A review on “Little Soldiers” by Lenora Chu.

I have gone through the book in the title. I am no saying “have read”, because for quite some time already, since first grasping this trick while conquering Baudrillard’s “Simulacra”, I am getting through a lot of material via listening to Text-to-Speech, rather than reading directly. Not just is it very handy when there is a “sunken” time during which it is not possible to execute tasks that require full concentration. This, however, comes at a price, namely, certain details are perceived differently, compared to reading in a traditional way.

Anyway, I have listened through the book, and it was an enlightening experience, which I would like to share with the world in this short review.

The book tells a story of an American couple with two children living in Shanghai for a few years, who’s elder son had a chance to attend classes in a Chinese kindergarten (as opposed to what typically happens to the expat children in China – they attend foreign-style kindergartens, which are especially plentiful in Shanghai).

The book was especially interesting to me, as I am not an original product of either American, or Chinese culture, so I had a chance to see the story from a third-party perspective.

Musings on “The Force of Non-Violence” by Judith Butler (2020).

The Force of Non-Violence by Judith Butler (2020)

A long, confusing, self-inconsistent and contradictory “review” is following.

A short review of the “Art of War for Women” by Chin-Ning Choo.

The Art of War.

NOTE: this review is not about a similarly-titled book by Sheetz-Runkle, and not about a similarly-titled book by Huang and Rosenberg.

The “Art of War”, not such a long time ago used to be fairly unknown to the western audience. Maybe because there had already been a well-established western military tradition, represented by von Clausewitz. The Soviets, however, perhaps due to being actively involved with Asia since the very establishment, were much more open to the Eastern tradition, and the Art of War was a part of the Soviet intelligence curriculum for a long time. Eventually the West has also fallen victim to this millennia-old book on strategy and tactics, and the Art of War began its triumphant parade over the business culture. This was also partly fuelled by the very visible progress that the Asian cultures, from Mongolia to Japan, had by the end of the 20th century. One of the most prominent marks of the era was a recent British independence slogan “Will the Brexit Referendum make London the Singapore-on-Thames?”. Such an astonishing claim to be made in the former capital of the world.

The book by Ms Choo introduces the concept of the 21st century being the “Century of Asia” at the very beginning of the book. Indeed, although the book is full of citations from the Art of War, my feeling was that they were cherry-picked with the main purpose of adding Ms Choo’s book an Asian flavour, rather being the core knowledge carrier.

Maybe it’s actually for the best. To each his own, I am still planning to lay my hands on the old book itself, and thankfully, the “for Women” version was not much of a spoiler.

The second claim that is firmly made in the book is that the 21st century is going to be the century of women. That’s probably a thing that nobody is going to argue against, since the technology is making the world a much more comfortable place for women, so even though I would be more careful about attributing the whole century to just a since human trait (sex), we are definitely going (in fact we already are) seeing more female influence on the everyday life.

The core ideas.

The book is roughly structured around five aspects of success.

They bear fancy Chinese names, but for simplicity I am just writing them out in layman terms:

• Personal qualities
• Temporal properties
• Fixed properties
• Skill
• Implementation

Each chapter is dedicated to one of the components of success, and in each of those the author tries, beyond presenting the basic concept of a component and the actions that are needed to nurture this component, some additional traits that are supposed to be more related to women than men.

Quite unsurprisingly, as the book progresses, each subsequent chapter bears less “femaleness” and more “practical guidelines”.

In general, I cannot say that I highly assess the parts that are more dedicated to the sexual dimorphism. The management chapters were quite good. I have made a lot of records, and rearranged some of my working practices, following her advice. The “female” parts, to be honest, did not help illuminating how exactly sexual dimorphism affects the differences of performance between the employees of different sexes too much. The book contains quite a lot of female encouragement and debunking of old misconceptions about women, which is a great thing, but seems to be of less use to those who have already given up those misconceptions. However, developing “conceptions” (pun intended), that is the understanding when and how exactly sexual differences can be used as a leverage, and where they should be kept in mind as a thing of concern, is sub-optimal, in my opinion.

Conclusion

The book is short, and can be done in a couple of evenings. It is probably worth reading as an encouraging material, although women who have already decided to be the best of themselves, are unlikely to need any more encouragement. Some anecdotal evidence is nice, it feels very nice to be able to relate yourself to some real-life examples. Some paragons of female success are also given, from various areas of life, from politicians to doctors and managers. The management-related, gender-agnostic chapters are just good and worth looking even more than once. Is it the book to be read to find out about gender differences and how to use them – perhaps not, and it is also not a good book about the “Art of War”.

The main military thought that you can derive from it is that avoiding defeat may be often a much more efficient strategy than winning a battle. After all, Suvorov is believed to be emphasising this a lot.

The Russian translation is horrible, however.

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A short review on “The Madness of Crowds” by Douglas Murray (2019).

I have read the “Madness of Crowds”. It is a book about several kinds of inequalities in the society, to which a lot of effort has been paid in order to compensate for them, and although up to a certain point a lot of this effort paid off, recently the effects became more controversial than working.

Douglas discusses four big (in the amount of text dedicated to them) inequalities, and many more small ones.

I think that the main point that should be taken away from the text is that much more thinking needs to be done before deciding on an important issue, even if this issue may seem perfectly obvious to the referential group. If someone is offering you a “clear solution” to an issue, doubt it even if it is a direct extrapolation of the solution to the same issue as it used to be in the past. Doubt it if is the same solution to a different issue, no matter how similar it may look. Doubt it in any circumstances.

Another thing that I take out of his book is: read the classics. Not the classical fiction, but the classical thought. The older guys, like Democritus, Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Confucius, Babylonians, they have been outdated and superseded… but it is astonishing to see how slowly the process of change goes in the human nature, compared to the human tools.

There is also one thought that is not terribly new, at least I heard it several times from different people, but which, I tell myself, is worth repeating. When listening to people giving advice, try to distinguish the people who are giving you good advice because they want you to become better from people who give you bad advice because they want you to fail.

The book is not too long, a native speaker can probably get through it in a couple of evenings.

Contacts

Subscribe and donate if you find anything in this blog and/or other pages useful. Repost, share and discuss, feedback helps me become better.

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A short review on “The Culture of Chinese Communism and the Secret Sources of its Power” by Kerry Brown

Abstract

Kerry Brown is a well-known scholar of Chinese culture. The Communist Party of China could not have avoided his attention.

I have read this book at a book club, and would like to share some of my impressions.

Proposing programming language features

This blog hasn’t had enough attention for quite a while. This is not, however, because I have abandoned it, but rather because the original purpose of this blog, that is dumping essays regarding books I read, is still valid. It’s just that the most recent book has taken an order of magnitude more time than I had expected it to take.

Okay, I’m going to write a bigger and better review on the “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”, but the book altogether took so much time, effort and emotions, that even writing the review is going to take a while.

Meanwhile, one of the by-products of my reading happened to be a proposal of a feature to be included into the Scheme Language, that is needed in order to support all the code examples in the book.

(Yes-yes, you’re not misreading it. The book published in 1996 is _still_ not covered by the existing language standard in full. Otoh, it means that there is a chance of achieving things.)

Now that the proposal has an official number, there is going to be a public discussion among the potential Language System providers, and maybe (if it passes the review), we will have this feature officially recognised.

Watching discussions of experts on what they may actually work themselves is a fascinating experience, and a chance to improve own skills too. In this case the discussion is not expected to be too heated, however, but anyway.

https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-203/ — this is the link to my recent proposal.

It speaks about quite an interesting approach to generating computer images, that builds on top of the classical features present in most drawing languages, such as PostScript, TikZ, MetaPost or SVG. While the expressive power is largely the same, the degree of abstractness is greater, which leaves gives greater code reusability and flexibility.

Scheme is by not means the only language that has a community feature review process.

• Python has Python Enhancement Proposals (PEP)
• Java has Java Community Process (JCP)
• Scheme has Scheme Requests For Implementation

The image in the header is a digital copy of a work of M. Escher, whose works have inspired the original author of the “Picture Language” Peter Henderson. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.137.1503