peteg's blog

Tropic Thunder

At The Ritz with Jen.

Tim Winton: Breath

I liked it, and can think of little more to say.

Graham Reilly: Saigon Tea

Meh. Apparently the author spent three years in Hồ Chí Minh City and the best he could come up with is this. In a tale is spread across three cities, Glasgow is the only one that is described in more detail than a tourist could manage after a day's visit and if you wanted to know about Scotland, you'd be reading Irvine Welsh. Reilly's evocation of Saigon hardly exceeds what one learns from the Lonely Planet, soured by the usual questions ("Why do the people smile so much after all that's happened?") that are never properly addressed by pop writers. Let's not even mention Melbourne, the book hardly does. One ends up with no greater insight about the places, the peoples, mixed marriages, cross-cultural humour or any other thing one finds canvassed here.

I found it especially irritating that his Saigon was little more than Westerner-friendly District 1, with District 3 being characterised as a rich people's ghetto, and District 4 as comprised entirely of criminal trash. He doesn't even mention Chọ Lớn! Lame, lame, lame... there is no depth here, and the humour is mostly clunky and derivative to boot. Sliding in some pigeon tiếng Việt does nothing for this book.

Apparently he is an editor at the The Age.

BTW, the best way to see Vietnam is from a motorbike. Walking everywhere gets old fast with all the street hawkers. If you don't want to drive, either find a mate who does or pay a local. Bring a helmet.

Run Fatboy Run

The Bank Job

The Simpsons Movie

National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets

Worse than the original?

Nam Le: The Boat

I picked this up on the strength of a gushing Smage review, and really, what's not to like: a young bloke, born in Vietnam and raised in Melbourne, cranking out self-confident self-aware prose.

There are so many reviews and things — many helpfully catalogued by the man himself — that I have little to add. I would more strongly recommend this interview from earlier in the year if the interviewer weren't so overbearing.

My favourite effort was the first story, Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, which is available here. Perhaps the stylistically weakest is his Winton-alike Halflead Bay, and even that is redeemed by some strong themes.

Dương Thu Hương: Paradise of the Blind

I have mixed feelings about this book; the endless food pornography dulled the edge of some sharp social commentary, particularly centred around the land reforms and the lifestyles of the post-war political cadres. Some of the loyalties are stretched super-thin, and the uncle character is barely more than a caricature. I enjoyed it when the plot was moving, and I do appreciate that many nuances were lost in translation.

The Herald Tribune has a good interview with the author. It was written at an interesting time in the country's history and apparently things are still not settled.

A Passage to India

If...

Wanted

At The Ritz with Jen. What a turkey. I'd prefer less blood, better editing and more action. Arnie is sorely missed in this genre.

The Trials of Henry Kissinger

Well made and quite depressing. You can watch it at Google Video and there's a somewhat pointless official website.

Our Country's Good

Sarah invited me to this National Art School production, where it seemed every cast member had invited a few hundred of their friends. Strangely enough Darlinghurst Theatre was putting the same play on at the same time.

I was right up the back so I couldn't hear much. The theatre itself was a delightful old sandstone cellar-ish thing which might have been cold if it weren't for the crowd.

Vertical Ray of the Sun

I did not understand this movie.

Growing up Asian in Australia ed. Alice Pung.

I picked this one up at the UNSW Bookshop on the strength of a Smage review. It's a real mixed bag; there are some excellent stories but too much samey-sameness to really push my buttons. The best are those that recount specific incidents which are indeed exotic to (most) other Australians, in much the same way as Henry Lawson's were a century ago. Memorable:

The Leaving Home section:
- Diana Nguyen's Five ways to disappoint your Vietnamese mother.
- Pauline Nguyen's The courage of soldiers.
- Paul Nguyen's You can't choose your memories.
- Emily J. Sun's These are the photographs we take.
Jacqui Larkin's cute Baked beans and burnt toast.
Blossom Beeby's account of finding her Korean birth mother, The face in the mirror.
Hai Ha Le's Ginseng tea and a pair of thongs.
Ken Chan's Quarrel.
Diem Vo's Family life.
The Battlers section: Hop Dac's Pigs from home is hilarious, as is Annette Shun Wah's Spiderbait. Lily Chan's Take me away, please is wanly endearing.
Kylie Kwong's My China, excerpted from her book of the same name.

There are others. On the balance I'm glad I read it, even though many stretches of tens of pages left me cold. It serves as a good entrée to authors I would not have otherwise found.

The Dark Knight

At the 8:30pm session with Jen at The Ritz. I'm glad we didn't try the 9:30pm session, we would've fallen asleep.

Machiavelli, a card game.

I learnt this one from an Italian girl while I was in Nha Trang last year. You'll need two decks of cards, a fairly large table and a mate or two. Please tell me how I can improve this presentation of the rules.

Choose the dealer.

Oldest person deals the first hand, then winners deal successive hands.

Deal.

The dealer shuffles the two decks into one pile of cards and deals each player fourteen cards face-down.

Goal.

A player wins by being the first to play all the cards in their hand.

Invariant.

Initially the table is bare, with the pile of undealt cards placed face-down within easy reach of all players.

At the end of each player's turn, each card played on the table must be part of exactly one:

three- or four-of-a-kind, with each suit appearing at most once; or
a run, where each card is of the same suit. (The ace follows the king in a run, and cannot be placed before the two.)

Play.

Play proceeds in turns, going clockwise, starting with the player to the left of the dealer.

Initially a player must play (at least) a self-contained group of three cards. After doing so, and on successive rounds, a player may play as many cards as they like. They can adjust the groups of cards already on the table by:

adding cards to an existing group; or
redistributing existing groups and adding cards.

If the player does not play a card on the table, they must pick up a card from the top of the deck of undealt cards, after which play continues with the next player.

Note there is no notion of "ownership" of a group of cards on the table.

Alan Chalmers: What is this thing called science?

This book was on the reading stack for a long time; I believe I purchased it at Gould's many years ago. Unfortunately it happened to be the outdated second edition, without the additional, possibly fascinating, chapter on Bayesianism. I read this book as I've always been interested in the philosophy of science but never received any formal education on the topic.

I came away quite impressed by the first half of the book, where Chalmers takes an axe to naive inductivism and falsificationism. I was curious how these arguments relate to Ehud Shapiro's MIS, and machine learning in general, and came to realise that there the languages are quite rigid, with a careful identification of "observations" and "theoretical terms" that skirts some of the problems with refining theories in the face of unreliable evidence. It remains unclear to me how much one can learn about science-in-the-large from MIS, though the algorithms are cute beyond belief.

The latter half on research agendas, paradigms, programs, and the division of science into different activities lost me, largely as my interest in how a given scientific theory is structured and refined by "normal scientists" was unsated by the first half. The accounts of the higher-level activity of "disruptive science" offered by Kuhn and Lakatos are also interesting, of course, but stand on a different strata.

Samir reviewed the third edition. I concur with him that some discussion of what constitutes scientific explanation might have been helpful.

Bomb Harvest

Great story of an Australian bloke doing his bit to reduce the unexploded ordnance in Laos. Pretty funny, and oh-so-familiar when the rice wine comes out.