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.

Music Lessons

Living in Silicon Valley sometimes feels a lot like living in Singapore for one reason: sometimes, it feels as though people around here (the ones with kids anyway) engage in competitive parenting more than any other sports. At one point, someone told me about how she forced her kid to practice music in order to earn hours at video games. And then there's the mandatory after-school Chinese language lessons (for those who are Chinese). There's nothing like useless jumping-through-hoops hyper-competitive parenting to make kids resent the subject.

You hear a lot of junk science about how this is supposed to teach kids self-discipline, or teach them to persevere to be good at something. There's also the frequent comment that it's harder to learn music as an adult. There's the real-science behind it mentioned in Brain Rules for Baby, which discusses how about 10 years of music lessons is correlated with better understanding of emotions or empathy. (I don't remember which)

Anyway, Xiaoqin said, "if those parents like music so much, why don't they learn the instrument themselves instead of making their kids that way?" My tip for kids is to make this bargain with their parents: they'd spend precisely as much time practicing their instruments as their parents spend playing Bloodborne. (Those kids who want to have mercy on their parents can choose an easier game like Uncharted 2 instead) (No, I'm not afraid of my kids doing this to me --- I've been secretly practicing video games)

In any case, I grew up hating piano lessons as well, just like many other Asian kids. Thankfully, my parents let us give up on those lessons before any permanent damage was done: I'll never love classical music, but at least I can enjoy some music.

In any case, I'd always thought that I'd enjoy the flute. I bought a tiny white recorder-toy for Bowen, and could play a few tunes for him, but the recorder's range is pretty limited. And then during a re-watch of Battlestar Galactica (we knew to stop at Season 3, Episode 4), I heard Wander My Friends, which captivated me. Coupled with my wife's comments about learning an instrument, I decided to buy a cheapo flute and a book and try to learn how to play.

A few days into it, I realized that learning an instrument from a book was a recipe for giving myself bad habits, and engaged an instructor for private lessons. A couple of weeks of practice later, and I'm beginning to hit high notes. Most of all, I'm now actually able to play tunes that I like, albeit not mistake free, and perhaps at a halting tempo. (I've long been able to play anything by ear, with minor experimentation, so this is not a surprise --- my sight reading skills are still piss-poor, however, mostly because playing by ear has made me neglect those skills)

The flute's a much tougher instrument than the piano: rather than just working your fingers and hands, you have to form an embouchure. Worse, the embouchure varies from note to note, so you're changing the embouchure and your fingering at the same time, which makes for challenging practicing. On the other hand, it's a much more fun instrument than the piano.

For one thing, you don't have to sit! I never realized how much I disliked sitting in front of a piano until the day I realized that the flute didn't have to be played sitting down. I can stand and play, walk around and play, and generally move around. The instrument is portable, and if I ever got really good at it, I supposed I could hike and practice at the same time. If you're a cyclist, hiker, sailor, a piano is a ridiculous thing to bring with you on trips, but it's entirely feasible to bring along a flute, or its cheap but robust relative, the fife.

So a couple of weeks later, my cheapo flute developed an air-leak that made me unable to play certain notes. My instructor looked at it and asked me how much I paid for it. When I told him, he said that he was surprised that it even made any noise at all. He recommended that I upgraded to the Gemeinhardt. That darn thing cost $300, but it was a revelation! Now I can easily hit every note I can form a decent embouchure for, and I could now play Wander My Friends. The day it arrived I spent a couple of hours playing it because it was so much fun being able to play whatever I wanted without the instrument getting in the way!  I was never that motivated as a kid! Note that the technical practice still sucks. It's still boring to repeatedly play the same piece over and over again, and it's still annoying as heck to fail for 4-5 days until suddenly everything clicks and you can do it on the 6th.

So the argument that it's easier to learn music as a kid doesn't really pan out for me. As an adult, it's easier for me to tolerate having to do technical exercises in order to get better. I've learned to reward myself by playing tunes I like after I'm done with the technical exercises. I also have low standards. I'm not going after orchestra-level performance: I'm playing for my own satisfaction and fun. When it gets boring, I stop.

And of course, Bowen after seeing me play, wants to play too. But even if we start him on lessons (most music instructors will agree that 5 years is about the right age to start, not earlier), there's no way I'm going to make him practice or let him treat music as anything but fun. Though having read this answer on Quora, I'm tempted to force him into music lessons and use math or cycling as a reward instead.

I think as far as music lessons are concerned, the advice written by Antoine de Saint Exupery from decades ago applies, more than anything else:
"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

Health Scare

In late May, on my regular physical, my doctor looked at my family history and decided to do an a1c check.  To my dismay, it came in at 6.1, which meets the clinical definition of pre-diabetes, though just barely. My doctor looked at me and said, "Don't panic. I know I can't tell you to exercise more, but I'm going to have you talk to a nutritionist and we're going to kick this in the butt."

My meeting with the nutritionist needed preparation before hand. For a week or so, I weighed everything I ate and took it down on a spreadsheet. When I met with the nutritionist, she asked for my weight history, and then said that all I really needed to do was to lose about 7 pounds to have a significant effect. (I was 152 pounds) She then gave me a food exchange list and a plan to get my weight down. She also advised what I'd known for years, which was to double up on vegetables and reduce intake of other foods.

I weighed everything I ate for another week to get a feel for what it felt like to get myself at the desired calorie intake level. Once I realized that I should eat until I wasn't feeling hungry any more (as opposed to eating until I was stuffed), ditching the weighing machine was fine. The results were almost immediate, with me losing 2 pounds a week until I started the tour of the alps this year at 145 pounds.

During my tour, my habit of eating less bit me. I didn't realize I wasn't eating enough until the day I rode over the Gavia, when a particularly hearty meal the night before made me climb faster and ride harder and better than I expected, while still feeling hungry by the middle of the day. So I gave up the diet and at everything I saw for the rest of the tour until I reached Zurich at 140 pounds despite all that eating. For the first time, however, I'd lost 5 pounds during a tour and not become weak. I was riding as strong as ever, and my metabolism had sped up.

I expected that I might have trouble coming back into my diet, but it turned out not to be a problem. I kept losing weight until today, when I'm at 135 pounds, which is still 5 pounds more than when I first joined Google way back in 2003. But at 130 pounds back then, I had bone density problems, so I'm not in a hurry to get back to 130 pounds.  Interestingly enough, having lost about 17 pounds has been great for my cycling: I'm climbing faster now than I was in April.

Recently, I did another a1c test and it came back at 5.9, which was low enough that my doctor's office called me and said it was normal. I do intend to keep testing every 3 months to check, but the health scare is in retreat. I'm now optimistic that I can pretty much stay at whatever weight I want, given what I know about nutrition.

You may or may not know this, but Asians get diabetes at much lower weights than Caucasians. As an Asian person, I have to watch my weight far more carefully, and clearly while the average American of my height at 160 pounds is considered "normal", I cannot even approach that weight without health risks. But at least I caught my problem early and know how I can deal with it. For someone with my genetics, forewarned is definitely forearmed.

Michael Wolf story

It was Mike Wolf's birthday yesterday. Mike, Steven Grimm, Marc Kwiatkowski, and Larry Hastings and I all worked at Mpath Interactivewhen it was a startup. Mike was one of the calmest persons you would ever meet. No matter how tense or intense the situation was, he would calmly speak as though it was sunny and there was not a care in the world. Even if the situation was that we were 50 feet off the rocks and had just committed anchoring 101 error: wrapping the anchor line around the boat's rudder. He once told someone that he only got angry if the situation demanded that he appear to be angry.

People sometimes ask me if I ever dreamed about work, and I would tell them this story. One night, I dreamed that I was in the back-seat of Mike's car (a Nissan Maxima). Mike was driving, and his roommate at the time, Steven Grimm, was in the shotgun seat. We were driving down the street when sudden Mike took a sudden left turn and drove the car up some stairs! I exclaimed, "Mike! I had no idea you could drive a car up stairs!" Completely unperturbed, Mike turned to me and said, "Piaw, it's amazing what you learn when you actually read the manual." When I got to the office and told Mike this story, he said, "Hm... you know, I've never actually read the manual for my car. Maybe I should."

Happy Birthday, Mike!

Book Update

For those of you who are wondering about the book. I'm now close enough to the finish line that I'm starting to think about things like book sizes (5x8? 6x9?), font sizes (size 10? size 12?), font type (Garmond?), and who to get to do my printing (Amazon is the current leading contender).

And yes, I horribly mis-priced the book over at Kickstarter. The final price will be likely closer to $29.95 than $15 a book, but giving my early supporters a price break seems only fair. I'm actually really shocked to see so much support, so thank you all very much. Obviously, at this point, even if Kickstarter fails to generate $1000, the book will go out.

The electronic edition actually offers a major conundrum. I'm a big fan of the Kindle, as anyone who has traveled with me knows. But the royalty split between the author and Amazon is an astonishingly low 30%/70%. I'm not expecting to get rich off this book, but at this point, it seems like I'm better off going John T Reed style and accepting Google checkout in exchange for a DRM-free version of the book! Funnily enough, the print split between Amazon and the author is a much more reasonable 50/50 split. Even that's annoying enough for me to want to go John T. Reed on everyone and just inventory and ship the books myself. (I'm not egoistic enough think that this will be a best seller by any means --- it's a highly technical book on a very niche topic)

Politics

I once dated a lady who told me that politics is for young people. "Older people," she said, "have no time for it." Yet I've found for myself that as I get older, I become more concerned about it, and not just because Healthcare and Health Insurance Policy affects me deeply and personally.

A colleague and I were having dinner the other day, and he complained to me that his significant other wasn't taking her impending job loss seriously, either by searching for another job, or starting her own business. My response, "Well, I used to puzzle over that, and then I realized that I went to school working two jobs rather than taking on debt, while others were happy to go to school full time, and I take vacations that are ambitious and difficult. The number of people in the world willing to work as hard or hustle as much as you and I are is very limited, which is why when I meet them I am willing to invest in them."

When Pengtoh and I were roommates in college, he was on a scholarship while I was working my way through school. He and I started doing system administration in Silicon Valley as a side-job --- we would drive down in the evenings around 7pm, and work till 6am setting up workstations for Crescendo Communications, which would pay us $20/hour. I would then stagger into the class I was the TA for (I was an undergraduate TA) at 8am with bloodshot eyes and graded papers, scaring the heck out of my students.

With that kind of background, you would think that I would grow up to be one of those wild-eyed libertarians, and to be honest, I've had one date accuse me of being a Republican during our first date (needless to say, we didn't have a second). But the truth is, what I've noticed is that it's usually the white, over-privileged types that become Libertarians, not those of us who struggled and hustled like mad when we were younger.

The reason is that most of us who were under-privileged were grateful to our lucky breaks. In my case, the Pell grant paid for my first year's tution, and the work-study program paid for my second year's, whereupon I had built up enough credit and reputation (together with a half year's paid internship) to land both the gigs I discussed above, and then a career in Silicon Valley. Without those breaks, my life would have been even tougher.

The federal government and the state of California invested in my brothers and I in terms of our education (Berkeley's tuition is an incredible bargain). At this point, that investment has paid off hundreds of times, maybe even thousands, in terms of taxes we've paid back to the state and to the federal government. That's one reason why when several folks I knew were fleeing for lower-tax regimes, I didn't feel like I had to join them (the other reason was --- if I'm rich enough to retire, I'm going to do it some place where the weather is actually decent --- you're not rich if you can't afford good weather so you can go cycling/sailing/hiking year round).

What amazes me, though, is that the Libertarian party line seems to be that investing in smart, under-privileged people (in other words, people who are under-valued by the market) is considered robbing the deservedly wealthy to giveaway to the undeserving poor, rather than investing in under-valued properties that has potentially high returns (sure, not all such investments make back the money --- but just like with startups, you only need one such good investment per hundred to pay off all the non-performing ones). No wonder Libertarians have given up on Democracy! With that kind of anti-social attitudes, no wonder so many of them dream of building their own country --- they have to, because if they moved to a tax-haven, their own body guards would be tempted to murder them. I'm going to be very entertained to see if such Libertarian paradises work out (I suspect they won't, unless they're simply monarchies owned by the "libertarian").

What amuses me more is that many Libertarians try to hide their anti-social attitudes (which is really more like, "I've made my millions, screw you!") by posing as defenders of freedom. I grew up in Singapore --- I've seen what it's like in a totalitarian society --- the people who defend freedom are the ones going to jail there, not these posers, who're really only out to cut taxes on themselves. They certainly aren't the ones speaking out on behalf of civil liberties, and are in fact, frequently complain that giving women the vote was a bad idea.

I had a conversation with Brad Delong a few years ago when he visited Google. I asked him if he had any hypothesis on the number of libertarian programmers out there. He had what I think was a very plausible theory: "There is a need for a 23-year old to justify his sudden wealth. It's against his ego and self-image to imagine that he had been lucky, somehow he must deserve it." Hence, I call Libertarianism a religion --- it makes you feel good about yourself, gives you justification to consider outsiders worthless, and makes you think that democracy is a terrible idea and theocracy is a better one. Too bad the recent financial crisis has given the lie to the free market ideology.

How I deal with Sleep Apnea and Cycling, Backpacking, and Sailing

As an active backpacker, cyclist and sailor, I refused to let my need for a CPAP machine stop me from doing things I love. So when I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, I viewed the need for the machine with dismay. Since I exhibit none of the typical symptoms of someone with Sleep Apnea (I sleep well and easily, I'm alert when I wake), my friends turn out to be very happy to help carry the CPAP machine so they don't have to hear me snore! For cycling, the Puritan Bennett is a nice lightweight (1.5 pounds, with a light power supply that's no bigger than one used to charge a cell phone) machine that was a pain to carry up the mountains, but no worse than a couple of extra water bottles. Incidentally, my doctor says that an occasional night without a CPAP machine won't kill me, but giving the degree to which I snore, my cycling companions might.

I've noticed that on the web at least, there's next to no information about backpacking with CPAP machines. A lot of this is likely because amongst Westerners, apnea is associated with being fat and out of shape, hardly a precondition for a backpacking/hiking lifestyle. However, among Asians, apnea is usually associated with a small airway, and Asians don't have to be fat or out of shape to have sleep apnea.

For camping and sailing, however, you don't just need a CPAP machine, you also need to carry your power supply with you. In the case of sailboats, they have diesel engines that can power an inverter, but if you ran the diesel engine all night, your crew would be extremely unhappy with you. For camping, there's just no real solution but to carry a big honking battery. Traditional batteries sold by the traditional manufacturers weigh well over 14 pounds. That's fine for a sailboat or for car camping but is not at all acceptable on a backpacking trip!

So I did some research and found Batterygeek.net's C-222 battery which has 222 Watt Hours worth of power in a convenient 5 pound package. I used it on both the Turkey Sailing trip as well as the recent overnight from Castle Rock to Big Basin trip. In particular, on the overnight trip, I started the trip with the battery fully charged (4 bars), and after about 10 hours of use, the battery still read 4 bars at the end of it, giving me hope that the upcoming Tasmanian Overland trail (5 nights) wouldn't strain it at all. (Update: Unfortunately, in practice, the battery will only last for 1.5 nights --- it turns out the battery indicator is just useless)

To their credit, batterygeek's numbers aren't all that promising for the battery --- they promise at most 2 nights worth of use, but the GoodKnight 420E is an auto-adjusting machine, delivering only as much pressure as I need --- my apnea is highly variable, so this means that most of the night I don't need very high pressure at all, but I do occasionally spike really high.

Personally, I don't want to put a "recommended" tag on this post, since I don't recommend having Sleep Apnea (it's genetic, so I don't really have a choice). On the other hand, given that this lets me sail and go backpacking almost like a normal person, it's as good as things can get, until someone makes a fuel cell battery that runs off a few centiliters of white gas or stove alcohol and weighs only a few ounces.

(And yes, batterygeek.net also sells similar sized batteries for folks who want to run their laptops for 24 hours at a time away from power outlets)

In memoriam: Nikola Postolov

In the wake of all these recent news about health problems, I received more bad news today. Nikola Postolov, who was my intern last summer in Munich working on Gtags. Nikola did many wonderful things, including reducing the indexing time by a factor of 75% (yes, it ran 4 times faster when he was done).

Nikola had a brain seizure on January 3rd, and after a short period in coma, passed away on January 16th, apparently due to some birth anomaly. There were no symptoms (certainly not when he was working for me), and I am very shocked as we were putting him through the intern conversion process so we could (eventually) make him a full time offer at Google --- he was back in school but expected to graduate soon and either pursue graduate school or work in industry.

This is definitely a loss for me, and for computer science in general.

Full Feed Available

Someone told me today that she'd stopped reading my blog because I had turned off full feeds. The reason for doing so was that some nefarious scumbag out there had started syndicating all Googler's blogs without proper attribution or link-back. I consider that evil, and won't do anything to make his job easy (and no, he doesn't have the smarts to scrape my blog --- I checked).

But I also don't want my friends to miss out on the full feed if they're too lazy to click through, so if you know me personally, and want access to my full feed, let me know and I'll give you the full feed address as long as you promise never to post it somewhere (or syndicate it into a livejournal, etc.).

My thanksgiving present

I felt a little funny on Sunday morning right after posting my last entry. I went for a hike anyway, but found my energy low. That afternoon, I took a nap, but started feeling really cold. Come Monday morning I woke up drenched in sweat. A temperature check found my temperature near 100, not yet a fever, but my throat felt a little itchy.

I went to see my doctor, and he thought it was viral. So he gave me some TamiFlu in the hopes that it would nix it in the bud. That night, I went in and out of shiver mode all night. I went back to see my doctor again, and he found what seemed to be an infection in my ear and throat, so now he added antibiotics to the mix. Lisa added a bunch of Chinese herbs and some acupuncture to this medical cocktail, just to make sure I got due representation from all sides of the East/West debate.

Last night was the worst. I had periods of 103 temperature, but I got myself fully hydrated and woke up only a few times. Still, I was so light headed I would just topple back to bed after using the bathroom.

This morning though, my fever appeared to break and I felt better, though I still can't seem to eat much and my throat now hurts more (or maybe it's that I now notice it more!). So hopefully all this medical stuff I'm on kicks in soon.

You might think that 'flu is not a serious illness, but I've been sick with 'flu a few times in my life, and it always felt really really bad. It's not hard to believe that it causes 1.2% of total deaths in my age group. And yes, we did get 'flu shots this year. All I can say is, medical science just can't progress fast enough. I'd take immunity to all diseases over a faster car (ok, maybe for me that'll be a lighter bike), movie star good looks, or a trip to outer space any day!

Ok, I will now return you to the regularly scheduled book reviews and commentary.