I'm a husband, father, author, cyclist, sailor, travel addict, and Silicon Valley software engineer. I've written 4 books and actively review books on this blog.
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7.5 Lessons about Your Brain is a delightfully short collection of essays about the human brain. Each essay is short enough to read in about 15-20 minutes, but they build on each other, so you're best off reading them in order.
The main point of the book is that your brain's job isn't actually thinking. (That's why thinking is so hard!) It's primary job is to manage resources, and in order to do so it has to be able to predict the future. The essays cover how memory works (nothing's actually stored, more like experiences are recreated), how infants learn, and how the human brain's ability to do abstraction can allows the construction of social reality.
What's interesting is that unlike many others, the author believes that you do have choices and free will, but doesn't specify how and why. There's a great section about how the old myths about the reptile brain and the neo-cortex is wrong, and that:
"Sometimes we're responsible for things not because they're our fault, but because we're the only ones who can change them." (Page 81).
It's rare to read a book so well written that a few short pages can cover so much. Recommended!
Moral Ambition is Ruger Bregman's book trying to convince people to stop taking high paying but soul sucking jobs in favor of jobs that matter. I enjoyed Utopia for Realists so I picked it up.
The book starts with the story of Thomas Clarkson, who while doing research in college about the ethics of owning slaves came to the conclusion that slavery was such a scourge that he could do nothing but devote his life to abolishing it. He eventually linked up with the Quakers and obviously the movement was successful in getting the British Empire to stop the slave trade.
The book then goes through other case studies indicating that while most people have a strong moral sense, many people require someone to ask them to do the right thing instead of doing nothing by default. This need for activation leads to clusters of people doing the right thing, but a small well organized group can be much more effective if they're willing to work very hard.
That sounds very much like a startup, so Bregman introduces us to a school in London that incubates and trains non profit entrepreneurs. We see various examples like how Bill Gates essentially funded the malaria vaccine, while a single entrepreneur singlehandedly funded the distribution of several million mosquito nets.
My critique of the book is my usual critiques of do-gooders. The biggest lever you can have is to win the government of the superpower in the world. Unfortunately, it looks a lot as though progressives keep failing to do that, and many of the gains they hope to achieve may actually be rolled back as a result of not focusing on such gains.
Bergman is not naive. He notes that many groups that are fanatically devoted to a cause may not even have sufficient introspection to realize that their cause is not a good one. Another problem for many progressive institutions is the demand for moral purity and refusal to compromise, which essentially means that they're very hard to work with and tend to get nothing done since the purity contests prevent effectiveness.
The book is short and a fast read. I'm not sure I agree with all of it but it deserves a reading. Maybe it'll inspire you to take up an important cause.
The Goal has "required reading for Amazon employees" all over the cover, and was assigned reading for work. It's basically a business process book written in the form of a novel, which I find strange and quite distracting, but since I was getting paid to read it I plowed through and read it anyway.
The POV character is a plant manager for a manufacturer of widgets (it's never even discussed what the widgets are, what they do, and who the customers are --- it's quite clear that this is a business book for managers who should be able to manage anything and don't care about the technical details). The plant is in trouble, always late for delivering goods for customers, and is in danger of being shut down.
The POV character recalls a physics instructor who's become a big name business consultant, and calls him for help. The consultant then guides the POV character through what's obviously Toyota's JIT manufacturing system, identifying the bottlenecks in the production process and then re-orienting the plant in favor of maximizing throughput on the bottlenecks regardless of other artificial metrics such as efficiency on non-bottlenecked machines and processes. Various problems are overcome, some of which are buffering the bottlenecked processes, reducing batch sizes, and thereby reducing latency from order to delivery, which then enables more sales to be made.
Then the author takes everything one more level up in abstraction and designates a process for this type of analysis: (1) identify the goal (2) identify the bottlenecks (3) re-orient everything around the bottlenecks (4) increase capacity around the bottlenecks (5) re-evaluate.
In between all this, the POV character has to overcome his wife leaving him because he spends so much time at work, and goes through epiphany after epiphany over how his egghead acquaintance who's a management consult is so useful.
Maybe the kind of people who don't read real novels but love lean manufacturing think this is a great book. Me, I think the book could have been much better if it had been a history of Toyota's development of the lean manufacturing (JIT) system.
I recently watched the movie adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with Xiaoqin, and I thought it to be a very compelling movie which followed the book quite closely. I'd picked up the entire trilogy while it was on sale, so it was time to re-read it to see what it was like.
To begin with, it's clear that Stieg Larsson an avid reader. Lots of books get mentioned as part of the casual description of scenes in the novel, and some of them are even English novels. The movie and the book match nearly exactly, with the movie able to make the mystery of the swap between Cecilia Vanger and Anita Vanger much more of a visual clue than the book was. The final search for Harriet Vanger was much more described in the book than in the movie, which treated it as an off-camera coda than the book did.
What books manage to do better than movies is to let you get into the heads of the characters, and here Larsson does a great job of depicting Liz Salander's thought processes as well as Blomkvist's. What I really enjoyed is that Blomkvist is a male protagonist who's explicitly not a sexist asshole, unlike many of the male characters in the book.
This book deserved to be a best-seller for its time. It still withstands a reread and I will go on to read the rest of the series or maybe even watch the movies, given how closely the movies followed this first book.
The Nvidia Way is another book about Jensen Huang and Nvidia. It was recommended to me after I read The Thinking Machine, and I found it a much better book. Rather than trying to be a biography of Jensen Huang, this book focused more on his management style and how Nvidia is run.
The interesting thing about a very flat structure is that the CEO has to work very hard. To the point where he would be responding to emails all weekend every weekend. Of course, one side effect of this was that his staff would wait to send status reports on Sunday night so that when his responses came it'd be during the work week so they could do it on work time rather than personal time.
The other comment that kept coming up all through the text were employees commenting on how free of politics NVidia was. The key point here was that NVidia would reassign employees on the basis of priority rather than allow managers to maintain fiefdoms. This effectively made all the managers learn to work with each other and cooperate rather than pick political fights.
Another key point is the lack of planning:
he would get rid of the practice of long-term strategic planning, which would force the company to stick to a particular path even if there were reasons to deviate from it. “Strategy is not words. Strategy is action,” he said. “We don’t do a periodic planning system. The reason for that is because the world is a living, breathing thing. We just plan continuously. There’s no five-year plan.” (kindle loc 2650)
Of course they have plans. No chip manufacturer (even one that does outsourcing) have to have plans, but the willingness to adapt and change those plans within a quarter is key. Another key point that comes across is that NVidia had no magic tricks or short cuts. 60 hour weeks were the norm and people regularly put in 80 hour weeks. That's demanding and probably the culture selects out people who aren't willing to put in that level of commitment.
I particularly enjoyed the way Icahn described how executives get selected for incompetence:
Icahn observed that competent executives often get sidelined in favor of more likeable but less capable ones because of behavioral incentives inside companies. The personalities who ascend the corporate ranks resemble college fraternity presidents. They become friendly with the board of directors and are not threatening to the current CEO. They’re not prodigies, but they’re affable, always available for a drink when you are feeling down. As Icahn put it, these figures (they are mostly men) are “not the smartest, not the brightest, not the best, but likeable and sort of reliable.” (kindle loc 2804)
To the extent that NVidia avoided promoting that kind of person, it all comes down to Jensen Huang. As far as I can tell from reading this book, however, Huang does not have a designated successor or a grooming program for future CEOs at NVidia. It will be interesting to see how long NVidia can sustain it's advantage going forward, since as the book frequently points out, Huang is the longest running CEO of a major tech company in the business, outlasting Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and many other luminaries.
In any case, I was surprised that I found this book interesting even though I'd just recently finished reading an NVidia book. Recommended.
I somehow got it into my head that we should do a backpacking trip in Yosemite for the upcoming memorial day weekend. I tried to get wilderness permits on Saturday but failed --- everything was snatched up when I hit refresh. But I tried again on Sunday, and saw that there were 6 spots available at Little Yosemite Valley which guaranteed a Half Dome permit, so I grabbed them. What many people don't realize is that a wilderness comes with a guaranteed entry into Yosemite National Park the day before, as well as use of the Backpacker's Campground in the valley proper, so even with a 2 day permit starting on Sunday, we got full access to Yosemite for the entire 3 day weekend.
Hotels in the area were expensive as heck because of memorial day, so we opted to just drive in on Saturday morning. Traffic was free flowing and we made it to Yosemite's Big Oak Flat at 11:00am. We showed the Wilderness Permit and Boen's Every Kid Outdoors Pass, we got into the park for free. I noticed that at least 2 cars in line ahead of us were turned away because of the park's new reservation policy, where reservations were needed to enter the park between 6am and 2pm.
Driving into the park, we still had difficulty parking near the visitor center, but eventually found a spot and walked to get the wilderness permit, where we opted to pay $10/person for the half dome permit. We also paid for the backpacker's campground $8/person. With the money we saved from not staying in the hotel, we bought lunch in Yosemite village. I'd forgotten how mediocre the food was and how slow the service was. That's probably the main reason you should bring your own food.
After lunch, we drove to North Pines campground, where there was a 15 minute parking spot so we could drag all our camping equipment into the backpacker's campground. Since we drove the minivan, we could bring both car camping equipment and backpacking equipment, allowing us comfort for our night in Yosemite Valley. When the tent, sleeping pads and sleeping bags were all setup, we drove out to do the newly renovated Bridal Veil falls trail. The falls are nothing short of stunning with the volume of water so high that we got spray even while far away.
It was a short hike, but for returning to the car instead of doubling back Xiaoqin found some trails that looked promising. We didn't realize that much of the trail was still under water because of the high water level, so we had to do several stream crossings as part of the hike. Returning to the car, we drove to our parking spot next to the Curry Village, where we would leave our van overnight.
We needed to walk to the village for dinner anyway, so we hiked to the lower Yosemite Falls along the way, admiring the beautiful trails and views of both upper and lower falls. Dinner was relatively fast at the Yosemite Falls Lodge's food court, and then we took the bus back to the Curry Village, where we took showers before bed.
Getting up the next morning, I realized I'd left our ham and cheese in the fridge at home, so we had to pay a morning visit to the village store for both breakfast and lunch supplies. The store didn't open until 8:00am, but by the time we'd packed everything up and driven over there it was already 7:30am. The alternate breakfast places were all jammed with people so we just made instant noodles and waited for the store to open.
We drove to the special Happy Isles parking lot reserved for people with wilderness permits. (they don't actually check, as far as I can tell) There we repacked our backpacks and put all food in the bear locker. We filled our water bottles, and then Boen had to poo. He ran off before I was ready, but we were reunited when he was done with the bathroom.
We walked up the same Mist trail we had done last Fall, and the Vernal falls now sounded like a jet engine. We refilled our bottles at the Vernal Falls viewpoint, and then proceeded up the steps where we got thoroughly doused by the spray from the falls. Looking behind us we could see rainbow halos, and we got thoroughly soaked. The price of the baptism was the crowds, where we frequently had to stop because the narrow steps could only allow one party at a time through the critical sections.
Past the top of Vernal Falls, the crowd thinned considerably and we stopped for lunch just prior to the bridge. Unlike the Vernal Falls, the Nevada falls trail doesn't go directly under the falls, but even then, we could still occasionally feel the cooling mist from the falls, which was how big they were.
At the top of the Nevada Falls, at the intersection with the John Muir trail, we met the ranger who issued us the permits the day before! He told us that the trail went up a bit more after that and that at Little Yosemite Valley we'd done half the elevation gain for Half Dome. He was right of course, and we arrived at Little Yosemite Valley around 1pm. We were pretty tired. By the time we pitched the tents, fetched water to refill water bottles, and loaded all the food into the bear canister it was 3:00pm. With nothing better to do, we decided to do half dome on Sunday instead of waiting till Monday morning. Boen resisted but it turned out that he didn't understand that if we did Half Dome today we didn't have to do it tomorrow.
The hike up to Half Dome is 3.5 miles, but it's a challenging 3.5 miles because while the approach itself was a challenging 1000', the final subdome was a series of steps, which combined with the cables would go up another 1000'. And of course we were tired from carrying camping equipment to Little Yosemite Valley. When we got to the sub-dome, Xiaoqin picked up a pair of gloves rather than using her biking gloves. The steps were difficult, but Bowen upon seeing the cables said: "That looks scary!" The views from subdome were gorgeous, where we could see snow-covered peaks all around us.
At the bottom of the cables, Bowen and Boen hesitated, but then decided to commit. Once they were committed they made great speed. Xiaoqin followed, and I brought up the rear. I was surprised by how slippery the granite was --- on previous visits I don't remember my soles ever slipping on the rock, and I had relatively new shoes! I then remembered that it had possibly rained the day before, and also the cables had only come up on Friday, so that explained why there wasn't a pile of gloves at the bottom of the cables. What did make everything easier, however, was that there was next to no traffic on the cables as a result of the new permit-based system.
At the top, it was windy, but the kids found snow and ice! It was already 6:15pm, so we quickly took a few pictures and then went back down. I anticipated the descent to be more scary than the climb, but it was also easier and a lot faster. This was where gloves were useful, as you could do a bunch of mini rappels and that made the descent go a lot faster than in the uphill direction.
Descending the steps were even harder than climbing them, since the eccentric motion at the end of a 9 mile hike felt like an insult to the joints. But we met another hiker going down (he said he did half-dome without a permit), and made it to our campsite before it got so dark that I needed to break out my headlamp.
We made dinner, brushed our teeth, and then went to sleep quickly, exhausted by our efforts.
The next morning, we woke up at 6:00am to the sound of birds singing, made our hot breakfast, packed up our camping equipment and hiked back down to the John Muir trail, opting for the longer but less knee cracking descent to the valley. Even here the effects of being here in Spring made for a different experience than last fall. Not only was the top of Nevada falls much louder and faster, the weeping wall didn't just weep, it rained! We made much slower time than we expected because every corner had something to see.
It being so early the traffic was very light, and there was none of the traffic jams we saw the previous day on the Mist trail. We arrived back at the car by 12:30pm, and then had a 1 hour drive to lunch and another 4 hour drive home because of the increased traffic.
