Re-read: Ender's Game

 After our spate of Gaiman novels I decided to go for more classic science fiction as a change of pace. Ender's Game was my pick for the next book to read to Boen at night. I remember the book being very exciting and a lot of fun, but on this re-read, what I realized was that the book doesn't actually spend as much time in the battle room as I remembered! Instead, there's actually a ton of time spent on the Giant's Drink virtual reality game, and on the social interaction aspect of the kids.

There's also a good deal of time spent considering the population growth problem (which at the time of the book's writing look insoluble), which contrasts very much with the (over-hyped) hand-wringing over the coming reduction of human populations. Similarly, the book is stuck in the 1970s where the eastern European bloc was seen as the counter-point to the American hegemony. Who says fiction doesn't get outdated?

Nevertheless, the writing is compelling enough to hold Boen's attention, and the story and conceit is just as compelling as ever. Theories of childhood development have changed quite a bit since the book was written, but on the other hand, agree with Orson Scott Card's stance that people regularly under-estimate how much kids can do, especially when properly motivated.

The impact of the ending of the book feels much more diminished now than it did when I first read the book --- I guess knowing that Card turned this into a nearly 10 book series now makes you feel like this is a setup for a bunch of sequels. I remember reading some of the sequels and they weren't nearly as good or exciting as Ender's Game was, so I'm probably going to stop reading this to Boen after this one book.

Regardless, it's still a great book, and I plan to watch the movie with Boen after this reading. Recommended.

New Resmed AirMini Camping Setup

 I've been traveling with the Pilot-24 medical grade certified battery for camping and sailing with my ResMed Air Mini. The battery is fine, but if you ever tried to use the USB output for say, charging your phone you realized it was kinda lame. I came across an online article about using a standard Anker USB power bank with the Resmed Air Mini. The price is right, especially if you don't mind buying used Like New from Amazon, which cuts 30% off the list price.

I got the powerbank and used it on the Haypress trip. The converter cable has an annoying blue light, easily rectified either with tape or by flipping it blue light down. The power bank reports back more than 75% full after the first night, and I charged my phone from 32% to 72% in less than 30 minutes, and got home and discovered that it took another 30Watts to charge back up to full. Anker specifies a 45W charger with this battery but I discovered that it never charged any faster than 30W no matter how empty it was. This is good enough  for sailing. The whole setup is only 10g lighter than my previous setup, but the thing is the AirMini wall-wart is dedicated to only running the AirMini while any powerful USB-C charger can be used for multiple purposes, so net net the whole thing is a win. It's also much cheaper than the Pilot-24, even accounting for the fact that the Pilot-24 can be paid for using FSA money.

Recommended.

Haypress Trip #2

 Last year's Haypress trip was abandoned because I got sick and there was forecast for rain, so I handed over everything to Mickey and Stephan. Haypress Campground is one of the few campgrounds where I can regularly get a reservation. This year, I grabbed two sites one Friday morning and got Stephan and Kevin to bring their kids.

We got in early, with me making 3 trips to the car and setting up our brand new North Face Wawona tent. The others eventually showed up with the stove and we got in some apple cider and mint tea before heading off on our designated adventure of the day, the Miwok/Coastal Loop with a side trip to Pirate's Cove.

On our last Haypress trip, we'd explored the area while Boen had fallen asleep in the tent. This time, I knew the correct approach was to climb the Miwok trail. The climb is steep but would be more or less manageable with a bit of walking here and there.

Up on the ridge the views of the Bay became spectacular.

Stephan deployed his towline to tow Otto up the hill --- I'd stopped using my towline as Bowen and Boen are now strong enough to ride wherever I can go, and I knew that I'd already spent a few matches towing the trailer back and forth 3 times.

Once past the summit, however, it was a thrilling descent all the way down to the coastal trail intersection with Pirate's Cove. At the pirate's cove intersection, we locked all the bikes together and hiked down the trail to the beach. The benefit of camping at Haypress is that you can go to the beach after all the tourists have gone home, and you get the place to yourself.

Once back to the bikes the descent back to the campground should have been easy, but I'd forgotten that the reason I thought Miwok was a better approach was that the climb up was slippery and full of loose gravel, and Boen crashed trying to keep up with his brother. Bowen had definitely gotten so good at descending since Whistler that on his skinny commuting tires he was confident and fast.

We made dinner at camp and slept well in our nicely ventilated tent --- Calvin no longer fit in his parents' tent and so slept over in our 6 person tent on a borrowed sleeping mat from Stephan --- the perils of growing up!

I got up at 6am to an almost cloudless sky but quickly the fog set in and created nasty condensation on the tent, so I had to pack it up wet. The ride back out to the car was gorgeous, and thanks to all the food we'd eaten and the help of our friends I only made 2 trips!

Review: The People's Hospital

 I found The People's Hospital through An Arm and A Leg podcast. The podcast is incredibly informative about how massively painful the US healthcare "system" is, and how beaten down most people are --- even the heroes of the podcast are people who cannot conceive of the idea that the US healthcare system could be any better, or that there are alternative healthcare systems that provide much better value for money, much better overall health outcomes, and that other countries do it much better.

The book is written by Ricardo Nulla, faculty member at Ben Trau hospital in Houston. Nulla clearly loves the hospital, and explains the challenges of serving the uninsured and under-insured in Texas:

The rate of mothers’ dying shortly after childbirth was also rising. In Texas, it had nearly doubled from 2011 to 2012, for reasons public health experts and statisticians couldn’t explain. The spike in maternal deaths loomed so large that Texas lawmakers added it to an emergency legislative agenda. The numbers looked bad. Only during war or catastrophes had there ever been such a spike. Was there a connection between the uninsured rate and the rate of maternal death? Nobody knew. What experts did know was that African American mothers bore the highest risk. So much of our healthcare system is mired in discrepancies. While the rate of new mothers dying in Texas was increasing, Ebonie’s home state of California was bucking that trend. When the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, California expanded Medicaid to cover more than twelve million Californians, making it the largest public insurer of the poor and near-poor in the country. Right in the middle of a pregnancy, Ebonie had left the country’s safest state for expectant mothers—where the mortality rate looked more like that of France or Germany—for one of its most dangerous. Her new home state, Texas, had the same maternal mortality rate as Mongolia. (kindle loc 520)

I was at a kids' soccer game, and one of the other parents came from Canada. He told me that his dad liked the US system better, because it made him feel like a customer. Nulla, of course, would disagree, as would I. I personally think that it's much harder to trust a US medical doctor whenever he recommends something, because the likelihood that he's increasing his revenue through an unnecessary procedure is much higher than the doctors in a system where his income isn't tied to "fee for service":

 “Medical-industrial complex” paints the picture of a firing squad, except the squad is disorganized, each of the gunmen—the insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, and Big Pharma—aiming not only for us but also for the other gunmen. The promise of profit means each of these players is clawing and charging the others: insurance denies claims, hospitals inflate bills for insurance, Big Pharma ups drug prices to scrounge from insurance’s profits. Let’s call it “Medicine Inc.,” then, this amalgam of healthcare suppliers in America, for its level of sheer conscience-less competition. It’s not a perfect term, and it’s not meant to disparage business or capitalism. Perhaps Medicine Inc. wouldn’t be so bad if we were the customers, but we aren’t. We might pay for our care, as a customer would, through insurance premiums and co-pays, but our bodies are the merchandise. (kindle loc 551)

The book follows 3 sample patients, all of whom have been failed by the healthcare system because they didn't have insurance, or bought less insurance that they thought they heard. For instance, I had no idea that the Bronze level of Obamacare didn't cover transplants!  Ben Traub doesn't do transplants either, since it's incredibly expensive, and Ben Traub is actually covered by local property taxes in Houston. Nulla argues:

Healthcare was simply too expensive. Health insurance was too expensive. The reason universal coverage in America is still being debated isn’t because most Americans oppose it in principle (though a few do). It’s because Americans fear the costs. We are already paying so much for our own care; how much can we pay for someone else’s care, too? Some people think that to solve the problem of healthcare in America, we will have to spend an inordinate amount in overhauling what we have. But in fact, healthcare in America already has too much money. The excessive profits made by middlemen and corporations keep prices high. We don’t need to spend more, we need to spend better. To cover more people, we have to decrease healthcare costs across all of America. Perhaps in this regard, Ben Taub presents a model. It offers universal coverage to residents of Harris County and yet it manages to keep costs so low that it was listed by the New York Times as the second-least-expensive hospital in the United States. (Kindle loc 3339)

Ben Traub's costs indeed rival those of what a good universal healthcare system would cover in the rest of the developed world. It's doctors do not operate on the "fee for service" model, and can therefore consider the patients' interest before the doctors':

In 2016, a group of researchers decided to survey the healthcare team members of a for-profit hospital in the United States to figure out if they could identify a “customer.” Doctors, nurses, administrators, patients, patient family members, and anyone working at a hospital—including support staff and therapists—were asked, “Who is and is not a customer for the hospital, and what leads to customer satisfaction?” The results, which appeared in the Journal of Healthcare Management, showed that neither patients nor doctors saw patients as a hospital’s customers. Nearly everyone in the study thought that the hospital’s customer was the doctor... One of my colleagues who splits time between Ben Taub and private hospitals explained it to me like this: “The private system is set up to be overused.” Working at nonprofit and for-profit hospitals introduced temptations he hadn’t experienced at Ben Taub. He could call a colleague in during a surgery when he didn’t really need an extra set of hands (and, likewise, expect to be called by that colleague). He felt incentivized to act lazily at times, letting other doctors perform the medicine he could handle well himself. (kindle loc 3399-3417)

You might think that doctors prefer the American system because it lets them charge more, make bank, and drive expensive Ferraris. Instead, Nulla argues that it actually leads to burnout:

 more than half of American doctors reported bureaucratic tasks as the top burnout factor. Only Portuguese doctors complained so much about bureaucracy. The survey showed similar levels of doctor burnout in all countries, including in France, Germany, and Spain, but for different reasons. American doctors craved more control and autonomy than their counterparts. Notably, UK doctors reported the lowest burnout and depression rate in this survey. These doctors, who, by and large, worked for the National Health Service, complained of government regulations more than doctors from other countries, but they didn’t identify these regulations as factors for causing burnout as much as US doctors did bureaucracy....Opening more medical schools and allowing more foreign medical graduates to work in the United States only places a Band-Aid on a larger problem: most doctors simply don’t like practicing the American style of medicine anymore. In a 2018 opinion piece published by Stat, a Harvard plastic surgeon and a military psychiatrist argued that the problem went beyond tired and downcast workers. “We believe that burnout is itself a symptom of something larger: our broken health care system,” they wrote. “The increasingly complex web of providers’ highly conflicted allegiances—to patients, to self, and to employers—and its attendant moral injury may be driving the healthcare ecosystem to a tipping point.” (kindle loc 3845-3859)

 Yet of course, the American Medical Association advocates against universal healthcare systems and obviously also fights to keep the number of doctors low to keep doctor pay high.

The book's not a depressing read --- Nulla's case studies are instructive and tell you how to work the system. It's got plenty of insights though I wish Nulla had personal experience in other developed country hospitals to see if those are better. It doesn't advocate anything --- Nulla, like many Americans has a "learned helplessness" about the system, but he goes a long way towards explaining why doctors themselves would fare better in a system like Ben Traub. My guess is it'll take more American suffering before Americans decide to vote for change. Needless to say I recommend this book and encourage everyone to read it.

Review: Volt Rush

 Volt Rush is a book about the resources behind lithium ion batteries. That's lithium, cobalt, and nickle, along with the energy required to refine them for ore. It's worth reading as it covers much of what's needed to extract those materials from the earth, and what the environmental and human costs are.

For instance, cobalt is largely supplied from Congo using child labor:

In 2014 Unicef estimated that some 40,000 children worked in the cobalt mines in the Congo, a year when mobile phone sales topped 1.9 billion. As late as 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that children were present or working at about one in four artisanal mining sites. One study based on surveys in the former Katanga province estimated that about twenty-three percent of the children worked in cobalt mining... A decade after Huayou took a gamble on the Congo over ninety percent of the minerals from around Kolwezi were shipped to China.15 No one cared where the cobalt came from, how it was mined, or whether children were involved. As a result, consumers across the world were all indirectly complicit in the practice of child labour. The only thing that mattered was making the phones, and their supply chains, cheap. Designed in California, Made in China. But don’t mention the Congo. It would take the electric car and the work of a global NGO to properly shake the world out of its slumber.(kindle loc 1859-1982)

Even after the car manufacturers got involved, it still seemed like there's little effort to hold the miners accountable for child labor. Similarly, nickle is produced in Indonesia, with immense environmental consequences:

‘Nobody ever imagined that a Chinese investment in Indonesia could have been so disruptive,’ one Western stainless-steel producer told me. ‘They have created the same capacity as the whole of Europe in a country where there is no consumption.’ The company’s stainless-steel production would destroy European industry, he said, even though it produced five times more carbon dioxide from its use of coal-fired power. ‘They are destroying the environment,’ he told me. Tsingshan went from having less than five percent of global stainless-steel production in 2009 to twenty-five percent, becoming so big that even Beijing threatened its Indonesian exports of stainless steel with tariffs in March 2019. Tsingshan had become the cheapest producer of stainless steel in the world...Key to its success was the access to coal-fired power and cheap supplies of nickel. One of the company’s partners in Indonesia told me they paid six cents per kilowatt hour for electricity, compared to ten to twelve cents per kWh in China. Because domestic miners could no longer export their nickel, Tsingshan was in a powerful position to dictate prices to local miners, since it was the biggest buyer in town. The industrial park consumed around 20 million tonnes of nickel a year. Tsingshan paid around $38 a tonne for the local nickel ore, compared to the roughly $65 a tonne that Chinese producers at home paid for material from the Philippines.22 As the scholar Alvin Camba put it, the industrial park had created an oligopsony, where numerous miners competed to sell to a few buyers. As a result, the mining companies had less money to spend on environmental protection....As they watched Chinese companies rush to build projects in Indonesia, Tesla and the world’s largest EV battery producers became worried. The reliance on coal-fired power meant nickel for batteries produced in Indonesia could be up to five times as carbon intensive as that mined in Australia or Canada, in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The sheer amount of energy needed to separate the nickel from the ore also meant that even if renewables were used, the number of solar panels required would mean a large land footprint – which could contribute to deforestation, which mining had already exacerbated. Mining nickel in Indonesia required stripping large areas of the upland forest to access the ore near the surface. ‘These nickel mines have very large footprints,’ Steven Brown, who had previously worked in mining in Indonesia, told me. Erosion and heavy tropical rainfall led to run-off into the sea, impacting downstream communities. In addition, many nickel mines also produced a toxic pollutant, called hexavalent chromium, which could damage human health, he said. (kindle loc 2464-2491)

 It's interesting to note that all the companies involved in doing the environmental degradation are Chinese. Many of them are directly backed by state-sponsored loans specifically to encourage the growth of battery manufacturing and electric cars in China.

There is one bright spot, which is that Europe finally woke up and made heavy investments of its own. The European experience clearly shows that you can catch up rapidly if you have the willingness to put money in:

In 2020, Europe’s sales of electric cars surpassed China’s for the first time. It marked a significant shift in the centre of the global EV market. For years China had been the leader. Yet in 2019 European investment in electric transport – at €60 billion – was more than three times higher than China, which invested €17.1 billion, according to Brussels-based non-profit Transport and Environment. Just a year earlier Chinese investment was seven times what Europe was investing in the sector. Europe’s rapid growth sparked concerns in China that Beijing was not doing enough to support the electric vehicle market. In a speech in late 2019 CATL’s chairman Robin Zeng called on China to introduce stricter policies similar to Europe’s mandatory carbon emissions limits. ‘If in the coming few years there is still this trend, if there’s no investment there won’t be production, and it will be very hard for us to continue to stay in the first echelon,’ Zeng said.10 Šefčovič was happy: he claimed that by 2025 the EU would be self-sufficient for battery cells. Of the 272 battery Gigafactories in the pipeline globally, twenty-seven were now in Europe, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. It was an acknowledgement that reaping the jobs and economic growth from batteries and reducing reliance on China would require government support. (kindle loc 3383)

Missing in all this of course are the Americans, though Biden's Inflation Reduction Act did start to put money into battery manufacturing and incentives to source production in the USA. It's probably not too late, but there are already political moves to try to claw that back. Ultimately, what I learned from the book is that you cannot leave green tech to China --- it takes Western Democracies to institute environmentally conscious manufacturing and carbon emissions limits. Otherwise the effort to electrify transportation will very likely be at least partially offset by the increased pollution from a country with a history of ignoring environmental protection.

That makes this book well worth reading. Recommended.

Review: Scosche Rhythm+2.0

 The Polar OH1+ I've had for a few years is starting to have its battery die too quickly, so I looked up the price. It's still an astonishing $85, while the direct competitor, the Scosche Rhythm R+2.0 is now $30 or less. I bought one as a backup and it showed up with a charger, the device itself and the strap.

The strap is an improvement on the Polar OH1+. While the Polar would frequently flip over by accident or by rolling a sleeve over the device, this never happens to the Scosche. My first couple of months with the Schosche, I thought that the monitor was unreliable because my HR would spike up to 170+->200 even when I wasn't working hard. By trial and error I eventually discovered that the accuracy goes up dramatically when you put it in its preferred place, on the inside of the elbow. Once I had it there those spikes went away, making it far more accurate than the OH1+.

Battery life is good, and the LED is kinda dim which makes it harder to see that I've turned it on or off correctly. For $30, this is way cheaper than even the traditional "bra-like" HRM, so clearly this is the one to get. I've been using it with no discomfort and it's more than good enough for my purposes.

Review: Oxo Outdoor Kitchen Soap Dispensing Dish Brush

 Once in a while you run into a piece of equipment so good that you can't see how it can be improved. The OXO Outdoor Kitchen Soap Dispensing Dish Brush is one. It's a brush that contains detergent (and is refillable, so you can use biodegradeable soap if you're actually backpacking). One push of the button and it dispenses a small amount of soap and then you can scrub your outdoor pans and dishes clean. It even comes with a storage case so that your soapy brush doesn't come in contact with other items in your backpack. The sides of the dispenser is clear so you know how much detergent you have left.

Perfectly designed, and totally practical. It's not too expensive at $12 each. I love it!

Review: Dark Sun - The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb

 I enjoyed The Making of the Atomic Bomb so much that I checked out Dark Sun, the sequel. If anything, this book is even better! For one thing, it's not just about the science and engineering of the hydrogen bomb. The book covers the interaction between the USA and Russia, including the espionage that allowed Russia to catch up rapidly to the bomb. What impressed me was that the entire operation was run very cheaply, as the spies embedded in Los Alamos (one of whom was a hot shot scientist in his own right) had ideological motivations, not monetary motivations.

Igor Gouzenko, the Soviet cipher clerk who visited Moscow during the October 16 panic, characterized the Soviet espionage system from personal experience as “mass production.”369 “There were thousands, yes thousands, of agents in the United States,” he estimated; “thousands in Great Britain, and many other thousands spread elsewhere throughout the world.”370 America and England were particularly well covered, Gouzenko reported. “When I worked in the Special Communications branch [in Moscow] the vast majority of the telegrams came from England and the United States. Telegrams from other countries were lost in the flood.” The military attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Washington had five cipher clerks working for him, added Gouzenko, “which gives some indication of the amount of information he alone sent.” (kindle loc 1926)

 “Fuchs held the envelope containing the 1,500 dollars as if it were an unclean thing,” Gold remembered at another time, “and flatly refused to accept it.”643 Five years later, Fuchs was still insulted. “He turned down this offer,” he told the FBI, “and stated he would not do such a thing.” (kindle loc 3113)

 The development of the hydrogen bomb itself was also not obvious --- there were many dead-ends, and at one point the entire project had to be paused while computers were developed to aid with the calculations. I thought that was pretty amazing. The lead characters here included Stanislaw Ulam, Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, the last being notorious for being the model for Dr. Strangelove. Unlike the project for the original A-bomb, the hydrogen bomb project was full of strife and politicking, with Oppenheimer trying to discourage work since he didn't think it would actually help the US strategic position. This led to him being accused of being a soviet agent and he had his security clearance revoked.

The soviet side of the story was no less interesting. Rather than just copying and implementing the espionage information they were given, the soviet team's director had his own team do design and implementation from the basic ideas, only using the espionage data as a cross-check against his team. This was to guard against misinformation as well as to ensure that they had the capability of generating new ideas as well.

When the spies were finally uncovered, the sentences for them were wildly different. For instance, Fuchs, who actively leaked the diagrams was sentenced to 15 years in prison, while Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were given the death penalty. The differences was that Fuchs was tried in England, while the Rosenbergs were tried in the US, and Truman wanted them to become an example and so refused to give them a reprieve from the death penalty:

I must say that it goes against the grain to avoid interfering in the case where a woman is to receive capital punishment. [But] . . . if there would be any commuting of the woman’s sentence without the man’s, then from here on the Soviets would simply recruit their spies from among women. . . . We know that the Rosenbergs were part of [a spy] ring.2375 If the Soviets can convince prospective recruits that the worst possible penalty they would ever have to pay for exposure as spies would be a relatively short term in prison, then their blandishments and bribes would be much more effective. . . . If it were possible to assure that these people would be imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives, there would be no question that the vast bulk of the argument would rest on the side of commutation. But the fact is that, if they do not go to the chair, they will be released in fifteen years under federal law. (kindle loc 11288)

The book ends with an analysis of how much the US spent on its nuclear armaments:

By one estimate that properly counts delivery systems as well as weapons, it cost the United States $4 trillion—roughly the US national debt in 1994.2623 Soviet costs were comparable and were decisive in the decline of the Soviet economy that triggered the USSR’s collapse.2624 Cold warriors have argued from that fact that spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy itself justifies the arms race. Their argument overlooks the inconvenient reality that the expense of the arms race contributed to US decline as well, decline evident in an oppressive national debt, in decaying infrastructure and social and educational neglect. The potlatch theory of the arms race also overlooks the unconscionable risk both superpowers took of omnicidal war. (kindle loc 12635)

 In many ways, Oppenheimer was right --- by sparking the arms race, the USA was trapped into spending an ever increasing amount on its military, and that prevented it from other spending on valuable infrastructure. Of course, many of the USA's other choices were entirely self-inflicted --- no other country spends as much on healthcare for so poor an outcome. It could be that not spending the money on nuclear armaments would simply have poured more money into insurance company executive pockets or into the hands of Wall Street instead.

All in all, the book was fascinating and well worth reading. Recommended.

Samuel P Taylor Backpacking Trip

 Arturo had a weekend available to go backpacking, and Bowen for a change didn't have events he couldn't skip. We had to decide where to go: Five Lakes was quite mosquitoey, and I didn't feel that sitting in a car for 4 hours was a good deal in exchange for experiencing a lot of mosquitoes. We floated several other ideas, including Barlow Flats in Big Sur (1800' of climbing, which would result in a lot of whining), but finally settled on a hike from the Bolinas Ridge Trailhead to Samuel P Taylor's Hiker Biker site. No permits were needed, no bear canisters were needed, and I don't remember encountering a single mosquito there, ever. My last trip there was in 2003, and I remembered the hiker-biker site there being idyllic. Hiker Biker prices have gone from $1/person/night to $7/person/night, but they had showers $1/token for 4 minutes, which made this a luxury camping trip. The weekend was also forecasted to be hot, so being in the redwoods sounded appealing.

It was already warm when we arrived at the Bolinas Ridge trailhead at 9:30am. The fire road had a surprising number of dandelion flowers, but the sun beat down pretty hard on us. We hiked up the ridge following a bunch of dayhikers. Whenever we turned around, we would feel a light breeze on our face, which told us why we were so hot --- the wind was the same as our walking speed and was at our backs, so we felt like the air was completely still!

Fortunately, the rise wasn't very much and we soon turned downhill towards the trees. We took a quick rest at the first sign of shade. Even though the exertion wasn't much we were sweating because of the humidity. Once into the Redwoods proper the air was much cooler and we were much happier.

Making it into the park, we found the hiker biker site and discovered to our surprise a couple of cyclists already there. Usually cyclists would ride all day and only make it into the park late in the afternoon or evening. They were from San Francisco and had left the city at 6:00am. One of them spoke Spanish and was happy to find that Arturo was from Venezuela, and happy to practice speaking Spanish with her. The hiker biker site had been moved --- I would discover the next day that the old hiker biker site in the middle of a gorgeous redwood grove had been "restored to nature", and the new site was where site #1 was. Site #1 was an undesirable site because not only was it closer to the road, the light from the toilet would disturb your sleep all night.

After pitching our tents, we went down to the entrance to pay for our stay ($21), buy shower tokens, buy a stack of firewood ($10), get a trail map, and then come back to lay it all down. We then went for the recommended hike on the Pioneer Tree Trail.

This was my first proper hike inside the park and I was impressed. The trail was well graded and gorgeous. We did however, walk past the pioneer tree before Arturo spotted it on Pokemon Go and we went back to discover that it had been burned down in 2022!

We finished the loop and decided not to see the fish viewing area which was another 2 miles down the cross-Marin trail. We went back to camp to find it busy with arriving cyclists. We played several rounds of Kingdomino (not having a bear canister meant I could carry some luxuries!), after which we made a campfire, roasted smores, took showers (the showers were very warm) and went to sleep. That toilet light was annoying and I was so sad that the old Hiker Biker site was no longer in use.

The next morning, we got up early, had breakfast, and headed back out. We said goodbye to the Redwoods back at the trail intersection, and climbed up back to the Bolinas Ridge trail while things were relatively cool. We now had the breeze in our face!

In addition to the dandelions we saw yesterday, this time we also spotted camomile!

Returning back to Arturo's Tesla (which had an internal temperature of 104F! Thank goodness for the app which let Arturo vent the car before we got in), we got into it and visited the Salmon viewing area, where the signs told us that Salmon only visited the river from October to February, with a peak in December. Still, it was a pretty area.

Normally we'd return via San Franciso, but the spate of thefts there in recent months meant that we saved ourselves the bridge crossing free and had a hefty lunch at Fentons Creamery in Oakland instead!

I was proud of Bowen. This was the first backpack trip where he carried not only his tent and sleeping bag, but also his own food and utensils. He did it without whining as well!

Re-read: Anansi Boys

 Anansi Boys was the first Gaiman novel that I actually liked, so when we got to the end of Odd and the Frost Giants, I checked out the book and started reading it to Boen. The story is a perfect blend of The Sandman and the spirit of stories, with interjections of the trickster god myths and little asides that bring in nice touches that Gaiman brings. Notably, it doesn't include any references to the Hempstocks.

The protagonist, Fat Charlie Nancy, is typically British, despite an American upbringing, bringing to mind Douglas Adams' aphorism that the driving force behind being an Englishman is fear of embarrassment. His brother, Spider, is as American as they come, trusting to luck and never planning, while seemingly able to twist the world to his way of thinking. Bringing them together sets in motion a cascade of events that leaves them very different at the end of the novel.

This latest edition of the novel comes with an out-take which I didn't read years ago, and an essay about where ideas come from that I thought was delightful:

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it. You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions.  (page 334)

Good stuff.

Review: Bubblebum Inflatable Travel Booster Seat

 Bowen has aged out of needing to use booster seats while traveling, but Boen hasn't. Here's the deal, when you're traveling light, car booster seats are the one item that will force you to check a piece of luggage. Sure you could rent, but the price can frequently escalate until it's just cheaper to buy your own. The Bubblebum Inflatable Booster Seat solves this problem. It rolls up small enough to take up relatively little space, quickly inflates and deflates, and meets US/European safety standards.

In case you're wondering, Alberta doesn't actually require kids to be in booster seats, while British Columbia does. It's OK --- safety is more important than just obeying the law. This is the kind of thing that if you keep it accessible, you can use it in taxis and Uber rides as well, that's how quickly it inflates and deflates.

I probably should have started using these all the time when I travel instead of bringing the cumbersome seats I've brought in the past. Boen finds it so comfortable he asked if he could use it at home instead of his regular seat. If that's not a recommendation I don't know what is.

Review: Osprey Savu 5 Lumbar Bike Pack

 I'd been riding the Roadini quite a bit, and sometimes take it out for long rides where the onboard storage isn't quite enough. Having more water bottle cages would help. The Osprey Savu 5 was on sale at the manufacturer website for $30, so I bought one. There are other versions of the pack, including one that has just one bottle holder (but the bottle holder is in an awkward place that splits the storage section into 2!), and others have built-in hydration reservoir, but hydration reservoirs are a pain to clean.

In office/commute use, the Savu 5 is fine. It will hold your keys, a mask, water bottles, and even a blu-ray that you need to return to the library on the way home. I then tried it on a ride with significant (but not a lot of) steep climbing off-road, and had a severe backache when the water bottle holders were loaded. Do people really do serious mountain biking with this? I thought to myself. I considered returning it, but we had the Waterton Lakes/Jasper trip coming up and I brought it along in case there were some minor hikes where I only needed to carry water.

For around town hikes and walking it was great. For a long distance walk, I usually brought the Deuter instead since it was unpredictable what my kids would want me to carry. But it was at Whistler where I really used the pack. There, I saw all the other variants of the Osprey Lumbar Pack in use as well, with many people using the hydration reservoir version.

Here's the deal --- a downhill rental bike doesn't come with water bottle cages, and you're not going to install one since the front wheel is expected to throw up plenty of dirt to cover the mouth of your water bottle. But this pack keeps the bottle high and away from dirt. The top zippered pocket is the perfect place to store your phone, and the side zipper pockets can hold your wallet, room keys, or park pass. The main compartment can be used to store your elbow pads and knee pads while you walk from your room to the rental bike shop. This pack is perfect for that! And in a downhill mountain bike park, you barely ride the bike up anything, so there's no way for your back to ache.

So now I know that when some manufacturers/reviewers say Mountain Bike, they mean "Downhill Mountain Bike at a Ski Resort where you don't have to pedal up the hill." Those of us who live in the Bay Area would never have thought of such a use case which was why it was such a foreign concept to me! In any case, now that I understand the use case, I'd say that this is the perfect pack for a downhill MTB park. It's not bad for a flat commute. Just don't expect to wear it and be comfortable on the kind of climbing you need to do frequently in the Bay Area. At $30.50 it's a great value. I wouldn't pay the regular price for it. Boen loved it because he could put a stuffed animal in it, but it turned out he's not hefty enough to wear it and have it not slip!

Review: Scientist - EO Wilson A Life in Nature

 After reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb I decided to pick up Scientist, since while I'd heard of E. O. Wilson, I had done very little reading in the field of biology. This is an unusual biography --- first of all, Wilson is still alive, so Rhodes got to interview him and talk to him. Secondly, I had no idea that the field of biology was split into molecular biology and field biology, and after the discovery of the structure of DNA, the molecular biologists had little time (or respect) for the field biologists, calling them stamp collectors.

Wilson, of course, was a field biologist, making his name by becoming one of the ant experts, keeping colonies of ants in his laboratory to examine and understand their behavior. I thoroughly enjoyed the book's exploration of how Wilson eventually came about to not just become a well known field biologist, but also co-founded sociobiology, evolutionary biology, and then became a two-time Pulitzer prize winning writer. What a resume!

The book ends with a description of his efforts to create public awareness of the current extinction events, as well as the controversy he started with accusations from other groups that he had an agenda to sell. The book is well written, transparent, and short while packing a lot of information in a relatively short space. Recommended!

Review: Deuter Speedlite 25

 For the Canada 2023 trip, I was venturing into a country in which it might actually rain in the summer (in fact, the forecast before I left was for rain the entire time!). With 4 sets of raingear to carry, my Matador Beast wouldn't have worked even if it hadn't already gotten torn up. And the Freerain wasn't an option as it had no frame. I needed something bigger, preferably something with a frame and good waterbottle sidepockets.

REI had the Deuter Speedlite 25 on sale, and Osprey also had a sale on the Hikelite 26 and 32 at the same time. I quickly determined that the Hikelite 26 was no good because of their waterbottle mesh pockets had reports of water bottles falling out of them, while the 32 was too big. Despite not having a raincover (I live in California, after all), I opted for the Speedlite 25. 

The backpack is light, and easily fit 4 people's rain gear, plus lunch, plus the hiking stick holders did a good job for when other people would give me their hiking stick to carry. There's a top pocket for quick to access items, and the mesh sidepockets for water bottles never failed.  The external stuff pocket is also great for storing wet clothes or items that are otherwise dirty and you wouldn't want inside the pack. The frame is very comfortable, and the wife and kids never gave me so much that I could fit into the backpack. Deuter, like Osprey, also offers a lifetime repair or replace warranty for this backpack. I've biked with it relatively full and it's still comfortable.

The backpack is expensive but it's lighter and the warranty and utility makes it a winner. Recommended.

Review: Attack on Titan Vol 1-8

 With my Kindle Scribe in hand, I checked out all 8 volumes of Attack on Titan that were available on Kindle Unlimited. With the title, I expected a science fiction story about attacking a civilization on Titan, that moon of Jupiter. Instead, it's a fantasy story about a human civilization that lives inside huge walled enclosures. The area outside the enclosure is too dangerous, as they are populated by "Titans", giant humanoid creatures that have only one weak spot and will just regenerate even if their heads are blown off by canons. These Titans like to eat humans.

Manga stories move slowly on a per volume basis --- the medium is serialized weekly, and most of the comic books are devoted to action without words rather than plot exposition, etc. The story revolves around Eren and Misako, both orphans. Misako's parents were killed and Eren helped rescue her, and when the first giant Titans manage to smash one of the protective walls, Eren's mother was crushed under their house while Eren's father has disappeared.

Beyond that, the plot and story starts getting wonky and strange.  If you're willing to accept the fantasy I'm sure it all works, but I got impatient and read the plot summary on wikipedia and decided it was too silly to keep reading.

Tips and Tricks for Canada 2023

This was the first time in years I'd flown inside Canada. I used Google Flights to find what I thought were reasonably cheap flights and booked them. This was a mistake. Two of my flights were changed out from under me with unacceptable times, both of which required cancellation and rebooking directly with the airline (Westjet), costing much more than the original Google Flights price.  Lesson: don't trust any intermediary sites and always book directly with the airline. The one flight that didn't require rebooking was booked with United using frequent flyer miles. This has never happened to me during transcontinental trips.

Parks Canada now requires a shuttle reservation for Lake Moraine. Last minute tickets open up 2 days before the day you want to visit and you have to jump on it at 8:00am. The website is designed for computer use rather than mobile use, so you want a real web browser and click on the last tab on the reservation page (labeled Day Use). You need the early shuttle if you're going to do a long hike, so plan accordingly. In retrospect a 3rd long hike on the trip probably wouldn't have gone over well, so I guess I shouldn't have been so ambitious.

You should not use the Whistler-Blackcomb website to book lodging. I naively thought that I could get a package deal with lodging, bike rentals, lessons all in one place. The only way that could work is if you bought a Season Pass, which you'd have to stay at Whistler for more than 10 days to justify. Instead, book your lodging on AirBnB, and then book your bike passes, bike rentals, and lessons separately from the website. It's probably a good idea to rent bikes rather than bring your own on the plane unless you already have a downhill capable bike (living in the Bay Area all our bikes are uphill capable rather than downhill capable).

The DFX kids lessons are hit or miss. On the first day, they got an instructor who was willing to push them and let them do more challenging trails. On the next two days they got conservative instructors who weren't as willing to let them challenge themselves. Knowing what I know now, I'd have gone for 1 day of DFX, and then hired a private instructor on an as needed basis afterwards. On the other hand, I needed that first day of instruction so I could ride with Brad on the second day.

Once you're in the park itself Creekside is way quieter and has far shorter lines as well as a better loading experience than the Village Gondola. It's well worth the detour to use Creekside.

Skylynx is potentially cheaper than renting a car, but you take 3 hours to get to Whistler instead of 2. Having said that, if you had a family of 4 it doesn't end up being any cheaper to take the shuttle rather than rent a car.

Plan for a break after a couple of days or 3 days of cycling at the park. Your hands will need it. Bring a bike mount for your watch because if you have a heavy watch it will chafe your wrists. That probably also means  you need to bring a separate HRM. I did not expect downhill MTB to be so different but it was a good new experience. Left to myself I probably wouldn't do it again --- the bike park is expensive as are the bike rentals --- I'd rather be road touring. But Bowen loves it!

Bowen was never interested in skiing but he loved downhill MTB. I was very glad we did this trip because Bowen discovered a sport that he liked! Days after we got back from the park, he's playing with stuffed animals with his brothers, and they're calling out the names of the park trails they've ridden. He looks at the map of the park that Brad got for us, and he talks about the trails and looks them up and watches youtube videos of people riding those trails. I never would have imagined that he'd have gotten into the sport this much.

2023 Vancouver

 We took it easy driving back from Whistler to Vancouver, stopping first at Shannon Falls Park to see the waterfalls which were very visible from the road, only to discover that there were several waterfalls we had passed if we'd known about them. Then we stopped at Horsehoe Bay for a good look at Bowen's namesake island.

We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant at Richmond and then to my surprise the kids wanted to go to the vancouver aquarium. In retrospect we should have had lunch near Stanley Park and saved the 1.5 hour round trip commute! Traffic in Vancouver was very slow.

The Vancouver aquarium was small but very well done, and we had enough time to experience the 4D shark movie, and the touch-based hands on lab. After that we checked into the hotel and then went to dow

ntown Richmond for dinner, where we returned the rental car.

The dinner was great, but the kids wanted Boba, so we walked to the nearest Boba place and along the way saw a supermarket. Going in, I saw Lay's Octopus Ball chips as well as Beef Wellington flavor'd chips, which I'd never seen before! Clearly random Vancouver supermarkets stocked stuff that made Ranch 99 look like Safeway.

The Day's Inn at the Vancouver International Airport was impressive --- the lodging was good, but the breakfast was far better than many much more expensive restaurants, as was the hotel's attention to detail and shuttle service. It's not in a great location but we were there for only one night anyway. I checked in on the flight while at the aquarium and booked another security appointment.

The last morning, we zipped through security in quick order, cleared customs and were at our gate in 30 minutes. The only snafu came when our overpacked luggage got flagged as being too big so we had to check the bags.

Bowen asked to come  back to Whistler again, a far cry from his stance at the start of the trip where he was threatening to boycott the classes. But when I asked if he'd give up his birthday present for another Whistler trip this year he said No. But he asked to give up his Costa Rica school trip in exchange for a Whistler trip next year instead. I guess that means we'll be coming back to Whistler some time.

Review: The Making of the Atomic Bomb

 The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a 1000+ page pulitzer prize winnder recounting the history of the atomic bomb. It is comprehensive, and includes depictions of physicists I'd never heard of before, such as Leo Szilard, who conceived of the chain reaction and held to patent (in secret), and went from worrying about beaing the Germans to the atomic bomb to worrying about the very human cost of deploying it in Japan.

The book goes so far as to cover the German efforts (and the allied forces successful effort to destroy the heavy water facility!) and the Japanese efforts to develop their bombs, though in the respect of success, no one came close to the Americans. One famous scientist said something like "You'd have to turn the whole country into a factory to make it happen in time to affect the war," and upon touring the facilities turned around and said, "OK, that's what you did!"

Lots of little known (to me anyway) details about the bomb was explored, including the imploding mechanism to trigger critical mass, and fully remote-operated lines for refining U235 and plutonium (once the facilities started production no human could enter those facilities and still live). I was astounded to learn that Roosevelt held the cards so tightly to his chest that Truman was never briefed about the Manhattan project until he assumed the presidency!

The book ends with the bomb dropping of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That chapter was so hard to read because the tragedy was so poignant and real. (Keep in mind that none of my teachers in school nor anyone who was occupied by the Japanese in Singapore had any sympathy for the Japanese after the atrocities they committed during the war, so I'm prejudiced about it --- a good writer can make you sympathize even when you have good reasons not to have sympathy)

I read this book because someone mentioned it on the Ezra Klein show. I'm impressed at the comprehensiveness of the book. Recommended.

2023 Whistler: Explorations with Bowen

The last few days had left my wrist in an unusual position --- the chafing from the watch had gotten to the point where I had to switch wrists for my Fenix 5X. What I should have done was to bring a bike mount for the watch but it was now too late for that, so I had to switch wrists, try mounting the watch higher on my forearm. It was all in vain --- by the end of the day I'd stick the watch into a pocket to give my wrist a rest. Brad would tell me that the proper solution would be to switch to the lighter Forerunner series with a plastic case that wouldn't have the same problem.

The bike shop couldn't fix the brakes on my bike (even after replacing brake pads), and so gave me a new instance of the same Rocky Mountain Slayer. Bowen would choose to spend our warm up run doing Beeline, after which the lines were so long we opted to ride the gondola all the way to the top to get started on Una Moss.

Una Moss, Midgard, South Park, and Midgard all proved to be no problem for Bowen but my rear tire was going flat! I borrowed a pump from someone but it made the situation worse --- I pumped up the tire, but when I unscrewed the pump from the presta valve the valve core came out with it! I screwed back the valve core and another biker with a press on pump showed up and I pumped up the tire and then proceeded to descend Earth Circus as quick as I could as the tire was still going flat!

Once in the village I went over to the bike shop and they took care of the flat while I had lunch with Bowen. They must have considered it their fault because I got a partial refund for the rental right away. We went back up the Creekside Gondola after lunch and with the new, fixed bike, we did Una Moss and Blueberry Bathtub and then went back up the Garbanzo express for Blue Velvet.

Blue Velvet gave Bowen a lot more problems. First, he got spooked by the drop. Then, he got stuck on a few of the more aggressive ramps. Fortunately, an instructor he'd met earlier ran into him and gave him pointers, but he would refuse to do Blue Velvet again, doing Una Moss and then exploring new trails. I'd never seen him so enthusiastic about riding a bike before. He was clearly out to make the most of our last riding day in Whistler.

Our last run into the Fitzsimmons area, I let him choose the route again, and we did two runs, once with Easy Does It leading into various technical trails, and then once with Beeline leading into Ninja Cougar, Samurai Pizza Cat, and other intermediate trails. I was very happy to see him ride the trails with confidence and that he was out to find a challenge, not just ride the easiest thing.

We finished the day at 5pm, returning our bikes and walking back, picking up more Gelato along the way. That night I had more laundry to do, and we started packing for our day in Vancouver.

Review: Scam me if you can

 Scam me if you can is written by Frank Abagnale, who also wrote the famous book Catch me if you can! The book is well written, in a transparent prose style that's full of anecdotes and stories about famous scams, some of it will make you question practices you might have considered innocent.

For instance, I've never thought letting someone stay at your house would be a risk, but there's a story in the book about someone who got her identity stolen because of precisely that! The book's full of tips, but you probably already know most of them:

• Never post personally identifiable information on social media (I've turned off birthday visibility on Facebook as a result of this)
• Always turn on 2 factor authentication
• T-mobile (and other providers) actually have scam protection settings you might want to turn on
• If an offer is too good to be true, it always is
• Scary phone calls are almost always scams --- government business is always conducted through the mail
• Passwords suck. The sooner they go away, the better.
• Shred everything that comes to your house.
• When someone calls you from the authorities, get their name, number, and location, hang up, and then do a look up on their actual place of business and call them back to verify
• Lotteries never ask for money up front to collect.
• Never assume a check from someone you don't know will clear.

Most of this is common sense, but when you have a person dressed in police uniform at your doorstep it might not be so easy to stay calm and do that verification! But I guess that's why people still get scammed all the time.

All in all, the book's full of tips and made me change one of my online behaviors. If that saves me one case of identity theft I think the time spent reading the book would have been worth it!

2023 Whistler: Rest Day

 For our rest day, we started with a 10:00am scenic flight to see the glaciers around Whistler. The day was ideal, with little wind and calm skies. It was Boen's first time on a float plane. What blew my mind was how large and beautiful
Garibaldi Lake was --- reflective and calm in the morning.

The cindercone and the closer up of the crevasse on the glaciers were also sights not to be forgotten.  We even spotted people walking on the glaciers that morning --- someone had gotten up pretty early.

After the beautiful flight, we got back to the hotel to pick up the camera and proceeded up the Blackcomb Gondola, the only gondola allowed for the peak to peak sightseeing trip. 

I expected it to be crowded but the gondola moved at a quick clip and there wasn't much of a wait at all --- I guess when you don't have to load bikes the gondola moves a lot faster. The top of Blackcomb had a poor restaurant that we ate a few snacks at and then proceeded to the peak to peak Gondola, where the kids opted to wait for the glass-bottom gondola, which takes an additional 20 minutes but in reality proved to be a bit disappointing --- the look down might give you a better chance of spotting wildlife but didn't grant as gorgeous a view as the windows did. The peak to peak gondola was a great engineering effort, possible only because the end of the valley was closed off by mountains so the gondola was relatively protected from the worst of the winds.

From the peak to peak gondola you have to walk down to the peak express, which takes you to the tippy top, for both cyclists and hiker. We visited the suspension bridge at the top (and Bowen loved the Peak Express), and we walked around.

The return from the peak express to the top of the village gondola was actually a long uphill in the thin air, and Boen and Xiaoqin opted out of any extra hiking to take the peak to peak express back. Bowen and I tried to do the Harmony Lake hike, but the mosquitoes started biting us at the start of the hike and without mosquito repellent and reports from other hikers telling us it got rapidly worse, we bailed as well. At the bottom of the Blackcomb Gondola we saw that there was a pop-up store for the Lucia Gelato so we bought some and it was good!

Dinner was at Nogomi sushi, which was so good two days ago that we went back.

2023 Whistler Day 3: Solo Explorations

I dropped the kids off telling Bowen that he should try to get his instructor to teach him how to do Crank It Up. My intention today was to ride and have fun and not think about instruction, so I did a run on Crank it Up, and then took the Gondola up. With the Canada Day crowds, I didn't want to stay in the Fitzsimmons area, but someone on my gondola told me that the Garbanzo Express would open up, so we got off the Gondola (it wasn't possible to take it to the top before 10:30am), and we rode over to the Express and took it to the Una Moss trailhead. 

From there, I rode Midgard, South Park, and Bengal Bear to Call Me Maybe. Without someone to guide me I became a lot more tentative on the bike, walking more and being aggressive less. But this time I remembered to take videos and not just photos of the various waterfalls. Call Me Maybe felt particularly hard, even though the progression chart said it was easier than many other trails I'd done. I realized then that the progression chart doesn't take into account length of a trail. I might be able to ride at a high intensity for 3 minutes, but that doesn't mean that continuous high intensity was feasible for 10  or even 5 minutes.

At the Creekside village, I bought a coke and ate two cliff bars before going back onto the creekside gondola to do Una Moss and Blueberry Bathtub again. At the intersection of Una Moss I ran into a bear and scared it.It ran off up the mountain to the right off the trail and I was shaken but I didn't want to look like dinner so I kept going quickly until the shock got big enough that I pulled off the trail and calmed myself down before going down to Blueberry Bathtub where the bath washed away my fear. I then took the Garbanzo Express again to redo midgard, south park, barking duck, and then Earth Circus again. This was so great, and I repeated the loop again and finally came down B-line just in time to pick up the kids from their class.

Bowen's instructor told me that he was ready to go to the intermediates, but she hadn't let him do Crank It Up, so I told Bowen to get on the lift. We went on the lift. I offered to buy Boen an ice cream but he chose to come with us.

Bowen did really well on Crank It Up, but Boen crashed, falling on his hip and getting some road rash. Boen managed to get down the mountain anyway despite his wound, and at the bottom we called bike patrol to get him to come and clean up his wound. Xiaoqin also came by to pick him up while Bowen and I went for another run, this time with rides of his choosing. He led me down Easy Does It to visit the Golden Triangle, which only opened a day ago so I'd never done it. He also picked some technical trails which convinced me that he could do Midgard.

We had dinner that night at the Ramen place in town, which was also the same shop as a Japanese supermarket place. The food was good and the Japanese soda pop was unique though messy in that you always had overflow whenever you opened it. I booked the scenic flight that Brad recommended the next morning and had also bought the sightseeing ticket that would let us go up Blackcomb and take the Peak to Peak Gondola on our rest day. Our rest day was much needed as my forearms and hands were sore from all the pounding from the mountain bike. The full suspension bike took a lot of beating but so did I!