Review: The Last Child in The Woods

I really wanted to like The Last Child in The Woods. I grew up in Singapore, in a city where door-to-door inspections have eliminated the Anopheles mosquito. Growing up, we hated visiting Malaysia, where mosquitoes were still prevalent and would make us itch. Our Malaysian cousins had all sorts of bite marks and nasty stuff on their legs, and we had no desire to become like them. My first camping experience as a kid was so unloved by me that I never considered camping again until I was in my twenties. I only became an outdoors person when recreational hiking and commuting cycling brought me into contact with so much natural beauty that I said to myself, "There must be more out there." Once I realized that as an adult I could plan my own trips around what I liked rather than being dictated to like a child, my enjoyment of the outdoors increased a million fold.

The Last Child in The Woods is about nature-deficit disorder. It's an entirely made up syndrome, and the author admits as much. After all, lots of children (especially those from Asia) grow up without any appreciable contact with nature (much like myself), but when given the opportunity as adults, do learn to enjoy the outdoors. The author cites many studies that demonstrate the calming effect of nature exposure to children with varying disorders (such as ADD), but then extrapolates that to include healthy, normal children. This is questionable and there's not a shred of evidence in the book to lead to that conclusion!

Then I ran across this passage:

One might argue that a computer, with its near-infinite coding possibilities, is history’s deepest box of loose parts. But binary code, made of two parts—1 and 0—has its limits. Nature, which excites all the senses, remains the richest source of loose parts. (Kindle Loc: 1261-63)

I don't know if Richard Louv could have destroyed his credibility or demonstrated his ignorance more.

This is a pity, as I agree with much of his complaints about American society and its approach to play and nature. For instance:

Typical Americans spend 101 minutes in their car daily, five times the amount of time they spend exercising. They also take fewer vacation days and work harder than the Japanese or Europeans. (Kindle Loc 1705-6)

I deplore the disappearance of see-saws from American playgrounds because of liability lawsuits. I definitely think that most American cities have little character and definitely aren't as livable as the European cities I've visited. I certainly agree with many of his prescriptions for building a more liveable, green, and environmentally friendly city, where kids get to build tree houses, and children falling out of those said tree houses and breaking body parts wouldn't cause multiple lawsuits and a media frenzy.

The reality, however, is that parents, if they truly cared about the issue, have a lot of control over what trips they take their kids on, and how they portray recreation with their children. For instance, I visited the Montebello OSP Backpack Camp expecting Bowen to be the youngest kid there. He was instead the oldest, with several 1-year olds who were ferried into the campground by dads on Mountain Bikes. I certainly do my best to take Bowen on trips where driving isn't the primary mode of transport as much as possible. There's tons of evidence that building aerobic capacity also improves intelligence and performance in school activities, so this sort of thing isn't even contradictory to being a tiger parent, if that's what you're after.

But Richard Louv chooses instead to wring his hands over declining membership in the Sierra Club, and the graying of hairs and reduction of outdoors activities in the Boy/Girl Scout organizations. The Sierra Club, especially the Loma Prieta Chapter here in Silicon Valley, is famous for fighting against Mountain Bike access to trails, so it's not a surprise that the later, more cycling-friendly generation of outdoors people no longer consider them a friend, but find other ways to express their environmentalism and love of the outdoors. And the less said about the Boy Scout organization's reputation, the better.

All in all, I'm very disappointed in the book. If you're an outdoorsy dad trying to convince your wife that all this hiking/camping/cycling/sailing is good for your kids, the evidence in this book is thin and unconvincing even to me, let alone your wife. If you're looking for help in advocating for more greenery in urban spaces, the book undermines its own credibility in enough places that I'd be leery of citing it if I were faced with determined opposition. I hope the outdoors advocacy literature has people who have more coherent arguments than Richard Louv. But in the end, maybe it doesn't matter: the last time Bowen took friends with him camping, they all became fans of camping, so he's not going to be the last child in the woods.

Review: Belkin Conserve Socket

It's rare that personal electronics pay for themselves, but the Belkin Conserve Socket is one of the rare ones. Basically, it's a timer attached to a power socket. You set it for 1/2 hour, 3 hours, or 6 hours, and when you push the button, it activates the power for that amount of time, and drops to 0 current after the time's up. There's also a power strip set up similarly.

The socket's spec'd for 15 amps, but in practice, you can't really max it out or it will burn out and fail. I had one attached to my desktop and the accessory monitors, and after running it for several months it failed (Belkin replaced it under warranty). Conversely, the one attached to the entertainment system's still going strong after several years.

If you do the math and monitor energy with a Kill-A-Watt, what you'll discover is that in typical usage, one of these will pay for themselves in a year at $9.99. That's pretty good, both for the environment and for your wallet.

Recommended.

Why it now makes sense to build your own PC

I've always been tempted to build my own PC. I'm no stranger to the tools, since my internship at Geoworks effectively required me to take apart and put together the machine I was given at work. But until recently it made no sense. Machines were increasing in performance significantly, so every 2-3 years it made sense to get a new machine. When you're getting new machines that frequently, it doesn't make sense to build your own, since the beige box vendors can get you much lower prices, and the cost of your time to swap motherboards, CPU sockets, etc., in and out would swamp the ability to bring over your hard drives, etc. Given Moore's law, every 2-3 years you'd have to buy all new hardware anyway!

I recently took a look to see if it was worth replacing my 5 year old desktop. To my surprise, the answer was "no." Looking at the CPU benchmarks, it looks like a "modern" i7-4770 would clock in at less than twice the performance of my 5 year old i7-920. In the old days, 5 years would have been enough to get at least a quadrupling of performance. Not even getting a doubling in 5 years would have been unthinkable. Part of it is that Intel's no longer getting any competition from AMD. Part of it is because getting up past about 4GHz would overheat a PC, so the easy way out of just merely increasing clock speed is out. Increasing the number of cores have already hit diminishing returns as far as most PC users are concerned (I'm an exception: I regularly process video).

The flip side of this is that the base operating system hasn't been using more hardware resources recently. Windows 8 is actually less resource hungry than Windows 7, which would have been unthinkable in the old days. Thanks to Microsoft's desire to compete in the tablets space with Apple and Google, Windows 8 actually runs decently on a tablet with just 2GB of RAM. This gave me the courage to replace my wife's 4-year old X201 with a Microsoft Surface Pro with half the RAM. My wife didn't even notice the missing RAM, despite running the resource hungry Android Studio, which is enough to spin my desktop PC's fan up.

This has several implications for users and developers:

1. Rather than buy a mid-range machine and planning to replace it every few years, it might be cheaper to build a high end machine and upgrade components. Given that CPUs and motherboards are no longer going to have to be trashed every few years, you might as well get a chassis that supports easy hard drive and SSD replacements/expansions, and GPU upgrades, if you will run GPU-intensive activities.
2. I/O standards do make a big difference, but any PC with a free slot will let you upgrade to USB 3 and other standards, so again, expand-ability might be more important than "planning to throw it away."
3. An adequately high end machine will probably last a good 10 years in this environment (i.e., a i7 4770k wouldn't be obsolete for 10 years), which means that it makes sense to put money into a high quality power supply, since the higher quality power supply would provide cost savings when you plan to run a machine for that long. This is in contrast to the "buy-and-replace" strategy, where spending $20 more on a better power supply wouldn't pay for itself in power savings.
4. This also seems to be applying to laptops, though laptops do benefit from the power efficiency gains of the latest processors, so if battery life matters to you, an upgrade every 4-5 years might make sense. The way most people seem to use laptops (constantly plugged in and never actually used as a mobile device), I think most people should replace laptops every 10 years, getting new batteries every 3-4 years or so, assuming that their device supports it.

I never thought I'd see the day when PCs would be expected to last as long as cars, but then again, I never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft would roll out huge new products and initiatives and everybody would just yawn. But yeah, my next PC is going to be something I build from the case in, and I'd be planning for it to last a good 10 years, something I did not expect when buying my previous desktop. I would have taken a completely different approach otherwise.

Review: The Cove

I don't usually review movies on this blog. First of all, I have my hands full just reviewing books. Secondly, to my mind, most movies can't rise beyond the point of brainless entertainment.

Thus it is that when I'm writing this review of The Cove, I find myself in desperate straits.I want to be able to reach out from behind the screen and grab you, and make you watch this movie, (It's only $1.99 on Amazon Instant Video) but in my desire to do so I don't want to sound too earnest, too rabid, for fear that you'd be scared off.

So let me back off a bit and talk about my relationship with dolphins. I never grew up watching Flipper, nor am I particularly a dolphin fan. I've never swam with one, and probably wouldn't pay money to do so. On the other hand, I'm a sailing skipper, and on many occasions have had dolphins swim with my boat, besides my boat, or play with the bow(s) of my boat while sailing. I've also seen whales in San Francisco Bay while sailing. If the sight of these creatures in the wild leave you unmoved, you're not a candidate to see this movie.

The Cove is about dolphins. Specifically, it's about the whaling community of Taiji, in Japan. Every September, Taiji engages in a slaughter of dolphins, killing over 2,000 animals. This movie is about the slaughter of the dolphins, the method by which they have been slaughtered, and the politics behind the International Whaling Commission which permits the slaughter to still happen.

I'm not much of an animal activist: I've killed animals for others to eat in my time, and if I had to kill animals in order to eat meat I wouldn't have any trouble doing so. But dolphins are on top of the food chain, which means that they accumulate more mercury in their bodies than just about any other kind of marine animal you could eat. The results of the dolphin slaughter is for no good reason at all: a lot of the meat produced gets distributed throughout Japan and sold as whale meat (which isn't a lie --- dolphins are pretty much whales). Taiji men and women have 5 times as much mercury found in their hair as other Japanese. These folks aren't just destroying intelligent mammals, they're also poisoning themselves and their fellow citizens (and children) as a result.

But why do they do so? It turns out that part of the catch is also to produce captive dolphins for the various Seaquariums around the world. That's right. If you've ever visited SeaWorld, or taken your kids to one, you're part of the problem. While dolphin meat is not highly desired (see above), captive dolphins generate $150,000 each in revenue for the town of Taiji, and the slaughter of the remaining dolphins is just a by product.

The film follows a group of activists led by Ric O'barry, who used to be a dolphin trainer for the above mentioned TV series. He describes his change from animal trainer to activist, and all sorts of high technology comes into play for capturing the footage in this movie, which obviously the Japanese officials tried very hard to prevent from coming into existence. Underwater cameras, cameras disguised as rocks, blimps, night vision cameras, and a team of skin divers come into play. It's technically impressive and there's not a little bit of suspense as they play cat and mouse with the authorities.

This movie won the academy award in 2009 for best documentary. It deserves it. I'm not the emotional type (and as mentioned, am fond of eating animals) and the movie touched everything about me that made want to go out and join the activists. Highly recommended. Watch it, and you may never be able to visit Seaworld again. But if you watch only one movie this year, watch this one. Please.

Cultural Differences II: Appliances

Another interesting difference between Germans (and I'm guessing this applies to most of Europe) and Americans are the household appliances. For one thing, German appliances are small and cute. Our dish-washer, for instance, can do at most one dinner's worth of dishes, pots, and pans. This does mean you get to use the dishwasher every night, and also since the tablets hold the same amount of detergent as the US ones, the dishes get much cleaner.

The big difference, however, is that American machines (like the washing machine and the dishwasher) are optimized for speed and volume, while German machines are optimized for energy and water savings. (250 Euros a month for a 2 bedroom apartment is not considered out of line, even though German apartments are better insulated than American houses by and large)

The result of this is that the appliances are first of all expensive, and they are slow. A typical washing machine in the US will do a load of laundry in about 45 minutes. It would not be unusual for a German machine to take 3 entire hours to do the same load, with the same settings. The process by which it does so is entertaining --- turn on an American laundry machine and you will hear water immediately start pouring in and soaking the laundry. The machine will then burst into action, agitating and making a host of impressive sounds.

The German machine, on the other hand, will first run the water as well, but the process is gentle and slow. You can then, if you are patient enough, watch the water seep slowly down into your clothing. The machine will then spin for about half a spin, and then stop. If you didn't know better, at this point you would think that the power had cut off. But a patient man is rewarded by the machine spinning for about half a spin in the other direction and then pausing. My only guess is that the machines are modeling the fluid dynamics of the laundry system it's got loaded, and all that number crunching means that it can only run the motors that much before it has to pause to compute the next cycle.

Nevertheless, what comes out of a German machine is very clean --- so much so that many machines come with a "short wash" option --- meaning that instead of taking 4 hours for the computation to finish, it only takes 2. Our dish washer is similarly slow, and can take 3 hours to do an entire cycle.

As one might guess, as a result of the high energy costs (which are driven by environmentalism more than by necessity), most people don't use drying machines, but instead hang their laundry to dry.

John Doerr Visits Google

I had the pleasure on Thursday of listening to John Doerr talk about global warming when he visited Google. This was a rehash of his TED talk linked to in the title of this post. He goes through many of the things we already know: getting the consumer to do the right thing without price signals is next to impossible (hence the need for a carbon tax), how Brazil transitioned to a largely fossil-fuel free transportation system, and what the upcoming technologies are.

Just as John Lovelock was, John Doerr is pessimistic. This is important, because by nature, venture capitalists are pretty much the most optimistic people on the planet. They have to be --- at least 50% of the companies they fund are outright failures. So if he's pessimistic, then I think Lovelock is right: the chances of Earth having an environment that human beings will find pleasant in 2050 is less than 50%.

Nevertheless, I had a few questions in my head as I left the talk:

• When the partners at KPCB flew around the world to observe the effects of climate change first hand, did they fly coach? Or did they fly in their private jets, adding to the problem?
  
• Did Mr. Doerr change his lifestyle when he learned of the problem? Or does he still drive a big fast car to work?
  

(These aren't my only questions, but my other questions are not appropriate on a public blog)

If someone as aware of the problem as Mr. Doerr is can't change his lifestyle despite knowing of the problems, what hope do we have of convincing the world that we have to do something about this?

James Lovelock thinks global warming is irreversible

Lovelock's pessimism mirrors my own. Again and again, we see humans take the easy, convenient solution over the tougher ones. It's easier to drive the car than to walk or ride your bike. It's easier to drive your kids to school than to teach them to walk to school. Lovelock might be right, but it's not going to stop me from doing what I can, and ultimately, what else can we do?

Articles like this remind me why I decided years ago that the proper recipient of any charitable donations from me should to environmentalism rather than humanitarian aid. Without an environment that can support human life, no amount of developmental aid will help the human condition. Environmentalism isn't about saving the planet --- it's about saving the human race, which I think is the ultimate humanitarian aid.

Lovelock knows that predicting the end of civilization is not an exact science. "I could be wrong about all this," he admits as we stroll around the park in Norway. "The trouble is, all those well-intentioned scientists who are arguing that we're not in any imminent danger are basing their arguments on computer models. I'm basing mine on what’s actually happening."

Review: Plan B 2.0

Apparently, Lester R. Brown is a big shot in the environmental movement, but when he came to Google for a talk I didn't know any better, so I went and sat in and got a copy of the book. The talk was lackluster, but I hoped the book would be better.

The book unfortunately, is a litany of the environmental disasters facing us. Divided into 3 parts, Part I covers the problems facing us, part II provides a plan for getting us out of trouble, and Part III waxes rhapsodic about what a brave new world it's going to be.

I'm a card carrying environmentalist, and I don't disagree with any of the problems Lester Brown covers in Part I. But I have a hard time considering many of the problems he delineates really solvable. For instance, I don't believe 3rd world poverty is solvable through 1st world intervention. All our history indicates that 1st world intervention does nothing but exacerbates the problems. All 3rd world countries that have bootstrapped themselves into becoming developing countries and then developed countries have done so without a lot of help from 1st world countries. I am therefore skeptical of any effort placed into the humanitarian corner of Lester Brown's plan.

Brown points out, in Part II, how cheap it is to save the world. All it takes is 10% of the world's military budget. He neglects to point out that the biggest problem is that while everybody benefits from having the world saved, only the ones who voluntarily chose to pay the costs of doing so pay the cost. That makes it a classic tragedy of the commons problem, which means that the chief job of an environmentalist is really to try to convince the public that it's in their self-interest to clean up. Brown does not go over this, and it is clear that he lacks the necessary training as an economist to propose real systems that can solve this problem.

Part III's call to action sounds a bit idealistic to me. He waxes rhapsodic about gas taxes. I'm a cynic because I've seen over and over again how one woman after another would tell me she's an environmentalist, but then refuse to ride her bike to work because it would screw with her hair, because she considers cycling dangerous, or simply because it would take an act of god to pry the steering wheel from her cold dead hands. I don't believe that people are willing to put their money where their mouth is, so the only hope, I guess is for there to be a politician willing to exercise true leadership.

All in all, this book isn't really worth your time to read. The plan is plausible but likely ineffectual and unlikely to gain traction, and the description of the problems at too high a level and too shallow for you to truly learn anything.

Not recommended, even at the price I paid for it ($0). Go buy yourself a copy of Jared Diamond's Collapse instead. (Capsule Review)