Books of the Year 2019

This was an unusually prolific year for reading 102 books! Granted, many of them were audio books, and some of them were kid's books, but this is the largest collection of books I've read in a year since as long as I've been keeping track.

This was also an unusually short year for fiction. Of course, that made the selection easy: Ted Chiang's Exhalation easily took the prize for the best fiction all year. In the current climate of door-stoppers being the standard for fiction, Chiang's devotion to quality over quantity stands out. Part of it is that he has a day-job (as a tech-writer, which is actually a decent paying job), and so can afford to work on his fiction and polish it. The other part of course, is that the man has consistently good ideas. You owe it to yourself to read Ted Chiang.

For non-fiction, there's much more to choose from and therefore a tougher choice, since the selection I made this year was unusually broad. For sheer impact on my thinking, I'll nominate Master of the Senate. Non-fiction books tend to try to engage your cerebral side (after all, you're trying to learn something), but few attempt to engage your emotions, but this one does, and not with any loss to the facts and arguments that the book presents. It's a long, intimidating book, but I think it's well worth your effort. If you're an American voter, you owe it to yourself to read this book. It's a piece of history that truly teaches you how the modern American landscape came to be.

Other great books that I read in the non-fiction category include Sex At Dawn, a radical rethinking of the traditional view on human social reproduction, and an example of how you can make good arguments in what is an extremely controversial topic. Kochland is also well worth your time.  It's very clear to me that when the inevitable environmental collapse happens, we're going to look upon this era with a strong sense of how greed overtook our sense of responsibility. It's unfortunately already too late to bring the Koch brothers to justice, but if there's any justice in this world, that brand of capitalism will be eviscerated from human society --- if we survive.

As a parent, I can't turn down books about child development and parenting. If you have middle-schoolers who might be headed for college, How to Become a Straight-A student is worth recommending to him or her. For parents themselves, Voice Lessons for Parents jumps out at me as being particularly important for Bay Area parents, who have a tendency to turn into tiger parents. Unfortunately, the people who most need to read it probably won't, and it's very likely that if you actually want to read a book like this, you probably won't need it as well. Wow, when it comes to good non-fiction this year there was a huge selection.

Comic Books: I ended up rereading Miracleman, and you still can't find a comic book story out there that's any better. Unfortunately, it requires a ton of context for the subversion of superhero troupes to be completely satisfying, but independent of that it's so well written and such a good story that if you've never read it you should.

Review: Spider Holster Black Widow

For cycle touring, I tend to just carry my camera in my jersey pocket. I can reach it, grab the camera, turn it on while moving it to position, and shoot when in place. (It's much tougher to do that with phones because the latency involved and the awkwardness in getting the camera in place isn't great, but it's possible)

Recently, I've been mountain biking. With kids, I carry not just snacks, and a tire repair kit, but also a camping hammock. That means a backpack, which blocks access to cycling jersey pockets, so I've been making do with cycling underwear, and a belt-mounted camera case. The zipper'd case, however, is awkward --- in the time it takes to take the camera out, I might have missed the decisive moment. Worse, when I put the camera back, I have to take the time to zip it up.

The Spider Holster Black Widow looked promising. It comes with a pin which you attach to the tripod mount (they claim it won't interfere with the SD card or battery case, which is false!), and then you wear the holster on your belt. A retaining mechanism keeps the camera solidly in the holster, requiring a lever to be pulled while unholstering the camera (which is surprisingly doable with one hand). The clever part is that when placing the camera back in the holster, the snap-down mechanism pops right in, allowing you to do this with one hand. The entrance is wide enough and designed in such a way that you can get the bolt in 100% of the time.

I'm well aware of the alternate camera slings such as the BlackRapid. They work for running and hiking, but not biking, where the lack of an attachment will cause the camera to swing and hit you or get tangled in the bars. The various chest mounts are better, but my experience with chest mount is that you feel it all the time, especially if you're breathing hard.

In practice, the Hoslter works fine, but has a few characteristics that you might want to be concerned about. First, it offers no protection: I noticed my camera knocked against say, door sills if I walked too close. Theres' enough degrees of freedom that it won't break, but if you fell off your bike you could easily smash the camera against the ground. The second issue is that if you wear a T-shirt tucked out, there's a chance that when you want to reholster the camera, your T-shirt flaps over the holster, then you'll have to take an extra second to slide the pin under your shirt to plug it back into the holster.

Niether are major issues. The first solution is to use a rugged camera (TG-5) or just accept the fact (as I do) that if you want good pictures you have to risk good equipment. There's no two ways around it. The second is to tuck your shirt in.

The device seem sturdy, and can probably be used with bigger cameras than the compact GR-3 that I've been using. On the other hand, for one handed operation, none of the mirrorless cameras would be acceptable (they require a second hand to uncap the lens cap, and mountain biking throws up enough dirt that you won't want to ride with your lens uncapped). Certainly it's a good option for walking around town with a small DSLR or mirrorless camera while being a tourist. Recommended.

Review: Master of the Senate

Strangely enough, the library didn't have the ebook version of Master of the Senate, but it had the audio book version, so I grabbed it.  This is a massive tome, coming in at over 18 hours of listesning time, and it took me 3 renewals of the book to get to the end.

To say the book is an incredible achievement is an under-statement. Certainly, the book deserves all the awards and accolades it has won, and filled me in on much of the American civics lessons that I should have had but never got as an immigrant.

The book starts with a great explanation of the structure of the senate, and where it fits in the legislative bodies of the federal government. It explains how the senate was intended to be the government's bulwark against change, and how that has served successfully in various parts of American history, as well as how it fails by being overly conservative. The exposition is intelligent, descriptive, and an example of clarity in both writing and great use of examples to illustrate the author's points.

The coverage of Lyndon Johnson's ascent to the senate and how he went about gathering political power is also exciting. This was a guy who truly could talk out of both sides of his mouth, to look conservatives to conservatives, and sound sympathetically liberal to the liberals. In other words, he was an out and out liar and a great example as to why nobody should ever trust a politician.

And yet, Robert Caro manages to make you feel for Johnson. For all his faults, his naked hunger for power, and his raw ambition, Caro makes it clear that only Johnson could have delivered the 1957 civil rights act, the first such act in well over 80 years. And the historical accounts of the times is nothing short of detailed and amazing. I'm not normally an empathetic person,  but the chapters of the book detailing conditions in the American south would leave me boiling with rage, while every other chapter would have me nearly in tears with how the South treated its blacks. The description of the Emmett Till case and how two white people could literally get away with murdering a 14-year-old boy is so well told that you can feel the bitterness seeping off the the book.

Many Americans (especially those of us who are immigrants and are in technical profession) tend to have give an understanding of history a low priority. We want to look at the future, and it's obviously easy to denigrate the causes important to those of other races. This book, so clearly relevant to our current times, shows why that is a mistake: without a clear understanding of history, without a good sense of how bitterly fought and hard won civil rights were in this country, it would be impossible to understand why and how the current political battles are fought. After listening or reading to how various historical figures would rather shut down schools than allow black children to attend white schools, you will more easily understand why universal healthcare is so difficult to achieve in this country --- there are many who would literally rather die than see members of other races get the healthcare they need.

If the cause of civil rights was not important to you before, you'd have to have a heart of stone for it not to be important to you after reading this book. Highly recommended.

Review: American Shaolin

I had a great time reading American Shaolin. At this point, the "New China" part of the title have been obsolete, and of course, when the book was written China's rise was already apparent which made the publishing of this book quite timely.

On the other hand, there's no question as to Matt Polly's achievements: how many people would drop out of Princeton, travel to China, learn Mandarin, and live at the Shaolin monastery for 2 years learning to be a bad-ass learning Kung-Fu? The parts of China that he visited then are quite different now, and everyone he knew has long moved away. But nevertheless, the books's well-written, the style transparent and enjoyable, and the Chinese language use accurate.

Polly, for instance, is surprisingly insightful about Taiwanese immigrants:

The truth was that John's father was like many successful Asian immigrants. He was educated, an engineer, so his move to America was a matter of choice, not desperation, and therefore represented the gamble of a lifetime, a bet that his and his family's life would be better in American than back in Taiwan. The problem for Taiwanese immigrants is that their birth-nation---perfectly positioned between huge consumer markets in the West, the technological savvy of Japan, and a huge pool of cheap labor in mainland China---refused to remain a backwater, which made keeping ahead of the Wangs that much more stressful. By the late eighties, Taiwanese doctors, engineers, and businessmen were waking up across America to discover that their second-rate classmates who had never been smart of ambitious enough to emigrate were now extremely rich VPs of sales at Taiwanese microchip firms. (Pg. 267)

 The book has sufficient number of such pithy insights combined with humorous situations for it to be a lot of fun to read. Better, it doesn't come across like a self-aggrandizing white guy's view of Asia, and has a mostly accurate view of Asia. That's pretty high praise, and good reason to read this book. Recommended.

Review: A Wrinkle in Time (Graphic Novel)

I never actually read A Wrinkle in Time, but the graphic novel was easily checked out electronically from the local library, so I picked it up and plowed through it in a few hours. It's a throwback to the 1960s, in both political context and in tone.

The story revolves around Meg, whose physicist father has disappeared for an unknown reason, but the mystical old woman living in a haunted house somehow has the answer. When I got to the explanation of the tesseract, I realized that this was probably the novel that inspired all the science fiction stories/illustrated novels that I'd read in the 1980s, meaning that the book is influential enough that the "space travel by a folding of space-time" is now a trope and the explanation and illustrations that accompany it are somewhat common.

The emotional part of the story is familiar to many of us, but is still told quite well, and definitely worth introducing to kids. The spiritual aspects of the story including the biblical quotes feel very much out of place, mostly because the Christianity that's often in media and politics today is no longer associated with physics, science, math, or compassion, but it's quite likely that a child approaching the comic without having to spend too much time dealing with evangelicals might not have the same association as I do.

Bowen probably won't get very far with this book because he doesn't seem to like  fiction, but perhaps if I tell him it has math in it I might fool him into reading it and getting the emotional maturity part.

The art in the comic is decent. It's all in black and white, and at the right level of abstraction. All in all, entertaining and worth your time. Recommended.

Review: World Class

World Class is Teru Clavel's book about comparative public educational systems.  She compares 4 different systems:

• Hong Kong (pre-school and early elementary school)
• Shanghai, China (pre-school and elementary school)
• Tokyo, Japan (pre-school, elementary, and middle school)
• Palo Alto, California (middle school)

First of all, you have to recognize how privileged Clavel and her family is. Her husband is a Wall Street (Morgan Stanley) banker who gets promoted and an expat position. If you know anything about how cushy expat positions are for spouses, the monies involved are substantial and the amount of help you get with relocation is also ridiculous.

Secondly, her children (all 3 of them) look Caucasian. This is a big deal. In particular, local residents of Shanghai don't even necessarily get to attend public schools in Shanghai. She admits that the staff of at least one of the schools her kid attended only accepted her kids illegally because they wanted photos of her caucasian kids in the school brochure. So the treatment she gets isn't necessarily representative of what a local resident might get.

OK, with that aside, I think that Teru's a brave person. I certainly wouldn't subject my kids to pollution in Shanghai during their developing ears (she noted how bad the pollution was as an adult, and kids are much more vulnerable). Nor would I have been sanguine if my son came home pledged as a member of China's communist party, but she took it all in stride as part and parcel of getting a top-notch public education with diversity and no compromises as far as academics is concerned. Maybe my growing up in a more or less totalitarian country makes me super-sensitive to this sort of stuff.

As everyone from Asia knows, US schools (especially public schools) cannot hold a candle to Asian schools in terms of academic challenge and difficulty. I will note that she glosses over the advanced stuff: my friends from India, for instance, have commented that they're actually a fan of the US approach to Math in Silicon Valley, because the kids do more than just learn a fixed set of problem solving skills and actually seem to understand the material at a deeper level. But of course, I don't know how much of that is because these immigrants do tons of coaching at home anyway, and are happily making up for the American school system.

Furthermore, it's quite clear that everyone in Japan is effectively a free-range parent, letting 6 year olds take public transit and go to school. (Crime in most Asian countries is a tiny fraction of what you see in American schools, and there are no school shootings, etc) But Clavel seems oblivious to the fact that the reason why Asian schools can do so well with so high a student/teacher ratio is that they actively stream and clump kids of similar caliber together, so teachers can teach to a group that's not too diverse in ability.

For me, the most interesting part of the book was when she moved to the Palo Alto school district, and finally views the American school system like an outsider. As I've mentioned before, I think that the American school system is bat-shit insane, simply because there are no national standards, and the tests are a joke. She eventually gives up and moves back to New York City and enrolls her kids in private schools, because public schools in the US are just a joke. This is as strong an indictment of the American school system as you can get.

This is a great book and fun and engrossing to read. I made it through in 2 days, and wish I was reading it on the Kindle instead of the paper copy so I could have highlighted it and posted quotes in this review for you to see for yourself. Recommended.

Review: That Wild Country

That Wild Country is a memoir of Mark Kenyon's various trips in the backcountry, hiking, camping, fishing, and hunting, along with a minor history of the wilderness in the USA. It's a short and easy read, which is about all the virtues of the book.

Kenyon was a marketing person at Google. You can tell, because there are all sorts of places in the book where he exaggerates for effect. For instance, he'll take up how tough a hike is, or how "he'd never been camping before", and then later on in the book he'll mention in an aside that his parents had taken him to Rainier National Park and the Hoh Rainforest in the Olympic National Park as a kid, and then you realized that some guy who's been hunting all his life cannot possibly be incompetent enough for an easy hike on a marked trail in a US National Park to be challenged!

The history, some of which I've heard before, is less obscure, but again, it's very shallow, with little detail about how the Wilderness Act got enacted, and even less detail about how the Koch Brothers keep trying to get the public lands as a gimme. He talks a lot about how the Hunters and Fishing enthusiasts were the ones backing the #KeepItPublic movement, but again, no statistics, no history, and no evidence. I might believe him, but again, why am I reading your book if you're not going to give me evidence and reason to believe me, especially after your attempt at "incompetence literature" destroyed your credibility? There's no mention of how (for instance), the MTB community had to get a seat at the table by threatening to join the "Wise Use" movement after continuously being marginalized by the Sierra Club, something I still don't forgive the Sierra Club for.

I do believe that public lands are a virtue, and obviously I'm raising my kids to enjoy and use that heritage. But the book's shallow approach and exaggeration isn't doing the cause any favors.

How to Teach Your Kids to Mountain Bike

I'm writing this article because amazingly, there are only classes that teach girls how to ride a mountain bike, and all I have are boys. I have no idea why this is. Maybe boys are just supposed to learn by crashing, which is not a good way to learn at all!

1. Get a decent bike! This is way obvious, but a surprising number of parents buy a Target/Walmart/Costco bike instead of a decent bike. It's pretty easy: your 30 pound kid shouldn't be riding a 30 pound bike. We choose the Woom, but there are other good manufacturers as well. It's just that Woom's owner's been good about taking feedback from me (and acting on them --- their bikes actually improve year over year), and I'm not about to start over and teach some other manufacturer about my issues.
2. Start at the local BMX park. Here in the Bay Area, Calabazas Bike Park is great!  It's free, and if you think it's just kids stuff show up there with an adult bike and see how the really good kids can smoke you!
3. Once they've had a few rounds at the mountain bike park, take them to a local mountain bike park and do the easy trails. Have them repeat the easy ones as much as they like to gain confidence. Teach them to stand up over bumps, and to be courteous to other trail users. Gradually increase the challenge.
4. Bring food and water. Keep their bike as light as possible. Don't be afraid to push them uphill. Kids bikes don't have as wide a gearing range as adult bikes.
5. Bring a hammock. I like to arrange one way bike rides with my wife, and then ride back to fetch the car. A backpacking hammock is light enough to bring on a MTB trip, the kids love it and never worry about waiting for you as long as mommy's there to keep an eye on them.

You notice that I'm short on skills. I'm actually a lousy mountain bike rider, so I don't know how to teach people how to do things like jump logs, ride teeter-totters, or ride up stairs on a bike. Which means that yes, I'd be happy to sign my kids up for a mountain bike class or summer camp, but darn, the only ones I've found only cater to girls. Don't ask me why that is. If you find a co-ed or boys only MTB class in the Bay Area let me know.

Review: Schwinn 20x1.95 MTB tire

Since Bowen started riding his bike off-road, I decided to buy some real MTB tires for him. A search on Amazon showed up the Schwinn 20x1.95 ATB tire. An e-mail to the owner of Woom bikes confirmed that his Woom 4 would take 1.95" tires. The owner couldn't help sending me a link to the very intriguing Woom Off series, but Bowen was so closed to being the next size up that we decided to wait until he grew into that size.

Schwinn has a pretty bad reputation for churning out heavy bikes that I wouldn't give my kids to ride, but since Amazon has a great return policy, I decided to try it and see. To my delight, the tires showed up and were easy to install. There's an appreciable improved traction compared with the 1.4" tire that came stock with the bike, though obviously for riding on the road the bike will feel heavier and slower.

Off-road, the improved grip has helped Bowen maintain control even on challenging terrain, and I saw him hop rocks and run over tree roots with confidence, if not grace. The price at under $14 is great too. Because the tires are so easy to install, I don't hesitate to swap the tires in and out for Bowen whenever he asks (it takes about 10 minutes to do both wheels), which means that they'll see more use than otherwise.

Recommended.

Review: G-Form Pro-X Elbow Pads and Knee Pads

Bowen got it into his head that he wanted to do mountain biking. (I swear it wasn't all those Danny MacAskill videos I showed him when he was small) Now you can buy MTB tandems, but I draw the line there. Off pavement, where there are no hostile motorists waiting to run you over, I'm a big believer that kids will learn how to do appropriate skill assessment, and become better bike handlers if they ride their single bikes.

Of course, Bowen is particularly accident prone, and crashing hurts, so I went shopping for elbow pads and knee pads. By far the most highly recommended body armor for MTB use are the G-Form Pro Elbow Pads and Knee Pads. These are astonishingly expensive, running around $50 a pair on Amazon, and I tried but didn't find any place selling them for less. If there's anything I've learned as an outdoorsman over the past 25 years, however, is that when it comes to outdoor equipment, there's just no point trying to save money.

These are incredibly flexible, and to be honest, Bowen never crashed while wearing them, having perhaps learned (finally!) from his years of crashing bikes that it's not fun. But since his brother started wanting to come along, we gave them to Boen instead since he was still crashing. We finally tested them on Long Ridge, where at one point Boen crashed hard down a gravel road. He cried and screamed as though the sky had fallen on him, but when I turned around and walked him down, I found that he was tapping those pads, surprised that he actually wasn't hurt. (Yes, the little guy was screaming and crying out of habit!)

People who don't have boys keep telling me how girls are more expensive. That's not true. Boys just spend money on different things, such as coast guard rescues and hospital bills. These $50 crash pads might end up saving you $300 on hospital bills, and obviously sparing your kids from pain because they had crash pads that they'll actually wear are a plus for any parent.

After writing this review, I realized that given how bad I am at mountain biking, I bought a set for myself. After all, unlike my kids, I'm unlikely to ever outgrow mine. As you can imagine, that makes this product something I would heartily recommend to anyone.

Review: Tile

I bought a set of 4 Tile Mates at the start of the year because Boen and Bowen would misplace everything from tablets to the PS Vita. The device turned out to be a dud, but worked well enough at the start that I kept it past the return date, which was a mistake. I hope this review keeps you from buying one.

First of all, the Tiles don't come with any easy method to attach to anything other than a key-ring. I've long transitioned to a keyless household for everything except car keys, and I don't normally drive, so the keyring compatibility is a worthless feature to me.

I tried the adhesives, but those didn't work too well either! They wouldn't properly stick to a Kindle case, or a tablet case, or anything at all!  I tried those screw-type rings, and those would work for a PS Vita (barely), but nothing else.

OK, so it's great for the Vita, right? Well, for the first few weeks they would work, but after about 9 months, I tried to use it to find the device, and nope! Zero response. Only recently did the app start warning me that the battery might be dead. Well, that's not useful. Before it goes dead you need to tell me so I can replace the battery.

This thing is a worthless piece of junk. Save your money!

Review: Superman - Earth One

Superman - Earth One is a series of 3 graphic novels written by J Michael Straczynski. Straczynski's been credited with several good TV shows, none of which I've watched, so I was interested to see his take on Superman, easily one of the most boring superheroes.

Being freed from having to write a continuing series meant that Straczynski could take a completely different approach to classic villains like The Parasite, General Zod or Lex Luthor. His take on the latter is by far the most interesting, and I was sorry that he ended the series on that reveal, indicating that he didn't actually have any further ideas on how to proceed on what was an excellent hook.

The rest of the story is surprisingly free of the common symbology associated with Superman, the comparisons with the the bible, and even the classic motivations that you would associate with the character. Not even the classic relationships are retained, though not without throwing plenty of red herrings one way or another.

Overall, I thought the books were short and worth reading, though perhaps I might not have felt that way if I'd paid real money for them instead of checking them out of the library via my Kindle Fire tablet. It's not up to the quality of superhero comics written  by Alan Moore, for instance. Mildly recommended. I hope Straczynski's fans will tell me that this is the worst writing he's capable of producing!

Review: Lost in Math

Lost in Math is a book discussing something that was also discussed in Not Even Wrong, which is that lack of progress in theoretical physics, mostly because it's actually very difficult to design theories that are testable while still fitting in within the framework of everything we already know. In particular, after a decade of the LHC, there haven't been new particles discovered (though the Higgs Boson was confirmed) that were predicted by some of the super-symmetry models.

A lot of the problem apparently is that the experiments generate so much data that much of that data gets thrown away if it's not explicitly looked for. That means that you have to know what to look for in advanced, something theoretical physicists get to help out with. But how do you know what to look for? Well, you have to have a theory, and that theory has to make predictions, and you have to persuade the community that they should look for the data that your theory predicts.

With an infinite number of theories to potentially look at, how do you decide which ones are most promising. Sabine Hossenfelder's book is a critique of the idea that mathematical beauty is the most criteria for selection. She asks various physicists what their idea of beauty is, and of course, finds that every person has a different idea of what that beauty entails, as well as what's important in terms of producing a good theory. In particular, I enjoyed her interview with Xiao-Gang Wen who discussed Qubit Field theory with her.

The text of the book is not heavily mathematical, and is full of self-deprecating sentences. It's easy to read and some of the ideas are fun to contemplate. Many of her metaphors for the mathematics behind a field of study are awesome:

To appreciate how bizarre this is, imagine you visit a website where you can order door signs with numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, all the way up to infinity. Then you can also order an emu, an empty bottle, and the Eiffel Tower. That's how awkwardly the exceptional Lie groups sit beside the orderly infinite families. (Kindle Loc 2634)

The book ends with an exploration into math in Economics, which as she mentions is full of disaster. The question then is obvious: is there any particular reason to believe that nature is going to be simple and easy to describe with math, any more than human societies are? What's wrong with those "fined-tuned" constants anyway? Why should you consider those constants ugly?

It's interesting food for thought. Recommended.

Review: Bonk

Bonk is Mary Roach's book about the science of sex. It should be a great topic, with lots of fun discoveries, but in reality what we learn is that there's nearly no funding for research on sex (blame puritanism, as well as, nobody in government wants newspaper headlines like: "government funds porn film"). Now you would expect that maybe some of the more open governments in Europe would venture into this territory, but you would be wrong.

As a result, there's actually not much content in this book. About the only thing I learned was:

Stop wearing cologne. Women don’t find it attractive. If you don’t believe me, here is a quote from a press release from the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago: “Men’s colognes actually reduced vaginal blood flow.” Foundation director Al Hirsch hooked women up to a vaginal photoplethysmograph and had them wear surgical masks scented with ten different aromas or combinations of aromas. (To be sure the women weren’t just getting aroused by dressing up in surgical masks, Hirsch put unscented masks onto a control group.) In addition to the smell of cologne, the women were turned off by the scent of cherry and of “charcoal barbeque meat.” At the top of the women’s turn-on list was, mysteriously, a mixture of cucumber and Good ’n’ Plenty candy. It was said to increase vaginal blood flow by 13 percent. (pg. 292)

Hmph! Hardly worth reading an entire book for. Not recommended.

Review: White Industries T11 Rear Hub

After about 15 years (and something like 60,000 miles of cycling), I finally wore out the cones on my Shimano 7700 Dura Ace rear hub. I took them to Cupertino Bike Shop, and they said: "this part is 15 years old. Shimano stopped making replacement parts years ago, your best bet is eBay. So  I gave them a Velocity Aerohead OC rear rim from my stash, and asked them to build up a new rear wheel using a White Industries T11 rear hub, and double butted spokes.

Pardo and I had done an analysis of rear hubs years ago, and I stills stand by that assessment.  If you want strong wheels, the best hubs are the Shimanos. All the other hubs are weaker. But the past 15 years have taught me that the total cost of ownership of Shimanos are very high if you're too incompetent to do your own hub overhaul. Each overhaul costs about $30 in labor, and you pretty much need to do them every year or so. So after 10 years, you've spent $300 more in hub overhauls than you would have if you'd bought say, White Industries or Phil Woods, which more than compensates for the Shimanos being about $100 cheaper than the equivalent White Industries T11 hubs.  Furthermore, the latest Shimano hubs (the FH9000) have changed their wR dimension to 17mm, which is less than the 18mm on the T11 hubs, so now the T11 hubs will actually build to a stronger wheel than the FH9000! (The reduction of the wR dimension is due to the need to accommodate 11 speed cassettes)

Overall, the wheel came out to 10g lighter than my 15 year old wheel. Whoop de doo. In exchange, they're noisy when you freewheel. I don't know why nobody but Shimano prioritizes having quiet freehubs, and the White hubs are less noisy than the infamous Chris Kings, but not by a lot. If you're riding on a bike path the hubs have the advantage of alerting non-headphone using pedestrians on the bike path, but the rest of the time it makes an annoying noise when you coast.

I finally bought new cones for my 7700 hub, and got the bike shop to install and overhaul the rear hub. They're a lot quieter but even with the new parts still aren't nearly as smooth as when they were new, so I'm relegating these to off-pavement work. Overall, I do like the T11 hubs, and hope I can get a good 15 years of use out of them as well!

Review: Range

Range is a book dedicated to the generalists, as opposed to the specialist. In general, society, companies, teachers, coaches and parents generally put pressure on their employees, students, and kids to specialize. The rarity is the liberal arts major, but even that's been going out of fashion of late.

David Epstein points out that the specialist domains like chess, music, and firefighting might be suited for specialization, but many domains do not. Even in music, early specialization might also not be helpful:

When Sloboda and a colleague conducted a study with students at a British boarding school that recruited from around the country—admission rested entirely on an audition—they were surprised to find that the students classified as exceptional by the school came from less musically active families compared to less accomplished students, did not start playing at a younger age, were less likely to have had an instrument in the home at a very young age, had taken fewer lessons prior to entering the school, and had simply practiced less overall before arriving—a lot less. “It seems very clear,” the psychologists wrote, “that sheer amount of lesson or practice time is not a good indicator of exceptionality.” As to structured lessons, every single one of the students who had received a large amount of structured lesson time early in development fell into the “average” skill category, and not one was in the exceptional group. “The strong implication,” the researchers wrote, is “that that too many lessons at a young age may not be helpful.”.. Those children identified as exceptional by [the school] turn out to be those children who distributed their effort more evenly across three instruments.” The less skilled students tended to spend their time on the first instrument they picked up, as if they could not give up a perceived head start. The exceptional students developed more like the figlie del coro. “The modest investment in a third instrument paid off handsomely for the exceptional children,” the scientists concluded... Nearly all of the more accomplished students had played at least three instruments, proportionally much more than the lower-level students, and more than half played four or five. Learning to play classical music is a narrative linchpin for the cult of the head start; as music goes, it is a relatively golflike endeavor. It comes with a blueprint; errors are immediately apparent; it requires repetitive practice of the exact same task until execution becomes automatic and deviation is minimal. How could picking an instrument as early as possible and starting in technical training not be the standard path to success? And yet even classical music defies a simple Tiger story.(Kindle Loc 1007)

And of course, once you wander off the domain of classical music into more improvisational arts like Jazz or Pop Music,  nearly no one is an early specialist! For creative work such as comic books, specialization hurts:

high-repetition workload negatively impacted performance. Years of experience had no impact at all. If not experience, repetition, or resources, what helped creators make better comics on average and innovate? The answer (in addition to not being overworked) was how many of twenty-two different genres a creator had worked in, from comedy and crime, to fantasy, adult, nonfiction, and sci-fi. Where length of experience did not differentiate creators, breadth of experience did. Broad genre experience made creators better on average and more likely to innovate. (Kindle Loc 3140)

The book covers topics as diverse as sports, scientific research, comics, and even describes the early history of Nintendo's foray into electronic toys. While some of these chapters are clearly central to Epstein's thesis, many of them (such as the chapter on Nintendo) fall wildly off the mark.

By far my biggest criticism of the book is that there's no direct comparison. You can pick the best specialists in the world and the best generalists and compare them, but that doesn't mean that one strategy is better than the other. What you need to do is to examine the number of people who pick one strategy, and what percentage of them succeed, and Epstein makes no attempt to examine those trends, and what has changed over time.

My own intuition on the topic is that in a world full of generalists, being a specialist will provide an advantage. In a world full of specialists by contrasts, generalists who can straddle multiple specialties and provide insight that might not occur the the specialists deep in their field will become more valuable because they have so many more places they can contribute. My guess, such as it is, in that in recent years, over-specialization has occurred to the point where it's probably more profitable to be a generalist, but that's speculating. I certainly don't have any numbers to prove it.

In any case, the book makes one exceptionally good point, which is that at no point is it too late to switch fields to see what's over the fence. To continue specializing past the point of diminishing returns is to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. That in itself makes it easy for me to recommend this book.