Review: Breakneck

 Breakneck is Dan Wang's book contrasting Chinese and American societies. It's actually mostly about Chinese society, because though the author is very familiar with American society, he presumes you know nothing about Chinese society.

The author worked as an analyst in China, living in Beijing or Shanghai, but has also traveled to Guizhou and the mountainous areas in the past. In fact, he did a bicycle tour in Guizhou on roads that were just recently built before cars were allowed on them, which sounds pretty cool. He also met his wife there.

Dan Wang uses the analogy that China is run by engineers and America by lawyers. He makes blanket statements like: "What do engineers like to do? Engineers like to build, so China builds. Roads, high speed rail, housing, etc." He makes other much less flattering statements about engineers, for instance, about how engineers have no sense of humor and cannot stand to be made fun of in social media. Ultimately, however, what Mr. Wang meant is that China is run by technocrats. (Engineers I know in real life are bright, full of humor, and not all of them are fascinated by railroads. In particular, engineers and scientists I know in real life who actually are good engineers and scientists are universally committed to truth --- some of them so much so that they cannot tell a lie even when it benefits them --- whatever else you can say about Chinese politicians you cannot claim that they universally are committed to truth)

The statement that America is run by lawyers is probably familiar to those of you who've read Abundance. The theme here is that by forcing government permitting to go through massive amounts of red tape, lawyers have successfully eliminate the American government's ability to build great infrastructure, and of course the big example is California's high speed rail, which still hasn't build much in 10 years, while China in the same time built enough high speed rail to exceed the track length of multiple European countries. Near the end of the book, Dan Wang notes that he did read The Power Broker, about Robert Moses' dominance of infrastructure building in New York, whose abuses led to the curtailment of government power as previously described. He makes broad statements essentially saying that he visited one of the neighborhoods that were split in half by Robert Moses but there's no a thriving community so people shouldn't villfy him anymore since he built stuff. That segment made me wonder if Dan Wang read the same book I did. One of the big points of the book was that Robert Moses had so much power that he was chauffeured everywhere by private car, and as a result never had to suffer the traffic jams New Yorkers put up with, and so declined to extend the subway/railroad lines. Giving someone like Robert Moses the same power wouldn't result in high speed rail being built either!

I don't want to say I learned nothing from this book. For instance, I didn't know how bad the Shanghai lockdown was, and obviously while I've heard stories about the rigidity and horrors inflicted on girls and women during the one child policy, Mr. Wang provides those details in ways that you can't look away from. (And sad to say, it sounds like the Chinese government is entirely capable of turning women into baby incubators if they ever got it into their head that they could do so)

On the other hand, I will note that the difference that Mr. Wang notes was summarized in much more eloquent form by Iain M. Banks in his essay, A Few Notes on the Culture:

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

I'm not saying you shouldn't read this book. But I think it says a lot that a few paragraphs by a dead Scottish novelist (who might never have been to China) seems way more insightful to me than an entire book by Dan Wang.

 

Re-read: The Magicians

 The Magicians TV show is now available to stream on Amazon Prime. Boen blew through a couple of seasons and I started re-reading the book to remind myself of how different the book was.

The TV show is actually very different from the book, and in many ways the TV show is better. The stories from the first couple of books are twisted together, and the evil Martin Chatwin character shows up far earlier. Quentin also never goes through the sequence where he lives through the real world post graduation and decides despite all the magical power available to him to live it up through drugs and alcohol. In many ways, the TV show has the best of the books --- the casting of Eliot and Janet/Margo characters are near neigh perfect, and the TV show has many episodes (like the one with Queen's "Under Pressure") that are excellent with no counterpart in the book.

The novel itself is badly written. Lev Grossman doesn't quite develop his characters, and the plot is what makes the book work. There are plenty of reveals after the fact that fit together nicely that the TV show can't quite do justice to, but the writing is uneven.

Having said that, without the books there would be no TV show, and the book itself while not well written has a great plot and sets up a situation that's enjoyable to experience, as evidenced by the TV show going on way past the books' finish without ending up boring to watch.

Review: Looking for Alaska

 Looking for Alaska was John Green's first novel. After reading The Fault in Our Stars I was so impressed I went and looked for more novels by him. As his first novel this book isn't even close to being as good as The Fault in Our Stars.

First, the narrator, Miles Halter is perhaps a bit of a doofus. He's not terribly smart, and goes to boarding school in search of "the great perhaps." He does get a change, with a new roommate ("The Colonel") who's a scholarship student from a poor family, and who pulls him into his orbit with Alaska, who's described as a gorgeous co-ed with a boyfriend.

Perhaps I come from too Asian a background to fully appreciate this story. "The Colonel" strikes me as very false. Someone from a trailer park, for whom the only way out is a university scholarship, but then goes ahead and smokes, drinks, and engages in pranks that could get him expelled from a wealthy private school? No Asian I know in that situation would do any less than Jensen Huang.

Similarly, the protagonist moves to a new school and promptly starts smoking and drinking, despite not enjoying either. In fact, every high schooler depicted in this novel smokes and drinks, frequently to excess. My kids would probably think these guys are idiots, and they wouldn't be wrong.

Eventually, the inevitable happens and someone in the book dies from driving while drunk. There's some redemption as the individual characters blame themselves for not stopping their peer from driving (in fact, they all helped the drunkard by distracting the authorities while they speed off from campus). Then they go right back to drinking and smoking. 

The deluxe edition of this book comes with works-in-progress chapters of the novel. Earlier versions of the novel has Miles sounding like Holden Caulfield. I guess that's where this novel starts from. I don't know why this book won such acclaim as a young adult (YA) novel. I'm glad John Green evolved and grew over time and became capable of writing The Fault in Our Stars. He really did get much better over time.

Review: The Fault in Our Stars

 Last year, I read Everything is Tuberculosis and came away feeling dumber for having read the book. Of course, I'd forgotten that the year before that, I'd bought The Fault in Our Stars during a kindle sale, and had actually read a couple of chapters of it and really enjoyed the voice of the author, and so came back and finished it.

Oh wow. The Fault in Our Stars is sensitive, well-written, well plotted, and emotionally touching in every way Everything is Tuberculosis is not. The story revolves around a cancer victim, Hazel Grace, whose diagnosis was a death sentence partially stayed through a fictional miracle drug. At a support group, she meets Augustus Waters, and the two fall in love.

I don't want to say too much about the novel --- the dialogue is smart, funny, and very characteristic of young adult novels, with that wry sarcasm you hear a lot. That makes everything feel real. The characters rib each other and angst about first world problems --- but because they have cancer or have had cancer you're more than happy to forgive them their foibles. Even the one asshat character has had a member of his family die from cancer.

Finally, after reading this book, the rave reviews for Everything is Tuberculosis makes sense. Cancer for these fictional characters is incurable. People in the book die from cancer. But John Green keeps making the remark in Everything is Tuberculosis that it is curable, we just need to spend money, and it's the inequity in the world humans have set up for themselves that makes Tuberculosis victims die from it. Clearly the heaps of praise for his non fiction comes from people who read and remember The Fault in Our Stars.

I still think Green's non-fiction made me dumber for having read it, but I'm now willing to forgive him that book since this book was so good.

Friction shifting finds its limits

 At the end of September last year, the m5100 rear derailleur on my Carl Strong frame started making funny noises, and shifting performance deteriorated. I finally narrowed it down to the pulley wheels, and after taking the upper one apart saw immediately that the bushing had failed.

A pair of replacement pulley wheels were only $10, but would take a few days. I saw that there was an ebay offer where I could get a GRX 822 rear derailleur for $80, and decided I'd order that as well and install the first one that arrived.

The GRX rear derailleur would handle a 10-51 rear cassette but was designed for 12 speed. Of course, years of shifting with friction shifters have made me blase about using unmatched rear derailleurs. I figured since the job of the derailleur was just to move the chain from one sprocket to another, as long as it could handle the chain and the cassette's spread I should be good to go. It didn't hurt that the derailleur was a good 40g lighter than the m5100 derailleur that it replaced.

At first, I was actually quite pleased with the rear derailleur. It was a lighter action --- whether it was because the higher end derailleur had smoother bearings or pivots and just a lighter action spring, the shifts definitely felt smoother or faster.

The problem was that the shifts were not reliable. For instance, the 45t sprocket was easily one of my favorite sprocket on the m5100. However, it was no longer quiet, making a strange sort of noise whenever it was on that cassette. In fact, the rear derailleur was finicky about staying on that sprocket. Any sort of nudge on the shifter would knock it off that sprocket. Even stranger, once in a while the chain would slip off a sprocket and then rather than recovering to that sprocket the derailleur would shift all the way down the cassette.

I lived with this for awhile, thinking that it was just a matter of retraining my friction shifting muscle memory so that the shifts would be good. But 3 months later it still wasn't good and worse, the chain started falling off the chainring even when the clutch was on. I went so far as to check the chains for both pin wear and lateral wear, and nope. That wasn't my problem.

I finally pulled off the derailleur and put the m5100 back in with the new pulley wheels, and immediately the problems all went away. So somehow, Shimano managed to make their 12s rear derailleur incompatible with the 11s rear cassette even when you're using friction shifters. That's a level of incompatibility I'd never seen before. One possibility is that you really need 12s chains, but since those are expensive I guess I won't make that experiment. In the mean time I guess I have a relatively new GRX 822 rear derailleur for sale.

Review: The Age of Diagnosis

 The Age of Diagnosis is written by a neurologist/psychologist.  It starts with a discussion of Huntington's disease, which is a genetic disease with no known cure, and goes through case study after case study as to why even though there's a non invasive definitive test, people don't get diagnosed for it. Apparently, people show up at her office thinking that taking the test is the responsible thing but looking for permission to not test.

Then she launches into discussions of much more controversial topics, especially topics like autism, which has had increasingly broad ranging diagnostic criteria, to the point where almost anyone could self-diagnose as being on the spectrum. The author is british, and when she spells out the criteria for getting a diagnosis (one thing I learned in this book is that self diagnostic tests are not accurate, and as many as 50% of people who self-diganose are mistakenly thinking that they're on the spectrum when they're actually not!), I'm astonished that the rates of autism have been going up so much. And then she reveals that a lot of the increase in diagnostics come from a small number of physician groups who have an incentive to diagnose more people as being autistic! Even worse than that, the highest functioning autistic folks presume to speak for everyone on the autism spectrum, and of course, the ones most afflicted with autism have a hard time even getting dressed, let alone speak up for their positions, which leads to huge amounts of conflict both within and without the medical and patient communities. (She doesn't mention the elephant in the room, which is that by writing the criteria for autism so broadly, the medical community has inadvertently armed the anti-vaccine folks, who're using the increased number of diagnosis to turn public opinion against vaccines!)

There's a bunch of other diseases discussed in the book, including breast and ovarian cancers (certain genetic mutations vastly increase your chance of getting both, and one way to protect yourself against those cancers is to have those organs removed, but then you have to trade that off against when to have the procedure because you want to maintain maximum optionality for having offspring), down syndrome (testing there has sufficient false positives to make the decision a hard one), long covid, lyme disease, and probably one or more items that I've forgotten about because I read this book in paper format and not on the kindle.

The book ends with a discussion of pyschiatric syndromes and psycho somatic disorders (which the author takes pains to note that a psychosomatic disability is just as real and painful to live with as one with physical manifestations). One of her concerns is that the diagnosis of having one of those boxes you in, and if you believe in that diagnosis enough, it becomes an excuse to not work on getting better in those areas. You start to believe in that instead of your own ability to induce positive changes in yourself!

The book left me quite a lot to think about even though it's short and easily finished in a handful of hours. Definitely worth your time.

Review: King Sorrow

 Stephen King (and his son Joe Hill, who wrote King Sorrow) books all have the same plot structure: there's a problem which the protagonist solves through some supernatural means. It works and empowers the protagonist, who takes it further, and then the negative side effects show up and gets worse and worse until he/she loses control of the situation, upon which the protagonist has to deal with the situation in which the solution becomes much worse than the original problem.

It's a simple plot structure, but within that structure you can tell a large number of stories and the nature of the plot structure if handled well draws you in and keeps you reading, provided that the characters themselves are compelling.

King Sorrow works on that structure, with the protagonists being 6 friends, one of which got into trouble because he did a good deed one day while visiting his mom in prison. To solve this problem, the 6 friends summon a dragon to deal with the evil-doers. The deal with the titular dragon in the novel is that the friends take turns choosing some deserving evil-doer a painful death via dragon.

Where the book rings false is that I have no problem in real life dealing with the kind of power Joe Hill portrays. In this case the side effect is innocent people dying but the reality is that when you look at the scale of damage certain folks like Vladimir Putin cause the kind of collateral damage described in the book wouldn't bother me whatsoever. Yet, Joe Hill makes this a central dilemma of the book, and the only person in the group of 6 for whom that doesn't bother is of course the villain.

The actual fantasy of the book is well done. I enjoyed the urban fantasy aspects, the references to the Arthurian mythos, the tie-in to the internet and trolling. I also admire how Joe Hill started the narrative of the book in the 1970s, and then advancing the narrative by decades to 2022 over time, allowing the protagonists to age and dealing with contemporary events and technological advancements. This integrates the novel with your know.

While this is unlikely to be close to the best novel you've read this year, it was good enough for me to keep reading it (though to be honest I had to take several breaks) and finish it within the library's 3 week return period.