10 years of Bicycle Quarterly

 I'm much too cheap to pay $44/year for a subscription to Bicycle Quarterly. Their back issues are also expensive. But someone offered me about 10 years in exchange for about $40 after shipping, so I jumped in and read it all. This is not the intended way for people to read the magazine, but I figured it'll give me some insight as to what the magazine's all about. I was not wrong.

First of all, Bicycle Quarterly should be renamed "Jan Heine's Quarterly Opinions, Reviews and Randonenuring Adventures." Nearly every article in the magazine is written by Jan Heine or one of his friends, with a few scant submissions from other people here and there. To my surprise, most of the photos in the magazine are pretty bad. After reading a few of the trip reports, I realized that it's because Jan Heine is not a bicycle tourist. He's a Randonneur, specializing in events where you ride a long distance with little or no sleep to a schedule. Well, if that's your goal you're not going to try to take beautiful pictures, and in fact, at night it's unlikely your photos are going to be any good anyway.

I have no idea who the magazine is aimed for. There's always an article introducing some new technique (like jumping curbs) to the reader, but I imagine most people who read the magazine already know how to do most of the things he describes. There are reviews of bicycles, but they tend to be of reviews of bicycles that are set up like Jan Heine's own favorite bikes. For instance, all bicycles are reviewed with 650b wheels (and 42mm tires), even bikes that would come in 700c sizes as well. The interesting thing is that the market for 650b tires seems to have been shrinking. When your preferred size is losing favor in the market you might want to rethink pushing it to your audience as you could lose credibility. (Having said that, I'm still doing friction shifting and rim brakes, so maybe his audience is like that but about 650b wheels)

Heine talks a lot about tires. Wider is better, and supple tires are best. The issue is that you have a hard time finding really supple tires at wider than about 32mm tires, so he formed another company (Compass Cycles, now Rene Herse) to supply those tires. The problem with his tire testing is that the sample sizes are really small, and the fact that his tires cost more than $90 for the extralight models mean that most people aren't going to be riding them.

Heine also talks a lot about frames and what makes a frame "plane." The term comes from boats where a hull could rise out of the water and "plane" and reduce drag, but his use of it in cycling bears no resemblance to what happens on a boat. Basically, the claim here is that certain frames under certain riders, will flex in such a way that the cyclist can sync with the frame, allowing the frame flex to return energy to propelling the bike up the road during pedal dead spots. If I was unhappy with his tire testing methodology, his statement about planing and cycling comes with next to no evidence. It's all subjective, and there's no attempt to generalize his experience for any other rider (who doesn't have the benefit of hundreds of different bikes to ride, including many custom frames) to figure out what planes and what doesn't. He makes general statements like: "Use lighter tubing for top tubes and down tubes, and stiffer chainstays". Go ahead and build a few bikes like that and figure out which ones planes and which ones do not. Don't have the budget for it? Me neither.

There's an obsession with "rinko" cycling in Japan. (No surprise, Heine's wife is Japanese) Here's the deal, I've ridden in Japan, and it's decent cycling, but nowhere close to what you can get in the alps, where the train systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy do not insist that you have to take your bike apart and stuff it into a bag to get on a train.

There's a time when he and his wife tries a really old tandem built by Rene Herse in the alps. But they have crappy gearing and don't do any of the rough stuff. It's all very shallow, because unlike the single bike reviews, Heine has never tried a modern tandem with gears low enough to climb steep stuff with his wife.

All in all, I'm glad I wasn't paying $44/year for a subscription (chances are I would have given up after a year when I noticed nearly everything in the magazine was written by Jan Heine). I'm not sure a typical cyclist reading this magazine will get much out of it, and I've already summarized 10 years of articles for you.

Review: How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't

 How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't is a book by Yale doctor and physician Perry Wilson. It is readable, funny in many parts, and well-written. For instance, he describes a surgeon's interaction with a family of a patient who's undergone surgery:

I remember listening to one of the cardiothoracic surgeons talking to a family after a large aortic arch repair. The patient had done well but was still unconscious, on the breathing machine. The surgeon, an expert by any definition, explained that the surgery was essentially flawless; in a few days, the patient would be up and around, out of the hospital within two weeks. “Thank God,” his wife said. “No, no. You do not thank God,” the surgeon said. “You thank me.” (pg 245)

I laughed out loud reading about it.  The book first describes what is very basic to scientists: correlation is not causation, and bayesian reasoning. He then points out that because of these problems the best way to identify causation is through randomized controlled trials. Even those are subject to errors and occasionally outright fraud.

He points out that even the best studies and the best outcomes from clinical trials of a new drug has to be done on a population statistical level, which means that in many cases, there's a ton of uncertainty as to whether or not a new drug or treatment will help you:

There is no “one thing” that will help you live longer. There are healthy things, and less healthy things, and unhealthy things. People who adopt multiple, broadly healthy lifestyle choices—from what they eat and don’t eat, to how much exercise they get, to the kinds of activities they take part in—live longer. The problem is no one wants to click on an article saying MAKE THESE 30 CHANGES IN YOUR LIFE TO LIVE LONGER. It is not easy to make thirty lifestyle changes. We all want simple solutions to complex problems. (pg 61)

Just as in investing there's no market for "get rich slow" when there are plenty of people touting "get rich quick" solutions. 

What makes medications special is not the fact that they are so incredibly good at saving lives, but that they are easy to use. You can’t change your age, and quitting smoking is tough, but popping a pill is a straightforward action that doesn’t demand too much change in your usual habits. The sobering truth is that drugs operate on the margins—they have an effect, but they aren’t as impactful as we like to think they are.  (pg. 139)

 Wilson even addresses the elephant in the room, which is the American healthcare system, notorious for being inscrutable, heartless, profit-driven, and liable to drive even insured folks into bankruptcy:

there is no industry that pays more money to Congress than the pharmaceutical industry. We may not have the kind of money pharma does, but we do have one thing it doesn’t have: the votes. I have never been a single-issue voter, but if you were to pick a single issue to vote on, I suggest you make it the one that has the most special-interest money thrown at it. That money tells me that the industry is scared—and while Congress members do like their drug money, they like keeping their jobs more. And drug pricing reform is incredibly popular. In a 2021 Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 88 percent of respondents favored allowing the federal government to negotiate what they will pay for specific drugs, including 77 percent of Republicans and 96 percent of Democrats. (pg 183)

Wilson acknowledges the huge amount of wasted money in the system, including on administrators who do not actually provide any healthcare:

In 2019, Healthline crunched the numbers and found that there were ten healthcare administrators for every one doctor in the United States. These administrators do not provide patient care, but they supposedly improve care. Most administrators argue they are making the system more streamlined, more efficient. But there is not much data to support that. The Harvard Business Review looked at the rapid growth of healthcare administration positions and concluded that the only meaningful difference for patients that correlated with increased administrative roles was a reduction in thirty-day hospital readmission from 19 percent to 17.8 percent. HBR also noted that this reduction happened to occur just when the Affordable Care Act imposed penalties on hospitals based on readmission rates.  (pg. 218)

 What about the frequently made statement that our doctors, nurses are overpaid and that's why we have the most expensive medical system in the world? Wilson debunks that too:

About 20 percent of healthcare spending in the United States goes to “physician services,” but physician salaries are only a fraction of that—just 8.6 percent, the lowest percentage of any Western country save Sweden. Since the majority of physicians now work for hospital systems or corporations, that money goes to headquarters and is parceled out from there. In other words, even if you slashed doctor salaries in half, you would save only 4 percent of the Medicare budget. (pg. 220)

Needless to say I found myself highlighting paragraph after paragraph of this book, taking note of new concepts such as NNT. I came away with this book knowing more than when I started it, which means that I recommend it to anyone. 

Re-read: V for Vendetta

 In the wake of the murder of Brian Thompson by a vigilante I had to re-read V for Vendetta, Alan Moore's treatise on totalitarianism and a vigilante who takes it upon himself to burn it all down. The art by David Lloyd is one of the best things about the book, tying in with Moore's plot (which is a little clumsy) and sensibilities beautifully.

Set in an England which is the sole survivor of a nuclear war, the story's main point of view character is Evey, who in desperation tries to commit a crime to survive but unfortunately is the victim of a police setup. She is rescued by the eponymous character V, and then we see that V has been systematically killing various people in power in government.

The backstory is revealed in drips and drabs and depicts the concentration camps that hear of. Presciently, Moore has the concentration camp victims not be of people of one race, but of the deviants in society, the gays, lesbians as well as people of color. V is himself a lone escapee from that camp and goes on to terrorize the people who ran that camp.

The writing is dense --- this was Alan Moore early in his career, not having learned to use pictures to tell stories as much as text. The dialogue, while characteristic of Alan Moore's later work in places, is at times still clumsy and does more "tell" than "show." But it's astonishing how predictive Alan Moore's work has been, and it's well worth revisiting this graphic novel in these troubled times.

Review: The Impossible Man

 The Impossible Man is a biography of Roger Penrose, who won the Nobel prize for physics in 2020 for his work on black holes in his early career. The author says that the biography took 6 years to write and he had the complete cooperation of Penrose the entire time.

The book describes Penrose's work as being driven entirely by mathematics and his geometrical approach (as opposed to the equation heavy approach of many of his colleagues).  Interesting insights abound, including his fights with his parents about becoming a physicist:

“They accused me of keeping bad company because one of my friends wanted to be a nuclear physicist. They said, ‘Oh, nuclear physics is atom bombs. You’re not allowed to do that. That’s terrible.’ It was horrible.”5 Even for committed pacifists, the leap from enrolling in high school mathematics to facilitating nuclear annihilation was big. Roger wasn’t thinking that many moves ahead. He knew he’d given up one career but hadn’t thought through the alternatives. He certainly had no plans to create weapons of mass destruction. (kindle loc 1099)

The author spends a ton of time on Roger Penrose's personal life, including his difficult relationships with his various wives, children, in contrast with his easy relationship with his colleagues. In many places the author claims that Penrose used his work as an escape from his personal life, and describe him as being so self-centered that he had no idea how his behavior affected those around him, including his family.

Lots of famous people get cameos in this book, including M.C. Escher, Richard Feynman, and Lee Smolin. The saddest part of the book comes at the end, when it's clear that in many ways, Penrose's deliberate contrarian views were no longer persuasive to the greater community, and he searched for ways to validate his work, rather than allowing evidence to guide his work. Of course, that criticism has been leveled at many other than Penrose, but because Penrose had a history of being vindicated he did not swerve or change his attitude.

The subtitle of this book is "the cost of genius." I'm not sure the author fulfilled that thesis. It's not clear that Penrose could only have achieved what he did because he was obtuse about his personal relationships. It's also not clear that his increasing isolation from his family was required or inevitable. It could also have been a result of his belief that free will does not exist.

I enjoyed the book and it made for good reading. I'm not sure the author successfully made his argument but it was a good read anyway!

Review: The Bright Sword

 The Bright Sword is Lev Grossman's contribution to the Arthurian mythos. Rather than tell the story of King Arthur right out, Grossman injects a Mary Sue character who shows up at Camelot after King Arthur's death. He finds a misfit band of the leftover Knights of the Roundtable, and embarks on a quest to restore the glory of Camelot.

The writing is clear and readable, and there are many digressions to explore the backstory of various of the characters of the misfit band. I especially enjoyed the story of Sir Dunadan, whose backstory is very modern and yet ties into Lancelot's story as well.

What makes the protagonist a Mary Sue is of course that he does everything that everyone else fails to do, including defeating Sir Lancelot (no shit). There's a ton of suspension of disbelief of the various quests required (which is ok in a fantasy story), but you can see various ideas from The Magicians TV show, including flying ships, big battles, and gory fights.

As a fun read it's OK. But I don't consider it as great a contribution as The Mists of Avalon or even Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Review: A Widow for One Year

 John Irving has always been hit or miss for me. I enjoyed The Ciderhouse Rules and The World According to Garp, but bounced off A Son of the Circus. Amazon had a sale on A Widow for One Year, and at that price I thought I could take another risk.

John Irving's prose is transparent and flows very well in this novel. The words just carry you along and turns off your brain. The protagonist, Ruth Cole, was abandoned when she was 4 by her mother and the rest of the novel explains what happened, and why, and what other traumatizing events affected her. 4 of the other main characters in the book are novelists, and Irving even inserts chapters of their books into the novel, giving you the sense of a novel within a novel at times. The plot weaves along, with moments of tension and comedy, at times introducing certain characters, speeding up timelines, or even occasionally breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader directly:

There is no intolerance in America that compares to the peculiarly American intolerance for lack of success (pg. 570)

 It is only after you've finished the book and read the author's notes that you start to notice the holes in the plot and the characters behaving irrationally (or perhaps even worse, out of character). Irving says he started the book from the final scene and then worked backwards as to how to get there. This meant that the novel at times just requires certain characters to do something even if it's not particularly in character. At other times, Irving just doesn't even bother to show you how someone is thinking but just tells you, because the narrator's voice can then override the implausibility of what the plot is about to do.

Nonetheless I don't regret the time spent reading the book, which means it was a good one.

Review: Fire Max 11

 Boen's Fire HD 10 wasn't getting much use so I traded it in for a Fire Max 11. Over the years I've come to expect low performance from the Fire tablets, but to my surprise, the Fire Max 11 was just as fast as the Pixel Tablet that we'd gotten for free last year from trading in an ancient iPad.

You do have to put up with lock screen ads, which isn't a big deal, and you do have to sideload the Google Play Store, which was a big deal, but less of a deal than you could imagine. But the tablet is snappy, loading websites, apps, and books with aplomb, and watching video on it is a pleasure. At less than 50% of the price of a Pixel Tablet, it's an amazing value. Get one. You won't regret it.

Review: Castle in the Air

 Castle in the Air is the second book in Diana Wynne Jone's series that started with Howl's Moving Castle. Rather than being told from the point of view of Howl or Sophie from that first book, the point of view character is Abdullah, and the start of the novel takes place in a middle eastern locale. The narrative is breezy and well told, with all the tropes you expect from that setting: magic carpets, genie in bottles, a romance, thievery, etc.

The problem with reading the books separated by so much time is that I didn't remember the personalities from that first book when they were finally brought back to the main narrative. The loose ends in the novel get tied up, but everything is so driven by magic and transformations that you had no way of deducing who was actually whom before the grand reveals.

What carries this book is Diana Wynne Jone's style and compelling prose. I'm not sure that's enough to make it satisfying but it probably is a good young adult read.

Review: Flashpoint

 I came across Flashpoint after I fished Three Jokers and checked it out despite my misgivings about Three Jokers. To my surprise this is a really good story, and formed the basis for The Flash movie. It's quite a bit better than that movie.

The premise is that Barry Allen wakes up in a world that he doesn't recognize. His mom is not dead, but Wonder Woman and Aquaman are in a fight with each other that's caused all of Europe to. be drowned. Superman is MIA, and the only recognizable superhero is Batman. And... he doesn't have superspeed.

I won't spoil the story for you, but rest assured that there are plenty of surprises even if you've already seen the movie. There are no points in the plot that makes you feel like it's unfair. There's a bunch of other crossover stories which I'm not sure I'll bother tracking down, but apparently this was the launch of the "New 52" which I heard is an absolute failure.

Regardless of the end result, this particular story was excellent and worth my time.

Review: Three Jokers

 For various reasons, we activated a Kindle Unlimited subscription. I was browsing and saw Three Jokers and checked it out for grins. This is a direct sequel to Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, in which Jason Todd (Robin) got killed and Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) became paralyzed from the waist down and becomes Oracle.

Somehow in this novel, Jason Todd comes back from the grave, and Barbara Gordon went through rehab and became fully functional. I'm not sure whether this is canon in the current universe or whether it's part of an alternate universe story.

Jason Todd becomes the Red Hood and runs around angry and unhappy about him being buried alive, and at one point murders one of the jokers. Of course, given the high lethality of the Joker as a criminal he would have gotten the death penalty ages ago.

There's no big mystery in this story, no displays of intelligence between the major characters, just a lot of anger and angst and much action. It adds nothing to Alan Moore's story and I'm going to do my best to forget that this sequel exists.

2025 Book Reviews

Non-Fiction

• The Impossible Man
• How Medicine Works and When it doesn't
• Engineering in Plain Sight
• Die With Zero
• Year's Best Science & Nature Writing 2024
• Revenge of the Tipping Point
• Keep Sharp
• Digital Minimalism
• Twitter and Tear Gas
• Jellyfish Age Backwards
• Outlive
• Rethinking Diabetes
• Why Your Bike is Made In Asia
• Careless People
• Abundance
• Stronger
• The Thinking Machine
• The Shape of a Life
• The NVidia Way
• The Goal
• Moral Ambition
• 7.5 Lessons about the Brain
• Our Moon
• Shift
• Everything is Tuberculosis
• Novelist as a Vocation
• Play Nice

Fiction

• Castle in the Air 
• A Widow for One Year
• The Bright Sword
• The Death of Chaos
• Fall of Angels
• The Chaos Balance
• Worlds
• Soldier Son Trilogy
• Normal People
• The King's Peace
• Exhalation
• The Adventures of Mary Darling
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Aurora Rising
• Norwegian Wood
• 1Q84
• Beguilement

Graphic Novels

• Three Jokers
• Flashpoint
• V for Vendetta
• Kingdom Come
• Justice
• Batman/Catwoman
• Zatanna
• Spent
• Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow

Periodicals

• 10 Years of Bicycle Quarterly

Audio Books

• The Power Broker

Books of the Year 2024

 I read 63 books this year, which comes out to more than a book a week. A lot of the books were re-reads, which I do not regret, since many of the books were read to Boen, and most of the books worth re-reading are so good that there's no way you can regret spending more time with them.

Easily the book of the year is The Rise and Reign of Mammals. The book taught me so much more about mammal evolution and even basic questions like "What is a mammal?" Other contenders in the non fiction category were Bruce Lee and Jobst Brandt Ride Bike! I would also recommend What Makes This Book So Great to any science fiction fan, since it's a list of great books to read.

The best fiction I read this year was Machine Vendetta. You can't go wrong with Alastair Reynolds and I was happy to pay full kindle price to read it. Obviously, it'll be hard to beat Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteneance or Among Others, but those were not new to me.

I wish I'd read better graphic novels this year. I did finally finish the entire Walking Dead series but I didn't think it was a particularly good series, especially in comparison with Invincible.

Yosemite 2024: Mirror Lake Loop

 

The forecast was for rain and snow but it got moved back to Monday afternoon from Sunday night! Driving into the park was saw notices that both Tioga Pass and Glacier Point roads would be closed from 4pm that day. Because it was the last day of the long weekend, we could park at the Happy Isles parking lot with no competition.

Just the walk out from the car to Happy Isles was beautiful, with leaves on the ground. At Happy Isles, we saw a crane on the river. And then walked past the Mist trail trailhead onto the Mirror Lake trail, eschewing the road even though the road was shorter. This quickly proved to be a wise move, as we saw a bobcat! This one was bold, walking out onto the road eventually and out of our sight.

The trail went up and down but was well paved, and covered with leaves. Every corner the fall foliage would get more and more impressive.

When we got to Mirror Lake, sure enough the lake was completely dry. We stayed on the trail to do the loop anyway, and were rewarded with occasional places where the views opened up.

On the return, we started to feel raindrops, and hurried back towards the car. Once at the car, Boen complained about being hungry so we ate a bunch of snacks before heading into the car for what would be a long drive.

But Yosemite was not done with us yet! On the way leaving the park, we saw a huge patch of gorgeous trees and had to stop the car for 20 minutes to get out and take photos.

It actually snowed on us as we exited the park via the Big Oak Flat entrance, but the snow didn't stick to the ground so I didn't have to deploy snow chains. By the time we got down to 3000' the snow had turned into rain. We had lunch near Manteca and stopped at the Costco there to refuel. Driving back over the windmills near Patterson pass we saw beautiful sunset views. It was great.

Review: Bruce Lee - A Life

 I enjoyed Matt Polly's book enough that when I saw he had a biography of Bruce Lee I decided to check it out from the library. This is a great book, since despite living only 32 years, Bruce Lee lived an action-packed life and this biography is just as interesting if not more than any amount of fiction that could be imagined.

Born in San Francisco, but growing up in Hong Kong to an upper middle-class famous opera performer, Bruce Lee was the first Chinese American to break into Hollywood in a big way, the one who made Kung Fu popular. But along the way, Matt Polly gives the backstory behind for instance, Shaw Brothers (there's a great story about the Shaw family burying gold, jewels, and watches in the ground in preparation for the Japanese conquest of Singapore, and then digging it up after the war). The origin of the Golden Harvest studio is in here as well.

I enjoyed the documentation of Bruce Lee's inner life as well. For instance, there's a famous incident about when he threw the gauntlet down in front of the Bay Area martial arts community saying that the ancient styles and forms that were being taught were ineffective for fighting, and then getting challenged. The fight was won by Bruce Lee, but rather than glorifying in it, he realized that the fight pointed out weaknesses in his own skills --- he was winded after only a 3 minute fight, and the Wing Chun training he'd had was not as effective against someone who was running away. That led him to adopt a physical fitness regimen to improve his cardio, skipping rope and running. This made him a much deeper character to me than someone who just beat up people. That he damaged his back one day lifting weights that left him bed bound for 3 months also made him a bit more human to me --- it's more convincing than someone who's just preternaturally strong and fit.

Polly doesn't shy away from Lee's faults, from his threatening his PE teacher in school, to his numerous affair when he became a big star, and his antagonistic approach to working with directors, producers, and script writers. I thought he was fair in the way Lee's faults were approached.

Finally, the book introduced the idea that Lee died of heat stroke. Other theories have been broached, and Polly does a good job explaining why they're not credible.

This book was great reading. I've never watched a Bruce Lee movie and maybe I should.

Yosemite 2024: Sentinel Dome, Roosevelt Point, Taft Point

 

On the way to Glacier Point road, the GPS on the phone announced that Glacier Point Road was closed. I kept going, assuming that there would be warnings all over the park if that was true. We stopped at the tunnel view point for a very cold morning shoot before driving straight to the trailhead.

Following the signs to sentinel dome, we hiked around the dome itself before climbing it on the gentle side. The view from the top was nice, we got a nice view of half dome as well as El Capitan.

From the dome proper, we descended down towards Roosevelt point, passing a generator driven cell tower along the way. Indeed, we got very strong 5G internet there, and this was the best cell reception I'd ever seen in a National Park. Roosevelt point itself had no marker, but the trail along the way granted us plenty of views.

When we got to Taft point, the crowds had increased. This was clearly well known. Lots of people were posing on top of the point for dramatic photos and we did not resist.

After the hike, we drove down to Washburn Point and Glacier Point for the views and more crowds. To my surprise despite the traffic, we never actually had trouble finding parking. Then we drove down to the Yosemite Valley Lodge food court for a late lunch/early dinner. The food court was an example of excessive automation. There were kiosks where you had to order food from a touch screen. However, all but two of the touch screens were broken, and all it took was a couple of parties who were slow at making up their mind to gum the whole works up. Somebody thought that saving money on cashiers or order takers was a good idea and forgot that electronics failure would be difficult to service in a National Park!

After dinner, we walked to the swinging bridge for sunset views. Unfortunately, we couldn't get any good shots of the half dome in Alpen glow from where we were, but the Merced river was still as a mirror and we got some good pictures before returning to the Cedar Lodge for the night for more swimming (proving once again that kids have infinite energy!)

That night, I searched in vain for an alternative to the Mirror Lake hike we were planning to do tomorrow, since the lake itself was all dried up in the fall! But everything would involve a lot more driving so we opted for sticking to the original plan.

Yosemite 2024: Mist and Vernal Falls

 

For the Veteran's Day long weekend this year we decided to visit Yosemite National Park, having never been there in the Fall. On Friday night, we drove out to Oakdale, staying there for dinner. I'd forgotten my belt and ended up paying absurd prices at a local Tractor Supply, but it saved time hunting for a belt.

Arriving at the park at 9:45am, we flashed our Every Kid Outdoors printout and exchanged it for a plastic card for the free entrance. We were told that the parking lot for Happy Isles might be filled up, so we parked at Camp Curry instead and walked the extra 0.5 miles. Getting started at 10:30am, we were immediately impressed by the fall colors in the valley leading up to the Vernal Falls footbridge.

Past the footbridge, the trail climbs along side the falls. In the spring and summer there would be mist from the falls, giving the trail its name. In the fall, the waterfall is but a shadow of itself, and the trail was completely dry. It was crowded though, and frequently we had to pause to let hikers past us from both sides.

At the top of Vernal falls, I took out my stove and we made lunch --- instant noodles. After lunch I made the mistake of showing Boen the top of Nevada Falls and told him we were headed to the top. He immediately threw a temper tantrum and refused to keep walking. It took quite a bit of cajoling and bribery to get him to keep moving. The thing is, the top of Vernal Falls is already more than half way up to the top of Nevada Falls, so it actually wasn't that long before we got to the top.

At the top, we got good views of half dome, Mt Watkins, and Clouds Rest. From there, we would descend the John Muir Trail down to Clarks Point. It was already getting pretty dark, and we were already in shadow at this point.

By the time we got to the car it was already past sunset, and we headed straight to our lodging for the night, Cedar Lodge, which had a restaurant serving mediocre food, but had a heated indoor swimming pool that Bowen and Boen had a great time playing in before bed.

I'd wanted to do the Four Mile trail up to Glacier Point and back, but then realized that we'd done enough elevation today that I was likely to be met with protests the next morning. I did some research and realized that Glacier Point was open, so we could do a loop I'd never done before, which was Sentinel Dome, Roosevelt Point, and Taft Point loop. It was a short easy loop and would give us time to explore the valley before sunset.

Review: The End is Always Near

 The End Is Always Near purports to be a history book about apocalyptic moments from the past. In practice, the apocalyptic moments it discusses don't feel that bad. For instance, the black plague reduced the population of England from 6 million people to 2 million people. That's terrible for the people who died, but as the author explained, 6 million people was the carrying capacity of England at the time! So the people who were living were in fact barely subsisting, and in fact the survivors of the plague ended up with a much better standard of living afterwards (for about 300 years) since the manpower shortage meant that the poorest of the poor now had land, and serfs could raise a middle finger to their lords if they were mistreated. Now you know why folks like Elon Musk are worried about a population decline --- the modern day oligarchs might have to pay a living wage if population declined sufficiently!

There's a strange chapter about how in the past effectively child raising techniques are so horrifyingly brutal that all persons were raised in an abusive environment:

Lloyd deMause quotes a piece written by the chief of police in Paris in 1780 estimating that of the, on average, 21,000 children born in that city every year, only 700 were nursed by their biological mothers. (Marie Antoinette, writing in a letter to her mother, noted after her daughter recognized her as her mother in a room full of people, “I believe I like her much better since that time”—which suggests she hadn’t liked her all that much before. (pg 25)

 I'm not sure how this has to do with apocalypse.

Finally, there's an entire 1/3rd of the book about the deployment and use of the atomic bomb, including the Cuban missile crisis. The examination of the mindset by the air forces involved at that time is interesting.

One item I found strangely missing is any mention of the pre-historic severe population bottleneck, where the human population we reduced to about 1280 breeding individuals. Obviously we don't know much about that time, but not even mentioning that in the book is kind of strange.

I did get interesting insights from this book, but I'm not sure I can fully recommend it. Maybe the author's podcast is more interesting.

Yosemite 2024 Index Page

 We visited Yosemite for Veterans Day. It was our first time there in the fall.

Photos

• Mist and Vernal Falls
• Sentinel Dome, Roosevelt Point, Taft Point
• Mirror Lake Loop

Review: Kiki's Delivery Service

 I of course enjoyed Kiki's Delivery Service as a Hayao Miyazaki movie, but I never realized that it was based on a book of the same name until Amazon served me an add.

Unlike the movie, which has an actual, relatively coherent plot. this book is actually a series of vignettes about Kiki, who's not very different from the one you see in the movie. There's a slight hint of romance between Kiki and Tombo, but there are no scenes with bicycles, and no drama in which Kiki loses her power, which makes the movie much more powerful than the book as a coming of age story.

That said, it's clearly a kid's book and if you have kids who enjoy the movie this is a good book for them to read after they've seen the movie.

Review: Tapped Out

 I remember enjoying American Shaolin, so when I saw that Matt Polly had a follow-on book called Tapped Out, I decided to check it out and read it.

Matt Polly is a funny guy in writing. For instance: 

When I was at the Shaolin Temple, I studied iron forearm kung fu, which involved repeatedly banging your forearms against a tree trunk for thirty minutes a day in order to make them tough enough to block a full kick without injury. When I returned to Kansas, my father saw me practicing against a tree in the backyard. After I finished, he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “I don’t know what we did wrong raising you, but whatever it was, I’m sorry.” (page 95)

Unfortunately, the topic, MMA isn't actually as exciting as it sounds. Matt Polly has a hard time explaining the differences between the martial arts styles, and his performative incompetence doesn't make you feel like it's  a sport worth watching or participating in, despite him stating near the end of the book writing that his blood pressure went from 145/100 to 118/80 in 2 years of serious training for his fight.

Throughout the book, Matt Polly name drops what are obviously famous people in the MMA world. Unfortunately, those references were lost on me. I guess I'm not really the audience for this book. You pretty much have to already be a fan of MMA to thoroughly appreciate this book.

Review: Barking Up the Wrong Tree

 Barking Up the Wrong Tree has the feel of several dozen blog posts turned into a book. But I noticed that it was a WSJ best-selling book, so plenty of people must think it's good reading. And to a large extent, Eric Barker is entertaining and breezy. For instance:

managing what your boss thinks of you is far more important than actual hard work. A study shows that those who made a good impression got better performance reviews than those who worked harder but didn’t manage impressions as well. Often this comes down to something we’re all very familiar with: good ol’ ass kissing. Is flattering the boss effective? Research has shown flattery is so powerful that it works even when the boss knows it’s insincere. Jennifer Chatman, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, did a study to see at what point flattery backfired . . . but she couldn’t find one. (kindle loc 802)

Later on in the same chapter he mentions that if the entire company turned into the kind of people who just ass kissed and nobody did any work, it suddenly became a much worse place to work and the company would tank eventually. (Unless you're Google of course, which has so much revenue coming in it doesn't matter that ass-kissing is the normal work ethic.)

 Barker notes that the entire point of fiction is to paint an unrealistic picture of the world:

Research shows that fiction makes us more “prosocial”—that is, kind and giving. It does this by making our vision of the world less accurate. Just as religion and stories of personal meaning help us cope, so do movies, TV, and other stories. Stories not only engage our minds but also quietly slip a pair of rose-colored glasses on our heads. (kindle loc 1508)

 You get the idea of what the book is like. There's a ton of references to say Robert Wiseman's work, and even a side mention of American Shaolin. (I never realized that Matt Polly wrote additional books other than that one, so this book caused me to go look up the other books!)

Each chapter ends with a recap and a bunch of summaries, and of course every "on the one hand" advise comes with an "on the other hand" advise. Ultimately, there's one saying that comes to mind over and over again when I read this book, which is to know the enemy and to know yourself. If you've already internalized that saying, you do not need to read this book. But you should read it anyway for the entertainment.

Review: The Wild Life of Our Bodies

 The Wild Life of Our Bodies is a book about the relationship between our bodies and their evolutionary partners/predators/symbiotes that modern life has changed. It is surprisingly wide ranging, from discussing various diseases (such as Crohn's disease) that have symptoms largely alleviated when some patients deliberately infect themselves with various parasitic worms in their intestines. In fact, one postulate in the book (not backed up with evidence) is that the modern epidemic of obesity is because historically humans have always had tapeworms and other parasites in their bodies absorbing nutrition that are no longer widespread in developed countries, and now that those parasites are no longer in our bodies our super efficient metabolism now causes obesity.

There's one particularly keen observation about lactose intolerance and how few people (globally) actually have the gene that allows them to process milk as adults, yet the USDA food pyramid encourages consumption of dairy products:

That our bodies respond differently to the same food as a consequence of our ancestry may seem obvious. Yet we ignore such realities every day. The USDA food pyramid still has as one of its main items “milk,” along with fruits, vegetables, meats, and beans, even though most humans worldwide cannot digest milk. Milk is just the beginning of the unraveling of the idea that any one species of plant or animal food (or processed version thereof) might do us all good. (pg 132)

There's a discussion of why we have a natural, instinctual aversion to snakes, and why we ended up as being the only hairless ape. (body lice and ticks are a major reason, and in fact we can stop the spread of headlice in schools if we could get all parents to get their kids' heads shaved!)

Rats, pigeons, cows, antelope, and monkeys groom. When pigeons are prevented from grooming, they grow speckled with lice. Cows prevented from cleaning themselves have four times as many ticks and six times as many lice as those left unhindered. Antelope have a specialized tooth called a “dental comb” that seems to serve no purpose other than to aid in grooming away ectoparasites (evidence of yet another case in which ectoparasites seem to have posed a cost that was significant enough to cause animal bodies to evolve).4 Many animals groom themselves and each other even though the lost time such efforts entail is costly. (pg. 220)

The book ends with the observations that urban infestations (cockroaches, rats, pigeons and other undesirable weeds) are a reflection of the ancient human predilection for living in caves. That those creatures fare best in caves is also why they fare best in cities. I'm not sure I 100% buy his argument, since plants like dandelions also do well in cities but I've yet to find a dandelion in a cave. Similarly bats do well in caves but we rarely see them in cities.

Nevertheless, this book gives you lots to think about and is worth a read.

Review: The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs

 I wish I had known about The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs back when Boen was in his dinosaur phase. This book is an encyclopedic dossier on dinosaurs, fossils, the history of dinosaur research, the big asteroid catastrophe (and how that theory was formulated and later proven). Each chapter has a beautiful illustration of a dinosaur, and full illustrations of the various fossils are depicted in photos.

The book has several details about dinosaurs that taught me new things:

Maybe you’ve heard the rumor that T. rex liked its meat dead and rotten, that Rex was a scavenger, a seven-ton carcass collector too slow, too stupid, or too big to hunt for its own fresh food. This accusation seems to make the rounds every few years, one of those stories that science reporters can’t get enough of. Don’t believe it. It defies common sense that an agile and energetic animal with a knife-toothed head nearly the size of a Smart car wouldn’t use its well-endowed anatomy to take down prey but would just walk around picking up leftovers. It also runs against what we know about modern carnivores: very few meat-eaters are pure scavengers, and the outliers that do it well—vultures, for instance—are fliers that can survey wide areas from above and swoop down whenever they see (or smell) a decaying body. Most carnivores, on the other hand, actively hunt but also scavenge whenever they have the chance. After all, who turns down a free meal? That’s true of lions, leopards, wolves, even hyenas, which are not the pure scavengers of legend but actually earn much of their food through the chase. Like these animals, T. rex was probably both a hunter and an opportunistic scavenger. (kindle loc 2338)

 It taught me the pterosaus/pterodactyls were not dinosaurs (I always associated them with dinosaurs but they're actually reptiles). Birds by contrast are dinosaurs and have lungs that are very different from ours:

The lungs of sauropods were very similar to those of birds and very different from ours. While mammals have a simple lung that breathes in oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide in a cycle, birds have what is called a unidirectional lung: air flows across it in one direction only, and oxygen is extracted during both inhalation and exhalation. The bird-style lung is extra efficient, sucking up oxygen with each breath in and each exhalation. It’s an astounding feature of biological engineering, made possible by a series of balloonlike air sacs connected to the lung, which store some of the oxygen-rich air taken in during inhalation, so that it can be passed across the lung during exhalation. Don’t worry if it sounds confusing: it is such a strange lung that it took biologists many decades to figure out how it works. (kindle loc 1357)

I don't think this is as good a book as The Rise and Reign of Mammals. (This is a case of the sequel being better than the original)  But if you like dinosaurs and can't get enough of them (there's a whole chapter about T Rex!) this is the book to get!

Review: What Makes This Book So Great

 You do not need to buy What Makes This Book So Great, because you can go back and read Jo Walton's columns on tor.com. But I really enjoyed having everything on my kindle, which is still a much better experience than reading on a laptop or a phone. Unlike a collection of book reviews, these are all books that Jo Walton has read multiple times (at least twice anyway) and appreciated. Jo Walton goes all fan-girl on these blog posts and her enthusiasm is infectious, causing me to read-read other books as a detour while perusing the pages of this book.

Walton notices things I didn't notice when I read those books (such as the connection between the title of each book and the story in the Vlad Taltos novels), making clear that she's a much more careful reader than I am. She's also faster than I am, which means that she can read an entire series in quick succession, allowing her to make connections between books that I couldn't. She's also capable of reading books that I found unreadable (such as Midnight's Children) which means that I don't have to read those books any more --- I can read her re-read review instead. I've been told by some people that they treat my blog that way.

I love the last few pieces in this book where she defends certain series or authors who aren't taken seriously in the mainstream literary criticism. (Why is Samuel Delany worthy of mainstream attention while Lois Bujold isn't?)

The best thing about this book is that it can easily be re-read in search of more books that I should have read but somehow bypassed. Recommended!

Re-read: Yendi

 Yendi is the second book in Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series. Rather than being a direct sequel, it's a prequel, telling Vlad's story about how he met his wife during an gang war in his district. Vlad Taltos is not a very nice guy, so there's lots of murder and mayhem as well as an extremely convoluted plot. This is something I wouldn't have noticed without Jo Walton's book What Makes This Book So Great: each book in this series is named of an animal in Brust's mythology, and the Yendi is supposed to be this super devious animal capable of extremely convoluted plots.

Overall, I'm not sure the plot is all that believable, though some of what makes it unbelievable (why does Taltos have such loyal and engaged Dragaeran friends, who will risk their lives for him?) is apparently explained in later books. The book is eminently readable --- Brust's first person narratives always are. But by the end of the novel I had had enough of Taltos.

Review: Abanen Quick Fit 22mm Elastic Band for Fenix 47mm watches

 For years, Arturo and I have joked that the heart rate monitors built into Garmin watches are random number generators. We would kill ourselves and the HR would read some obnoxiously low reading, like 120bpm. We would start a descent, and the HR would give us an absurdly high number like 144bpm. This occurred across multiple generations of watches and sensors. People with white skin do not seem to have a problem.

I tried switching to the Schosche Rhythm 24 as an external HRM. While that HRM was much more accurate, it was subject to multiple dropouts from the Edge 840. If you read various forums, that dropout is usually blamed on Garmin's firmware. On the other hand, the Edge never experienced any dropouts from my Fenix watches.

I then theorized that the reason the cheap $30 HRM would outperform my $700 watch was positioning. The wrist is a poor position for an optical HRM. Not only does it not get signal from blood vessels easily, but (especially on thin-wristed people) it's subject to vibration and noise. The upper arm position that the Schosche Rhythm 24 demands probably contributes to its improved accuracy. My solution was to look for an elastic strap that would let me wear the Fenix like a Schosche during workouts.

The Abanen Quick Fit 22mm Elastic Band was on sale during a Prime day for around $17. That's half the price of the HRM. The quick fit works as advertised, and the band itself dries quickly even when submerged in water.  I adjusted the strap so that it could be used both on the wrist (albeit suboptimally) and on the upper arm. The difference was immediate and visible. Any moderate effort would push the HR reading on the Edge to 120. A tough climb at 200W would slowly drive my HR up to 150, and a sustained push beyond that will get it to 170. Garmin's connect app stopped complaining that I had a high aerobic shortage.

It took me years to figure out the problem, but now that I have, this setup cannot be beat for touring. I have a HRM for rides, plus a hiking GPS and step counter off the bike. And of course, it also means that things like HRV are probably suspect if you're wearing your watch on the wrist as you sleep!!

Needless to say, the Abanen comes highly recommended!

Review: The Rise and Reign of Mammals

 For whatever reason, Boen demanded a Kindle Unlimited subscription. We signed up for 2 months, so I might as well use it. I checked out The Rise and Reign of the Mammals.  This is an unexpectedly great read. Just the pictures alone illustrating the evolution of whales from a 4 legged land animal to the leviathan of the ocean is well worth the read. What's even better is that Steve Brusatte's text evokes the sense of wonder that adults too often lose as a result of too much adulting:

The blue whale is the most extreme of these “extreme mammals.” It is not merely the largest mammal alive today, but the largest living animal, period. Nobody has ever found a fossil of anything bigger, which means that the blue whale is the all-time record holder, the heavyweight champion of the history of the world. It’s a simple but profound statement that bears repeating: the biggest animal that has ever lived is alive right now. Of all the billions of species that have lived during the billions of years of Earth history, we are among the privileged few that can say such a thing. How glorious is it that we breathe the same air as a blue whale, swim in the same waters, and gaze at the same stars? Blue whale mothers birth three-ton calves the length of a speedboat, which bulk up by about fifteen tons during their half year of nursing. Adults can dive to depths of more than 1,000 feet (315 meters) and hold their breath for well more than an hour and expel a two-story column of water from their blowhole when they come up for air. With one gulp of their expandable mouths, they can take in a backyard swimming pool’s worth of water, which they do several times a day, in order to gather the two tons of krill—little shrimpy crustaceans—they need to power their metabolism. They’re smart and social, and their low-pitch vocalizations are the most powerful sound in the animal kingdom, able to reverberate for over nine hundred miles through the abyss. But all is not well. It is estimated that 99 percent of the blue whale population was exterminated by whaling over the past couple of centuries. Of a community that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands at any given time, only a few tens of thousands of individuals—at most—remain. (kindle loc 3122-3135)

It is books like these that made me want to become a scientist, all those years ago, and it's sad that we live in a post-literate society, where books like these aren't common reading amongst children.

I love the questions and answers posed by this book, such as the exploration of what delineates a mammal. When I was a kid, the textbooks talked about the definition of mammals as being creatures that gave birth live (not true it turned out --- the platypus lays eggs), fed its young milk (true, but it turned out that this feature arose late),  was warm blooded (also a relatively late development). The book traces the evolutionary development and points out that the development of a jaw that could pulverize leaves and plant matter (thereby starting digestion early in the food intake process) was when the split happened. What's even more interesting is the evolution of the earbones in mammals!

The ring, hammer, anvil, and stirrup enable one of the most advanced neurosensory skills of mammals: our ability to hear a wide range of sounds, particularly high-frequency ones. Birds, reptiles, and amphibians can all hear. They can all take sound waves and convert them to liquid waves in their cochleas. But they can’t hear anywhere near as well as mammals, and across such a wide range of frequencies, because they have only a single ear bone to do it all—the stapes, the equivalent to the stirrup. (kindle loc 1473)

Other questions addressed include why land mammals never became as big as dinosaurs:

Why didn’t land mammals get as big as dinosaurs? As huge as they were, Palaeoloxodon and Paraceratherium were still not even half as heavy as the most enormous long-necked dinosaurs. There’s no easy answer to this conundrum, but I suspect it has to do with the lungs. Mammal lungs are tidal; breaths go in and out, as the lung expands and contracts. We feel this every time our chest goes up and down as we breathe. Birds are different: they have a flow-through lung, as air can go through it in only one direction. This feat of engineering is choreographed by balloonlike air sacs, which connect to the lung and funnel air through it in a precise sequence. When a bird breathes in, some of the oxygen-rich air goes directly across the lungs, while the rest is shunted into the air sacs. Then, when the air sacs contract, the still-oxygenated air inside is passed across the lung during exhalation, meaning birds—and the giant dinosaurs with the same lungs—take in oxygen while breathing in and out. This means dinosaurs got more oxygen with each breath than a similarly sized mammal. And there’s more: the air sacs extend through the body and even into the bones, acting as an air-conditioning system, and lightening the skeleton. The end result: large dinosaurs were more efficient breathers, could cool their bodies easier, and had lighter and more limber skeletons. This, I think, is why no land mammal has been able to approach their titanic sizes.  (kindle loc 3268)

What this book illustrates is how modern science is inter-disciplinary. The research crosses paleontology, genetics (DNA analysis was what allowed the origin of whales to be determined),  geology/earth sciences, and climate science and ties everything together to form a coherent story about the evolution of mammals. The book also covers the location of many fossils and may give you a reason to visit what you used to have considered flyover country. Even something as mundane as teeth in grass grazing animals is explored in detail:

Because grasses grow near to the ground in wide open spaces, they are a magnet for dirt, dust, and other windblown particles. Many grazing mammals today ingest an unholy amount of grit as they nibble. On average, domestic cattle swallow about 4–6 percent dirt, compared to less than 2 percent for leaf-eating browsers. Sheep, which crop grass closer to the ground than cows, have it worse: in New Zealand, they have been observed to consume 33 percent dirt—in other words, one ounce of dirt for every two ounces of grass. The dirt and phytoliths function as sandpaper, filing down the teeth of grazing mammals as they eat. This is not a trivial concern: grazers today lose about three millimeters of tooth every year, the enamel literally scoured away. That might not sound like much, but consider this. My molar teeth are about a centimeter (ten millimeters) tall above the gum line. If I ate nothing but grass, my teeth would barely last three years. (kindle loc 3860)

My one criticism of this book (and I suspect one reason I will find it tough to make my kids read the book) is that it spends a lot of time giving credit (and telling the story) of the various scientists that the author knew and interviewed and interacted with. I understand the intention and the respect the author has for these scientists (who were frequently his colleagues, mentors, students, and friends!) but frequently these vignettes disrupt the evolutionary/scientific story he's telling and caused me to want to skip pages in impatience to get to the good parts. That the book has so many good parts (and I've only covered a few of them --- there's so much more --- go read the book!) means it's worth it to bear with those sections. After all, some of these stories might inspire a kid reading this book to go on to become a scientist! 

Needless to say this book comes highly recommended and is likely to be my recommendation for the book of the year!

Review: CycPlus Tiny Pump

 In the interest of keeping Xiaoqin's Ritchey Road Logic as light as possible, I opted not to install a regular air pump, but instead to stuff a CycPlus Tiny Pump into her saddlebag instead. We bought one during Prime Day for $72 (which is expensive but cheaper than many competitors), charged it up, tried it to see how it worked, and then forgot about it until September, when she had a flat tire during a ride.

To my surprise, the device was still charged and happily pumped up a spare inner tube that we had with us to full operating pressure (which admittedly was only around 50psi for 700x32mm tires). It saved me a bit of pumping on a hot day, and I'm impressed that the charge stayed good for so long.

The caveat with these pumps is that you cannot use them with a TPU tube --- the heat of the electric motor running would melt the plastic valve stems on those tubes. That's a small limitation in my book. If you're hooked on TPU just install them on your bike and then carry a standard tube as a spare and you can have the best of both worlds. Or you can buy an extension hose (which is not very practical to store or carry!).

Recommended.

Reread: Jhereg

 I ended up re-reading Jhereg once again because of Jo Walton's What Makes this Book so Great. Indeed, this book is great. The voice of Vlad Taltos is perfect, just the right amount of cockiness and self-assurance. Taltos is not a great person (hey, he assassinates people for a living), but he's a great story teller. The novel is a lot like a heist story --- there's a setup (we're giving you a ton of money to get rid of this one guy), introduction to the characters are just enough to get you inclue'd but not long enough to bore you or drag in a lot of exposition, and the action is fast.

There are many places where just like a mystery novel or heist story, Taltos explains the plan to his buddies but doesn't explain them to you, only showing you the plan as it is put into action. This feels like a conceit, mostly because you would never do that when you tell a story to someone else, but Steven Brust does it with such finesse that you're willing to go along with it.

I enjoyed the book enough to keep going in the series. I guess I'm yet another victim of Jo Walton's.

Mt Tamalpais Birthday Trip

 

Xiaoqin found a hotel on Mt Tam and decided it would be a great birthday present for me to do a trip with her. I mapped out two rides and we drove up on Saturday and rode the first, an ambitious 38 mile loop with more than 4500' of climbing, taking in RidgeCrest, Mt Tam summit, and Highway 1. It did not disappoint.

While the valley was shrouded in fog, on Panaromic Highway and Pan Toll road we were in the sun, with gorgeous views of the sea of clouds below us. You might think things couldn't get better but when we descended down to Ridgecrest, the gate across the road was closed!

We saw plenty of cyclists coming the other way so we knew it was passable by bicycles so we rode around the gate and onto the car free highway. The views were nothing short of phenomenal, and we could use the entire road because no cars were going to be on it!

Once the road descended enough, it was foggy and mysterious but the pavement despite being wet didn't splash any water on us, and the road was still car free so we could dodge around wet spots and avoid construction debris. On the other side of the gate a group of cyclists stopped us and asked if we could help with their broken chain. While I had an 11s quick link they clearly needed a chain tool and I didn't have one with me. Fortunately, they had a radio and radio'd their parents for help.

The descent down into Bolinas was gorgeous if cool, making us wear our jackets. At the bottom we turned left and headed along the Bolinas Lagoon, which was beautiful even on a cloudy day, with fast flat curves that denied the right to cars to drive at full speed but were perfect on a bicyle.

At Stintson beach we stopped at the Parkside Cafe for some seafood tacoes to brace ourselves for the inevitably trafficky climb up Highway 1 towards Muir Woods. A hostile hitch hiker told us to block all the traffic going southbound. Usually it's the motorists who are rude but I guess anti-bicyclist sentiment extends to many hikers as well.

At Muir Woods we stopped to use the bathroom before climbing up the Muir Woods road to four corners. The sun came and went but it never rained and the temperatures were warm though not unpleasantly so.

Back at the car, we loaded it back up and drove to Mountain Home Inn, a tiny hotel with just a few rooms. Rather than miss the sunset, Xiaoqin had the smart idea to bring instant noodles and we could eat dinner in our rooms and then drive back up to Ridgecrest for the gorgeous sunset.

The next morning, we had breakfast at the hotel and then drove to Point Reyes Station to start an easier ride along parts of the Marshall Loop.

In retrospect, I should have reversed the route, since the traffic on the return was much worse later in the day while traffic on that part of highway 1 was relatively light. Nevertheless, we had gorgeous views of Tomales Bay before turning inland.

Once inland past Tomales it got warm very quickly. Unfortunately Xiaoqin suffered a flat at a rest stop from a thorn. We quickly fixed it thanks to the Cycplus Pump that was on her bike. Despite my never having topped up the charge it happily pumpped up her tire after we installed a new tube.

The return via Wilson Hill Road followed by Hicks Valley Road and then Pt Reyes Petaluma Road had  a lot of traffic but the road mostly had wide bike lanes and it was mostly downhill. It could have been cooler, but we got to Point Reyes Station and our car before 2:00pm  and could buy a nice lunch and sit outside before going home. What a wonderful birthday present from Xiaoqin!

Re-read: The Snow Queen

 After A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, I was so impressed that I decided to go back to re-read The Snow Queen, the 1981 Hugo Award Winner that I read as a kid. I had vague memories of it being good.

Unfortunately, some books don't age as well over time, and this is one of them. The analog with the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale was well done --- I have no issue with that, but the idea of a trans-star wide computer that uses humans as input output mechanism (but that results in the human medium unable to even recall what was transmitted through them) doesn't work as well. (For one thing, where does the power source come from?) I did enjoy the use of the biological hazard symbol and the virus-infection method of transmission, but again, that doesn't seem very robust, and then there's the old trope of ancient mechanisms still working hundreds or thousands of years in the future without bugs seems very unlikely.

The characters now feel like they were jerked around like puppets on strings. I can see how at the time the book was written female protagonists that rescued the male would have been considered innovative.

I don't think I'll bother with the rest of the series.