Review: Empire of AI

 Empire of AI is about OpenAI, with the inside story about how a couple of years ago over a weekend, Sam Altman got fired by the non-profit board and then got himself brought back. It's got all the juicy details behind that backstory, and describes a high level of corporate politics that I'm glad I've never had to witness first hand, despite having various toxic managers in the course of my long career in Silicon Valley.

The book is also about a lot more, such as the environmental and social costs of the scaling up of modern LLMs. The problem with the author's approach, however, is that she appears to be writing for a non-technical audience, giving you abstract ideas of the environmental costs of serving a gemini query vs a regular google search. I would have rather gotten absolute numbers. There's an entire section on how the human reinforcement folks in 3rd world countries working for scale.ai or one of those analogues suffered from mental health problems. But any skeptical reader would see that the fact that those workers continued working indicated that they didn't actually have any better jobs available, and that the AI sweatshops were actually the best jobs they could find!

Ultimately, I came away with an understanding of how Sam Altman could get so much resources to build massive data centers and consumer 40% of the world's RAM production. But if you had a computer scientist's mind, you'd also realize that the current LLM approach is already hitting their limits --- when you've already added all of reddit and 4chan into your training corpus and is already using video to speech to create more text for your LLM to train on, where's the next order of magnitude of scaling up going to come from? Sooner or later you're going to hit diminishing returns (assuming you haven't already), and I'm guessing that eventually the lawsuits about OpenAI and other companies illegally scraping content they didn't have permission to use will get to the point where those creators would have to be compensated.

Anyway, the book is good reading (but you need to read it with skepticism), and I'm guessing the OpenAI employees are getting paid so much so they will happily put up with a level of toxic politics that I've never encountered.

April 7th: Andratx to Club Del Sol

Waking up early, we ate breakfast in our room, which had a kitchenette so we could make instant noodles and a couple of coffee pods. Mallorca is on the far end of the central European time zone, which meant it would be dark fairly early in the morning, but in exchange it stayed light enough for cycling until 8:00pm.

The bus ride was  uneventful. I’d always assumed that people taking the bus were all going to do the gorgeous coast route, but in fact, the English cyclists who shared the bus with us were planning to use the easier inland route. They were very impressed when they heard that Stephan and Otto were also going to do the coast route.

The coast route to Estellences starts with a 1000’ 5% grade. Joe was worried about his battery lasting the entire day, so he chose to do the first couple of climbs without battery assist. Once past the first climb, the ride develops an undulating character, swooping up and down the contours of the terrain, granting beautiful views of the mediterranean that rival California’s highway 1. What made it better, of course, was that first, the road was in exceedingly good condition, amost perfectly smooth, as though repaved only in the past year or so. Mallorcan drivers are also far more polite than their California counterparts.

We stopped for coffee early on, and ate Empanadas and had coffee to fight jet-lag. After that we rode to Esporles and then towards Deia, where a supermarket lunch was the order of the day. At this point, the group was broken up—Xiaoqin, Joe, myself, and Mark Brody in the forward group, with Arturo providing support for Stephan and Otto on the backend.

Past Deia, the road does one final climb before descending to Soller where rather than ride Puig Major we would ride Col Soller, itself a 1600’ climb from almost sea level. What sucks about Soller is that the road pavement is terrible, and up until the auto-only tunnel, cars and bicycles share the same road. At the tunnel entrance, however, bicycles get to ride the old road rather than the tunnel. While this adds 1000’ of climbing, in the mid afternoon the shadows were long enough to provide ample shade, and there’s a café at the top that wasn’t there the last time I rode by 7 years ago.

I was feeling bloated and mildly nauseated from having eaten so much over the day, so all I did was order a lemonade to share with Xiaoqin. Mark came by, and then we all elected to ride together the rest of the way. Mark had routed us through Bunyola, where we did decide to give the Orient valley a pass for lack of time. From there, it was not 10 miles of riding before we hit the bike path we saw 2 days ago. Since I now knew all the short cuts I took over navigation duties. I even had enough energy for a finishing spring kick.

We made it back to Club del Sol just in time to take a shower before dinner with the kids., who had gone for a ride with Adria Bauza, a guide highly recommended by Brad Silverberg. Ironically, the kids had ridden the Orient Valley via ar shuttle (which had newly paved roads) , and they would be the only ones to ride the Orient valley on the trip. Bowen even had a flat which highlighted that his front tire had worn out. Good thing we had a spare tire with us!

Arturo, Stephan and Otto would make it right after dark, giving themselves 15 minutes to load up their plates for dinner. That night, Arturo's call for an after dinner walk got no takers.

The kids had had a great time with Adria, and they considered the ride with him one of the two best rides on the trip.

April 6th: Cap Formentor

The last time I’d gotten to Mallorca, I’d ridden every road I could, but at the last minute Linus Gerdemann had informed me that I had neglected to include Cap Formentor. This time, I was determined to rectify that oversight. Rosie would join us today so Stephan and Otto had a chance to rest up in preparation for Tuesday’s cross island tour.

We rode North from the hotel, through the beach area of Port Pollenca before finding the main road to the Formentor lighthouse. Stephan had ridden this route earlier, and said that he’d never seen so many road cyclists on one road. Indeed, even though the hour wasn’t late there were cyclists in both directions (the route was an out and back).

After the first climb, the road descends almost all the way down to sea level before winding away around the Peninsula. As we started the second climb, Bowen rode up and said, “My shifter doesn’t work.” One look and it was obvious that his shift cable was a goner, along with the barrel adjuster on his downtube. Arturo happened along, which was fortunate. He ripped the cable away from the stop and make-shifted a knot. The chain settled onto 4^th gear, which would let Bowen finish the ride albeit without the ability to shift.

To Bowen’s credit, he refused to let this obstacle stop him. He kept going on a single speed, demonstrating that even if he kept professing that he didn’t like riding, once he got started he had the will to finish. The ride passed through a tunnel, and then a final descent before a short climb to the lighthouse itself. The final approach had turned into a parking lot—there’s no metering for parking at the lighthouse, and despite it being a Monday the parking lot was already full and cars were now jammed up along the road, with many drivers making the ill advised decision to do a 3 point turn on a single road adding chaos to the clutter. While everyone agreed that the ride was gorgeous, we all agreed that the traffic was the least favorite thing about the ride.

I started descending from the lighthouse but then I heard Mark shout “Piaw, wait up!” A cyclist caught up to me and asked me if I had an 11s quick link. Normally I would have an extra quick link, but because Formentor was so short, I had swapped out my normal saddlebag for my extra small saddlebag which did not have any spare quick links! I was flattered that everyone thought that I was the kind of person who would have such spares and normally I did, but not today! I would remember much later that I actually did have a spare quick link in Xiaoqin’s saddlebag but she’d already gone on ahead!

The return felt far easier than the outbound leg of the journey. Part of it was that Xiaoqin was going to pace Bowen while I paced Boen. Boen had elected to bring his single bike on this trip and he was making the most of it, attacking each climb with vim and working for all he was worth, able to stay in any draft on the flat.

At the top, we waited for Bowen before doing the hike and then doing the descent to Pollenca, where we went to find a bike shop that could replace his derailleur cable. It took 2 tries since the first one we tried was about to close for lunch. I had also assembled the crank wrong, leaving too much space on the left crank, and I tried to borrow a Shimano tool to fix it, but the shop mechanic said he’d just fix that as well.

Boen wanted to head back to the hotel to play with Otto, so he rode off with Arturo while Xiaoqin, Bowen and I had lunch while waiting for the bikes to get fixed. Just as we had finished eating, the bikes were done. The charge—15 Euros including the replacement cable.

We rode back with no incident. To my delight, the buffet dinner was different every night and would remain so every day of the trip. Joe had arrived and picked up his rental bike. We had to get up and leave at 7:00am the next day for the shuttle to Andratx for the ride across the island. We discussed various options. Mark suggested that we leave out the Orient valley to save about 1000’ of climbing, and that appealed to most people.

Review: Exit Interview

 Exit Interview is Kristi Coulter's memoir of her 10 years at Amazon. The title of the Chinese translation of this book translates back into English as "I spent 10 years at Amazon and needed alcohol and a psycho-therapist." Clearly, the Chinese translation could save you a ton of time reading!

In all seriousness, the book traces her abandonment of a quiet Michigan career in a company where not much was happening, through her interview loop at Amazon, which led to her being the senior manager of the merchandising team. In 10 years, she'd managed to go from that to managing the Amazon Crossings (translation) imprint, to being part of the management training program to running the ill-fated Amazon Go's writing team.

The book has several themes, one is that the internal corporate culture of Amazon is just as dysfunctional (or functional) as any other tech corporation on the planet, but if you're coming from outside tech it feels like an alien culture, especially to someone who basically went to school in the humanities. The second, of course, is being a woman at Amazon is difficult. How difficult compared to other tech companies? You couldn't tell, because Amazon was the only tech company she ever worked for so she had no frame of reference. For instance, at one point she talked to her manager about getting a promotion to Director. His response, "When you change the world, you'll get a promotion." She took it as a denial or lack of support. In the unlikely event that a man would come to me for advice, I'd tell him to switch jobs. But of course, a job switch at that point would have cost her multiple millions in valuable stock, so she stuck around. That's the kind of career trade-off anyone at FANG has to do continuously, so it came off as unsurprising.

There's also a sense of total hostility towards Amazon whenever she has to meet or talk to people outside Amazon. For instance, in the publishing industry, Amazon is treated as the outsider who wants to eat everyone else's lunch. Her internal dialogue is, "We're just this tiny experimental outfit inside Amazon that can get shut down any time now, why are you treating us as a behemoth?" This strikes me as a little disingenuous, since Amazon clearly had a larger market cap than any single publisher and also owns the biggest bookstore on the planet:

Amazon Crossing recently became the world’s largest publisher of literature in translation. If you think that must mean we published hundreds of translated books, ha-ha, no. Fewer than 3 percent of books in English are translations from other languages, so we became the industry leader with a list of just twenty-nine. Naturally, people are mad about it. (page 208)

When I talk to tech people they always "forget to count that low." Many are always surprised that all it takes is to sell 10,000 copies of a book in a month to show up on the New York Times best seller list. 

Finally, the narrative has lots of gaps. There's no description of any single event that drove her to alcoholism. That's probably because she's beholden to an NDA or maybe even a non-disparagement agreement. But of course, there's no explanation. You have to treat this as "creative non-fiction" (which is a genre all in itself)

In any case, I enjoyed the book --- the author's voice is fun to read, but I can't help but take it all with a large dose of skepticism.

2026 Mallorca Trip Report

From April 4^th to April 12^th, I took my family to Mallorca for a fixed based cycling-oriented vacation. Joining us was the crew from last summer’s bike trip—Arturo, Mark, Stephan and Otto Ellner, who were also joined by the rest of the family, Rosie and Benjamin. At the last-minute, Joe Chung, who went to college with me decided to come, though a few later than the others.

Bowen's bike suffered a broken derailleur cable and a flat tire that was worn out and replaced during the trip. Joe Chung's rental suffered from an unreproducible intermittent failure in the power delivery. Because it was a fixed based tour, everyone did varying amounts of riding, but I got in 296 miles and 24,300' of climbing in 6 days.

This post contains all links to videos, photo albums, and the day by day trip report.

Videos

• Santa Magdalena
• Cap Formentor
• Port Andratx to Club del Sol
• Col de la Feminia
• Sa Calobra from Lluc
• Early Morning Cap Formentor

Trip Report

• April 3-4: Prologue
• April 5: Santa Magdalena
• April 6: Cap Formentor
• April 7: Port Andratx to Club del Sol
• April 8: Ermita de la Victoria
• April 9: Col de la Feminia
• April 10: Sa Calobra from Lluc
• April 11: Cap Formentor (again), and Cami de Boquer
• April 12-13: Epilogue
• Mallorca Recommendations

Equipment Reviews

• Ritchey Logic Wheels
• COROS HRM
• Airfly Headphone Adapter

Review: Lies My Teacher Told Me

 Lies My Teacher Told Me is about the way history is taught in American classrooms. In many ways it's also about the ways history is not taught in those same classrooms. In particular, the textbooks used in history classes come in for particularly (and well deserved) sharp criticism:

In 2005, for example, the Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.” Twenty-seven percent of Democrats also agreed. Such responses can only come from people who have neither had a conversation with a poor person nor imagined their economic and social reality—yet somehow imagine they know enough to hold an opinion. Educated people are more likely to venture such ill-informed opinions.24 Education does not have this impact in other areas of study. People who have taken more mathematics courses are more proficient at math than those who have not. (kindle loc 7496)

 The book starts with a provocative question: what was Helen Keller famous for, other than being blind and deaf but managed to teach herself how to read and write? I found myself unable to answer that question, and in fact, history books deliberately left out her achievements --- she was a socialist activist! Similarly, President Woodrow Wilson was an extremist socialist who re-introduced segregation to the White House, but that fact is never mentioned in the history books, where he was treated as a hero for attempting to start the league of nations.

The book then goes on to eviscerate various typical American founding myths, such as the idea the Christopher Columbus was uniquely smart to believe that the world was round --- that fact was in fact common knowledge. The book points out:

Columbus is not a hero in Mexico, even though Mexico is much more Spanish in culture than the United States and might be expected to take pride in this hero of Spanish history. Why not? Because Mexico is also much more Indian than the United States, and Mexicans perceive Columbus as white and European. “No sensible Indian person,” wrote George P. Horse Capture, “can celebrate the arrival of Columbus.”90 Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history. (kindle loc 1691)

This telling of history as the heroification of famous Americans, the author points out doesn't do justice to the heroes or to Americans. By not showing that Abraham Lincoln struggled with racism himself, there's also no appreciation that he did work hard (and ultimately sacrificed himself) to eliminate slavery. 

In 1863 Lincoln desegregated the White House staff, which initiated a desegregation of the federal government that lasted until Woodrow Wilson. Lincoln opened the White House to black callers, notably Frederick Douglass. He also continued to wrestle with his own racism, asking aides to investigate the feasibility of deporting (euphemistically termed colonizing) African Americans to Africa or Latin America...Saving the Union had never been Lincoln’s sole concern, as shown by his 1860 rejection of the eleventh-hour Crittenden Compromise, a constitutional amendment intended to preserve the Union by preserving slavery forever.32 Not one author explains the political context or the intended audience for the Greeley letter. Nor does a single textbook quote Lincoln’s encouragement that same summer to Unitarian ministers to “go home and try to bring the people to your views,” because “we shall need all the antislavery feeling in the country, and more.” If they did, students would understand that Lincoln’s response to the issue of slavery in America was hardly indifference. (kindle loc 4096-4121)

The book covers many more topics in great detail, including the nadir of anti-black racism, and how many history books written during that period could not make sense of the anti-slavery movement, and those templates carry over till today. As a result, we still have large numbers of educated Americans claiming that the civil war was about states rights, or that it was about economics, or continuing to spread the myth that black people actually enjoyed being enslaved and had a good life being slaves!

By pretending that the US had overcome racism and conveniently forgetting about the period between  Woodrow Wilson and the post-civil rights era, the author points out that it also glosses over what the country's greatest achievements were:

 Antiracism is one of America’s great gifts to the world. Its relevance extends far beyond race relations. Antiracism led to “a new birth of freedom” after the Civil War, and not only for African Americans. Twice, once in each century, the movement for black rights triggered the movement for women’s rights. Twice it reinvigorated our democratic spirit, which had been atrophying. Throughout the world, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, movements of oppressed people continue to use tactics and words borrowed from our abolitionist and civil rights movements. The clandestine early meetings of anticommunists in East Germany were marked by singing “We Shall Overcome.” Iranians used nonviolent methods borrowed from Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr., to overthrow their hated shah. On Ho Chi Minh’s desk in Hanoi on the day he died lay a biography of John Brown. Among the heroes whose ideas inspired the students in Tiananmen Square and whose words spilled from their lips was Abraham Lincoln.81 Yet we in America, whose antiracist idealists are admired around the globe, seem to have lost these men and women as heroes. Our textbooks need to present them in such a way that we might again value our own idealism. (kindle loc 4457)

I learned lots and lots in this book, highlighting passage after passage. I smile every time Professor Loewen proudly proclaims that teenagers write to him about using this book to heckle their history teachers from the back of the class. I will say that I learned more about American history from this book than from an entire semester at Berkeley taking an American history class to fulfill a social studies requirement.

Highly recommended. 

April 5: Santa Magdelena

To my surprise I actually slept a bit (just as I had slept a bit on the plane as well) and woke up only at 4:30am. By 5:30am, Boen was up and bouncing, so rather than have him annoy everyone else I took him downstairs to the lobby and asked if we could start assembling the bikes. The night receptionist felt sorry for me and told me that I could assemble the bikes indoors as it was cold, but that if anyone started trying to use the lobby, I had to give them room. I happily assented.

First to come together was Xiaoqin’s bike, because that was where all the tools were—her bike was by far the lightest, so her bike box had the capacity to store tools, an extra chain, and lubricant. After that, I assembled my bike, followed by Bowen’s, and then Boen’s which was the easiest—since it was too heavy to put into a Trico hard case without exceeding the 23kg weight limit, we opted to use the bike box in the garage left from when we had purchased the Lynskey GR300. Boen’s bike was so small that all we had to do was to remove the pedals, remove the handlebars from the stem, and the rear derailleur, and the front wheel, and everything fit into the box. We did not even have to lower the seatpost or remove it from the frame!

By the time I finished, the breakfast room was open. We parked the bikes at the bike shop and put the empty boxes back into the luggage storage area and ate a breakfast. After all that, a change to bike clothing and we were ready to ride! All this time Arturo and Mark had been texting us about their progress, but they in fact only got to the hotel just as we departed on our ride.

I’d never been in this part of Mallorca before, and had picked out a gentle ride with two out and back climbs. Bowen wanted to skip them but had refused to load the route onto his bike computer, so he ended up doing the first (and prettiest) out and back climb to the start of the Victoriax hike parking lot. The day was gorgeous and the mediterranean looked as blue and beautiful as the Pacific Ocean does in California. Once back in the town of Bonaire, the route took us on what I consider classical Spanish roads—narrow single track roads lined with stone walls with next to no traffic and occasional views of beautiful flower fields. The day was warm but not too hot and the occasional sea-breeze felt refreshing.

Sadly enough, we had to ride through Playa du Muro, the super-touristy resort strip. However, the silver lightning was that this gave Bowen a chance to buy new sunglasses for his ride. We then exited on a main road. Since the prevailing wind was from the West, this meant we were hitting a headwind. The going was tough since the wind was light. The best feature of Mallorca is that there are cyclists everywhere—every day is  like a century ride. No matter where you look and which direction you’re riding, there’s a paceline of cyclists going this way and that.

At one point a group of women passed us and we jumped on the paceline, being disappointed when a couple of kilometers down the road they veered off into another direction. Bowen had fallen off the pace, however, as we skirted around Sa Pablo and we stopped often to let him catch up.

We eventually made it to Santa Magdalena, the start of the second out and back climb. The scenery wasn’t uninspiring, but Xiaoqin decided that since we were there anyway we might as well climb it. Bowen, Boen, Stephan, and Otto waited while we did the 30 minute 3km, 200m climb. It was a very pleasant climb, gentle in grade like in most of Mallorca.

When we got to the top I realized we should have made everyone do the climb as there was a very highly rated cantina on top! Nothing to do but to descend and then find another restaurant. It was already 2:30pm, so the other restaurant we found was already fully booked and refused to seat us! Instead, we found a supermarket and had a supermarket lunch before starting to ride back.

This time, we had a tailwind instead of a headwind and it was very pleasant going. We’d gotten a text from Mark and Arturo that they had abandoned the ride past Playa du Mura, since the headwind had strengthened. Our ride back along a designated bike route was nice, and at one point when the route deviated from the GPS track I had laid down ages ago we decided to just use the bike route. In fact, I turned off route following and used my Edge’s 840 instead, which gave us a short cut to our hotel.

Arriving back at the hotel at 4:30pm, Boen and I took a quick dip into the unheated swimming pool and we decided we had better options than being cold in a hotel pool for the rest of the trip.

Over dinner, we marveled at how the food was better than Miralago’s. Going back to the hotel room, we went to bed early hoping that the jet lag would be kind to us again.

Prologue: April 3-4 San Francisco to Club Del Sol, Port de Pollenca

 
Packing our bikes the day before, we got onto the plane and arrived in Copenhagen before transiting to the Mallorca flight. Unlike other airlines, rather than make us take the bikes to oversized luggage, the airline took the bikes directly at the bag drop and told us it would be checked all the way to Palma. The flight was uneventful despite a late start, and the dreaded EES system while slow, was no big deal as we walked quickly to the passport control and were close to the beginning of the line. They took pictures and fingerprint and stamped our passports.

Arriving at Mallorca, the first thing we saw when we exited our gate was a picture of cyclists riding! That put me in a good mood right away. SAS did a good job on the bikes, which arrived at the same time we did in luggage claim.

As promised, the hotel’s taxi operator met us at the exit to the baggage claim, and led us straight to the shuttle which had a trailer just for our bike boxes. He helped me put all the boxes in the trailer, and we got in and he drove us all the way for 115 Euros.

For this trip, we’d elected to stay at Club Del Sol, which was exactly in between Port Pollenca and Alcudia. You get a 10% discount for booking fairly early, and we’d booked half pensions for the entire week. Stephan and his family had already arrived a few days ago, since they were based out of Germany. In fact, they’d already ridden the Cap Formentor, which was the lighthouse ride I’d missed the last time I was on the island in 2019.

We’d arrived too late to put together the bikes, plus Xiaoqin and Bowen were hungry so they went to dinner at the hotel’s buffet while I checked us in. The hotel’s bike shop was already closed, but we were allowed to store our bike boxes at the hotel’s luggage room. We went to bed, with me dreading the impending jet lag.

Review: Lone Wolf and Cub: The Gateless Barrier

 The Gateless Barrier is book two in the Lone Wolf and Cub series. This volume is just as violent and bloody as the previous book, and the adventures the father and son go through make it quite clear that the protagonist is not a hero. Each story can be independently read like the old style TV episodes, so there's no character development.

In one episode, Ogami Itto is asked to kill a Buddhist priest. He tries to do so and discovers that he can't, yet the priest gives him hints that he first has to understand Buddha nature in order to kill him. The guy actually goes and meditates in the mountains for days in order to understand Buddha nature and successfully assassinates the priest. There's of course a bunch of things wrong with this, especially since Buddhist teachings prohibit killing (many Buddhists are vegetarians). In any case, these stories demonstrate something of Itto's character, but ultimately the effects of all that killing never seems to affect him. In another story, he abandons his son in a cave after an avalanche has buried the entrance in favor of his mission, saying that if fate wills his son will live and he will come back to rescue Daigoro.

Definitely a man with dedication to his mission!

Review: Miracle Children

 Miracle Children is the story of T. M. Landry College Prep, a prep school for black children that became famous on social media to sending children to top Ivy League schools, including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell. It was then later discovered that the entire school was a sham, fabricating transcripts in place of classes, and teaching applicants to lie about their life experiences in order to make a more compelling application.

The book effectively reveals that the "Holistic admissions" process is a scam. There is simply no way for any school to effectively vet that what candidate submit as essays are the truth, nor do they actually care. In fact, these schools do not actually care about academic excellence or actually education:

“Princeton is a rich man’s college,” the university’s president Francis Landey Patton told the faculty when they complained about students’ behavior. “Rich men do not frequently come to college to study.” After Woodrow Wilson replaced Patton in 1902, vowing to raise academic standards, his wife quipped to The New York Evening Post that her husband was trying to destroy “the most agreeable and aristocratic country club in America by transforming it into an institution of learning.” But prep school students knew their success was ensured, regardless of how little they worked; in fact, in the early 1900s, more than half the boys admitted to Harvard and Yale and two-thirds of the boys admitted to Princeton had failed the entrance exams...Harvard capped its number of incoming freshmen, limiting the intake of students who passed the entrance test. Unable to take every academically qualified applicant, Harvard began to weigh non-academic qualities as part of the admissions process. It emphasized the importance of athleticism and good character to help maintain aristocratic, if not meritorious, classes. College interviews and feeder schools were all the more essential as admissions tools, as they helped officials weed out academically gifted but undesirable students. Wilbur Bender, the Harvard dean of admissions in the 1950s, argued for admitting students “with IQs well below others” because they became business executives, governors, and presidents, “our most distinguished and useful graduates.”(kindle loc 1109-1115)

What allowed Mike Landry to get away with all this for years was that Louisiana effectively allows private schools to be outside the jurisdiction of the department of education. This was because of segregation. By putting private schools outside of the jurisdiction of public supervision, these schools could discriminate as much as they liked, allowing parents to keep their white children from being forced to mingle with black children. However, that meant that Mike Landry's abuse of children or effective non-teaching of any kind of curriculum (later on, he focused on recruiting higher performing students rather than teaching the kids who joined at lower grades) could not be punished.

The elite college admissions offices are not setup to actually read applications very carefully:

In cases where the applicant attended a feeder school or one that admissions counselors have visited, the readers rely heavily on notes about those schools. “During my time inside admissions offices,” Selingo wrote, “I quickly discovered that the unit being evaluated was less often the applicant than the applicant’s high school.” Selingo cited a study by an admissions consulting firm that found that of 130,000 applicants to a brand-name college over a decade, just 18 percent of high schools were responsible for 75 percent of applications and 79 percent of acceptances. (kindle loc 2497)

What's even more damning was that after the fraud came out, the Ivy League schools closed ranks and refused to admit that they had done no vetting. They defended their admissions of students who had actively lied on their applications so the whole facade they had created about admitting "deserving" students had fallen apart.

 The Landrys “were selling to the colleges this perfect-package student, and to the parents, they were selling hope.” But colleges were also seeking out up-from-nothing tales, especially among minority candidates, and helping to create the conditions for a place like T.M. Landry to thrive. “The reality is the colleges weren’t interested in merely mortal children,” Stancil said. “They wanted miracle children.” The colleges involved defended the students they had accepted, continuing to support them even after the Times ran accounts of the Landrys’ abuse and fabrications. Wellesley said that the T.M. Landry graduates were “thriving and engaged.” George Washington University was confident that those who had been admitted “have the capability to succeed and graduate.” Harvard, Brown, Yale, and New York University also defended their students (kindle loc 2923)

After you've read this book, you'll wonder why elite schools in the US have the reputation they do. Recent surveys about how Americans are losing faith in the value of a college education start to make sense. 

Review: The Anthropocene Reviewed

 The Anthropocene Reviewed is a book full of random reviews written by John Green. I was, of course, uneasy about reading another piece of non-fiction by him, given my one experience with his non-fiction left me feeling dumber for having read it.

Fortunately, this book avoids all the weaknesses of Everything is Tuberculosis. For one, every essays is relatively short, no more than 3-5 pages, essentially a blog post or short podcast, which is a format that enables any competent writer to hide his lack of knowledge about any topic.

Secondly, since he picks essentially random things to write about, and frequently the title of the topic is only a jumping off point to either a different point that caught Green's attention or for Green to provide some sort of autobiography, the human interest side-stories that would annoy me in a longer piece of work doesn't annoy me here. I will note that in the middle of this book, I had to take a break to read another book as a palette cleanser --- even in this format, I can only cope with unadulterated non-fiction Green for 100 pages or so at a time.

I learned that he settled down in Indianapolis, but that Kurt Vonnegut was also from there. He did note that Vonnegut moved away as soon as he could and never returned:

Indianapolis’s favorite literary son, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Home ownership was all maintenance. There were always window treatments to install and light bulbs to change. The water heater kept breaking. And most of all, there was the lawn. God, I hated mowing the lawn. The lawn and the mini-malls of 86th and Ditch became the two poles of my resentment. I couldn’t wait for Sarah to get a job somewhere else. (kindle loc 2163)

There was one particularly poignant story in which he discusses being on call as a trainee chaplain when he's asked to  serve when a badly burnt little boy of 3 came in. He described the story as one of the contributors to him quitting his career as a chaplain to become a writer, but then he finds out later that the boy survived.

The voice of the book is unaffected, at times sensitive, and at times very contemporary bro-like. Green seems to be an interesting character. I'm afraid to watch his youtube videos or podcasts for fear that I won't like him very much if I see or hear him instead of reading him.

In any case, I had fun reading the book. The star rating (1-5 stars) is kinda used weirdly. I give them book 3.5 stars.

Review: The Elements of Marie Curie

 The Elements of Marie Curie is a biography of the famous two time Nobel prize winner. It's a thorough, event by event description of her life. What's clear to me is that she overcame a lot of obstacles and prejudices to become who she was, but the price was her health. Of course, nobody studying radiation at that time didn't know it was dangerous. In fact, one of the first applications was in medicine, using both X-rays and for radiation therapy.

What I didn't like about the book was the lack of information about how Curie approached the deaths of her lab employees --- by the time they started dying she should have realized that radition was dangerous. We never get any insight in the book about what she thought of it. Similarly, while we see how she crossed paths with many famous scientists, the book is very light on the details of what they discussed.

What Curie did during world war one was well documented in this book, but very little about the second world war. I kept reading in the hopes of getting more out of the book than I eventually did but got to the end with precious little additional insight.

Re-read: The Magician's Land

The Magician's Land is the third and final book of The Magicians trilogy. Following directly from The Magician King, the book starts with Quentin drawn into a heist. The heist, of course, goes horribly wrong, and in the mean time, in Fillory, the earthborn royalty discovers that Fillory is dying.

By the time everything weaves together, we get a reveal from Rupert Chatwin, and Quentin successfully resurrects Alice (I'd forgotten about this from the first read --- and the scene is faithfully replicated in the TV show as well), and discovers the secret to rejuvenating Fillory.

The writing style is just as bad as ever for the series, but for a change the plot doesn't suck, and a large part of the book is actually coherent, being in Rupert Chatwin's voice instead of Lev Grossman's omniscient 3rd party.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit more than the other two. I don't think the series will ever become a classic fantasy series, but it's quirky enough to deserve your time.

Review: The Haywire Heart

 One of my colleagues died in 2024, supposedly during a bike ride. The guy was fit, frequently passing me as though I was standing still, and the family (understandably) didn't disclose many details about what happened other than it was a sudden cardiac event.

I ran across an Outside article about Leonard Zinn getting into trouble because of years of endurance training. This was more fully documented by a book, The Haywire Heart. The book fully acknowledges that there can be no final medical study on whether excessive endurance training will cause you to die or get really poor medical outcomes. That's because you can't do a randomized blinded trial! On the other hand, intuitively we all understand that overdosing on any kind of medicine (and exercise is frequently listed as a medicine) can (and does) kill you.

The book starts with a description of what the heart does, and how both the muscular and electrical systems work. It's amazing how much the heart does, even in  sedentary person:

the heart produces as much energy in a single day as a 100-kg boulder does while falling from a building 383 feet tall (or as much energy as it would take to lift that boulder up to that height). That would leave a big dent in the sidewalk; 15 states in America don’t even have a building tall enough to do this experiment! The mechanical efficiency of the heart is less than 10 percent,9 so the heart will demand over 10 times as much energy (in Calories) as it produces, or in this case, 10 × 115,000 J = 1,150,000 joules in a day, or 1.15 × 106 J × 0.239 cal/J × 10-3 Cal/cal = 275 Calories. In other words, your resting heart requires about one Clif Bar per day in order to keep ticking. (page 43)

 The book has scattered throughout articles about various athletes who've succumbed to over-exercise syndrome. Some of these (including Dave Scott, multiple ironman winner) you might have heard of. The book describes how hard it is for athletes to get appropriate attention and medical care from doctors:

Most doctors don’t know the sensation of being in a road race, criterium, or time trial. They’ve never been in the gutter because of a crosswind, saying to themselves, Ten more pedal strokes, just do it for 10 more pedal strokes. Hold that wheel! Don’t let go! Most doctors don’t know the effort it takes to bridge across to a breakaway. When normal people feel the sensation that a curtain is closing in on their peripheral vision, they turn the tension down on the exercise bike or reduce the speed of the treadmill. They pull the plug on the pain. They are normal. Competitive athletes are not....at a European heart meeting where a doctor presented a case including an ECG that showed a heart rate of 32 beats per minute. The presenter withheld the fact that the ECG belonged to an athlete. He then asked the audience which treatment they would recommend. The audience response system, an automated way to ask the audience questions and compile the most common answers, revealed that a significant number of attendees recommended a pacemaker. Before the first presenter could clarify things, a fiery senior presenter stepped to the microphone and chastised the audience. He was visibly angry. He used the example of five-time Tour de France champion Miguel Indurain, who famously boasted a resting heart rate of 28 bpm. (page 144, 146)

 The book acknowledges the complete lack of data and studies. For instance:

research paper from Denmark garnered significant attention in the lay press because it boldly concluded there was a U-shaped association of running and death rate.62 That is, light and moderate joggers had lower death rates than sedentary controls, but strenuous joggers had death rates similar to the sedentary controls. This paper, with its common-sense conclusions, suffered from a severe statistical problem: The group of vigorous runners included only 36 of more than 1,000 runners in the study. Although the authors reported that vigorous runners had nearly twofold higher death rates, the confidential intervals were wide, ranging from a 50 percent lower death rate all the way up to an eightfold higher death rate. You simply cannot draw any conclusions from this sort of data. (page 111)

What's interesting is that the book doesn't recommend running out and getting tested immediately! That's because there's a huge risk of over-treatment! The book has a horror story in which someone got an MRI and that turned into a series of tests culminating in a completely unnecessary procedure that did permanent damage to that person's heart!

OK. What are you supposed to do? Well, you're supposed to listen to your body. By the way, that's a dangerous advice when you're reading this book, because after reading all these horror stories I found myself more sensitive than usual and can easily believe that I would hallucinate issues even when there were none. I'm very grateful now that my Garmin connect frequently tells me that I'm too lazy to have sufficient "high aerobic" or "anaerobic" workouts! (On the other hand, my 23andMe results once told me I hada high chance of Atrial Fibrillation)

In any case, the book recommends a few supplements that haven't been shown to do any harm (CoQ10, magnesium). They also recommend backing off a bit on the ultra-high-intensity events and intervals that people who are training for hard races do. I think that probably makes sense --- I observed that last year's tour was particularly easy, and I ended the tour stronger than at the start because I was resting so much. That's probably a much healthier tour than a full on, push yourself to the limit every day day after day!

The book's worth reading, and then giving yourself some time off to avoid being a hypochondriac before taking its advice to heart. Fortunately, most people are unlikely to ever push themselves to hard for whom exercise overdose is even a potential problem.