Review: The Sandman (Season 1)

 I don't have a Netflix subscription so I didn't watch The Sandman when it debuted on Netflix. Between when it debuted and when I was about to cave and subscribe just to watch it, the local library flagged it as being ready for pickup by me!

I thought Tom Sturridge made for a great Morpheus, getting the expressions right, especially the glare he had when he was trapped in the prison. I enjoyed the recasting of Lucifer as Gwendoline Christie. I enjoyed the rewriting of John Constantine as Johanna Constantine. I thought Kirby Howell Baptiste wasn't perky enough for a depiction of the best representation of Grandmother Death in literature.

So the cast was great. The look was good, but given the amount of money spent on the series ($15M per episode) I found myself wondering whether various people were lining their pockets unduely. I expected jaw dropping visuals and those were far and few between. It didn't look like a $15M per episode series.

In general, I liked the story changes such as making Lyta and Hector no longer being former super-heroes. I thought that rather than "A Dream of A Thousand Cats" they should have depicted the story of Nada instead, but those are rather minor. For instance, I thought the Hob Gadling episode didn't add much back when it was a comic book series and don't think much of it now.

I'm very glad that the showrunner chose to do the series at a fairly brisk pace, approximately 2-3 issues per episode. Would I pay for a Netflix subscription to watch it? Sure. Would I go out of my way to watch it? Probably not, despite being a massive Sandman fan. What the show did tell me though is that while reading the books, I thought that the short stories (A Dream of A Thousand Cats, for instance) were much better than the longer story arcs, in a TV show the longer story arcs made for much better depiction.

If you've never read the Sandman the show is definitely worth watching. In this case, the TV show is almost (if not quite) as good as the book.

Review: Machine Vendetta

 Machine Vendetta is the recently released Alastair Reynolds novel feature Prefect Dreyfus. As far as I can tell it's the last book in the trilogy featuring the Panoply and the Glitter Band in the Revelation Space universe. It's the first book in recent years that no longer has a jacked up kindle price since before Apple got involved in price fixing with various publishers, and at $9.99 I used some of my kindle credits and didn't bother with waiting for the library.

The plot revolves around the murder of two prefects, both previously exemplary, performing what seems to be suicidal acts. One of them is Ingvar Tench, a close friend of Tom Dreyfus, and she turns out to have a previously unknown daughter! This is by far the weakest part of the plot, requiring the rest of the police force to believe that she had a daughter at an improbable time while devoting unlimited time to her career.

The rest of the plot is great. We have battling AIs vying for dominance over humanity, a final resolution to the plot of the first novel in the series, lots of police procedural work in addition to the exciting action-filled betrayals and crisis. This book could be turned into a high budget science fiction movie and it would be fun to watch.

Alastair Reynolds is in my auto-buy list. The science in his science fiction is great, his characters are much more 3-dimensional than you would expect from science fiction, and while he has plot weaknesses if you can get over them the reading is just compelling. I finished this book over 3-4 days and it was fun!

Recommended!

Review: Road Holland Utrecht Wool Jersey

 I'm a cheapskate about clothing, and usually pick up cheap cycling jerseys for about $20/pop whenever they go on sale. People rave about Wool Jerseys, but I never found them practical: you can't toss them in the dryer, they take forever to dry when you're touring and have no access to a laundry machine, and obviously, in California they're not useful for about 3 seasons out of the year.

Someone on an internet mailing list put up his Utrecht Wool Jerseys that were in my size for $50 and threw in a Walz cycling cap as well. For that price I couldn't resist. I figured I'd wear them in winter, and save my $20 summer jerseys for summer touring. When they arrived I was impressed by how nice they were. Online research show that they're not 100% wool, but a 39/61 merino/poly blend. The jerseys fit well and aren't scratchy, though the pockets show a disturbing tendency to unfurl when you take something out of them.

For washing, I throw them into the washing machine on "delicate" and put in some Eucalan. Then I air dry them. It's unlikely this will work when touring but I have no intention of using these jerseys while touring, when days might hit 100F. I discovered that these jerseys work well around 40-70F. I've had days on top of black mountain when people who're all bundled up with gear ask me how the heck I'm possibly warm wearing a short sleeve. About 70F they start to feel a bit too warm, and no way am I wearing these in 80F.

They do make me look fat, but that's only because as my kids will tell you, that I am fat!

So far, they've shown no signs of shrinking, and are nice enough that when I wear them in the office nobody immediately points out that they're cycling jerseys, not office wear. No way am I paying their original full price (which must have been $100 or more), but at $25 they were well worth it for California winters. I can definitely see how the company went out of business but if you see them in good condition they're worth a look.

Review: Narrative Economics

 I'm a huge Robert Shiller fan, but somehow missed that he had a new book called Narrative Economics. When someone at work mentioned it, I checked it out from the library right away and read it. The book's thesis is that economists spend too much time analyzing models like interest rates but should consider ideas and stories going viral and thus causing economic events.

To back this up, the book actually goes out and proposes several different narratives/stories that could have created/prolonged the great depression. The stories all seem rather plausible but there's no proof whatsoever that these stories had massive impact. Even worse, there's no guidance as to how you could have used the stories to predict what had happened.

This book more than anything else, proved to me that if you actually want to do investing, numbers are the way to go. What a surprising waste of time.

Review: The Fund

 The Fund is Rob Copeland's take down of Ray Dalio.  Ray Dalio is the founder/owner of Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund that purportedly had a phenomenal track record of beating the market, and Dalio himself became a celebrity, writing Principles, which was actually quite a good book, and follow on books that I thought was awfully fawning of a Chinese authoritarian system that was probably more about talking up Dalio's Chinese corporate/personal investment portfolio than based on reality.

I expected an account of Ray Dalio's rise and perhaps some expose of the secret sauce behind Bridgewater Associates, but to be honest the entire book was expose. There's an early section on Ray Dalio's background and how he got rich (hint: marry a wealthy person!), but the sections on how he managed to get pension funds to give him money to manage were given short shrift, as was the heuristics/algorithms he used to become successful early on.

Most of the book focuses on post-success, where the principles he espoused actually got turned into a horrible nightmarish social-network based pile-on app used inside the company. This mechanism was made worse by Dalio rejecting any criticism of it and taking on the form of the final arbiter. What really astonished me was that Dalio was selling pieces of Bridgewater to his own employees through an employer-financed loan. His second in command therefore was living a hand-to-mouth lifestyle:

Over just three years, 2011, 2012, and 2013, industry researcher Alpha reported that he made $815 million in total. While just a fraction of Dalio’s compensation, it was also enough to vault Jensen onto the industry lists of the highest-paid hedge fund managers—he made more than most of those who ran their own firms. Only a handful of people knew, however, another reason for him to stay. The Bridgewater founder had concocted a complicated arrangement in which the more money that Jensen seemed to make, the more he actually owed. Dalio had challenged Jensen, as a condition of the younger man’s employment, to slowly buy out the Bridgewater founder’s ownership. Jensen didn’t have nearly enough money, so Bridgewater lent it to him—essentially transferring slivers of his ownership each year, building up a gigantic IOU to the hedge fund’s majority shareholder, who just so happened to be Dalio. Jensen’s debt skyrocketed as the value of Bridgewater rose. When Dalio sold a piece of the firm to the Texas teachers’ pension fund, not only his own stake was impacted. Since Bridgewater was now worth more, it made Jensen’s own tithe that year even more expensive as well. (kindle loc 2926)

This seems like a particularly bad deal, and poorly negotiated for his employees while enriching himself, hardly the "principled" man Dalio like to style himself. The various shenanigans surrounding sexual harassment was just as bad though perhaps all too common in the age of "me-too" revelations to raise too many eyebrows.

What surprised me in the book was that Dalio was perpetually pessimistic about the US economy. We know that over the last 50 years, the US stock market has been on an incredible bull run, and anyone betting consistently against it should have been wiped out, but apparently his algorithms worked even when he was pessimistic his funds were still doing well. His pessimistic outlook also meant that he loved autocrats:

Since the late 1980s, Dalio had been convinced that the United States was in an inextricable fall, not merely economically, but culturally. He saw U.S. politics as on a slow descent into unproductive squabbling, a journey that could end in nothing less than another civil war. At times, he called himself “an economic doctor,” with the prescription to fix all that. In place of U.S. hegemony, Dalio looked for a better blueprint abroad. He seemed particularly smitten with societies ruled by powerful autocrats. Thanks to Bridgewater’s long history of managing money for Singapore’s government-run funds, Dalio became friends with Lee Kuan Yew. The elder man, who served as Singapore’s prime minister for a staggering thirty-one years, was a controversial figure whose long tenure achieved stability for his nation at the cost of freedom. Lee governed through what was essentially one-party rule, restricting freedom of speech and dismissing the value of democracy...Over dinner at Dalio’s New York apartment shortly before the Singaporean leader’s death, the men discussed the best models among world leaders. Lee gave an unlikely answer in a posh Manhattan setting: Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader, Lee said, had stabilized Russia after the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union. To Dalio, the analogy would have been seamless. He, too, had stabilized Bridgewater after a tumultuous stretch. (kindle loc 3476-3487)

 The book also covered the gross mismanagement of top talent that Dalio had hired for Bridgewater, including Jon Rubinstein and David Ferruci, both of which wanted nothing to do with Dalio's "Dot Connect" app but were roped into doing them anyway. Rubinstein in particular complained about Dalio's Principles, which wasn't the clean version he espoused in his book but an unwieldy, constantly changing giant ass book:

Once Dalio caught word that his new prized hire had struggled in boot camp, he asked for some time to chat. Rubinstein, cognizant of everything he’d learned about the Bridgewater founder’s love of raw honesty, decided to tell Dalio what was on his mind: “You’ve got three hundred and seventy-five Principles. Those aren’t principles. Toyota has fourteen principles. Amazon has fourteen principles. The Bible has ten. Three hundred and seventy-five can’t possibly be principles. They are an instruction manual.” (kindle loc 3723)

 The book covers the years of Bridgewater's underperformance perfunctorily --- there's an offhand suggestion that once computers became powerful enough and the rest of wall street started hiring up quants and computer scientists to do stock market analysis, Dalio's heuristics no longer offered a competitive edge and instead started to underperform the market. At this point apparently a lot of the money being managed is coming out of new rubes in totalitarian countries where Dalio has managed to cultivate sufficient contacts to have an information advantage with which to make investments, and even those aren't sufficient.

Take downs are fun to read, and this one was compelling. While Principles was good reading in theory, as usual in practice the implementation is more than a little tricky, and Dalio's success had nothing to do with his principles but a matter of being early enough and lucky enough to have money fall into his lap in big chunks (marry rich and be a good salesman). I'm much reminded of Google's promotion committees and how despite the high sounding principles only succeeded in making Google's promotion system even more political than the traditional manager-led promotion system. It's worth reading this book after reading Principles. It also explains why Dalio is such a China-supporter and all I can say is that the business/popular press loving to lionize businessman billionaires from Steve Jobs to Rockefeller to Elon Musk has a lot to do with the worst things happening to society today.

Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium Four

 The Walking Dead Compendium Four is the last volume in the series. In this volume, the story has Rick Grimes' collection of 4 communities link up with a much larger one called The Commonwealth. The contrast between a class-based hierarchy and the much more egalitarian society that Grimes had established also parallels the much wealthier and larger commonwealth.

This contrast doesn't make a lot of sense. For instance, the commonwealth is depicted as having body armor, and specialists (including having lawyers as professions that they're in dire need of), but yet seems lacking in innovation, as Eugene, one of Rick's friends from way back in volume one is able to make locomotives work with relative ease.

In addition, we never get much of a backstory of the Commonwealth's formation and rise, which again makes zero sense --- so a couple of high class aristocrats take control once they get involved and everybody else goes along?

OK, so the story behind the series never made much sense anyway. But the action and characters? They're mostly good. We get a colorful loner who somehow managed to survive on her own and yet happily encounters Rick Grimes' group to meet the commonwealth. And for whatever reason the much larger Commonwealth never has had to deal with a huge herd before? The setup felt fake and quite rushed.

Nevertheless, Kirkman redeems himself by giving Rick Grimes a fitting sendoff and a beautiful epilogue that's got surprises, interesting twists (though again, not very believable --- it's hard to imagine a single generation being able to restore safety to the point where few people have seen a Zombie, especially since early on in the series Kirkman makes a point out of noting that even dying of natural causes would turn you into a zombie, and in any reasonably sized city at least one person would die every day), and fine resolutions for many of the characters we've gotten to know.

In any case it was compelling reading and made me put other books on whole while I zipped through it. Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium Three

 The Walking Dead Compendium Three continues Rick Gimes' story of post apocalyptic survival.  This volume features a conflict with a "protection racket" governance regime along with the "whisperer" gang. The former forces Rick to build an alliance to overthrow the tyrant Negan, but at the last minute he uncharacteristically lets Negan lives. What I can say is that some of the characters do grow and develop and we see constant action as well as the humans starting to learn how to cope with the zombies in an intelligent way (though again, I'm just surprised that nobody learns how to drive a tank or even mount automatic weapons on SUVs or jeeps).

The whisperer gang seems much less plausible to me. Living amongst the zombies by wearing their skins on your face seems like a recipe for getting all sorts of skin infection and/or other diseases (dead human bodies are toxic/poisonous to living humans, which is one reason we bury our dead or burn them), so it seems unlikely that any group adopting that survival tactic would survive long enough to pose a threat to the living.

The art is good, and the action never stops. It's quite clear that the series is turning into an exploration of various crisis governance regimes, and Kirkman is always happy to put all his characters into the wringer. I can see why the TV show based on the book would be incredibly popular. Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium 2

 The Walking Dead Compendium Two continues with the story from the first book. The post apocalyptic story as always is pretty unrealistic. For instance, the group encounters a different community that then attacks them. That community has a freaking tank. One tank basically can make short work of any number of zombies just by running over them. You don't even have to fire your guns (though I will note that most tanks also have machine guns in addition to the main cannon). But what do these humans do? Instead of using the tank as a lawn mower to take out all the zombies, they use them to attack other humans? And since the US military has lots of tanks how did the zombies take over in the first place? None of that is explained, because it can't be.

OK. Let's take the story for what it is, which is a tale of survival. What will humans do to  ensure their survival? And after they've compromised themselves ethically, is what's left still human? One of my friends told me that after time as a refugee and watching what people have had to do to survive, they have a hard time readjusting to normal society. I can believe that's true. But on the other hand, when the nature of the threat is so obvious (we're not talking about invisible microbes here), I'm not sure that humans (especially in the small groups depicted in the comic book series --- none of the groups depicted go above Dunbar's number) wouldn't naturally form alliances for protection rather than try to fight each other instead over the scraps. After all, if 90% of the population has turned into zombies, what's left is enough to feed the remaining population for at least 10 years (and probably more given that the average lifespan took a dramatic drop!)

But instead what we get is hostility between human tribes over and over again, even in the face of an immediate zombie threat. And when the protagonist (Rick Grimes) finally decides that humanity can do a lot better if large groups of people cooperate and work together it's treated as an unbelievable epiphany. Of course, all through the pandemic I was convinced that this sort of cooperation is precisely what American society isn't capable of doing, which was why the USA was uniquely hard hit by COVID-19.

But when I think about it, even that's an aberration --- American society did cooperate in the 1940s to defeat its opponents. It could very well be that the current situation is what happens leading up to a crisis. Regardless, the book is still compelling reading because Kirkman is good at stacking one crisis on top of another and moving events along. That ability makes the book never boring, and characters change in permanent ways. Heck of a lot better than many prose novel series I've seen in recent years. Recommended.

Review: The Time-Crunched Cyclist

 With a power meter handy in on my bike I decided to once again try to read a book about serious training to see if I could motivate myself to get stronger for this summers' tour. The Time Crunched Cyclist came up with a web search, and well, with 2 kids, a job, I figured I might qualify under that rubric. For grins, I also checked out the latest edition of The Cyclist's Training Bible (touted as 100% completely rewritten) to compare.

The theory behind The Time Crunched Cyclist is straight forward. Rather than spend hours and hours on your bike building "base miles", the idea is that you will orient your workouts around higher intensity rides. These rides will feature various mini workouts such as power intervals or steady endurance, or climbing intervals, and the total stress on your body will be sufficient to build fitness. The book comes with a warning that it's a challenging program and you would start racing 8 weeks into the program and be able to hold on to your fitness for about 4 weeks after that. Interestingly, reading this book alongside with The Cyclist's Training Bible was a good idea because the other book explains how it works: the idea is that there's a model of your body's response to exercise: training stress score. A cyclist is supposed to get a certain about of training stress in order to build fitness. You can get the same stress from either a long ride with easy miles or a short ride with high intensity. The model gets you to the same place either way.

The huge difference between the two books is that The Cyclist's Training Bible is all about how to build and optimize your ideal training program. The Time Crunched Cyclist is far easier to use because it dispenses with that and just gives you a pre-cooked program and just tells you to follow it for 8-12 weeks. That way you don't have to think about it. There's even a special program for cyclists who bike to work! By contrast The Cyclist's Training Bible warns you against doing bike commuting --- if you're going to race you have to be serious about it and not ride with friends or do anything silly like that.

OK, the problem with both these books are that they're about how to excel in a one day race. The Time Crunched Cyclist claims to prepare you for a 24 hour MTB race or a grand fondo, but even their special "endurance block" training program never has you riding more than 3 hard days in a row. I looked in the index in The Cyclist's Training Bible for stage race, and found the following:

Preparing for an A event that is a stage race requires a different approach to training. With only a few exceptions, the typical stage races for amateurs last three or four days and include three to five stages. There are a few weeklong stage races, but they are rare... The three primary challenges of such races are being physically and mentally prepared for back-to-back races, managing energy expenditure in daily races, and recovering between stages... I need to warn you, however, that such training is quite risky, especialy for the rider who is not capable of managing high levels of such accumulated stress. It flirts with overtraining. The most vulnerable are novices, juniors, and seniors...For most riders, it's probably best to do no more than 4 consecutive days of such training before taking a much needed break... I call this method of closely spaced workouts over several days "crash training." That name is intended to imply a risk. You're likely to crash and burn by doing this. By that, I mean that all sorts of bad things are likely to happen, including overtraining. (pg 132-133)

So there you go. Not recommended by professionals. Good thing I don't care and generally enjoy myself on multi-day tours lasting 3 weeks.

In any case,  I found The Time Crunched Cyclist easy to use --- in fact, you can program the commuting workouts into your Garmin in very little time. Now performing those workouts are a different story. The power thresholds provided in the book are very narrow. There's a very good chance that while commuting you'll be much more worried about traffic lights, not crashing into errant drivers and pedestrians, and what not rather than staring at the power meter. Definitely something to watch out for. And of course there's no guarantee that the terrain will cooperate! You might find yourself descending just when the workout program calls for a power interval! I don't know how people deal with these structured programs. Even worse, on some weeks the program calls for a "rest day" where you're supposed to drive to work. Not an option for those of us who don't have cars!

I guess I just can't follow these programs. I'll just do what I do, which is to bike kids to school, bike to work, and bike everywhere I can, and just forget about optimizing performance. Nevertheless, the book is comprehensive, has a lot of programs that you can pick and choose from, and more importantly never over-promises. They point out at every step the limitations of the program (namely, you're expected to be able to do well in courses that take less than 3 hours to complete, and you won't be able to hold on to your fitness for more than 4 weeks before needing to back off and recover). Very honest and realistic!