is introduced in an earlier chapter and the string instructions are postponed until chapter 15). Large chunks of the book are dedicated to the old Microsoft Macro Assembler, MASM. While not very useful as written, mentally translating the examples to nasm is a useful exercise. The final chapters of the book briefly cover how to program various PC hardware: the keyboard, text display, game adapter and serial and parallel ports. There's also a fairly thorough discussion on parameter passing, covering the implementation of several call-by-foo styles of passing arguments.

I would recommend it to anyone who wants to start learning DOS arcana (the BIOS and hardware progragramming chapters might be interesting to hobby-OS developers). The 32-bit versions' "High-Level Assembler" puts me off, so I can't recommend it as a general-purpose assembley language tutorial (for that, I think that one of the other titles here would be more appropriate).

We've just come back from another voyage. This one was ten days at sea, training a new voyage crew from another school. Two crews, actually: we sailed one crew to Port Davey so they could hike from Melaleuca back to civilisation, and we took on another crew of walkers who had walked in.

I have a rule about Port Davey: never trust a hot, still, sunny day. I coined this rule after we dragged anchor in Joe Page Bay last November. That rule proved correct again, when a front came in just as we finished weighing anchor one morning. The wind quickly picked up, sending us all scurrying up the rigging to sea-gasket sail. That was a good experience, as even a few months ago I would not have worked well enough aloft to be useful in such a situation.

The most interesting thing that happened on the trip was the adjustment of daylight savings time. When the shift happened, we were in Port Davey and chose to ignore it. Once we returned to Recherche Bay, we had to come back to the real world. To do that, we extended three watches by 20 minutes each and stepped the clock back one hour after that.

Another book I've recently finished: Edward De Bono's Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity. This is the book that defined the term "lateral thinking" and defines it as orthogonal to traditional thinking, which De Bono calls "vertical thinking". De Bono warns the reader that he may repeat himself to drive his points home, and he certainly does repeat himself a lot. His central point is that lateral thinking involves a deliberate suspension of judgement in order to enable people to hold onto arrangements of ideas that would usually be dismissed out of hand.

In order to achieve this, De Bono sets out a few techniques. One is to reverse aspects of a situation in order to generate a new idea. Imagine a policeman directing traffic at an intersection. Now turn it on its head and imagine the policeman summoning traffic, then the traffic controlling the policeman. Another technique he describes is the brainstorming session. Since that's become commonplace, I won't spend time describing it. A third technique involves pulling random words from somewhere in order to spark new lines of thought.

The most interesting technique in the book is the use of a made-up word called "po". "Po" can fit just about anywhere in a sentence and is used to hold ideas without making any judgement about them. It can be used to connect two unrelated concepts to search for a new link between them ("computers po omelettes").

The book could've presented its core ideas in about half the size, but the ideas are reasonably interesting. The techniques remind me a little of the heuristics in Polya's How to Solve It. Polya's heuristics are intended to help get from a problem to a solution, but De Bono's techniques are designed to generate new lines of thought and possibly restructure the problem itself.