Review: Revenger

Revenger is Aliastair Reynold's novel about space pirates in a far future setting. Told from the point of view of a highly educated young woman (Fura Ness) from a family down on its finances, it tells the story of her and her sister's attempt to go on an adventure by signing up on a sailing vessel as "bone readers." Bone readers are the VHF/telegraph operators in this millieu, and since it's a talent that you can age out of, new  bone readers are always in demand and the sisters sign up on a treasure-hunting expedition boat. During the expedition, the boat is attacked by space pirates and the rest of the story revolves around Fura's attempt to get revenge and rescue her sister.

The millieu is particularly interesting, obviously constructed to mirror the golden age of sail's particular constraints so as to make the kind of voyages described interesting. For instance, everything takes place within a single solar system, so solar sails can be used as a means of getting everywhere. The result is travel times described in weeks, rather than years required for interstellar distances without breaking the known laws of physics. Similarly, the worlds described aren't planets, but rather artificial habitat constructs ranging from 25 miles wide to about 100 miles wide, similar to island sizes in the Caribbean. Scattered amongst the worlds are baubles, apparently stasis-protected former habitats that may contain artifacts or quoins (treasure) so treasure hunters have something to do.

It's always interesting to me to see authors work around their weaknesses. Reynolds, for instance, cannot write a romance to save his life, and in this novel he works around it by eliminating any such possibilities: the lead characters are essentially asexual, and married people are introduced with their status as though it's a title. It works, but obviously one of the tropes of pirate fiction is completely eliminated.

As a story, the novel is fun: we watch as Fura Ness goes from naivete to becoming a classical pirate. The book is full of slang and sayings that evoke the golden age of sail while being more or less scientifically correct, and the setting is interesting if improbable.While not his best work, it has a certain appeal to those who like pirate fiction/science fiction mashups and can be recommended as such.

Review: The Populist Explosion

The Populist Explosion is a political overview of recent political movements that have swept both the USA and Europe as a result of the great recession. It ties populist movements in the past (such as Huey Long's) with recent movements like Occupy Wall Street as well as the Tea Party.

What's interesting is that it covers both left and right movements. For instance, while the left explicitly avoided scapegoating by race, the right has no compunction against doing so, and in fact, this probably did win Donald Trump the election. As a result, the author's attempt to conflate the two sides don't really make a lot of sense to me.

What is interesting is that the right wing in Europe does seem particularly focused on immigration, and the movements have been because the generous welfare states mean that the middle class is opposed to large scale immigration of any form. Those societies have historically been so homogeneous that even relatively small amounts of immigration constitutes a sizeable shift in the feel of the population to citizens.

What the author fails to do is to provide context: for instance, when discussing immigration in Denmark, he provides absolute numbers but neglects to provide the total size of the country, so you have no idea whether citizens are complaining as to whether new immigrants consist of 1%, 2%, or 10% of the population. When reading the book you want to have Google handy so you can give yourself context with regards to those numbers. Otherwise you start to see big numbers like millions or hundreds of thousands and have no idea whether it's a big shift that would take a while to get used to.

Regardless, the author points out that the center-left in Europe and in the US has been neglectful of the working class, to the point where they have no felt like they have any stake in the process and therefore might rationally choose to "burn down the house" rather than continue to accept a (to their point of view) worsening situation. This is an important dynamic that has led to the political situation we see today. He doesn't provide any suggestions but does allude to the fact that in the past, such political movements rarely turn into long lasting changes in the system, but instead get co-opted into actions like the New Deal which were driven by the existing political parties.

Here's hoping that something like that does happen. In any case, flawed as the book is, it gave me a lot to think about. Recommended.

Building a custom desktop

In recent years, performance on consumer desktop processors have pretty much stagnated, so I felt comfortable sticking with my 2009 HP m9600t. That machine's had several upgrades: to SSDs, additional RAM, and a new GPU. It's had hard drives added and expanded, and a blu ray drive when those became cheap. Over the past year, the ethernet port went out, so I added a PCI ethernet card to it. The machine's gotten flakey over the years: it no longer slept or hibernate, waking up whenever it put itself to sleep. While this was annoying, I lived with it by hard powering off the machine every time I turned it off. For a while, it wasn't a big deal as I used a laptop for non hard core tasks (any Adobe software).

Then I won a Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 motherboard during a web-site lottery. The motherboard was not the latest, but it's over-clocking enabled, and was forwards compatible with the latest intel desktop processor: the Core i7 7700K CPU. Since I had a friend at Intel who could supply me with the processor (and a PCIe m.2 SSD) at employee discount prices, I figured i could build a new machine. Note that in most cases you can usually purchase equivalent machines from Dell or some other white label device at a better price than putting it all together yourself. Those manufacturers, however, typically skimp on parts. For instance, the case of my HP m9600t was so tightly packed that I pinched my fingers every time I installed or replaced a part. Similarly, the PSU is usually not an energy efficient PSU. Back in the old days, you wouldn't keep a PC around long enough for a more efficient PSU to pay for itself, but now that you typically keep a PC around for 10 years or more (because of the failure of Moore's law) there's no reason not to pay for a better unit, especially if it's quieter.

As a first time PC builder, I went with the Fractal Design Define R5 case. I picked it because it was a fairly large case, which meant no more pinched fingers. It comes with 7 3.5/2.5" drive trays and 2 5.25" drive trays, which I figured would be sufficient capacity even for a storage-hungry photographer/video processor. The case was indeed huge but to my surprise was well balanced and easy to handle. It also came with an ample set of screws and nice features such as being able to change the direction in which the front door opens.

The instructions start with screwing in the power supply, which apparently is a fixed size in PCs. Mys elected power supply screwed in just fine, and then I plugged in the power cord and then grounded myself using an anti-static strap. Next came the motherboard. Plugging in the processor was easy, but then the cooler felt like you had to be much more careful. I'd acquired both a water cooler and an air cooler, but at the last minute went with the air cooler for simplicity, so I wouldn't be managing 2 pieces that are attached to the motherboard. The air cooler was interesting because it had multiple orientations, and you're supposed to point it up or out of the case for better airflow, so I played some 3D rotation games before I settled on "up." I then plugged in the memory and the SSD. The SSD is weird because the motherboard had a bizarre table which showed what configuration of SSD installation would preclude the use of which other SATA slots and/or reduce the speed of the PCIe SSD. I found myself thinking: "Really, Intel? Really?!" Apparently this has been fixed in the latest Z270X motherboards, but of course, I wasn't going to buy one when I had one for free. But the next step after selecting the right slot really puzzled me.

All motherboards come with a back plate. You're supposed to insert it into the case, and then insert standoff screws into the motherboard and then insert the motherboard and then screw it down. What I was surprised by after having such an easy time with the processor, cooler, memory and SSD was how much I had to wrestle the motherboard and backplate together into the case and make everything line up. You have to tighten down the screws because otherwise if you insert or remove display cables or USB cables from the computer you'd shift or move the motherboard, which would not be good. I did so without damage (I thought!).

Then I started plugging in cables into the motherboard. The manuals here just don't help much. For instance, some of the case fans have only 3 holes while the corresponding motherboard pins have 4! I had to do some googling around before figuring out which 3 pins should be used. Similarly, for many of the single jumper cables I practically needed magnifying and tweezers to get a 5mm cable plugged into a pin squeezed into a 8mm space. This was definitely a pain. This was also where spending lots of money on the case helped. The Fractal Design case had rubber grommet windows where many of the cables were already pre-wired to run correctly. Unlike my HP, where there were cables everywhere, you could place only the cables you needed and route even those cables under the motherboard, so you had nothing hanging on top. Working on this was a pleasure.

Then came the moment of truth: plugging a display cable in and seeing if the machine would POST. To my horror, when I powered it on, the fans spun up and then spun down. Something was horribly wrong. I googled around and finally figured out that I'd made the rookie mistake: I had forgotten to plug the CPU power cable in. For whatever reason I thought that giant 24pin cable plugged into the motherboard ought to be sufficient. It's not. I plugged in 2 4-pin cables into the motherboard socket, and the device posted!

After that, the rest of the process was easy, though I was disappointed that the "backside of the motherboard" 2.5" SSD trays didn't actually fit 2.5" SSHD drives. But I moved over the blu ray player, intalled 3 HDDs, and still have room and power left over for more.

After installing Windows 10 (which transferred the license over with no issues), the machine sleeps and hibernates with no issues and is also incredibly quiet. I tried over-clocking it a little with no issues, but probably won't do too much. Lightroom and Premiere Elements 12 now fly! A usual, the storage upgrade to a PCIe SSD was probably more responsible than the mere 3X increase in CPU performance.

I haven't installed a GPU yet so am relying on the built in Intel GPU which many enthusiasts love to complain about. I am still of 2 minds as to whether to decommission the old machine or to let my son use it, but if the latter I can take my time to shop for a GPU.

I must say that over-all, the process has been much easier than I expected, and some of it was (dare I say it) even fun! Just like with a bicycle you've built yourself, there's something special about a machine you've built yourself. I expect that this is probably the best approach if you're not in a hurry for a machine and have time to shop. My wife's Dell now sounds loud by comparison, while my old HP sounds like a jet-engine whenever it does anything compute intensive. Given the changes in the PC market over the past years, I fully expect this to be the correct approach going forward.

Review: Rise of the Rocket Girls

Once upon a time, computers didn't refer to machines running programs, but to people who did the computation work that were eventually relegated to those machines. Rise of the Rocket Girls is the story of the computer department at JPL. It's a great read and well worth your time.

That the computer department at JPL consisted entirely of women was not an accident but deliberate policy. The supervisor of the team, Marcie Roberts, had a policy that she only hired women. She would say to the women in her team:

"In this job you need to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog." (Kindle Loc. 3061)

As the department switched to electronic computers, the women involved trained and learned to write computer programs. What's document is interesting: the early IBMs were so unreliable that the engineers involved wouldn't trust the results unless it was a human who did the computation. It took several generations of improvements before the computers became good enough to be used. The first of such machines was even given a name by the department and became a valued part of the team. Subsequent generational iterations happened so quickly that the people no longer became attached to them:

The scientists reviewed the computer analysis and tried to make sense of it. Some of the students were surprised by how much of the operation required human interaction. They expected to see supercomputers instead of people doing all the work. Senior scientist Harold Masursky good-naturedly responded to one inquiry: “Computers are just like wearing shoes. You need them when you are walking on gravel, but they don’t get you across the gravel. (Kindle Loc. 2922)

Note that JPL as an eventual government agency focused on research instead of financial results, didn't hand out stock options. That didn't actually matter: the programmers were paid by the hour, which given the usual extreme overtime hours required of programmers actually meant that they were paid much better than if they were salaried:

The women worked late nights and weekends on Mariner, desperately checking their trajectories and programs. The hours were exhausting, especially for new mothers Barbara and Helen, but their paychecks were worth it. As hourly employees they were both earning impressive incomes, outstripping their husbands, thanks to the long hours Mariner required. (Kindle Loc. 2154)

Having an all-woman department at JPL meant that in the early days the lab could run beauty contests:

As odd as it seems by today’s standards, the beauty contest was a result of JPL’s progressive hiring practices. As the bouquets were handed out and an attractive woman crowned the winner, the competition was unintentionally highlighting the presence of educated young women working at JPL. After all, other laboratories would have found it impossible to hold such a contest in the 1950s; they simply didn’t hire enough women. (Kindle Loc. 949)

An interesting difference between  biographies of men and women is that while men's biographies rarely mention their personal lives (like raising kids, etc), in women's biographies that's covered in detail. Nevertheless, the book provides ample coverage of the various missions that JPL ran, including the practice of planning dual missions for redundancy.

It's also well-written and provides a compelling narrative. Highly recommended.

Review: Planet Hulk

Amazon was having a comic book sale, and Planet Hulk came up as an Amazon recommendation. I was about to be taken in, but fortunately, I've installed library extension on my web browser, which automatically told me that the library had a copy and the hold queue was 0.

You don't read a Hulk story for the subtlety or characterization. Hopefully the plot is interesting, and there are fun set pieces, but it didn't take 20% of the book to get tired of the "hulk smash, bigger problem shows up, hulk smash" loop. I finished the comic book but don't feel the need to read further.

Not recommended.

Review: How Great Science Fiction Works

How Great Science Fiction Works is a survey course for science fiction, easily my favorite fiction genre. I audited this course hoping to find themes or maybe even discover great books I haven't already read.

Not surprisingly, I've already read a ton of the books referred to in the lecture series. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, when he discusses a book, most likely I know what it's about, and can recall the primary themes of the book. On the other hand, there's only a handful of books he's mentioned that were new to me, and I would want to follow up on.

The worst part of the series is that he doesn't really explain what makes a particular work great. He covers the plot but doesn't explain, for instance, that Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun was interesting because it was one of the early examples of the unreliable narrator in science fiction. Further disappointing me was that the themes he chooses for the lectures are usually surface detail: Robots, Spaceships, etc. rather than the themes I would choose to organize a course on science fiction about: "Science Fiction as the literature of ideas", "Provoking the sense of wonder", etc.

The last lecture of the series redeems the series, as he captures one of the differences between the literary genre of fiction and science fiction. "Literature" usually provokes the "Ah yes!" reaction of recognition, while "Science fiction" tries to provoke the "Oh my!" reaction as the author extrapolates (usually to the extreme logical conclusion) the initial premise of the setting, plot, or idea. There's room for both types of fiction, but the best novels or stories would ideally involve those. As such, the lecturer points out that good science fiction is actually really hard to write as it needs to provoke both reactions in the author, while literary fiction as a genre doesn't have to provoke the sense of wonder in order to win awards in the traditional fields.

As a survey of the genre, I think the course has some merits. But for me, it just wasn't fun enough to recommend to anyone else.

Reread: House of Suns

I don't normally re-read novels, but my recent read of Beyond the Aquila Rift's Thousandth Night made me go back and start reading House of Suns again, and the book absolutely sucked me in. Not only had the 9 years between reads eroded my memory of the book so that it was completely fresh to me again, but I discovered new things upon re-reading the book, which is a true test of how good a book is.

For instance, I realized that the novel postulates answers to the question, "What is Dark Matter and why can't I see it?" And the ending, far from being unsatisfying, was actually quite good from my point of view. I certainly no longer feel like Reynolds wrote himself into a corner.

The secondary story, which tells the story of Abigail Gentian is less compelling as I don't think it gave us a good grip on what motivates the primary characters in the novel. Nevertheless, it references the Winchester Mystery House in an indirect fashion.

What I love about the book is how subtle all the references and postulations are. At no point does Reynolds point out "Hey, this is my great idea. Pay attention!" He respects the readers' intelligence and expects you to do the heavy lifting. Thinking about the lesser novels I read this year like The Three Body Problem or The Wall of Storms, I think that makes even the worse parts of House of Suns better than the best parts of other novels.

Highly Recommended, and well worth the re-read.

Review: Ortlieb Compact Handlebar Bag

My 15 year old REI nylon handlebar bag finally gave up the ghost. My first instinct was to just buy another one, but REI in its infinite wisdom had stopped making it. Try as I might, I couldn't even find a reasonable replica on the internet. Fortunately, fellow cycle-tourist Pamela Blalock came to my rescue: she had previously upgraded her handlebar bag, and was now willing to give me her old Ortlieb bar bag for the price of postage.

The bag arrived, and I immediately mounted it onto the handlebars of the single and the tandem. It comes with a mounting kit that requires a pretty permanent screw on mount on every bike you use. The benefit is that it's an "easy on/easy off" system, not that the velcro on the old REI bag ever gave me trouble.

It's pretty waterproof, and much bigger than my old bag, with the issue that it no longer has a map case. The older REI bar bag's map case was pretty useless anyway, so I didn't miss it. I can stuff a cycling jacket, a pair of leg warmers, a cheap cable lock, alternate blades for my Oakley M-frames, and it would still all fit. I anticipate no problems stuffing other valuables like smart phones (the bag's waterproof, so even if your phone's not this would make the phone reasonably accessible), wallet or passports while touring, provided I moved items like the lock away. The idea is you can lock up your bike, remove the bar bag with your most valuable items, and eat lunch at a restaurant without worrying about the rest of your gear.

In practice, on particularly rough roads or off-road, the mount shifts a bit. Fortunately, it bottoms out against the head tube, so there's only so much it can descend. Even in this position, I can still get at it while riding. The velcro is kinda loose, but so far, I haven't lost anything from the bag yet, even when the flap flew open while the bike was on the rack of my car while going 65mph.

It came with a shoulder strap that Pamela said was useless, and indeed, it was pretty freaking useless. It's not even worth the weight of carrying it!

It's definitely lighter and higher quality than the other bags that I've seen. I'm not sure it's $50 better than the $20 bag I bought from REI 15 years ago, but to be honest those aren't made any more, so I'm not sure you could do better today.

Recommended.

Review: As You Wish - Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride

I don't expect actors to be great writers, but Cary Elwes (the man in black in The Princess Bride) collaborated with a ghost writer (Joe Layden) to recount his experience making the movie in As You Wish.

This account is all from Elwes' point of view, but includes many quotes from the other actors as well as the director and William Goldman in various sidebars, granting the reader various perspectives in the story and the role they played in making the movie.

Among the titbits I didn't know:

• The budget was only $16M
• The film was mostly shot in the Peak District of England.
• Goldman had bought back the original film rights from the studio after they failed to make it, and had to be persuaded that Ron Reiner (the director) could actually make it.
• Andre the Giant was in pain the entire time he filmed the movie.
• Elwes had broken his toe in an accident just before filming the "rolling down the hillside" scene, and tried to hide it from his director.

I wish the story included more details of what went into film-making, but it was clearly written to provide fun anecdotes in mind rather than the nitty gritty details behind it.

Nevertheless, with a breezy, easy-to-read narrative, the book's sure to provide enjoyment to any fans of the movie.

Recommended.

Weight loss is the easy part

In the spring of 2014, I met with my doctor for a regular physical. My doctor's always been really supportive, but sometimes I think he's only impressed by me because his other patients are pretty old. He'd say things like: "Your chloresterol levels are really good. I have patients on statins whose chloresterol levels aren't this good." My first thought was: "well, if their chloresterol levels were good, you wouldn't have had them on statins anyway!"

This time, however, the news wasn't good. My fasting blood sugar levels were elevated. Rather than do a re-test, he said, I should get an a1c test. He thought the a1c level is a much more reliable indicator of diabetes risk. My a1c level came in at 5.9%, which was pre-diabetic. "What does this mean, doc?" "It means if you don't do anything about it, you'll get diabetes within 10 years." "I definitely don't want that!" "Let me refer you to a nutritionist. You're one of the few people to whom I can't say 'exercise more' to, but in many cases if you lose a bit of weight that should be enough to prevent diabetes."

I made an appointment with a nutritionist, and she had me do a food diary for a week prior to the appointment. For a week, I weighed everything I ate. My doctor's comments had scared me into eliminating sweets and desserts from my diet. It was ironic that just as I'd finally had the time, know-how, and equipment to make a really good creme brulee (and I'd gotten pretty good), I could no longer eat one. I e-mailed the spreadsheet to the nutritionist prior to the appointment, so by the time I showed up she had everything calculated: I was eating too much.

My weight was 155 pounds, and at 5' 10", that gave me a normal BMI of 22.2. But with a family history of diabetes (both my parents had it, though my mom could control hers mostly through diet and exercise), clearly my heritage meant a greater susceptibility to metabolic syndrome than the average American. As they say, "Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death." I graduated college at 113 pounds, and in 2003 weighed around 130 pounds, so I thought I had a good chance of getting down to at least 145 pounds.

Weight loss is fairly straightforward: eat less than you burn. The nutritionist had me cut down portions on calorie dense foods. "A fistful of rice or pasta is one serving." Similarly, a handful of nuts was all that you wanted. We went through my entire day's diet and basically cut down serving sizes everywhere. She emphasized eating more vegetables. I determined to switch to having salad prior to eating other entrees. (The alternative was soup, but unless I'm at Hotel Rosenlaui, I don't usually like soup)

The nutritionist also explained what the a1c test is: it measures how much of your blood hemoglobin has been glycated (i.e., been coated with sugar). The higher the a1c level, the more of your hemoglobin's been coated with sugar, indicating that you've had more frequent bouts of increased blood sugar. The reason it's considered a better test for diabetes by my doctor is that red blood cells on average live for 3 months, so it's less prone to day to day fluctuations from dehydration, exercise, etc. As a bonus, you also don't need to fast prior to getting the a1c test.

Actually putting the diet into practice was eye-opening. What it did was to re-calibrate me on what was the proper amount. Prior to it, I was eating until I was full. I learned that you can't do that once you're in your 40s. You need to eat until you're about 75% full (unless you're bicycle touring, at which point your problem is eating enough to stay fueled). Once I'd recalibrated my stomach and sense of fullness, the weigh loss came easily. I quickly went down to 145 pounds by the time of the 2014 Tour of the Alps.

I'd once thought that my optimum weight was 145 pounds, because weight loss below that during the Tour Across France caused me no small amount of performance loss. But what happens in your 30s doesn't always happens in your 40s. During the tour, I reduced my weight to 140 pounds. After the tour, I made sure to reduce my food intake back to normal, and my weight loss continued. My nutritionist was worried that I was losing too much weight, but I assured her that I wasn't waking up in the middle of the night hungry.

Very disappointingly, getting my weight down to 135 pounds didn't have a dramatic effect on my a1c levels. It went down to 5.8. "That's a good trendline," my doctor said, but I was used to having much more impact through lifestyle changes, especially considering that my body weight loss was much more than the 7 pounds the doctor originally said would be sufficient.

One thing I never realized until I started doing it is how much Chinese culture would rather that you be fat. This probably isn't just restricted to the Chinese, since even in English, the opposite of "Fat and Happy" is "Lean and Mean." But person after person would comment on my weight loss, usually with negative connotations. My mom started asking me if I was healthy because I'd lost so much weight. I even have a memory of watching (with my wife) the Chinese version of "The Bachelor" TV show where one woman explicitly laid out her need for a guy with a paunch as one of her key requirements! Fortunately, as a cyclist, I'm used to society's negative associations with my favorite sport, so I pretty much ignored all the peer pressure and went ahead with my weight loss.

I wish I could tell you that there was a break through, or a magic pill. To be honest, I wasn't interested in doing science experiments: I just wanted to get that a1c level down. So I tried a bunch of stuff including increasing my coffee intake to 3-5 cups of coffee per day (to prevent the jitters, about half that intake was decaf). I didn't put salad dressing on my salad, preferring to add seeds and nuts to it (much of the nutrition from salad is fat-soluble, so to get the most out of it you do need some fat in the salad). I had my sleep apnea under my control, but I could also change my exercise regiment, to add more intervals to it, and to cross-train with swimming so that I could up the intensity when I did get on the bike. I added a fitness tracker to my wrist. My 2016 Tour of the Alps was one of the toughest challenges ever, and I felt better than ever by the end of the tour. My weight went down to 130 pounds and then down to about 125 pounds. I now look back at pictures of myself from 2012-2013 and exclaim, "Holy crap I was fat!" My wife said she hadn't noticed because when she met me I was already fat. This goes to show that you gain weight slowly, so you'll never actually know that you're fat unless you actively weigh yourself.

All through the past 3 years, I'd get my a1c levels checked every 6 months or so. My doctor (who was astounded at how quickly I could take off weight) was always encouraging, even when the levels ticked up. "Keep doing what you've been doing." Finally, this year's test came out of the pre-diabetic range. I'm now no longer pre-diabetic! Of course, there's always a margin of error on tests, so I can't ease up on the lifestyle changes. But the nice thing about lifestyle changes are that if you do them right, they're sustainable for the long term --- I no longer get the urge to eat dessert. This has been by far the toughest health project I've done so far, but it's a relief to know that I'm actually finally getting some results. The long feedback cycle (it makes no sense to test a1c more than once every 6 months) and the long delay in the changes taking effect explain why fighting diabetes is so challenging. By comparison, weight loss was the easy part.

Review: The Wall of Storms

I somewhat enjoyed Ken Liu's debut novel, The Grace of Kings, but not enough to even keep track when the second novel in the series (The Wall of Storms) showed up. When it did, there wasn't even a line for the ebook from the library, so I checked it out and started reading.

All the flaws from The Grace of Kings are present in The Wall of Storms, as well as the strengths. The strengths are that Ken Liu does a great job of providing an alternate history of inventions and scientific discovery, albeit in accelerated form. All the technological innovations presented in the book are feasible, and the world clearly behaves within certain rules that are somewhat fun to decipher.

The flaws are that the characters are wooden and single-dimensional, never actually growing or learning despite their experiences. In fact, one of the lead characters repeatedly does evil things despite repeatedly suffering the consequences of her actions. Her role in the story is to be the advocate for the idea of process and systems over trust and personal relationships, and as a result her suffering is meant to be a moral or parable for the reader to draw from, rather than being a real character.

I did finish the book, because it was interesting enough to keep going, but it never got so interesting that I felt like I couldn't wait for the next book.

Review: Beyond the Aquila Rift

I'm a huge fan of Alastair Reynolds, having read most of his short story collections and his novels. Beyond the Aquila Rift is a collection of short stories from over his careers. Many of the stories in the collection are pretty long, and the book itself is physically huge, making the Kindle edition the preferred means of reading this.

I'd read many of the early stories in this collection before, especially those set in the Revelation Space universe. As you can imagine, the stories are great, with a breadth of imagination that's hard to beat (including several robot stories that hold true, even in the light of recent developments in AI). I then got to Thousandth Night, which is a novella set in the same universe as House of Suns, featuring two of the same characters, and that was such a great story that it made me go back and start reading House of Suns again.

The last few stories in the book were a reminder that in recent years, Reynolds has focused on novels (novels make money, short stories don't), and the last few stories feel more like filler, without the verve of the earlier work. Nevertheless, if all you have is a few minutes a night of reading time, this is a great collection with which to start your introduction to one of the great science fiction authors in modern times.

Recommended.

Review: Secrets of Sleep Science

Secrets of Sleep Science has a misleading title. None of the "secrets" in the lecture series are secrets. They've pretty much all been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. What they are are little known facts.

For instance, one little known piece of research about sleep deprivation is that even after a 3 day recovery period, all it takes is a night of short sleep and you're back to your previous state of sleep deprivation. We know so little about sleep and how it affects us that we don't even know how recovery from sleep deprivation works, and what it takes to restore our optimal operating conditions.

The lecture series covers a great deal, with a big emphasis on animal studies, since that's what the lecturer's expertise is in. There's coverage of typical sleep problems like insomnia, sleep apnea, and even nightmares as a result of PTSD. (An interesting piece of research mentioned is the linkage between dreaming and learning, with the possibility that PTSD nightmares are a case of learning gone wrong --- the mind reinforces the traumatic event and the emotional responses to it instead of recovering)

One of the most fascinating titbits coming out of the lecture on sleep apnea was that central sleep apnea (where the brain basically forgets to breath) is a prime suspect in the cause of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). The circumstantial evidence (which is still under research) is that babies who have particularly regular breathing and heart rate have a higher incidence of SIDS. The current hypothesis is that this indicates that the control mechanisms in those infants are less sensitive to the environment.

What I like about the lecture series is that Professor Craig Heller does not mince words about the importance of sleep --- he cites over and over stories about how sleep shortage, untreated sleep apnea, or insomnia can lead to death (usually in combination with operating heavy machinery or driving). This grabs your attention and makes the entire series well worth an audit.

Recommended.

Review: The Flash Season 1

Modern TV series have state: in other words, you're expected to watch them from beginning to end in sequence (and that's a good thing!), and watching episodes out of sequence wouldn't work as well. As a result, my habit is to wait for a sale on the TV series and then buy them and watch them, rather than wait a week between episodes.

The Flash is, of course, the TV show about the fastest man alive. With a big budget and high production values, it's a crowd pleaser. The initial set up is fun, and all of the characters are given little twists that are a lot of fun. For instance, Barry Allen is given a highly motivating back-story (i.e., his Dad's unjustly put in jail for his mom's murder). He's also given a support group consisting of a personal doctor, a tech guy who makes his gadgets and costumes, and a coach in the form of a professor Harrison Wells. He's given a long-standing love interest, a father-figure, and a romantic rival.

All of this is weaved into a story where the appearance of super-humans is given a rationale: the origin of The Flash also turns out to have created a bunch of super-powered humans, most of whom turned out to be villains, but some of whom get spun-off into their own superheroes, including some pretty obscure ones like Firestorm, which I got a kick out of.

What I liked about the series is that the exploration of Barry Allen's powers are gradual and staged. You're never overwhelmed with the large number of things that the Flash can do, and he never has so much power that he isn't vulnerable. Most of the characters are also very sympathetic and believable. I also liked the way the end of the first season's plot wrapped up, though it also introduced all sorts of time paradoxes that's left to the next season to follow up on. I also love the color palette of the world of The Flash. It's been fashionable to do "dark, grim and gritty" super heroes in recent years, and I like how bright and optimistic Barry Allen's world is.

What I disliked about the series is the early denouement of the villain. I felt like that robbed the reveal of any dramatic impact whatsoever, and by the time Barry Allen figures out who his enemy is, I'd long reconciled myself to it and his feeling of betrayal never quite got through to me. The last episode was by far the weakest, with multiple plot holes you can pour a speedster into. Also, comic-book gobbledy-gook seems a lot more acceptable when it's on paper than when it's spoken by actors.

Nonetheless, the show's quite fun and I found myself wanting to keep watching. It's not quite Buffy, but then again, even Josh Whedon has yet to top himself on that one.