Mendoza’s Gurp

Eduardo Mendoza is one of the most recognised Spanish authors in the last decades. I have read a couple of his books: La Verdad sobre el Caso Savolta, La Ciudad de los Prodigios, Riña de Gatos, el Laberinto de las Aceitunas and now Sin Noticias de Gurp.

I have to say: all his books show an impecable command of the Spanish language. Just because of that they are good. He shows a rich and yet natural vocabulary. He has a good sense of humour. Gurp was conceived as a kind of light-hearted comedy, a pseudo-science fiction book.

I have to own up I was not very impressed. Perhaps I have too many expectations after reading a lot of real science fiction and that wonderful mix of science fiction with comedy that was the incredible Douglas Adams. Still, I missed the element of surprise, some original trait…it was, all in all, a bit childish. Mendoza, very humbly, concedes in the forewords he did not expect that book to be as succesful as it actually became. To his surprise – and to mine – it is his most popular book among all readers.

My favourite Mendoza books are still La Verdad sobre el Caso Savolta and, undoubtedly, La Ciudad de los Prodigios. If you speak Spanish well, I recommend you both of them.


Rusia de cabo a rabo

He leído dos libros interesantes sobre Rusia. El primero es A History of Modern Russia del historiador británico Robert Service y el segundo es un libro del periodista noruego Øystein Bogen, Russlands hemmelige krig mot Vesten o, en nuestro idioma, La Guerra secreta de Rusia contra Occidente. sobre la guerra híbrida que lleva a cabo Rusia en Occidente. Ambos dan una buena perspectiva sobre lo que ha ocurrido en Rusia. El primer libro comienza a la entrada del siglo XX y llega hasta 2014. El segundo, aunque tiene muchas referencias a los tiempos soviéticos, se enfoca en la guerra híbrida de Rusia de los últimos tiempos (pero explica claramente cómo se formó la FSB y toda la trama de los siloviki).

Boris Pasternak and family…one of those great writers who could not publish as he wanted

Another NLP/Text analytics by O’Reilly

I got the Applied Text Analytics with Python by Benjamin Bengfort, Rebecca Bilbro and Tony Ojeda. If you have some NLP experience a few of the chapters will be old stuff.

That was the case for me. Still, there were some pieces from which I learnt a bit:

  • custom corpus preparation
  • some about text visualization and graph analysis of text and
  • scaling text analytics with multiprocessing.

The creative brain

I just finished the second book on the brain by Dick Swaab. I do not think the English translation has come out yet but if you read Dutch, here you have a reference about it.
This time Swaab focuses, as the Dutch title indicates, on creativity on a general scale: how it is generated, how it is shaped by our genes, by the way children develop in their mother’s wombs, by every single thing that happens to them, to us, until our deaths.

The book is written with the usual dry Dutch humour. It has lots of references to the ailments and quirks of artists, scientists and other people.

The book can become very technical but for someone really interested in the brain, it is a trove of information. It has very good references and a really complete index.

The only thing I wish could have been done better is the images on the different brain parts – there are several small pictures mostly at the start and at the end of the book. Thinking about this I thought it could be good to have something like an online search where you can enter terms about the brain and a 3-D-like visualization rotates, gets zoomed in o or out. That would be the perfect addition for this book. But perhaps I am asking too much. It would be a nice application, though, for people like me, a layman, who want to understand a bit more about our brains.

Testing Python

Professionally I started work using C++ and from there started to go more and more into Java and from there, without leaving it, moving more and more to Python. One of the things I discovered with Python was how little there was on structuring compared to Java. The other thing I found was that I found less information on possibilities for testing than in the Java world.

Percival’s book Test-Driven Development with Python has been an excellent help to getting fast on track using more than basic possibilities for proper testing in this language. A great thing this book does is to help you get a Django project up and running.

Take a look at the book’s site here. It is really good.

Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow by Ganegadara

I actually started to read this book last year. I went through most of it and experimented a lot but had no time to write. I finally read the last chapter, which I had somehow put off. All in all, it is a useful book on using TensorFlow for NLP.

It offers a good exploration of what Word2Vec is. It goes on to CNNs first with image recognition and then with sentence classification, then it does a good initial cover of LSTMS and finally it touches very briefly some trends.

I think I would have skipped the NLP introduction, but then I have worked on NLP almost all of my life. Ganegadara should not have gone so long on WordNet etc. As much as it was an usual tool, it still might be, a paragraph would have been enough.

It was a pity the last part, the one I left until now on trends, was so short but then the technology and even the basics on what deep learning is about are changing so fast!

Рунет

Я прочитал книгу Солдатова “Битва за Рунет”. Солдатов написал книгу на английском и это было перевод, но перевод на языке автора и поэтому думаю что текст был в порядке. Книга рассказывала особенно о развитиях, о отношениях и мерах принятых правительством России за контроль Рунета, мало о технических аспектах. Советую книгу всем которые интересуются Россией не только в области  достопримечательностях.

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Congo revisited

I finished reading David van Reybrouck’s “Congo, een Geschiedenis”. in English Congo, the title is the Epic History of a People. The book is a wonderful work even though it also became a very tough journey through a country we often forget about.

Children in Congo (Wikipedia)

Stylistically the book is a treasure trove. Van Reybrouck’s vocabulary is exquisite, his images powerful. I read the book in the Dutch original but according to several articles, the translations into French, English and German are excellent.

The story starts from prehistory, which in the case of Congo means up to the arrival of Europeans. That part is rather short but that is understandable as basically we still know very little about the country’s most distant past. Things start to become more detailed with Stanley’s arrival to the region. Van Reybrouck lets lots of people, mostly Congolese, do the talking. One of the things I got a better view of was the independence period. Another one was the evolution of Mobutu’s regime. Even though I have read here and there about the Chinese involvement in Congo, the details one finds in this book are also fascinating.

There was some discussion – or criticism – on the book’s historical rigurosity. You can read a bit of that in the Flemish Knack (Dutch). It is a pity I haven’t seen a clear stance from Reybrouck on this topic, perhaps even a desire to review certain parts. Still, the 680 pages were worth the time.

Another Pac(k)t

OK, terrible pun. I was not inspired. Anyway: I am going through Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow by Ganegedera and although I find Packt books often are published in a bit of a rush, this seems to present a neat introduction to Tensorflow as related to NLP. There are some simplifications on NLP and all, but it does present a good introduction to TensorFlow in this area.

 

On beliefs

Some time ago I read Harari’s Homo Deus. Although I did not consider it a very original book, I found it offered a detailed discussion about how beliefs in science, economics and other fields have shaped the  world and will keep on shaping it.

Hariri presented an interesting discussion about how societies are manipulated by a few. Here the communist elite in Romania, with dictator Ceasescu back in the seventies (Wikipedia)

Harari focuses on what is happening now with humankind’s desire to re-engineer everything.

One item I did not like were his references to the Internet of Things. I am not an expert on it but even I could see he just needed to talk about it too without having a grasp about it. At least that is my take. All in all, it was an interesting reading.