Re-read: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteneance

 One of the perils of reading books to your kids in an effort to mold their tastes is that while they might not take to the reading, you're going to get sucked in and re-read the book. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was something I started reading to Boen in an effort to get him to stop reading easier books. I got him a couple of chapters into it and to my surprise it was surprisingly easy reading --- the thing about having done many bicycle tours by this point in his life, the touring aspects of the book were completely comprehensible and enjoyable for Boen.

I enjoyed the book on this reading, even getting into the section on the various philosophers that I'd always tried to zip through as fast as I could. What's interesting for me on this reading was the considerable emphasis on academic life. At no point do we get any motivation from Pirsig's narrator as to why he spent all that time teaching. It's quite clear that after his nervous breakdown he was capable of holding on to other jobs like technical writing.

Another aspect of the book that comes to mind was how uninterested Pirsig's narrator was in systemic answers. At the time of publication the United States was comparatively wealthy compared to the rest of the world, and hence the narrator had the luxury of assuming that physical well being could be taken for granted. In the current political environment that's not quite possible, and the book provides no solutions and even seems to try to move away from seeking such solutions.

To the extent that craftsmanship has become devalued in modern society in favor of an ever bigger emphasis on the use of AI to achieve goals with minimum effort, it's quite clear that the book failed to influence society in a better direction. I suppose it's too much to expect a book, any book to influence society to any such extent. One can only fantasize about a society that takes the tenets described by the book to a greater extent.

Review: Cosmos

 Boen was resisting learning math, so I bought him Cosmos, A Spacetime Odyssey and we started watching it together. Bowen got really into it, and I bought him Cosmos: Possible Worlds as well, and all that reminded me that I owned the original Carl Sagan book and then I read that as well.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that my interest in science and decision to become a scientist was driven by the original TV series. I will say that there's an elegance and sense of wonder conveyed by the Cosmos TV shows that I do not find in other documentaries. Xiaoqin's been watching various PBS series, and nobody comes close to Carl Sagan or Neil Degrasse Tyson as hosts. Their enthusiasm for science comes right through.

Not only is Cosmos a science documentary, it's also a history of science documentary. I love the episode about Clair Paterson fighting the oil/gas industry to make leaded gasoline a thing of the past. The obvious parallels to the failed climate change accords is stark. It's also how prescient Carl Sagan was about the need to popularize science in this parable about the library of Alexandria:

The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not. Science and learning in general were the preserve of a privileged few. The vast population of the city had not the vaguest notion of the great discoveries taking place within the Library. New findings were not explained or popularized. The research benefited them little. Discoveries in mechanics and steam technology were applied mainly to the perfection of weapons, the encouragement of superstition, the amusement of kings. The scientists never grasped the potential of machines to free people.* The great intellectual achievements of antiquity had few immediate practical applications. Science never captured the imagination of the multitude. There was no counterbalance to stagnation, to pessimism, to the most abject surrenders to mysticism. When, at long last, the mob came to burn the Library down, there was nobody to stop them. (kindle loc 5565)

 Obviously, I'm very happy to see my kids being exposed to the influences I was when growing up. I'm really sad that the US is trending to become an anti-science society as warned by Carl Sagan. But as long as we can find scientists who're willing to stand up and explain to the general population why this stuff is relevant I can hold out hope that as the consequences of ignoring science become more and more obvious we can have a return to sanity. One thing that the scientific community has completely fallen down on is its failure to reward and award prestige to the people doing the important work.

For the newer TV shows, I found Possible Worlds to be less interesting --- it has quite a bit more speculative stuff, and I didn't feel like it was as strong about science history. Nevertheless both kids watched both shows and it was a good use of my Google video credits. Recommended!

Review: Science Under Seige

 Science Under Siege is the account of the authors' experience working as researchers in both climate science and vaccines, both of whom have suffered death threats (both authors have needed police protection at their houses), widespread industry attempts to discredit them and attempts to intimidate them (not to mention online smear campaigns and publicity aimed at causing them to lose their jobs).

As you can imagine, this is a depressing book to read, and it took me many days and multiple pauses because it was distressing. The book points out that there are several actors that have to get rid of the professional science/educated class in order to achieve their goals (which are largely to retain their wealth):

• plutocrats (rich people)
• petro-states (Russia, the Arabic states, and obviously oil producing states such as Texas, Alberta)
• propagandists (who make their money off being paid by the above as well as by hawking alternative medicines)

It's very interesting to me that after hearing Carl Sagan and Neil Degrasse Tyson continually dispasraged by science snobs, these are the first two bona-fide scientists who referred to Carl Sagan as "great." I agree with them. In a world where the public has little to no science education in school (even in Singapore, the science education was abysmal), TV shows like Cosmos was what got me into science and enthusiastic about science. Science communications and education is essential or the electorate will lose their support for science, given how much more powerful these other agents of society are.

The details in the book are pretty telling, where the one of the authors were accused of making money off selling vaccines even though their vaccines were given away for free for no commercial return. And obviously climate denial has been a thing for ages. The authors do point out that despair is not an appropriate reaction --- that's what the opponents want you to do --- is to give up and do nothing. They also point out that mainstream newspapers like the New York Times have in recent years gone from caring more about accuracy and correctness to only caring about "balance." As a result, the lab leak theory (which apparently does not have much support from real scientists) for COVID19 was given more credence than it should have been.

The end of the book has the authors showing off their geek creds by analogizing their battle against misinformation and anti-science with the plot of The Lord of the Rings --- except in this case they're not expecting the white wizard to come in and save them.

On reflection, ultimately the reason science will eventually win is that nature doesn't care whether you believe in scientific theories. The consequences of ignoring climate science is already being felt today, and the consequences of not getting vaccinated are going to be pretty severe as well. The American public that has bought into anti-vaccine and anti-climate propaganda are going to be in for a very painful few decades.

You should read this book. It's not going to be fun reading but it's essential.

Books of the Year 2025

 I read 72 books this year, which is more than my usual count, probably because I started reading more graphic novels again, which tend to read fast. The best book I read this year was probably Twitter and Tear Gas. If you want to understand why the civil rights movement and the labor movement won, while "occupy wall street" and the "arab spring" failed, this is the book to read. Zeynep Tufekci's writing is worth reading wherever you can find it. It's rare to find a book where I regretted checking it out from the library instead of buying it, and this book is exceptional. Other exceptional non-fiction were Abundance and The Woman Behind the New Deal. I will admit that I treated those two books as escapist fiction into a world where the American people actually elected leaders who could do good things.

The best fiction I read this year was Exhalation, but of course that was a re-read, so it shouldn't count. The best novel that was new to me was probably Norwegian Wood. It got me to read more Haruki Murakami, though that binge didn't last. A runner up would be A Widow for One Year.

The best graphic novel I read was Flashpoint. It's an excellent story and very much worth your time, even if you're not normally into superheroes.

I only got through one Audio Book this year, The Power Broker. It's well worth your time and you should read it in conjunction with Abundance to see how the American system went from being capable of doing amazing feats of construction in New York City to being barely able to build a toilet for $1 million in San Francisco. It's not for bad reasons, but you still wish that the pendulum hadn't quite swung all the way.

Here's to another year of great reading!

Review: Very Far Away From Anywhere Else

 I remember reading Very Far Away From Anywhere Else as a teenager and finding it very moving. It was sort of a teen romance story, but without any external drama, or even an unrealistic ending. I worried as I re-read it as an adult that it would be one of those stories that didn't age well, but I shouldn't have worried --- this is Ursula Le Guin, and the story is timeless.

Owen is a nerdy, introverted kid with aspirations for MIT and big ideas. He doesn't have any friends and is alienated from his own parents since they don't understand him but have expectations for him that he doesn't want to live up to.  He meets Natalie (or rather, finally notices her, since they're in the same classes) one day on the bus and they finally start to talk and get to know each other.

Their relationship develops but encounters the uncertainty and mixed-upness that teenagers would have, except in this case Natalie is much more mature than Owen, and knows what she wants out of life and Owen doesn't.

I won't spoil the ending for you --- it's a bittersweet ending and not the usual saccharine endings that most Americans would expect. The book's a short read, and well, if you're anything like the kid I was when I was 16, it will haunt you for years.

Review: Plays Well With Others

 Plays Well With Others claims to dispell myths about human relations with science.  It turned out to be a fun book to read and well-written. Fundamentally it, it covers certain aphorisms you might have heard of, such as "A friend in need is a friend indeed", "No man is an island", and "Love conquers all." The author, Eric Barker, then does a deep dive into the meaning of the aphorism, and the scientific evidence for and against.

Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire says you tell about two whoppers a day. Whom do you lie to most frequently? Mom. (kindle loc 605)

I enjoyed the discussion on how bad humans are at lie detection. And why is that? It turns out that trusting people is much less stressful.  

One study asked people how much they trust others on a scale of one to ten. Income was highest among those who responded with the number eight. And low-trust people fared far worse than overtrusters. Their losses were the equivalent of not going to college. They missed many opportunities by not trusting. In The Confidence Game Maria Konnikova points to an Oxford study showing that “people with higher levels of trust were 7 percent more likely to be in better health,” and 6 percent more likely to be “very” happy rather than “pretty” happy or “not happy at all.”  (kindle loc 738)

 The section on love is also surprisingly upbeat. It does provide the context that in the past most marriages were not based on love, and the modern divorce rates are incredibly high. But it also notes that when modern marriages work they work far better than historical marriages did with huge benefits to both parties.

Other interesting titbits from the book include the fact that Prozac is largely a placebo:

 A 2014 paper concluded: “Analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect.” And another study, titled “Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo,” looked at over 2,300 subjects and found “approximately one quarter of the drug response is due to the administration of an active medication, one half is a placebo effect, and the remaining quarter is due to other nonspecific factors.” Did these papers result in a torrent of pushback from the scientific community at large? Nope. (kindle loc 2791)

In fact, the placebo effect is so strong because we're so wired to be social that the fact that someone is paying attention is enough to make most problems go away, since the fact that you're socially supported in itself is enough for your brain to think that you're fine. In fact, the most optimistic scenario tends to happen in a crisis, when despite popular conception, people ignore class and party lines and just give help to everyone in an egalitarian fashion:

When we are one, we don’t need placebos. We give care and are provided with care. During war, psychiatric admissions decline. This phenomenon has been documented time and time again. When Belfast experienced riots in the 1960s, depression plummeted in the districts with the most violence and went up where there was none. Psychologist H. A. Lyons wrote, “It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.” (kindle loc 2851)

I found the book rich with insights and very easy to read. Recommended.

 

Review: Aurora

 Aurora is Kim Stanley Robinson's book about a generation starship arriving at Tau Ceti after several generations. The colonists onboard the ship have at this point been several generations apart from the folks who volunteered to go on this mission, and the ship itself is falling apart. We learn that the planet they're supposed to colonize ("Aurora") is actually a moon of another world orbiting Tau Ceti, and upon landing on the planet, they discover that the planet is not actually lifeless as they thought but has a mysterious micro-organism that starts killing the colonists.

A conventional science fiction story would have the colonists trying to find a cure to this micro-organism (which isn't a virus or a bacterium --- we never know what it is), but Robinson didn't not write a conventional science fiction novel. Instead, there's next to no biologists with technical expertise to come up with any kind of cure, and the moon was kinda sucky anyway as a place to live --- very strong winds, and no actual way for the colonists to self-sustain without serious terraforming work.

So the colonists take a vote on what to do next, igniting a civil war when two factions cannot agree on what to do. In the end, the somewhat sentient starship takes a role, and the groups compromise on setting up the "stayers" for success on a different moon within the system, and the "backers" get to take a reduced version of the starship back to Earth. The "stayers" obviously do not have a good outcome, and the story then follows the "backers" on their exciting journey back to Earth on a rapidly deteriorating craft ending up with an exciting rescue and a denouement of the idea of colonizing planets in other systems.

I enjoyed how well thought out the generation starship approach was, as well as the ideas about what tends to go wrong with such systems and how 2000+ people (about the population of the Starship Enterprise) wouldn't be sufficient to last over 200 years on a journey. I'm not sure I liked the section about the sentient starship which wasn't actually sentient at the start of the journey, and I disliked how few technical people there were for a project of this magnitude. You could argue that expertise was lost over generations, but it seemed that cross generation education wouldn't be something you would want to leave to chance.

The book also assumes that people will continue to want to have more children than they're allocated, but the last 20 years might teach you that the kind of highly educated people who would want to go on missions like this would probably have the opposite problem!

All in all, I enjoyed the critique of "man's mission is to expand to the stars", and the realistic view that when you sign up for one of these generational missions, you're signing up your children and they might not want to do what you signed them up to do. The characters are as wooden as any you'll find in science fiction, but not so badly written that I stopped reading.

Review: Struck by Genius

 Struck by Genius is the story of Jason Padgett (ghost written by Maureen Seaberg) about his transition from being a non-academic party animal to becoming a Savant after a mugging that caused a traumatic brain injury.

It is very rare that brain injury can have benefits rather than being purely detrimental, but Padgett was one of the lucky ones. He described his life prior to the mugging, with very little discipline two marriages and a kid out of wedlock, with a focus on partying and disliking academics. He describes this memory like remembering another person.

After the mugging, he started seeing patterns and shapes whenever he saw numbers, and the PTSD caused him to hole up in his apartment for 4 years, seeing no one except his daughter whenever he visited. His fascination with Math and patterns developed and after he had enough self-learning he went back to working at his father's furniture shop and enrolled in community college to learn formal math.

In between, he was compelled to draw. The pieces of art he draws range from simple geometric shapes to his interpretation of a hydrogen atom or quantum events. He says he read Born On a Blue Day and identified himself someone who saw numbers in shapes or colors, and then started going to conferences for people with that syndrome, where he met doctors who tested him and attested that he had all the attributes of a savant born with that syndrome but with fewer drawbacks.

There are all sorts of theories in the book that don't pass muster with me --- for instance, there's a doctor that claims that his mathematical abilities are a result of genetic memory. That makes zero sense and I see no way mathematical concepts could be encoded into genes, other than that the structure of the brain itself is determined (obviously) by genetics. That's also compounded by the fact that as far as I can tell, Padgett hasn't contributed to academic mathematics.

The book is easy reading and quite a bit of fun. I'm not sure I'd agree with many of the conclusions he or his doctors draw from his syndrome, but it's still a remarkable event and story.

Review: Ghost in the Shell - Standalone Complex

 Ghost in the Shell - Standalone Complex was on sale for $2, so I picked up the kindle copy. In case you haven't kept up with any of the Ghost in the Shell movies, the world is a cyberpunk universe in which major Motoko Kusanagi runs a top-shelf police/commando unit that deals with criminals, terrorists, and political operators in world where human brains can be moved into cyborg bodies and brain swapping is something that's feasible.

This particular story isn't written/drawn by the original creator of the universe, but in some ways that's a good thing --- there aren't any assumptions that you know what the conventions of the cyberpunk genre is, and so concepts are introduced in such a way that a reader is not lost. The characters are a bit wooden, and the art occasionally hard to follow.

The mystery in this episode is easy to follow, and most important for someone like me, fair. You're given all the clues in the story (along with the world-building needed to make use of the clues), and when the reveal happens you're not left feeling like the writer cheated you by pulling out some previously unknown facts.

The action in the story is just OK. I suspect that at the time the comic was written it probably would have been perceived as much more innovative than it is today, but obviously the bar for special effects has been raised quite a bit.

I enjoyed the book, despite having been away from cyberpunk for a while. It's enjoyable and easy to follow.

Review: The Grand Design

 The Grand Design came recommended by the Amazon Kindle direct mail ad, and it was available at the library so I checked it out and read it. It's an easy to read Physics primer that discusses the difficulty reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity, and discusses what the evidence for the accuracy of these theories are.

What I enjoyed was how clearly written the descriptions of the weak Anthropic principle and the stronger versions of the Anthropic principles are. In particular, the authors go over how finely tuned the fundamental constants of nature are, and even go so far as to explain why the Universe had to have 3 dimensions instead of 4 or 6 or 10:

If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit are necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. Circular orbits are possible in other dimensions, but those, as Newton feared, are unstable. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planets, would send a planet off its circular orbit and cause it to spiral either into or away from the sun, so we would either burn up or freeze. Also, in more than three dimensions the gravitational force between two bodies would decrease more rapidly than it does in three dimensions. In three dimensions the gravitational force drops to ¼ of its value if one doubles the distance. In four dimensions it would drop to ⅛, in five dimensions it would drop to 1/16 and so on. As a result, in more than three dimensions the sun would not be able to exist in a stable state with its internal pressure balancing the pull of gravity. (kindle loc 1530)

Where the book fails is that it promotes M-theory as the one theory that would unify quantum theory with relativity, but doesn't go into why it's superior to all the other theories. One issue is that it's not a single theory, but a class of overlapping theories that can effectively have constants plugged in to satisfy the constraints of the universe we find ourselves in. The authors pretty much state that scientists have to give up on the idea of our laws of physics all deriving from one fundamental theory that fixes all the constants. That's quite disappointing for those who value elegance in their theories, but of couse, nothing says that our messy universe has to correspond to a model of a simple and elegant fundamental theory.

Review: The Woman Behind the New Deal

 The Woman Behind the New Deal is the biography of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor. I've read biographies of FDR before, and they usually gloss over Frances Perkins, but over time as I've read other historical reports (such as Robert A Caro's biography of Lyndon B Johnson and Robert Moses), I saw references to her over and over again.

It turns out that I'd been missing an important part of the origin of the New Deal, the first woman to serve in the President's Cabinet, and the person to whom he delegated all of the various aspects of the New Deal to. A key scene in the story is where Perkins named all the important aspects of what she wanted to accomplish before she would accept the position to FDR. In fact, she noted that Roosevelt was not a deligent person nor was he attentive to detail, but was indeed a C student:

She disapproved of the tendency at Telluride to select for admission only the boys with the highest academic grades, noting that it is often the C student with strong leadership skills and a good personality who makes a greater mark on the world. “Franklin Roosevelt would never be admitted to a first-class college today,” she said. (kindle loc 6978)

Perkins was extremely religious and also quite unlucky with her personal life, marrying a husband who was promising but who turned out to have a family history of mental illness, and after an initial setback in his career never came out of his depression and ended up in one institution after another, leaving her to be a single mom to take care of their only daughter. In that time, mental illness was considered shameful, but society also disapproved of working mothers, so she had to hide a lot of what she was doing. In the ultimate repudiation of her, her own daughter never gave her the respect she deserved, despite Perkins sacrificing so much of her own well being (Perkins herself worked until the day she died, and her family was not present when she passed away):

None of the children were ever told about Frances’s benevolence while Susanna was alive. In fact, they recalled, Susanna generally ridiculed her mother, as she did many people who worked for a living. Frances had spent her life laboring on behalf of America’s workers and had produced a child of the leisure class, more ornamental than useful, who felt contempt for people who worked for a living. (kindle loc 7106)

 Nevertheless, Perkins achieved a great deal. She introduced worker's comp, the 40 hour work week with mandatory overtime, unemployment insurance, and social security. Her next target would have been universal healthcare, but the war got in the way. What a different America we would have lived in if her agenda had been completely achieved. She turned the labor department's statistics department into what it was before Trump decided to start firing bearers of bad news:

Lubin turned the bureau into a respected source of economic statistics. He quickly improved the country’s system for gathering employment and wage statistics, and put systems in place to minimize political pressure to show positive results. For the first time, the federal government tracked hourly earnings and average weekly hours by industry. Lubin also modernized the cost-of-living index. One component in the outdated index was the price of high-button shoes, still included long after people had stopped wearing them. The BLS also tracked productivity, an important gauge of business modernization trends, and it made separate forecasts of growth in different occupations in order to steer workers to new industries. (kindle loc 2627)

Not only was she progressive about worker's rights, she was the first to recognize the threat of Hitler, and did everything in her power to help German jews escape the regieme.  This was despite the prevailing sentiment against immigration:

Frances knew restrictive policies were politically popular. “It is generally recognized that the United States can no longer absorb annually hundreds of thousands of immigrants without serious economic and social dislocations,” she wrote. “Certainly the present restrictions can not be relaxed while millions of workers are unemployed and maintained at public expense.”12 In fact, Frances had to spend much time reassuring disbelieving citizens that immigration had indeed been curtailed. Many refused to believe government statistics, and they circulated reports alleging that 1 million foreign sailors jumped ship in the United States each year, or that five hundred thousand Mexicans strolled across the border in the previous decade. In her annual report in 1935, Frances blasted these accounts as “fantastic exaggerations.” (kindle loc 3488)

Reading this book, you really see the parallels between the current political climate and the what happened in the 1930s and 40s. There was never a time when America's population was positive disposed towards more immigration, and even back then misinformation was still very much prevelant. I'm continually surprised when progressives refuse to admit that immigration is very much in tension with progressive objectives despite that long history. (Think about it: the rest of the world is generally much more conservative than American progressives --- importing a lot of immigrants will not result in a population that's willing to support progressive objectives!)

In any case, this was a book very much worth reading. If you're a feminist, progressive, or student of history you owe it to yourself to read this.

Review: Genius Makers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Human Compatible

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Empire of Pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Shokz Openswim Pro

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: TheMagic5 Swimming Googles

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

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

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

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

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

Review: AstroCity Metro Book Vol 6

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

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

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

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

Reiew: The Molecule of More

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

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

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

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

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

I enjoyed this book and can recommend it.

Review: Batman - Creature of the Night

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

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

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

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

Review: Superman - Secret Identity

 Somehow I'd missed that Kurt Busiek wrote a Superman story called Secret identity. Well, of course I had to go and check it out from Hoopla. The story is set on Earth Prime (or rather, our Earth, where no superheroes exist). On Earth Prime, DC Comics continue to publish superhero comics, so everyone knows that Clark Kent is Superman. Except, in this universe Clark Kent was just the cruel joke played on him by his parents, who figured why not subject their kids to the worst bullying possible by naming him Clark when they live in Picketsville, Kansas.

Much like the story in Invincible, Clark Kent has a normal childhood and grows up having broken bones just like any other kid. But in high school, his powers manifest one day, and he discovers that he's Superman! Unlike other Superman stories there are no Lex Luthors or other Super-Villains. (There is a Lois, but not Lois Lane) He works as a writer, but not as a reporter for a newspaper. (It's The New Yorker)

The challenges this version of Superman gets are of course, the government trying to capture him and subject him to experiments and so forth. (Why governments are never sensible can probably be a PhD thesis on Earth Prime) Strangely enough, this Superman can get his blood drawn and so on. We see him fall in love, get married, have kids, and even retire.

As Superman stories go, this is a pretty down to earth, easy to read, and short story. We never get to see where his powers come from, or whether he truly was adopted. There are lots of loose ends. But beyond that it's a pretty reasonable story but not quite up to par with Busiek's AstroCity work.