Re-read: The Walking Dead - Compendium 1

 Last year was a year when Boen loved zombies. I enjoyed The Last of Us TV show, though the video game is still too hard for him. Similarly, he tried to watch the first episode of The Walking Dead TV show, but that wasn't compelling enough for him to keep watching. But he loved the comic book. I'd bought it ages ago back when the Google Play Store was trying to actually become a viable for buying books and had DRM free comics for sale. (Nowadays it's too expensive) I picked it up to read.

The premise of the series is kinda hooky. A zombie apocalypse has always seemed to me to be improbable because any pandemic that a small group of poorly-outfitted people can survive would be easily survivable by an organized government (though probably not a very democratic one). The swiftness into which civilization falls apart also doesn't make sense --- even warlords in places like Somalia rarely commit the kind of depravities regularly seen in this book.

Finally, the characters are flawed, regularly making poor decisions (even the lead protagonist in the series who starts off demonstrating how competent he is) that have disastrous consequences.

Set against that is that this is a series where there's non-stop action. Events happen that shake up the status quo almost every chapter, and it's a far call from series like Game of Thrones where entire novels go by where nothing happens. I can see why it turned into a hit TV show with lots of fans (even some Asian parents watched it!). Each chapter leaves you hanging and keeps you wanting to find out what happens next. But of course 10 years later I'd forgotten it all and the events still happen and are shocking.

The black and white art is crisp, clear, and easy to follow and probably not for people who don't have a strong stomach (I can't imagine any of this being done on TV). Hey, anything that can hold my kid's attention through two fat thousand page volume books (he abandoned the series halfway through the 3rd book) has to be recommended.

Review: Determined

 Determined is Robert Sapolsky's book arguing that we have no free will and examining the implications of it. This book is incredibly dense and difficult to read, but the summary of its argument is that essentially there is no mechanism in physics or chemistry to indicate that you and I are nothing more than moist robots. Fundamentally, you're born with the life you have with genes that you have no control over, , under circumstances you have no control over, grow up in childhood where you also have no agency, into an adolescence into which you also have no agency, so why should we expect you to be able to exercise control just because you turned 18?

Intellectually, of course, you might agree with Sapolsky. But the reality is that we see people effect change all the time. As John Douglas in Mindhunter wrote: "I never saw anyone criminally insane feel compelled to exercise his criminality in direct view of a cop." The fact that a habitual lead-footed driver would suddenly ease off his accelerator just because he happened to see a cop indicates that people can choose, and that we can actually help them choose the right thing by providing an environment in which they can effect change. More prosaically, I've had co-workers who effected a whole-scale change in their lifestyle because their doctor told them that they were going to have to go on statins and other high blood pressure medication. The engineer, being an engineer inquired: "Wait, why go to drugs right away? Shouldn't I try lifestyle changes first?" "Lifestyle changes don't work, statistically." came the reply from the doctor. "Gimme 6 months, doc!" And of course, 6 months of hiking with his kids later he had no need of medication. Of course, I recognize that the people I meet in my social life are high functioning adults and unusually capable, but that just tells me that a blanket statement is most likely wrong or at the least unintuitive. 

The rest of the book is an exploration of the implications of this on various parts of society, chiefest of which is the criminal justice system. Once you accept the premise that even the most heinous criminal had no control over his action, your goal is to prevent harm by that defective individual, rather than punish him in the hopes of achieving deterrence. There's good evidence for this --- Finland's justice system is focused much more on preventing recidivism than the US's, and it achieves those goals better than the US policy of putting lots of people in jail. But of course, first you have to be willing to accept the idea that people do what they do because they effectively have no control over their behavior. I'm not sure American society is ready for that or will be ready for it anytime soon.

I don't want to give the impression that the book is not worth reading. I did learn a few interesting things, for instance, about the brain's default network:

One level higher—do entire networks, circuits of neurons, ever activate randomly? People used to think so. Suppose you’re interested in what areas of the brain respond to a particular stimulus. Stick someone in a brain scanner and expose them to that stimulus, and see what brain regions activate (for example, the amygdala tends to activate in response to seeing pictures of scary faces, implicating that brain region in fear and anxiety). And in analyzing the data, you would always have to subtract out the background level of noisy activity in each brain region, in order to identify what was explicitly activated by the stimulus. Background noise. Interesting term. In other words, when you’re just lying there, doing nothing, there’s all sorts of random burbling going on throughout the brain, once again begging for an indeterminacy interpretation. Until some mavericks, principally Marcus Raichle of Washington University School of Medicine, decided to study the boring background noise. Which, of course, turns out to be anything but that—there’s no such thing as the brain doing “nothing”—and is now known as the “default mode network.” And, no surprise by now, it has its own underlying mechanisms, is subject to all sorts of regulation, serves a purpose. One such purpose is really interesting because of its counterintuitive punch line. Ask subjects in a brain scanner what they were thinking at a particular moment, and the default network is very active when they are daydreaming, aka “mind-wandering.” The network is most heavily regulated by the dlPFC. The obvious prediction now would be that the uptight dlPFC inhibits the default network, gets you back to work when you’re spacing out thinking about your next vacation. Instead, if you stimulate someone’s dlPFC, you increase activity of the default network. An idle mind isn’t the Devil’s playground. It’s a state that the most superego-ish part of your brain asks for now and then. Why? Speculation is that it’s to take advantage of the creative problem solving that we do when mind-wandering. (kindle loc 3493)

An argument in favor of day dreaming inside a book telling you that there's no free will and therefore you had no choice when you're day dreaming anyway feels super strange. But there it is. You probably can skip reading this book --- I'm not sure it was worth the effort and it certainly didn't change my mind --- I'm of the firm view that if you accept that you have no control over your life then you will end up with much worse outcome than if you have the view that you're the master of your own destiny. But I suppose if you want to have excuses for your failures this book will provide lots of evidence for you to justify your own foibles!

 

2023/2024 Point Reyes Wildcat Campground - New Year's Eve Backpack

 Ever since we visited Alamere Falls in 2022, I'd been so impressed by Wildcat Campground that I tried  over and over again, succeeding only in September this year for the New Year's Eve slot. Boen wanted to go, and the weather looked reasonable --- right in between two rain storms. I posited that the easiest way to do the backpack was to actually bike down the Bear Valley trail until we weren't allowed to bike any more, then hike to the campground. We'd ridden the whole thing from Five Brooks, but the horse poop at the trailhead and the ruggedness of the ride meant that I'd be pushing the bike most of the way on the return anyway, so I might as well carry a backpack and wear it.

On New Year's Eve, we packed everything we needed into the car, and then drove to Bear Valley Visitor Center. There, I confirmed that leaving our bikes at the bottom of Bear Valley trail overnight wouldn't be a problem, and that I couldn't swap out my Site #7 ticket for a Site #6 as some other person had grabbed it and hadn't relinquished it.

The ride was no big deal but I had to take it extra gingerly because I'd forgotten to bring a hammer to snap close the retaining pin on my ancient Yakima trailer. If I'm going to do more bikepacking in this configuration in the future I'm going to have to buy a new trailer. I stacked the two backpacks together on the trailer and tied it all together with bungee cords. The stability wasn't great but on the other hand it's such a tame trail that my biggest concern was getting the backpacks muddy, hence I wrapped both packs with garbage bags.

The easiest way to Wildcat from Bear Valley was up Glen Camp. We'd bought sandwiches at Point Reyes Station earlier, and half way up the trail was a good place to stop and eat --- I've learned never to let kids eat unless they're hungry. Otherwise, it's a waste of food. Even so, Boen only ate 3/4 of his sandwich.

We met other backpackers exiting the route and they told us to get onto the fire road and just stay on it --- there were alternate routes, but this was the easiest way with a kid in tow. At the junction with the Coast Trail we noticed a bunch of backpackers coming down the trail. I asked for a picture of the two of us and they obliged. Daniel, the group leader had Pixel 8 Pro, and was a pretty friendly guy. They told us that the Coast Trail was pretty, and would take us back to our bikes.

Boen's reaction to the first view of Wildcat Campground this trip was "WOW! That's an amazing campground." He didn't remember our previous trip by bike! We got to the campground and found site #7 perched over the beach, but with only a slight view of the ocean. We pitched our tent and made some hot beverages, and then visited the beach but realized that the tide was still high --- low tide was at 8pm, so we went back and explored. We took a look at Site #6, which was indeed occupied by an Asian couple with a huge antenna setup for AM radio, which looked like it would take a good hour to setup.

The views were incredible. We could see all the way to the Farallons, which surprised me because it was cloudy and once in a while I could see rain showers offshore.

We decided to try our luck again, and went to the beach to discover Daniel's group in the midst of starting a fire. I'd brought a fire permit and fire starter, but they had way more people and were way more motivated. They had a guy finding twigs, other people gathering fire wood for drying, and we could spectate. Daniel was a hard worker, frequently getting onto his hands and knees to nurture the fire.

At 4:15, I'd had enough of waiting and decided that this was our last chance to see Alamere falls before sunset. I set off with Boen and Daniels' group decided that I knew what I was doing, which was a mistake.

I cannot fault the views from the beach. The Golden Hour didn't disappoint. Sandpipers on the beach flittered back and forth, looking for grub, only to take flight when the waves came crashing down. 

We steadily got closer to the Alamere Falls, hut were thwarted at the last segment, where big waves kept crashing against the one rock guarding the actual falls. Two of Daniel's party members just resigned themselves to getting wet and soaked through, but Boen and I settled for an ephemeral fall fairly close to the actual falls themselves.

Those falls didn't exist when we last visited the area, so must have been produced by the most recent series of rains.

By the time we got back to our tent site, it was dark, so we made dinner and ate it by lantern light. I'd forgotten to bring headlamps for both of us, so the whole meal was awkward, with lots of spillage, but Boen really enjoyed his Mountain House Beef Stew. He got cold after dinner, so we hurriedly brushed our teeth and joined Daniel's party for the fire, which was nice and hot!

The stars were out, indicating that our cloud cover was gone. But the tides were still crashing down hard on the beaches, so nobody felt like venturing forth to the waterfall in the moonlight. Boen was too tired to do so anyway, and asked for an early night at 8:00pm.

When morning came, we were both refreshed enough to contemplate taking the long way back to the bike, along the coast trail. We ate a hurried breakfast and packed up and hiked up with wet tents and fly for despite the cloudless sky the humidity was high enough to induce a lot of condensation on the tent.

It didn't even take a quarter mile climbing out of the campground for us to have to shed clothing for we had warmed up plenty despite being in the shade.

Turning off on the Coast trail at 0.8 miles we saw signs for the Bear Valley trail intersection at 2.5 miles. The views became very nice, with the spray off the coast visible even at our distance.

The route took us into forests with mists rising around us, lending the area an ethereal look for us to greet the new year. It being early we saw no one else until we got close to the Bear Valley trailhead, where the views started to become spectacular.

California's distinctive sea stacks, along with a clear blue sky and a calm looking Ocean belying the crashing roar that was our soundtrack the night before reminded me again of how nice it was to live where we lived.

Finally, crossing a bridge, up a tiny hill and we were back on the Bear Valley trail. Just a mile later we were at the bikes, loading them up and headed for home.

There's nothing like the relief of pedaling a nice bike after 5 miles of walking. Even a little pump of the pedals and you're flying up a hill at twice your walking speed.  We had quite a bit of splatter on our clothing and bike by the time we got to the car. But it being New Year's Day, traffic home was non existent and we got home in plenty of time to dry the tent and put it away!

Review: Pixel 8 Pro

 Arturo and Pengtoh have long shifted over to using smartphones for their travel photography, and I've been the last holdout. What caught my eye in 2018 was when my wife produced an absolutely fantastic picture from a Pixel 3a XL:

It was perfectly exposed, and the auto-HDR worked far better than I expected. So 2 years ago we switched entirely to the Pixel 6 for smartphone use mostly because of the camera (and also the good trade-in deals we got). But my brothers bought me a Ricoh GR3 and I kept using it, repairing it twice for damage done to it. My GR3 has had about 17000 exposures behind it and now has dust spots (easily removed by Photoshop's Context Aware Fill, but that's significant work) when stopped down past about f/11.

Over the past few years, I got frustrated by the lack of a built-in zoom on the Pixel 6, but the curved screens on the Pixel 6 Pro and Pixel 7 Pro kept me from upgrading. While I could upgrade my wife to the Pixel 7 with the outstanding Black Friday deal of 2022 ($20 + tax!), I make full use of my 256GB phones and so upgrades are neither cheap nor compelling. When I saw that the Pixel 8 series got a $100 increase in price I was pretty sure that I wasn't going to upgrade despite the now flat screen of the Pixel 8 Pro which is very tempting.

Well, two deals surfaced during the holidays that overcame my reticence. One was the 40% off retail price coupon for being a Gold status Google customer. This one was easy: switch to the 1TB tier for Google one and wait 3 days. I had plenty of Google Rewards credits and no better way to use it, so I did that. The other was the Youtube $125 coupon which stacked with the holiday $200 off promo. So we ended up with 2 Pixel 8 Pros, and the price was very good after the trade-ins for our various existing Pixels. (Google was offering the same price for the phones as they were going on Swappa, which meant that it was better to trade in the phones than to try to sell them on Craigslist!)

Google has actually improved the onboarding experience of new Android phones. Now the transfer from your old phone is wireless. The restoring of apps is dumb though ---> every app you ever installed not gets installed on your new phone, so I went through and deleted all of them. All the authenticator apps now also back up to the cloud, so you no longer have to go through and re-register every account you ever had on your 2FA app.

The first thing I notice were the quality of life issues: the fingerprint reader now worked consistently, and the face unlocked was so fast the first time my wife's phone unlocked with face recognition she thought that the security system was broken! The phone charged faster and used less power. For instance, on a 2 hour drive in the past my Pixel 6 could never charge from 20% to 80%, but now the Pixel 8 Pro will easily go to over 90% for a drive that long! Overnight when not plugged into a charger the Pixel 8 Pro no longer loses more than 5% of its battery at most, and this is with both work and personal accounts sync'd to the phone, as well as the kids' accounts. The phone is fast and smooth, and I no longer felt the need to turn off the high resolution display. I took Boen on a backcountry camping trip in Point Reyes with the phone in airplane mode. At the parking lot, the phone was at 65%. After about 24 hours of biking, hiking, and camping using the phone for photos and running the National Park Service App for maps, I returned to the parking lot with 35% of battery. That's outstanding compared with the Pixel 6 --- I did not have battery saver on, and would occasionally get out of airplane mode to see if I had reception. With the phone at 100% I'd expect to survive a 3 day backpacking trip on airplane mode and being liberal about shooting photos and videos. The bigger battery and lower power draw on the chip obviously made a big difference.

The photos, are of course, the meat and potatoes of the phone. I shot a few photos side by side with the main camera on the phone and the Ricoh GR3:

Ricoh GR3

Pixel 8 Pro

You can see that the GR3 with its stopped down aperture can produce sun stars, while the Pixel 8 Pro suffers from flare. But the exposure and color balance on the Pixel 8 Pro out of the box is just so much better! Here are two more shots, one from the Ricoh GR3 and one from the Pixel 8 Pro's 5x lens.

Ricoh GR3, 28mm uncropped

Pixel 8 Pro 5x telephoto lens

Here, the Pixel 8 Pro clearly has artifacts and an artificialness not present in the GR3 shot. But it's still competitive and the 5x lens grants a better composition. Next, let's compare a cropped GR3 shot to the uncropped 5x Pixel 8 Pro lens.

Ricoh GR3 Cropped

Pixel 8 Pro 5x Telephoto

No question, the GR3 is no longer competitive, no matter what I did in lightroom. The automatic macro mode is also impressive:

The long exposure mode on the camera also lets you get nice waterfall shots

Long Exposure

Original

It's quite clear that computation photography has allowed phone cameras to keep up with dedicated cameras, even ones with APS-C sized sensors like the Ricoh GR3. But that's not all. The dedicated camera makes have made things worse by taking away features that used to be in cameras! For instance, nearly all cameras in the 2000s had GPS chips and stored location data in EXIF, which is absolutely useful for travel photography. No there aren't any high quality cameras that can do that without a badly written app that's going to run on your smartphone instead. (Note that my Nikon W300 does do this, and it's a very nice waterproof camera that I still use!) The lack of weatherproofing also precludes you taking a camera out in the rain.

At this point, I'm willing to stop considering a smartphone to be something for making phone calls, but instead as a waterproof, dustproof camera. In that sense the Pixel 8 Pro has come to displace my dedicated cameras and I will now seriously consider selling my dedicated cameras off.

You cannot beat that as an endorsement. The Pixel 8 Pro is that good.

Review: Built

 Built is Roma Agrawal's book on civil engineering. It won several awards so I started it with fairly high hopes. The book is written in modern "creative non-fiction" style, with lots of personal interjections into various parts of the exposition, which irritated me quite a bit. Do I really care about your initial impressions of your fiance or what you decided to wear while I'm learning about how the Romans used cement?

A lot of the parts of this book are not surprisingly covered better in the great courses series Engineering Lessons and the Lessons they teach  

Review: Steam Deck OLED

 My brothers bought me a Steam Deck OLED as a birthday present.  I remember playing the heck out of the PS Vita back when I bought one, and a device that has access to my entire collection of PC games was exciting.

The worst thing about the Steam Deck is the compatibility. The device runs Linux instead of Windows, and is meant as a platform to sell steam games. I don't have a big steam backlog, and in fact, most of the games I own are on Epic Games due to the large giveaway library. To my surprise, both Epic and GOG installed nicely by my brother functioned really well, to the point where I could play The Witcher 3 and Rise of the Tomb Raider (as well as the original) and to me when I launch both games there's no distinction between them. Other libraries, however (EA Connect and Ubisoft Connect) did not install no matter what I did and time spent tinkering with them was a total waste of time. What's worse, the initial installs of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City failed as well! My brother had to tinker with it, installing different compatibility libraries and in the case of Arkham Asylum deleting and redownloading it to work. My Windows PC has its share of compatibility problems, but not to this extent! For instance, XCOM-2 ran, but I couldn't make a single move!

Cloud saves on Epic Games and GOG didn't work either, so in all cases I had to restart games from scratch. Maybe this is to be expected, but if the device had run Windows I bet it wouldn't have all these problems. (Valve promises that some day they will have fully supported Windows drivers --- I'm not holding my breath --- what incentive do they have to make that work?!!)

The games that work, work well. I happily played The Witcher 3 and Tomb Raider ran well and had an immersive experience. So did the Batman games, once my brother got it running for me. Obviously any of the weaker games (like Braid) would just work as well.  Bluetooth audio connect to my Pixel Buds Pro worked well, and with no discernible latency, which was impressive. One interesting glitch is that the device is very aggressive about awake from sleep. If I pulled out the Pixel Buds Pro within pairing distance of the Steam Deck, it would wake up from sleep! I eventually turned off the Steam Deck completely so as to avoid that.

The battery life was much less impressive. You can get about 120 minutes of either of the triple A titles mentioned above. When connected to the 65w powerbank, you can nearly get through a 6 hour coast to coast flight. That's probably good enough --- my Pixel Buds Pro wouldn't make it past that anyway!

All in all, this is the device that will get me buying games on Steam again. Well done!

Review: The Death of Chaos

 The Death of Chaos continues the saga of Recluce with Lerris' contribution and the end of Justen's story. If you've paid any attention to the magic system behind the series, you'll know that the Death of Chaos automatically also means the Death of Order as well. The story once again revolves around an invasion from an empire, and Lerris's increasingly desperate and costly effort to fend them off.

One interesting piece is that the technology we saw at the start of the novel is no longer unique to Recluce, and other states have started manufacturing steam ships and ironsides warships as well. Lerris gets very annoying in parts because of how obtuse he is about other people's reactions to his actions, but by and large he's still a very likable character, and has hobbies other than saving the world, which is unusual in this type of adventure story.

The ending is really sad, as with other Recluce novels --- the cost of being able to keep your independence is very high. The book is a bit of a doorstop, taking me a long time to finish but at no point did I feel like I was going to stop reading it. Recommended.

Long Term Review: Anker Battery/USB Adapter for Resmed AirMini

 I used my new Anker Powerbank with converter cable on this past sailing trip. While not a certified CPAP device, it operated with extreme reliability. Even better, the Katja had USB outlets in the cabin that operated even when the boat was sailing and the generator wasn't running! My routine for the days on the sailboat were to wake up, immediately unplug the battery to the CPAP after syncing it to my phone, and plug the battery into the USB outlet to let it trickle charge. By noon, the battery would be full.

I didn't need to use the battery to power any other devices, but in theory, I could have done so. In addition, I wasn't carrying the dedicated charger that could only be used to charge the Pilot-24. The battery performance was also superior --- at no point did I drain it past 50%, so I could have survived 2 nights on the Anker battery if I needed to.

When traveling to places where I have wall power, I pair this with the Anker 715 Nano II 65w charger.  This saves no weight compared to carrying the dedicated AirMini charger, but unlike the dedicated AirMini charger, the Anker charger can be used to charge any other USB-C compatible device, so it serves two purposes!

This is clearly a superior option to what I was using before and I can recommend it without reservations.

Review: Fenix 7 Pro Sapphire Solar

Through a series of unlikely events, I managed to snare a Fenix 7 Pro Sapphire Solar at an excellent price. Given that I had also gotten a Garmin Edge 840 recently, I no longer felt obliged to get the biggest screen possible, so I went for the 47mm version of the watch, which is smaller while not being as small as the S. It fits perfectly and is lighter. Unlike in the past, where the X series usually has additional features not on the other sizes of watch, for the 7 Pro series all watches have the same feature. The difference is in size, weight and battery life. I did not opt for the Epix series because there were reports that in cycling mode the display would turn itself dim.

The number of new metrics available on the Fenix 7 Pro that didn't exist on the 5X is substantial. First, you get a training readiness metric that you didn't use to get. Unlike in the past Fenixes, this seems actually accurate. I had a stressful trip and it told me that my body was strained and that i should back off from serious activities.

The sleep section is vastly enhanced, now including breath detection, SpO2 (which by default only turns on during sleep to detect sleep apnea), and a body battery metric that does a relatively good job of detecting how much left you are (though you probably shouldn't need an app to tell you that!)

There's a new wrist mounted flashlight on the watch, which works really well, and I've used it often enough that it doesn't feel like a gimmick, which surprised me. What's better about it than using your smartphone as a flashlight is that being mounted on your wrist effectively makes the flashlight hands free, which is a much bigger deal than you might imagine.

Even the heart rate monitor is improved, giving much more accurate than what was on the Fenix 5X, which I considered science fictional. For instance, my HR never rose about 100 during strength training on the Fenix 5X, but with the 7 Pro it regularly registers 140 when lifting. That makes way more sense. One interesting thing is that if you choose to use a separate heart rate monitor and take off your Fenix, the Fenix doesn't carry that data over from your Edge, and instead treats that segment of the day as blank. On the other hand, for road riding using the device as a HRM doesn't seem to burn substantial battery life, so I'm OK with that. In fact, on a bike tour that means the watch substitutes as a HRM and you no longer have to bring a separate one.

What does feel gimmicky is the sapphire solar screen. Over the course of a 10-day sail trip, it felt like it added at most 4 hours of battery life, not substantial enough to make a huge difference. On the other hand, if I was going on a multi-day backpacking trip with no access to charging my suspicion is that this might let me eke out one more day of battery life. Of course, my CPAP battery would probably run out long before this happened.

Unlike the Edge series, the Fenix doesn't store elevation data on maps. This lets me load it up with both European and US maps and still have substantial storage left. As a backup for the Edge 840 I think this is a good device to have.

There's now a snorkel mode but I didn't find out about it until after my trip. I'll remember to use it next time! There's also jet lag advisory and altitude acclimation data and advise that will be substantially useful in the alps or on mountain trips. I've done enough of those trips that I don't really need this, but if you're new to big mountains I think this will be very useful!

There's a "good morning" screen that summarizes how ready you are to train, how well you slept (which might give you anxiety if you're the anxious type), and some encouragement to start your day off with. It was surprisingly good to have on my sailing trip!

All in all, I'm surprised at how much the Fenix 7 Pro has improved over the 5X. Then again, that's 4 generations of devices. I probably should have upgraded earlier but waiting for a lower price is never something I will regret.

Review: The Curious Human Knee

 The Curious Human Knee is a book about the knee. I borrowed it from the library expecting to learn about the knee's architecture, why they are so easily damaged, and how to prevent injury and what the process of fixing a damaged knee is. Instead I got a curious mis-mash of knee information and weird fashion segmentations. The author feels like she suffered from a case of ADHD, jumping from one random topic to another.

I've long thought that the human knee was a particularly good example of poor engineering. Han Yu instead explains that the reason the knee is so easily damaged is because it's so flexible and offers so many degrees of freedom of movement:

Dynamic freedom comes at a terrible cost. The knee is flexible because it is fundamentally unstable. It is, essentially, a few pieces of rigid, ill-fitting bones bound up by rope-like soft tissues. Nothing is fused in place, so the knee can move in just about any direction. For the same reason, it can also twist, misalign, overstretch, or simply fall apart. (kindle loc 508)

Ok, so what can we do? She mentions  that there are training programs that can help prevent injury:

In one program, female high-school volleyball players were drilled in various jumping tasks: broad jump, vertical jump, single-legged jump, squat jump, and more.98 The emphasis was placed on maintaining good techniques: keep the spine erect and shoulders back, point the knees forward, jump with the chest over knees, and land softly with bent knees and toe-to-heel rocking. After six weeks of training, the participants were able to reduce valgus collapse stress by about 50 percent, increase hamstring power by up to 44 percent, and reduce landing force by 22 percent.99 In another successful program, female soccer players completed, among other things, leg stretching, jumping tasks, and strengthening exercises.100 Similar emphasis was put on correct landing techniques. Compared with soccer players in the same league who did not enroll in the program, those who were enrolled saw an 88 percent reduction in ACL injury in the first season and 74 percent reduction in the second season. (kindle loc 1826)

Details? How to do it yourself? Nada. That kinda sucks. She does debunk several myths. For instance, icing does nothing, and neither do prophylactic braces. In fact, both might cause more problems:

 Compared with using a stationary bike to cool down, immersing legs in cold water after strength training reduced muscle mass and strength.34 Researchers have speculated that this is because muscle protein synthesis depends on blood supply, and icing, by reducing blood supply, suppresses protein synthesis. In other words, icing can negate the benefits of exercise and reduce long-term muscle development, quite the opposite outcome for people who ice for sports recovery. (kindle loc 2506)

 prophylactic braces were not able to reduce knee injuries; in fact, they seemed to make players more likely to hurt themselves.81 Alarmed, the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Sports Medicine issued a statement in 1990 recommending that these braces “not be considered standard equipment for football players.”82 (kindle loc 2709)

 Then suddenly the book would switch into a discussion of skirt length and fashion. It would then come back and tell you interesting things about Osteo-Arthritis:

Despite their relatively lower body mass index, Asian populations have more knee OA than Western populations.58 In Malaysia, for example, an estimated 25 percent of people over the age of fifty-five suffer from knee OA.59 In Korea, 38 percent of people over the age of sixty-five do. (kindle loc 3488)

It turns out that many Asian cultures do a lot of kneeling, and that's not good for your knee. The book then jumps back into fashion and discusses ripped jeans and other distressed clothing that are part of fashion nowadays. Sure, I'm concerned about the environmental impact of fashion and the irony of rich people wearing clothes that are deliberately made to look worn out (my wife had to tell me to throw out swim shorts because they were starting to develop holes in all the wrong places), but does that really belong in this book?

I really wanted to like this book, but I think in this case the author needed a much better editor than the one she had.

Review: Garmin Edge 840

 The Pro's Closet had open box Edge 840 for under $300 before Black Friday, and at that price it was too good to resist. The big feature that I wanted that's not available on the Fenix 5X is Freeride Climb Pro, which Garmin has said that it will not bring to watches because the watches have to deal with runners and Freeride Climb Pro is just too hard to do for runners. The other feature is that it now charges via USB-C, which saves one more cable type to bring (though unfortunately most of my bike lights are still micro-USB, so I can't avoid having a few adapters when I travel with the bike) 

Ok, coming from using my Fenix 5X as a bike computer, the Edge 840 feels like it's a giant screen. Garmin has also revamped its UI, so you get choices between Road, Gravel, Commute, MTB. In addition, the Edge 840 has both buttons and touch screen, and I found myself using both UIs! The map display is excellent, and Garmin no longer tries to rip you off by charging for European maps if you happen to buy a US unit.

The 32GB storage is not enough to store both US maps and European maps at the same time! I was quite disappointed by that. Storage is cheap, and you would think that Garmin would take $10 out of its profit margins to give me both US and European maps at the same time. The nice thing is that Garmin with its new UI can now display graphs, so you can get a nice climbing graph or power meter graph.

Climb Pro behaves as I expect, giving you its best guess as to what hill I'm going to ride, and despite some friends telling me it wasn't accurate, it seemed to work just fine for my favorite hills. For grins I tried the structured workout mode and it told me after the workout that I did a horrible job of complying with the workout.

I rarely follow routes, but when I tried it as an experiment, whenever I go off route (which I invariably do) the UI now gives me an option to pause navigation (if you know where you're going) or to route back onto the route. Sweet!

Charging is fast, and battery life is good enough that I never have to charge it more than once a week. Syncing to Garmin connect is fast as well, and it brings over all the sensors from my old Fenix 5X no problem, including HRMs, speed sensors, cadence sensors, etc. Stay within the Garmin ecosystem and everything works great.

Startup is also superfast. I can no longer play the game of starting up the computer and taking off at rocket speed to keep the GPS confused for as long as possible. All in all, it's a great device and I'm looking forward to touring with it!

Review: Democracy Awakening

 Democracy Awakening is Heather Cox Richardson's history book with an emphasis on recent history (from 2016 to 2022) and a deep perspective on American history and context. The recent history part of the book is a good reminder of how quickly Trump moved to consolidate power and try to dismantle democracy and delegitimize elections, and how he quickly used the authoritarian playbook to great effect:

Trump purged officials who accepted the findings of the Intelligence Community from his administration. He replaced Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates, a well-regarded former Republican senator who maintained that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. Trump also fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, replacing him first with Sessions’s loyalist chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, who became acting attorney general without Senate confirmation, and then with William Barr, who had been President George H. W. Bush’s attorney general when Bush pardoned those involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Barr took office on February 14, 2019, just as Mueller was finishing his report. Before letting anyone else see it, Barr spun the document as a complete exoneration of the president. The media repeated his misstatement. In fact, Mueller’s report established that Russia had illegally intervened in the election to benefit Trump and that the campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mueller publicly complained to Barr about the spin he had put on the report, but it was too late: Trump crowed that he was exonerated, and his supporters not only bought it, they accepted it as proof that the institutions of government were persecuting their president. Barr then appointed his own investigator, John Durham, to prove that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had hacked the election (the investigation closed in 2022 without any proof of those allegations).[10] Republican lawmakers helped Trump’s disinformation campaign, using their positions to mislead the public and legitimize his lies. House Republicans, especially those in the right-wing Freedom Caucus, along with a bloc of right-wing senators, backed the president. Since the Republicans controlled the Senate, their chairing of key committees helped them legitimize his allegations. Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, and Rand Paul of Kentucky echoed Trump in calling for investigations of Democrats. (kindle loc 1612)

The look back into history further away from  the present day presents some much needed optimism. The history of the American republic has been one of imperfect equality and ideals, but also that the citizenry does eventually opt for freedom over oligarchic rule. She points out that the arguments used by right-wingers have always been used by slaveholders to deny women or black people the vote, and it's always been the task of ordinary people to fight back:

it is ordinary Americans like Harriet Beecher Stowe turning her grief for her dead eighteen-month-old son into the story of why no mother’s child should be sold away from her; Rose Herera suing her former enslaver for custody of her own children; Julia Ward Howe demanding the right to vote so her abusive husband could not control her life any longer; Sitting Bull defending the right of the Lakota to practice their own new religion, even if he did not believe in it; Saum Song Bo telling The New York Sun that he was insulted by their request for money to build a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty when, three years before, the country had excluded people like him; Dr. Héctor García realizing that Mexican Americans needed to be able to vote in order to protect themselves; Edward Roberts claiming the right to get an education despite his physical paralysis; Stormé DeLarverie, the drag king who was identified with the first punch at the Stonewall riot that jump-started the gay rights movement. (kindle loc 2418)

Much of the description of the pre-civil war era sounds very familiar:

 To maintain their power, southern leaders made common cause with southern men who defended local government, and for whom opposition to the federal government had become the core of their political identity. In the 1840s, when northern leaders began to try to stop the expansion of slavery through federal law, southern white leaders insisted that such action was an attack on democracy, which they were coming to define as states’ rights. By the 1850s, southern leaders had narrowed that definition of democracy even further. They insisted that the Framers had never intended for democracy to mean that voters got to influence policy; they could merely vote to change their leaders. Indeed, they argued, the Framers had set up the system so that it could never come under the sway of a mob. Federal lawmakers could do nothing that was not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution; the Framers had limited the government so it could do nothing but protect property. Even if an overwhelming majority of Americans wanted the government to do something more expansive, it could not...Leaders outlawed possession of books and pamphlets that questioned the slave system—those that urged solidarity among poor white men as well as those challenging enslavement—and they provoked violence against those they called agitators. By closing off access to factual information, enslavers could use the media, churches, society, and politics to spread their worldview first in the South and then nationally. Their worldview was taking over the country. In the 1850s, Southern elites who controlled the government of their states took over first the Democratic Party and then, through it, the Senate—where each state had two seats regardless of population—and the White House. Control of those two institutions meant they also took control of the Supreme Court. (kindle loc 2818-2828)

 The book is a quick and easy read, and provides much perspective on the chaos of the present day. It's going to be a very uncomfortable next few years, but despair never provides any solutions, and Richardson's book provides a much needed reminder that it is possible to fight for democracy and a government of the people, by the people, and for the people:

In 1858, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience: “I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments . . . are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. . . . Whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” (kindle loc 2789)

 

Review: Garmin Rally XC200 Pedals

I acquired a bunch of Garmin stuff at an employee discount, which meant that rather than jumping on the XC100, I paid $700 for the XC200 pedals. Coming from the powerpod, these are an astounding improvement: they're not finicky --- install them on your bike, pedal backwards and unclip, and the units calibrate and you're finished. No 10 minute test ride. From then on, as long as you don't swap the pedals over to another bike, all you have to do is ride.

Despite warnings from others, I've found that my existing SPD shoes and cleats mesh perfectly well with the Rally pedals. They behave just like regular SPDs, except that you have to swap batteries once in a while and they're heavier. But they feel solid and just as indestructible as the stuff Shimano produced.

The data from the pedals are much more accurate than from my old powerpod. No more bizzaro spikes to 1200w (which I'm pretty sure I'm not capable of doing) when they're out of calibration. In fact, now I know that my old powerpod numbers were inaccurate, I have to go back and delete them. That's how bad they were.

There are two ways to use power meters: to train, or to pace yourself. I loaded up a training program to try to train and discovered that it's much harder than you expect to actually use structured training. It's very easy to overshoot or undershoot what your training program asks you to do. After my one session, the Edge 840 declared that I was only 15% compliant. Ok, I'm never going to win any races.

The dual leg nature of the Garmin pedals let you know whether your legs are balanced (I'm 1-3% off, depending on the day). If your legs are grossly unbalanced you might have one leg longer than the other and might want to see a podiatrist to get prescribed orthotics. But mine were fine. The power meter also lets you know if your perceived effort is much higher or lower than usual. The way to use that is if you go out cycling and your perceived effort is much higher and your watts aren't responding you should actually call it a day and go home and rest more. OK, I hardly ever do that --- which is another reason I'll never be a good bike racer. Cycling time is too precious to waste!

Finally, the pacing yourself thing is worth thinking about. In practice, this is how I will use the power meter. If you're working too hard, slack off a bit. Oh wait, you're climbing a 20% grade? You're already in your lowest gear? Too bad. Just kill yourself and get it over with and rest. Ok, so maybe a power meter isn't going to help you.

Finally, one of my long distance randoneuring friends told me this trick: just use the power meter to gauge progress and motivate yourself. If your power has plateaued, go climb some hills and do some intervals. The rest of your time, just relax and take it easy. Sounds like a good idea!

I wasn't going to move the pedals from bike to bike But it turns out that now that I have them I do take the trouble to move them to the Roadini whenever I do a gravel ride on it. I guess I do like the info! But now that I have them, I suspect I'll probably take the trouble to pack them into carry-on luggage and bring them on tour, as well as spare batteries, just because those big blocks of riding means you get lots of data. I'll probably try them on the gravel bike once in a while to see how they go.

Do I regret buying them? Not at the price I paid --- though in retrospect I probably only needed the single sided power meter --- I would have been better off buying 2 pairs of the single-leg power meters! The better data alone tells me that while I can't improve my VO2max much more, I can improve my power quite a bit. I just have to have a plan and motivate myself to do so. These cost much more than the crank-arm based ones, but I think the fact that they're easy to move from bike to bike means I'll have power data much more often, and that's worth something.

2023 Bahamas - What I learned

 Someone during the trip told me that Bahamas comes from the Spanish phrase "Baja mar", shallow sea. And this trip definitely highlighted that. There were many places on the chart that said: "shifting sands", meaning that the chart was unreliable and you shouldn't keep going. Similarly, this was the only trip I've been on where I've actually had to change direction during a channel crossing when I realized that the bottom was too shallow. Couple that with tides and unusually difficult anchoring and harbor entrances and this is definitely not a sailing location a beginner should visit.

The snorkeling on Sandy Cay was nothing short of amazing, as was Snake Cay, which surprisingly was hardly mentioned in the guide or chart briefing! Mermaid Reef was meh, and the wrecks near Rat Cay were ok. Fish Hotel was definitely a disappointment, as was witch point. We discovered that Fowl Cay is probably a summer/late spring destination, as all mooring balls described in the book were missing and the surface so rough that the dingy was taking on water. That was probably why the local dive outfit wanted $1200 for a visit!

This visit completely destroyed my view of the Bahamas. I thought that it was a popular cruise ship destination, and that the place would be crowded and full of parties. I don't know how much of the Abacos was popular before Dorian, but years after Dorian it's clear that cruise ships don't visit the area, and the sailing is so challenging that 5 boats at Sandy Cay constitutes a crowd. We saw plenty of sail boats, but it's nowhere as crowded as the BVIs, and nobody even tried to anchor near us in a crowded anchorage or in an anchorage where there was only room for one, indicating that most of the sailors knew what they were doing.

I'm curious as to what the rest of the Bahamas is like and whether it's quite different from what we experienced. On the other hand, as skipper the Bahamas isn't quite a chill-out experience so you'd pretty much have to have your act together all the time. The water is cooler which made mosquitoes less of a problem but when the wind dies you get biting gnats which can be just as bad!

All in all, when I think back about it this was a very good trip. While we backtracked more than necessary and wasted time at bad places, we made very good decisions such as not staying at Little Harbor overnight. We probably should have spent more time at Hope Town and Snake Cay, and I should have pre-planned the route on the dinghy tour at Snake Cay better, but all in all we had a great time!

Review: The Delusions of Crowds

 The Delusions of Crowds is the latest book by William Bernstein, a retired neurosurgeon turned financial advisor with some success. The book covers both religious delusions and financial delusions. Bernstein, of course, is very credible when it comes to financial delusions, from the housing bubble to the dot com bubble, to Enron's collapse. I wish he'd write an addendum covering the crypto insanity that's obviously full of fraud, though maybe Molly White has it covered well enough.

The religious delusions are, believe it or not, quite new to me, despite having grown up in a methodist mission school that couldn't wait to propagate hell-fire-and-damnation, anti-D&D propaganda, as well as telling growing kids that Star Wars was evil because Yoda's explication of the force was inspired by Zen Buddhism. (Growing up surrounded by Buddhists, the school's religious authorities lost their credibility with me on that last bit --- I've had a deep suspicion of the Abrahamic religions ever since)

What the book taught me that I didn't know is the prevalence of the dispensation Christianity end times narrative, with a large number of the religious right having bought into it. If you've ever wondered why the most anti-semitic population on the far right nevertheless are such strong supporters of Israel, this is why:

The current polarization of American society cannot be fully understood without a working knowledge of the above dispensationalist narrative, which strikes the majority of well-educated citizens with a secular orientation as bizarre. In contrast, for a significant minority of Americans, this sequence of prophesized events is as familiar as Romeo and Juliet or The Godfather, and the appeal of televangelists such as Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart rest solidly on their dispensationalist credentials...The centrality of Israel, and particularly the rebuilding of the Temple, to this belief system has profoundly affected U.S. Middle East policy. Uncritical American support for Israel’s expansion of West Bank settlement and its apparent abandonment of a two-state solution can be traced directly to the advocacy of evangelicals, so-called Christian Zionists, who now exert far more influence than Jewish Zionists. Indeed, the opening and closing benedictions at the May 2018 dedication of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem were given by two dispensationalist ministers. One of them, Robert Jeffress, once claimed that Hitler had helped plan the Jew’s return to Israel; and the other, John Hagee, had deemed Hurricane Katrina God’s punishment for New Orleans’s sinfulness. (kindle loc 228, 234)

The book covers the start of the dispensationist religious movement, its roots in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, various Christian sects (including that of David Kouresh), and of course, Islamic extremism, which is the mirror image of Christian extremism:

Given that the roots of apocalypticism are found in both the New and Old Testaments, and likely have earlier roots in Fertile Crescent polytheism, it is not surprising that the doomsday scripts of both extremist Israeli Jews and the Islamic State have more than a passing resemblance to that of Christian dispensationalists, differing only in who plays the heroes and who plays the heavies. Today’s Muslim apocalypticists almost uniformly consider Jews to be the Antichrist, and the remarkable ability of the Islamic State to attract recruits from around the world to the killing fields of Syria and Iraq rested in no small part on an end-times narrative drawn directly from the hadith, the sayings of Muhammad. (kindle loc 254)

 Some of the earlier dispensationalist works actually predicted the creation of the state of Israel, which obviously makes their other random prophecies sound more likely to be true. The author does point out several examples of cases where end-times prophecies failed, and the so-called prophets doubled down multiple times over several years only to be discredited at the end, so not all end-times prophets get what they want:

The dispensationalists had already identified two occurrences that would mark the end of this hiatus and the resumption of time and God’s renewed attention to the Jews, and so bring about the end-times: the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and the reassembly of the Roman Empire into the Antichrist-led European ten-nation confederation. While Darby left behind dozens of volumes, his unreadable prose confined his readership to a small core of literate and determined true believers. On the other hand, not only did Anderson’s prose go down like fine claret, but his accurate prediction of the return of the Jews to Palestine in The Coming Prince electrified his later twentieth-century readers...Even today, Anderson’s prediction of the restoration of the Jewish nation in Palestine astounds. The same, alas, cannot be said of his prophecy of a renewed Roman Empire, which has embarrassed Christian fundamentalist prophecy ever since. For example, a century and a half after Richard Graves identified the post-1815 rise of European constitutional monarchies as the new Roman Empire, dispensationalists would do the same for the European Union, which has thus far failed to produce the Antichrist or form a strategic alliance with Israel, let alone invade it. (kindle loc 4759, 4771)

 You might be tempted to believe that this type of fantasy is restricted to the kooky far right, but the book points out several republican presidents actually appeal to the people who believe this stuff:

President George W. Bush’s address to the nation announcing military action in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 nicely illustrated this divide. To the secular ear, it struck a tolerant, anodyne tone almost devoid of religious content, and mentioned Islam only in terms of American open-armed acceptance of and good wishes toward its nearly two billion adherents. Evangelical listeners, on the other hand, heard a rather different message in phrases such as “lonely path” (Isaiah), “killers of innocents” (Matthew), and “there can be no peace” (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Chronicles, Isaiah) that suggested the wrath of a Judeo-Christian God. Religious scholar Bruce Lincoln observed that such phrases were “plainly audible to portions of his audience who are attentive to such phrasing, but likely to go unheard by those without the requisite textual knowledge.”540 Bush’s speech was a loud and piercing dog whistle; as put by Christianity Today after Lincoln published those words, “Sadly, we’ll no longer be able to secretly nod and wink to each other as Bush talks.”541 (Bush himself is noticeably silent regarding dispensationalist beliefs; officially a Methodist, most observers classify him as mainline Protestant.)542 The prevalence of the dispensationalist delusion in the United States also separates this country from the rest of the developed world, and carries with it the potential for catastrophe. (kindle loc 5487)

 This book was published in February 2021, more than 2 years before the Oct 7th atrocities committed by Hamas. Ordinarily you would expect Americans to not care (Israel has no oil, neither does Palestine), but the book clearly points out that even as far back as Jerry Falwell's time, there was a religious movement to support the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank:

Asked why Israel had the right to occupy Gaza and the West Bank, he answered simply, “God said so.”596 The piece ended with Falwell, who remarked, There are about 200,000 evangelical pastors in America, and we’re asking them all through e-mail, faxes, letters, telephone, to go into their pulpits and use their influence in support of Israel and the prime minister.597 No one, though, exemplifies the shift of fundamentalist influence onto the potentially cataclysmic arena of geopolitics as does Pat Robertson, whom diplomat and journalist Michael Lind labeled “the single most important purveyor of crackpot conspiracy theories in the history of American politics.” (kindle loc 5827)

 Why are Americans so susceptible to religious crackpot theories and conspiracy stories? Bernstein doesn't hesitate to point out that the Americans are easily the worst educated of developed nations, and unlike our closest analogues, the British, we do not supply educational public programming as a counter-weight to the entertainment industry. So our public is particularly ill-informed:

The United States consistently ranks near the bottom of developed nations for the OECD’s PISA international educational evaluations, and when compared with the citizens of other developed nations, Americans know depressingly little about both their own country and the rest of the world. The latest PISA cycle, completed in 2015, showed American students ranked fortieth, well behind the likes of Slovenia, Poland, Vietnam, Russia, Portugal, and Italy, let alone top scorers like Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea.618 A study from 1994 throws this problem into sharp relief: fully 37 percent of Americans got all of five representative basic facts about the world wrong, versus only 3 percent of Germans. (Of Spaniards, 32 percent got all five wrong; of Mexicans, 28 percent; of Canadians, 27 percent; of French, 23 percent; of British, 22 percent; and of Italians, 18 percent.) Italians and Germans who didn’t attend college outscored Americans who did...“American television is noteworthy for the cognitive busyness of its jump cuts, advertisements, and staccato style, and cognitive busyness makes it harder for some people to absorb information.” The authors dryly noted that American researchers are “generally reluctant to ask too many factual questions for fear of embarrassing the respondents, who might terminate the interview or become too flustered to answer other questions.” This may explain why the Germans did so well, since they were far more likely to be regular newspaper readers than those in the other six nations studied...In the United States, the media’s mission centers more on entertainment than education, whereas Scandinavian governments vigorously support high-quality news and informational programming. The U.K., which possesses both a prestigious and well-endowed public news outlet, the BBC, and a prosperous private media sector, occupies a position midway between the United States and Scandinavian nations....the knowledge gap between Americans of high and low educational status was much larger than in the other three nations studied: A poorly educated Briton, Dane, or Finn knows far more about the world around them than a poorly educated American.623 It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the poorly educated in the United States, relative to those in other countries, are uniquely susceptible to dispensationalist narratives that even the most educationally disadvantaged in the rest of the developed world resist because of their better grasp of everyday facts. (kindle loc 5962, 5972, 5983, 5988)

What's worse, in recent years, evangelicals have increasingly had a prominent role in America's military as well as political establishments. 

You might be wondering why I put so much emphasis on the religious delusion part of the book, as opposed to the financial delusions. Well, the financial delusions (such as bitcoin or cryptocurrency) might cost you to lose your money and your retirement, but it's unlikely to destroy the world. The end-times delusion, however, can easily cause people to believe that it's their religious duty to bring about the end times, and of course, our modern technology allows us to bring about the end times through nuclear or other means. I'm surprised that this book doesn't get more attention, but that's probably because of Bernstein's writing style --- he is turgid and never uses short words when he can use long ones, and I believe the financial delusions part of the book fully dilutes the impact of the warnings he brings about religious delusions. After all, the dot com bubble collapse did gift us a ton of dark fiber that was later put to use by Google and follow-on companies. But there can be no recovery from an end-times plan put into action by religious people believe themselves to be doing God's work.

I consider this book important and well worth reading. It explains much in American politics as well as America's attitude towards Israel amongst the far right.

2023 Bahamas: Nov 27th Man O'War Cay to Marsh Harbor

 The wind shifted overnight and was now blowing from the West instead of the East. This killed any hopes of sailing back as it would mean tacking back and forth using up a ton of time. Arturo, Marcie, Bowen and I elected to swim to shore (I'd talked Bowen into doing it by betting him $100 on a race with him wearing fins and me without --- I lost)

, and there, Arturo blew the conch one last time.Turning on the engine, we weighed anchor and headed straight against the wind towards Marsh Harbor, encountering rain and seeing a rainbow for the first time on the trip.

It kept raining all the way into Marsh Harbor and the wind strengthened. At the fuel dock, it must have been blowing 20 knots! I struggled to place the boat just saw, and the crew of Navigare Yatchting watched me harbor until the man in charge took pity on me, and boarded the boat and took over, revving the motor into red line to back the boat into the wind while the Katja pivoted against the dock just like I'd been taught in my certification class. I was no longer in charge and I could pack!

We paid up at the fuel dock, let the crew move the boat back into the slip and plug in the shore power cable. The debrief was easy, though they gave us a hard time about returning the boat with the septic tanks uncleared. They didn't charge us for the broken deck brush, and then we went off to the coffee shop and then lunch. It was Xiaoqin's birthday, and Bowen and Boen picked out some chocolate flowers for mommy's birthday.

We were all on the same flight back to FLL except for Niniane, who opted to stay at Hopetown for a few more days to do more snorkeling and exploration. At FLL, Arturo and Marcie joined us for pizza dinner at 3 sons, a brewery next to our hotel serving detroit style pizza. Our flight the next day went exactly as scheduled. Our trip was over.

Review: Remember

 Remember is Lisa Genova's book about memory. What hurts it is that I've read about most of the topics she covers in various other neuropsychology books (e.g., the need to do spaced repetition in order to learn something permanently, the unreliability of eyewitnesses, the difference between episodic memory and flashbulb memory). I'd say that what distinguishes this book from other books is that (1) it's short, and (2) there's an emphasis on practical ways to help yourself remember what you want to remember, and (3) there's also short sections about forgetting stuff you want to forget.

One interesting titbit is that if you're blocked and forgotten a word ("tip of the tongue" situation), it's OK to use Google find blocked words:

Many people worry that if they use Google to find their blocked words, then they’re contributing to the problem and actually worsening their already-weakening memory. They consider Google a high-tech crutch that’s going to ruin their memories. This belief is misinformed. Looking up the name of the actor who played Tony Soprano doesn’t weaken my memory’s ability whatsoever. Similarly, suffering through the mental pain and insisting on coming up with the word on my own doesn’t make my memory stronger or come with any trophies for my doing so. You don’t have to be a memory martyr. You are not more likely to experience fewer TOTs, resolve future TOTs faster, better remember where you put your keys, remember to take your heart medication tonight, or prevent Alzheimer’s if you can retrieve Tony Soprano’s name without Google. (kindle loc 1324)

Similarly, her practical advise about prospective memory (intention to do something) is to just use checklists as an aid, as well as cues (e.g., put the stuff you need to remember in front of the door so you literally have to trip over it to forget it as you leave your home)  The advise to forget something is basically "don't keep repeating the story of your painful incident or it'll be seared into your memory --- don't talk about it other people, and don't ruminate on it!" Hm... That's probably much harder advice to follow than to give.

Practical advise about avoid dementia and Alzheimers are pretty straightforward: eat a mediterranean diet, exercise, and sleep well, and get plenty of vitamin D.

Aerobic exercise has been associated with a significantly reduced risk of dementia in many human studies, and it decreases amyloid levels in animal models of the disease. Exercise improves sleep (it decreases the time it takes to fall asleep, increases the quality of sleep, and decreases the number of times you wake up in the night). And as described earlier, sleep improves normal memory and reduces your risk of Alzheimer’s. Even a daily brisk walk has been correlated with a 40 percent decreased risk of Alzheimer’s. That’s not a small impact. Exercise works. (kindle loc 2325)

Another interesting thing she notes is that building a cognitive reserve doesn't mean stuff like sudoku and crosswords. You actually have to learn new skills:

Building up a cognitive reserve doesn’t mean doing crossword puzzles. There is no compelling evidence that doing puzzles or brain-training exercises does anything to decrease your risk of Alzheimer’s. You’ll improve at doing crosswords, but you’re not building a bigger, Alzheimer’s-resistant brain. You don’t want to simply retrieve information you’ve already learned, because this type of mental exercise is like traveling down old, familiar streets, cruising neighborhoods you already know. You want to pave new neural roads. Building an Alzheimer’s-resistant brain through cognitive stimulation means learning to play piano, meeting new friends, traveling to a new city, or reading this book (kindle loc 2352)

All in all, the book is short, easy to read, and practical. I'm not sure you can find a higher recommendation than that!