Review: Broken Stars

 Broken Stars is a collection of contemporary science fiction stories, selected and edited by Ken Liu, who's translated many science fiction authors including "The Three Body Problem." I picked it up because it's far faster for me to read English than for me to read Chinese, and obviously I'm not very in touch with Chinese science fiction (or any other contemporary Chinese fiction for that matter)

A lot of the stories in this volume aren't basically science fiction. They're effectively fantasy exercises (including one where a time traveler travels back in time and reinvents the internet), without the rigor of science fiction that I normally expect from my preferred science fiction authors like Alastair Reynolds. Even someone like Iain M Banks (whose Culture novels are set at such a high tech level as to seem magical) do pay attention to the plausibility of many details.

What you do get out of many of these stories is an appreciation of Chinese history. Lots of events in contemporary and past Chinese history is placed in context and you can see how the authors felt about those events. There's just not any "hard" science fiction or even cyberpunk in this collection.

On reflection maybe I shouldn't be surprised. China's demand for tech talent and work environment that probably a heavy STEM engineer or scientist wouldn't have time to write, so the folks writing science fiction in China come from the literary sector and won't be deeply immersed in the science.

At the back of the book is a couple of essays about the state of science fiction in China. This would be informative, but obviously the book was edited prior to the major scandal about WorldCon in China in 2024, where the voting was rigged. It seems like science fiction in China cannot be separated from the governing environment the country is in.

Review: Genius Makers

 Genius Makers is a biography/chronicle of Geoff Hinton and a number of his students, starting from Hinton's entry into the AI field until the night him and two other students won the Turing award.

The book is well written but spotty, with too many characters towards the end of the book showing up and being given barely enough time for you to fully comprehend what's happening. I thoroughly enjoyed to story about how Geoff Hinton, driven by his wife's dislike of living in the USA when Ronald Reagan was president, ended up at the University of Toronto:

At the height of the revival in neural network research, Hinton left Carnegie Mellon for a professorship at the University of Toronto. A few years after this move, as he struggled to find new funding for his research, he wondered if he had made the right decision. “I should have gone to Berkeley,” he told his wife. “Berkeley?” his wife said. “I would have gone to Berkeley.” “But you said you wouldn’t live in the U.S.” “That’s not the U.S. It’s California.” (kindle loc 751)

I left Google at 2010, which was when Google started gobbling up AI talent (including Hinton and his students) at a rapid pace and integrating it into many areas of the company. Google at that time also left China because the Chinese government hacked Google (true story --- I know the people behind the detection). Despite that, Google still thought it could come back into China after Deep Mind became the #1 go player in the world, with Eric Schmidt giving a patronizing talk about Chinese AI:

 China’s tech giants had already embraced deep learning. Andrew Ng had been building labs at Baidu for years, and, like Google, he was erecting a vast network of specialized machines to feed new experiments. Similar work was brewing at Tencent. In any case, even if it did need Google’s help, China was unwilling to take it. The government, after all, had blacked out the match in Wuzhen. It did not take long for Schmidt to realize just how naïve his message had been. “I knew when I gave the speech that the Chinese were coming. I did not understand at the time how totally effective some of their programs would be,” he says. “I honestly just didn’t understand. I think most Americans wouldn’t understand. I’m not going to misunderstand in the future.” (kindle loc 3109)

What was real obvious to outside observers (i.e., anyone with an ounce of common sense) was that the Chinese government would never let a Western company have any significant market share in the country. That Western companies one after another fell into the trap and did a ton of technology transfers to China for free at their own expense just tells you how short-sighted and badly run most Western companies are.

Another thing that comes through in this book was how one top executive (Andrew Ng, Qin Lu) after another with ties to China actually moved back to China or took top jobs at Chinese companies and helped with that technology transfer. Of course, much of this happened before the current cold war between the USA and China, but it's still pretty amazing to watch.

A lot of people I knew from my Google (or even pre-Google) days show up in this book (e.g., Jeff Dean). The depictions are sort of accurate so I do find most of the book believable. The book was written in 2021, so pre-dated the era when ChatGPT took the world by storm. Nevertheless, for an understanding of the history of neural networks and deep learning, this is a book well worth your time.

Review: Human Compatible

 I took my one and only AI class from Stuart Russell, who wrote Human Compatible. Written in 2019, this book predated OpenAI's ChatGPT and the LLM revolution, but nevertheless anticipated many modern concerns about the rise of AI. It addresses concerns such as the paperclip apocalypse with a critique of current AI approaches to problem solving.

Fundamentally, Russell's critique of the current AI approach is that the systems that are designed have an explicit goal and 100% certainty about their goals. This is appropriate if the AI system is incompetent and sucky, but will lead to bad outcomes if the system is superior in intelligence to humans and can prevent humans from interfering with its goals by turning it off.

The solution, Russell claims, is for the AI system's goals to be to be to assist the human's goals and to infer those goals from the human's statements and behavior. The inherent uncertainty about human goals will force the AI system to ask questions, and allow itself to be turned off if necessary. There's excellent analysis as why this is and why this is rational even in the case of super-intelligence.

The solution is elegant, interesting, and obviously unenforceable --- all it takes is one bad actor with super-intelligence to deviate from this principle and we'll be back at the paperclip apocalypse again. On the other hand, we're probably very far from being able to encode this sort of thinking into an AI system, so obviously this has no direct impact on current research.

Nevertheless, it's a great book that's well written and has an intelligent solution to what's widely perceived as a common problem. Recommended.

Review: Katabasis

 I have to applaud R. F. Kuang's PR team. Within the same week, I got 3 magazines in my mailbox with a profile of her: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Outside Magazine (!!). This was all done in coordination with the launch of her new book, Katabasis.

R. F. Kuang's superpower is skating to where public attention will be. Yellowface, for instance was about cultural misappropriation, and Katabasis is about graduate school (and University as well) as hell, timed to coincide with the decline of public support of elite Universities. Set in Cambridge (keep in mind that Kuang despite having 4 degrees is going for yet another PhD, so she's spent essentially all her life in one school or another), the universe of Katabasis is an alternate world in which magic and the study of it is a defined rigorous subject in academia, and the protagonist, Alice Law, is a graduate student under a demanding supervising professor. When that supervisor dies in a research accident, she decides the only thing to do is to go to hell and retrieve him. The other student Professor Grimes supervises also decides to join her.

This is by far the weakest link in the story. The cost of visiting hell is high (half your remaining life), and while Alice Law might have had sufficient motiviation to recover Grimes (her hatred for him is revealed later in the book), the after-recovery plan stinks and makes no sense. In fact, this aspect of the book smells a bit like an autobiography, complete with R. F. Kuang's in-real-life husband (who does suffer from a similarly dehibilitating condition) playing the role of Peter Murdoch.

The depiction of hell is kinda bland and boring. That's probably because no matter how Kuang tries to depict it, academia isn't actually hellish. Think about it: people willingly give up additional 4-6 years of their lives at low pay for a chance to get a tenure track position. If it was truly hell, you would have to pay more to get less talented people, but many of the brightest people in the world sacrifice so much to live their lives at University, and as one of my academic friends once said, "Being a tenured professor means you get to work on whatever you want which is like being retired already."

As a fantasy novel, I'm not sure Katabasis works. The problem with writers who come from out of genre to write fantasy and science fiction, is that they tend to write magic as a form of deus ex machina. There are no rules, anything goes, and so whatever happens in the novel is whatever the author can think up. This is fine if you're telling a bedtime story to a 3 or 5 year old. In a full length novel, what happens is that the reader feels that the author is unfair and there was no way for you to have seen the ending coming (especially since in this case the ending comes in the form of a gift from a character Alice Law betrayed!).

The way to predict the novel's ending, of course, is through meta-cognition --- you knew that R. F. Kuang married her husband, so the ending must involve Alice Law rescuing Peter Murdoch and them getting to live happily ever after. I guess that's why Kuang's PR team landed all those profiles of her in various magazines --- so you might not come away after reading the book feeling cheated.

Capitola Overnight

• Video from Xiaoqin's GoPro

This year the kids declined to do any biking for Labor Day, and we ended up doing a hike or two instead. But for my birthday, I wanted to revisit Jamison Creek, a road I hadn't climbed for at least 15 years, so I booked a room at the Monarch Cove Inn, laid out a route and then invited Mark Brody to join Xiaoqin and I --- we'd taken the last room at the Inn but he found suitable accomodations in Santa Cruz despite their being a triathlon on that weekend. I'd always wanted to know how the Roadini handled as a credit card load touring bike, so rather than bring my custom Strong frame (which had the Ortlieb mount on it making it a pain to remove for just an overnight trip), I installed the Carradice Bagman on the Roadini and the Carradice Nelson Longflap, which unlike many modern bikepacking bags actually have a light attachment loop mounted. The Roadini had Conti Terraspeed tires on it, but I wasn't going on any challenging off road riding on this strip, so I installed a Michelin Power Cup 28 on the front Ritchey Zeta Wheel, and a leftover nearly worn out Vittoria Corsa NEXT 34mm tire on the rear.

Loading up with myself and Xiaoqin's minimal overnight setup, the ride felt heavier than I expected but on the other hand my overnight setup included a CPAP machine so that was to be expected. Mark Brody missed his train to Mountain View the night before so we couldn't get started until he arrived on the first train the next day, well after 9:00am. Eva would also join us for the climb up highway 9.

Xiaoqin headed up expecting us to catch her, but had forgotten that she was unloaded while both Mark and I were carrying a load. The climb up Highway 9 was easy though with the weekend traffic it could hardly be called enjoyable. At the top, we waited for Eva and then Mark. Mark had suffered from insomnia and did not have a good time up highway 9, so he wouldn't be able to join us on Jamison Creek.

Descending Highway 9 was fine. We were passed by 2-3 groups of cars but they occured at places where we could pull over. Once onto Highway 236 into Big Basin the traffic petered away and we arrived at the intersection with China Grade road having marvelled at how many trees had survived the fire with just charring at the base instead of burning. Mark was lagging, though, which meant that descending China Grade despite its washed out and bumpy ride was better than taking the extra 10 mile loop through Park HQ.

Arriving at the bottom of China grade, I waited for the others. The descent was scary, but if you pretended it was a mountain bike trail it's way easier than most singletrack at any beginner's mountain bike park. You had to be willing to stay off the saddle, however. From there it was only 3 miles to the bottom of Jamison Creek Road but we were out of water and stopped at the Golf Course just before the intersection to refill our water bottles. Once we saw the menu we ordered some food as well --- a salad split with Xiaoqin and myself to avoid overloading stomachs prior to a hard climb, and some Tacos for Mark to get him to Santa Cruz via Branciforte.

Climbing Jamison Creek was a bear and I wasn't looking forward to it given how warm it was. I was pleasantly surprised therefore, to find that it was almost completely shaded. It was still warm and my shirt and shorts were completely soaked by the time I was half way up, but it wasn't the scorcher it could have been. The steep parts near the intersection with Empire Grade road required getting up and standing on the saddle while breathing hard, and I questioned bringing the heavier bike for a few moments but once we got onto Empire Grade road the grade lightened up dramatically.

Empire Grade road is much like Skyline Boulevard, with swoopy curves, rolling hills, but with much fewer vistas than the latter. The traffic, however, was much lighter which made it a lot of fun. Once we descended past UCSC we were in Santa Cruz proper, where the route took us past the boardwalk and over the bridge. From there a road closure forced us off the route into some unplanned unpaved excursions but all was well. The hitch was the final block to the hotel where I'd gotten confused as to the street the hotel was on but two phone calls with the hotel manager solved the problem, and we found the place and were checked in.

After a shower and stretching we got dressed and went to dinner at Mijo's Tacos, followed by a short walk exploring the little cute hotels that looked very European on the beach. Then we went to Gayle's bakery to eat chocolate cake and buy secondary breakfast. (Monarch Cove Inn served breakfast but it would be anemic by cycling standards)

The next morning we got up early enough to see the sunrise over the water from the Inn grounds! On the West Coast you don't expect that but the position of the Inn,, the time of year, and the Monterey Bay all conspired to give us a beautiful view of the sun over the ocean fog. Mark arrived just after we'd had breakfast and were packing. We checked out of the hotel and rode the traditional "apple pie ride" route over to Trout Gulch Road and to Corralitos before starting the climb up Eureka Canyon.

Eureka Canyon is a beautiful and lightly traffic'd climb through the redwoods to Summit Road. While the surface is bump and in many places falling apart, at climbing speeds that doesn't bother the cyclist much. The shade helped a lot and even at the top the sun wasn't bothersome. We had a quick snack at Buzzard Lagoon road and therefore skipped the summit store in favor of beelining to Los Gatos via the Los Gatos Creek trail. We even skipped Aldercroft Heights and the long way around the lake in favor of a dirt trail Xiaoqin had found earlier this. year.

After the ice cream Mark headed off to the San Jose train station while Xiaoqin and I made our way home. It was a great trip at over 100 miles in 2 days with almost 10000' of elevation gain. The Roadini more than proved itself a capable credit card touring machine.

Review: Empire of Pain

 Empire of Pain is the history of the Sackler family. This is the family responsible for the opioid epidemic in the USA, killing lots of Americans and contributing to the recent decline in life expectancy in the country. 

What I didn't realize was that the Sacklers were also responsible for Valium, which was also marketed widely. (Arthur Slacker, the patriarch of the family was one of the first people to market medicines directly to doctors, and pioneered the use of drug company representatives who visit physician offices one at a time over time in order to get the doctors to write more prescriptions for the drug)

This made the family rich, and they used that wealth to start collecting art and getting their names into museums. The family also owned a variety of other firms, one notably called IMS, that tracked where prescriptions were being filled, granting valuable information about which regions of the country are buying which drugs. They also owned a notable medical journal, which also served as placement venues for their ads budget.

This complex web of businesses was a design, and the three Sackler brothers (and their spouses) were in on it. In order to avoid the appearance of improprietary, ownership of the various companies were split, occasionally given to various close friends of the family so that Arthur Sackler wouldn't been seen as serving himself.

When the family bought Purdue Pharmaceuticals, they started with making MS Contin, a slow release morphine pill that could be swallowed. This was as opposed to injected morphine, allowing those in hospice care to go home and self medicate. Of course, morphine has a negative reputation, and doctors would think twice before prescribing it. They would then come up with Oxycontin, which is a similar slow release form of Oxycodone, which apparently is an even more powerful opiate but which doctors didn't associate with addiction because its previous formulations was in very low dose and weak forms.

The book is exhaustive in its documentation about the tenuousness of the entire FDA approval process. Apparently, the FDA official in charge was bribed with a future consulting job at Purdue Pharmaceuticals, and he allowed all sorts of wild claims that were not substantiated in the literature accompanying the drug. At the same time, the company promoted up other non-evidence-based claims that the slow release nature of the pill would mean that the drug was not addictive.

The most frustrating bit about the book, of course, is that there's no happy ending. The Sacklers get away (by hiring very good lawyers) with their wealth intact, while leaving tax payers holding the bag for all the drug rehab centers and loss of lives. The book implies but doesn't provide evidence that the judge handling the bankruptcy case was on the take from the Sacklers --- he retired after he finished handling the case.

The only bright spot in the ending is that one of the activists managed to get the Sackler name removed from many of the donated buildings and wings of various famous places (including the New York Met, Tufts' medical school), and the Sacklers are no longer held in high esteem amongst the society they like to hang out with. There's pretty slim consolation for any who lost loved ones to the opioid epidemic though.

It's a depressing book, but everyone should read it.

Review: Shokz Openswim Pro

 I started doing more swimming again, and once again, swimming isn't like cycling. The scenery doesn't change (and in America, the scenery is particularly awful), and it's pretty much boring to do just lap after lap. Since I'm not a competitive swimmer, I can't even bring myself to push hard and do intervals and try to go faster. (Swimming speed is almost 100% technique --- no amount of thrashing about will speed you up --- you just have to get the perfect stroke in consistently)

I've tried plenty of swimming headphones in the past, and they've all failed. One possibility, however, is Bone Conduction headphones. I found a pair of Shokz Openswim Pros at a sub $100 price on eBay and jumped on it.

Openswim Pros are called Pros because in addition to having onboard storage and waterproofing, they can pair to a bluetooth phone and stream audio as well. At a public swimming pool I'm not going to have my phone next to the pool to stream music, so in retrospect I didn't need the pro.

The nice thing about the headphones is that they work. The sound quality isn't great, but they work both in an out of the water. The worst thing about them is that their in-water and out-of-water sound volumes are completely different. So if you adjust it so that you can hear the music at a decent volume, when your head's in the water you feel like you're getting music blasted at you at high volume. This is of no issue if you're doing the crawl or backstroke. If you're doing the breast stroke, however, this is very annoying.

Another problem with the product is that there's no display and no method for organizing songs. The device will either shuffle all or play them all in order. You have no way of playing an audiobook split into chapters in a reasonable fashion. That's OK. Music in the pool is better anyway, because falling asleep while swimming would be embarrassing.

All in all, I enjoyed the product and use it. It's good.

Review: Arrowsmith

 After admiring Carlos Pacheco's work on Superman, I decided to look for more of his work, and came across Arrowsmith, which comes in two volumes: So Smart In Their Fine Uniforms, and Behind Enemy Lines. Since Pacheco is now dead and the second book ends in a bit of a cliffhanger, you have to be OK with the story probably never getting finished.

The world is a fantasy version of the state of the planet during World War 1, complete with trolls, dragons, and wizards and magic spells substituting for the technology. In this world, history is quite a bit different (there's an appendix in volume one where a writer friend of Kurt Busiek fills in the background behind the world).

The art is the highlight of both volumes. Pacheco's art is gorgeous, and makes you really believe the world exists. The story is a bit of a cliche --- it's the loss of innocence that happened in World War 1 but transplanted into this fantasy milieu. Sure, maybe that's some plot about the trolls being the bridge to the sunlit lands or to the seelie court, but to be honest Busiek breaks no new ground here in the story. As a vehicle for beautiful art though I cannot fault the setting or the way the story takes you through a mythic version of a Europe that might have been, seen from the point of view of an starry eyed American would-be-hero.

The story is short and obviously unfinished, so we never see how the world of Arrowsmith lives up to its potential. But it was very much worth my time checking it out from the library.

Review: TheMagic5 Swimming Googles

 I've been using Cressi tempered glass swimming goggles for years. They work, even though they're heavy, but they do leak on initial entry into water, and I usually spend the first few laps constantly adjusting the googles until they're just right. I saw an add for TheMagic5 goggles, which claim to personalize a pair of goggles for your face such that they won't leak and will fit perfectly. 

I was skeptical, of course. I've used various goggles and they've always leaked. And of course, if I were running the show, I would consider just buying standard googles and then making the same fit guarantee. The ones for whom it didn't work would just return the goggles but the ones for whom the goggle fit would be pleased and would have paid an insane amount for non custom goggles. I tried them anyway.

The goggles take far longer than the website promises to deliver. From ordering to delivery (the scanning process demanded a smartphone app with the camera and it took a couple of tries but in total took about 15 minutes) it was more than 3 weeks. When they showed up, they were unusual, being split where the nose piece is (the nose piece is actually a slot on one side and a hook on the other so you would put the two sides together. The instructions say to just let the goggles find their place on your face and not to over-tighten. The goggles come with anti-fog coating and you're told not to touch the inside of the goggles.

To my surprise, the goggles just fit and did not leak! The weird curvature of the goggles made me think that there was a layer of water at first, but when I flipped over and did a backstroke there was no stinging in the eyes from chlorine. No amount of diving, flipping, or playful thrashing about in the water dislodged the goggles. And the goggles never fogged up either!

I'm forced to recommend these and rescind my cynicism. They work. I use them and think they're great.

Review: AstroCity Metro Book Vol 6

 I never got around to buying/reading the last few AstroCity collections, and it turned out that they're now all available on Hoopa as part of the Metro Book collections, so I checked out the final volume. The framing story is that of a mysterious blue-skinned character known as the Broken Man. It turns out that he's the last of a series of historical supernatural characters that embody music. This gives Busiek a chance to explore the history of Astro City and its previous incarnations.

Unlike the first few AstroCity volumes, which focus on the mundane characters living in AstroCity, this one is truly focused on the superheroes. What I like about the heroes is that these are all really quirky characters. One is literally the figment of his daughter's imagination (unfortunately, I got exposed to the same idea in Kurt Busiek's Creature of the Night). Another is an amulet that confers the power of a bonded animal with the human it's attuned to. This one was fun, because the amulet got bonded with a Corgi puppy. The result was hilarious (imagine a superhero being told how adorable and cute he is after saving the day).

One great mundane story was a follow up to a story told in the first volume of Astro City where a man lost his wife as a result of a time changing battle between heroes and a volume, and as a result his wife never existed. In that story, he was given the choice to forget her and absorb himself into his new timeline or to remember both time lines. In this story, we see the followup consequences of that. It was a great story.

I enjoyed the book. It kinda ends tentatively --- we never see what happens to the Broken Man. I get the impression Busiek abandoned Astro City because his other contracts were more lucrative. It's a unique universe, however, so I hope he comes back to it.

Review: Superman - Camelot Falls

 While browsing Hoopla I saw that Busiek wrote another Superman story called Camelot Falls, so I checked it out as well.

The thesis behind Camelot Falls is that human civilizations move in cycles, with a rise and then a fall. The fall can be resisted, and Superman and the Justice League form one of the forces resisting the fall. An ancient Atlantean sorcerer called Arion insists, however, that the longer the fall is put off the worst it will be, and if Superman insists on going on his current path it would result in the extinction of humanity.

Superman, of course, posits that he has free will, and that he cannot simply not help out and feel good about himself (was there any doubt about this?). He has a fight with Arion and defeats him, but the overall arc of the story ends there --- apparently Busiek stopped working on Superman and nobody ever picked up the unfinished grand plot he left behind, leaving the story very unsatisfying.

There are a few interesting pieces of the story, including one where it is revealed that everyone from the United States government and the Justice League has a plan for stopping Superman on the day he goes rogue from mind control, magic, or just decides to turn against humanity. The intention there is to make you feel how alienated Superman can feel.

In this Superman universe, he's married to Lois Lane and they even have a child. Lana Lang is running LexCorp (another weird one). The art is fantastic (especially the interpretations of Lois Lane and Lana Lang), making me sad that Carlos Pacheco died in 2022.

I can't really recommend this story. It's just not that satisfying and an unfinished storyline. Probably the only reason to read it is to look at Pacheco's art.

Reiew: The Molecule of More

 The Molecule of More is a book length exposition of Dopamine. There's plenty of exposition about Dopamine's role in well known human syndromes such as addiction, but this book managed to explain it in a clear and interesting fashion without boring me, which I thought made it an excellent book to read as a review of what I'd already learned in previous books.

The long and short of the book is that Dopamine is the molecule exuded by your brain when there's a positive prediction error. In other words when something is a lot more pleasant or pleasurable than you expected. This leads you to do more of whatever the action you took until that positive prediction error goes away, which of course is pretty fast in the case of typical substances like food or drink.

When it comes to addictive substances like drugs (alcohol, cocaine, or sometimes even video games), however, this prediction error can turn you into an addict. In those circumstances, what medical practice can do is to try to heighten the pleasure you get from the H&N ("here and now") molecules which your body uses to direct pleasure at what you currently have as opposed to anticipatory pleasure that dopamine provides. Disappointingly enough, the book doesn't go into very much detail about how H&N molecules work.

The book then expands on this principle to describe how certain people who have heightened dopamine receptors can never be unhappy no matter how much they have. This explains why certain driven people keep focusing on achievements no matter what they've achieved, and why Mick Jagger never settled down with a single woman and just kept looking for more.

Some of the book is clearly speculative, for instance, the section speculating on how immigrants tend to have more dopamine receptors. Many of the book's points are told in the form of stories about an individual that feel compelling.

I enjoyed this book and can recommend it.

Review: Batman - Creature of the Night

 After reading Superman - Secret Identity, I discovered that Kurt Busiek wrote the Batman equivalent called Creature of the Night which showed up in 2020. So of course I checked it out of the library via Hoopla and read it.

Just like the other graphic novel, this one is set in a world where DC Comics exist, and everyone knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman. In fact, growing up, Bruce Wainwright loved Batman and made sure everyone knew about it, even calling a family friend Alfred.

When Wainwright's parents are killed, he gets distraught and somehow a Batman appears to help him out. Over the rest of the graphic novel, we get exposition about the nature of this Batman (which is nothing like the conventional Batman comics) and then we deal with how the real world differs from the easy answers of the Batman comics.

The story falls strictly into the fantasy category. There is no explanation for the Batman that makes sense (unlike even in the official DC comics), though there's some bizarre explanation in the narrative that's unsatisfying to me. There's no deep exploration of Bruce's psyche, and there's no long journey where Bruce gets any ephiphanies. That makes this book a weaker work than Secret Identity, but it was worth reading for a unique take on Batman.