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: Broken Stars

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Genius Makers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Human Compatible

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Katabasis

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Empire of Pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Shokz Openswim Pro

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Arrowsmith

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

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

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

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

Review: TheMagic5 Swimming Googles

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

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

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

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

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

Review: AstroCity Metro Book Vol 6

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

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

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

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

Review: Superman - Camelot Falls

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reiew: The Molecule of More

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

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

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

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

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

I enjoyed this book and can recommend it.

Review: Batman - Creature of the Night

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

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

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

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

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.