日本人の英語

日本人の英語 (English of Japanese People)
マーク・ピーターセン(Mark Petersen)
ISBN 4-00-430018-5

Well, I thought I should write about this book in Japanese, my mother tongue.

この本は初版が1988年、まだ僕が大学生の頃に出版されている。
なんで出た当時に、せめて大学院の頃に気づいて読まなかったのだろう。
このblogも、思うところあって英語で書いているわけだけれど、この本を読んでいて、正直、冷や汗が出たというのが正直なところだ。
マーク・ピーターセンの本は、他にも「続日本人の英語」「心にとどく英語」とあるのでどちらも順次読んでみよう。

しかし、それにしても、見事な「日本語」だとしかいいようがない。
最近は日本語の通じない／書けない日本人も多いことだし…

A LISP Textbook

LISP For Beginners Revised Edition (初めての人のためのLISP 増補改訂版)
Ikuo Takeuchi
ISBN 978-4-7981-1941-0

I bought this book today.
The author is Professor Takeuchi whom I mentioned in the beginning of this month.

Actually, I studied LISP about 15 years ago using Winston and Horn, but it's a quite standard textbook and in other word boring for me.

You can understand that the textbook is abnormal by skimming it within a minute. :o
It consists of mainly dialogs of Professor K and students, and what the most important thing is that it tells us philosophy of LISP and computer science throughout the book.

Actually, the book has been out of prints for years. But, Professor Takeuchi revised it greatly and published again yesterday. :)

It's worth reading if you are working on computer science. :)

La plus belle historie du monde

"La plus belle historie du monde"
Le secrets de nos origines

Hubert Reeves, Joel de Rosnay, Yves Coppens and Dominique Simonnet
ISBN 4-480-42176-9

This book looks like a best seller in France.
There 3 famous scientists give talks on the origins of Universe, Life and Human Beings led by a famous journalist.

Actually, there were several points which I was not sure if they are really established theories or not, but anyway the book is easy to read and a very good popular science book.

Unbroken Arrow

Unbroken Arrow
Chohei Kambayashi
ISBN 978-4152090515

This is the third book of Yukikaze series.
Kambayashi is one of the most discriminating Sci-Fi authors in Japan.

For years, Kambayashi has been seeking for a bit philosophical things.
"What is reality?" for example.

Yukikaze series is a story about a battle between human beings and aliens called Jam which look like machinery life form, especially forms of combat airplanes.

In the first book of Yukikaze series, Kambayashi wrote mainly on relationship between human beings and machines.
In the second book, he tried to describe differences between human beings and Jam, but still the main focus was on the earth side. Actually, the relationship between human beings and Yukikaze, the most cutting edge artificial intelligence optimized for battle.
Here, the point is, the alien, Jam, was described as completely 'alien' throughout the two books. Anyway, too different to understand each other.

Here in the third book, Kambayashi steps into a new stage.
The story begins when a journalist received a mail from the planet Fairy, the battle field, connected by subspace corridor in the Antarctica. The sender is a human, a renegade commander of the earth side force in the planet, and his message was a proclamation of war on behalf of Jam...
Thus, there are not so many dog fight scenes of airplanes like the previous two books, but it's full of dizzy but meaning a great deal scenes which Kambayashi is good at.
I assure you that the book is worth reading. :)

Chaos Phenomenology

Chaos Phenomenology
Hiroshi Serizawa
ISBN 978-4489004223

A plain introduction to classical chaotic dynamics with sample programs.
But, they are based on TurboC (!) and depend on Borland's Graphic Interface (BGI).
Nowadays, a bit obsolete... :(

Prime Obsession

Prime Obsession -- Bernhard Riemann & the Greatest Unsolved Problem
John Derbyshire
ISBN 4-8222-8204-X

This books is a plain expository on Riemann Hypothesis.
Actually, I didn't know well how good describing distribution of prime numbers the hypothesis and related theorems are.

I believe that you can do good mental gymnastics reading the book even if you don't have enough background knowledge on number theories. Actually, I didn't have almost at all. :o

Guin Saga 130

Guin Saga 130
A Fathomless Future
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030975-6

This is the very last book of the Guin Saga series.
It's a great pity that Kurimoto could not complete her greatest work.
But, as her husband writes in postscript of the book, Kurimoto left us great amount of information about overall story line of the series. So, even I can imagine my own version of Guin Saga story, and now I'm wondering if my daughter would have interests on the series. If she does, it must be a happy time chatting various topics of the Guin Saga world with my daughter. :)

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide

Hadoop: The Definitive Guide
Tom White
ISBN 978-0-596-52197-4

Today, I made a 6 nodes small Hadoop cluster finally.
In also Japan, recently everybody and his brother of IT industory is interested in Hadoop and similar technology, and I am not an exception. :o

Around me at work, there seem to be a lot of people who indeed have interests on Hadoop but do not know what they can do using Hadoop. :o
In case of me, the situation is a bit different. I'm working on a national R&D project related to cloud computing, but actually I'm not sure if the technology is really useful or not. :o So, as a use case of it, I began to work on Hadoop/MapReduce recently. :(

I know it's like putting the cart before the horse, but what can I do?? :(

An Introduction to The Human Sciences

An Introduction to The Human Sciences
Takeshi Yoro
ISBN 4-480-86064-9

This book is worth reading.

Yoro, author of the book, defines Human Sciences as explaining something by using a human being as a criterion defined in scientific and universal way. I think Yoro is trying to reconstruct the way to build up a world perspective in a bit different manner from the modern western science.

Why can a human being, a highly objective thing, be used as a criterion for having perspective of the world, the most subjective thing?
It is because the perspective must be expressed by a language which is a collection of commonly understandable symbols among human beings, and it's a human brain which processes the symbols and gives senses to them. Thus, the world perspective cannot be separated from the nature of a human being.

Anyway, I think readers can see a bit new approach to this very old problem.

Guin Saga 129

Guin Saga 129
The Child Chosen
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030971-8

I thought this is the last completed book of Guin Saga, but book 130 seems to be available in December. It's said that the 130th book was not completed when Kurimoto past away, but anyway we can enjoy one more book...

One Thousand and One Nights (13/13)

Le Liver Des Mille Nuits Et Une Nuit (13/13)
Translated to French by J.C. Mardrus
ISBN 4-00-327813-5 (Japanese translation)

The 13th book of "One Thousand and One Nights."
From the night 940 to the last night.

It took me about 4 months to finish the 13 books because I was a bit busy in July and August. But, to tell the truth, I bought them more than 15 years ago... :o

As I mentioned before, Shahrazad got three kids for her king.
In a sense, this is a happy ending. But, the king was going to kill her and didn't notice that she got pregnant by him at all. It's amazing...

One Thousand and One Nights (12/13)

Le Liver Des Mille Nuits Et Une Nuit (12/13)
Translated to French by J.C. Mardrus
ISBN 4-00-327812-7 (Japanese translation)

The 12th book of "One Thousand and One Nights."
From the night 881 to the night 940.

BTW, story of the night 882 is a collection of short episode, and among them an episode named "Anklet" which plot is like Cinderella. I'm not sure which is older. But, this episode might be the original.

One Thousand and One Nights (11/13)

Le Liver Des Mille Nuits Et Une Nuit (11/13)
Translated to French by J.C. Mardrus
ISBN 4-00-327811-0 (Japanese translation)

The 11th book of "One Thousand and One Nights."
From the night 826 to the night 881.

This book contains "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," and like other famous Arabian Nights juvenile stories, the original story is quite different from my memory.
In a sense, it's a bit cruel, but maybe it's just a problem of cultural difference.

One Thousand and One Nights (10/13)

Le Liver Des Mille Nuits Et Une Nuit (10/13)
Translated to French by J.C. Mardrus
ISBN 4-00-327810-0 (Japanese translation)

The 10th book of "One Thousand and One Nights."
From the night 774 to the night 826.

One Thousand and One Nights (9/13)

Le Liver Des Mille Nuits Et Une Nuit (9/13)
Translated to French by J.C. Mardrus
ISBN 4-00-327809-7 (Japanese translation)

The 9th book of "One Thousand and One Nights."
From the night 622 to the night 774.

This book contains "The Tale of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp," and I felt it's OK letting my daughter read it different from the case of "The Tale of Sindbad the Sailor." But, one thing interesting is that genies of lamps serve a enormous bird, Roc, which appeared in also Sindbad's adventure stories. Maybe, it's just a coincidence. But, anyway it's a bit impressive for me.

One more thing to note is that Shahrazad took 20 days refreshment and mentioned that the fact means prosperity of her king's family. But, the king didn't notice anything. It's more than 2 years since Shaharazad began to tell various implicative stories for him, and still he does not show any signs of changing his mind. In a sense, it's amazing...

One Thousand and One Nights (8/13)

Le Liver Des Mille Nuits Et Une Nuit (8/13)
Translated to French by J.C. Mardrus
ISBN 4-00-327808-9 (Japanese translation)

The 8th book of "One Thousand and One Nights."
From the night 515 to the night 622.

The story for the night 576 to 615, "The Adventures of Hasan of Bassora" could be one of the best stories among 1001 ones.

BTW, its Japanese title literally means "The Adventures of Hasan Al-Basri."
I picked up the English title above from this site, I'm not sure which is correct because I don't speak French which the Japanese translators used as their base text...

The Big Switch

The Big Switch -- Rewriting the World, from Edison to Google
Nicholas G. Carr
ISBN 978-4-7981-1621-1 (Japanese translation)

I'm not sure if there is an English word "cloudize," but I want to mean making something cloud (computing) by the word.

Here, I wrote above because the Japanese title of the book, "クラウド化する世界", which roughly means "Cloudizing World " which must be named so because of the huge hype on cloud computing.

Car, author of the book, explains a paradigm shift caused by cloud computing by using an analogy of the change before and after diffusion of electricity. Actually there was a change of even concept of values, and it's nostalgia remembering the good old days before the change. For example, reading books under light of an oil ramp in the night was not convenient nor good for eyesight. But, not a small number of people must feel something attractive from that. But, times have changed.
Car says this kind of change is now coming.

BTW, hey Saeki-kun, do you understand what I said at a party after Maru-chan's wedding ceremony? :o

The Psychology of Men of Genious

The Psychology of Men of Genious (Geniale Menschen), 5th edition
Ernst Kretchmer (Japanese translation)
ISBN 978-4003365816

A classical work on psychology of geniuses.
I bought the book possibly more than 10 years ago, and finally finished. The primary reason why I took it after such a long interval is mainly because I read Shroedinger's work on Mind and Matter recently. Also, Shroedinger is one of the greatest genious in the histroy of contemporary physics. I'm going to write on Shroedinger in another day.

This book is definitely one of established classics, but I'm wondering what people think about the section VII where Kretchmer says that there was no great female geniuses and explanations about "the fact." His analysis is mainly based on various talented people of Western European countries mainly before the 20th century. Especially after the second world war, the world is changing so rapidly. Thus, I'm feeling the theory of geniuses could be different nowadays. But, anyway maybe it just means I should read more contemporary works on philosophy of geniuses.

BTW, in Japanese translation, titles of part 2 is "映像" which means "Image", and I was not sure what Kretchmer meant by that. But, according to English translation available here, actually it was "Patterns." It might have been better reading the book in English... orz

One Thousand and One Nights (7/13)

Le Liver Des Mille Nuits Et Une Nuit (7/13)
Translated to French by J.C. Mardrus
ISBN 4-00-327807-0 (Japanese translation)

The 7th book of "One Thousand and One Nights."
From the night 414 to the night 515.

It was impressive that this book and the book 6 contain stories about people who live in the sea. They can breathe even in water, but except that they are almost the same with us. Actually, they have their own civilization under the sea.
In also Japan, we have a famous nursery tale, Urashima Taro, in which a fisherman helped a turtle and was invited to a castle under the sea.

I'm wondering if there are similar stories of people who live under the sea all around the world...
And if so, why?

One Thousand and One Nights (6/13)

Le Liver Des Mille Nuits Et Une Nuit (6/13)
Translated to French by J.C. Mardrus
ISBN 4-00-327806-2 (Japanese translation)

The 6th book of "One Thousand and One Nights."
From the night 331 to the night 414.

Nothing special to note about the stories in this book, but one thing came up with me is that in the stories of One Thousand and One Nights people really often lose consciousness when they were deeply impressed. I read in some literature that women nobles often lost consciousness when they felt deep emotion in medieval Europe. I can understand that because most of them were brought up in a bit special family situation and so they didn't have enough experience to control their own emotion since their childhood.
But, in One Thousand and One Nights, even common people often lose consciousness, and I'm wondering if it's just an expression technique or not...