Review: Slow Gods

 Slow Gods is Claire North's "science fiction" allegorical novel set in a far future space. I use "science fiction" in quotes because there's really very little science in this novel. It's more like a fantasy novel with science fictional trappings. The premise here is that the FTL travel requires pilots to confront a Lovecraftian type horror during the traverse, to the point where most pilots go insane after just one or two trips.

The protagonist is a special case, coming from a hyper-capitalistic society ("The Shine") where you accrue debts starting from birth, and have to work to pay it off. Everything's run by corporations, and what matters is how "shiny" you are, which is mostly about money, but also about being an influencer.

The novel has lots of allegories, obviously, to modern American society, and brings in allegories about global warming (in the form of a supernova that will sterilize all planets within a few hundred light years of the supernova, but with the worlds given several hundred years of warning in advance). There's also more allegories about the Palestinian Israeli conflict. By the time you're done reading this you're kinda burned out on allegories, which makes this book very weak. Pile on huge numbers of new pronounces being invented by the author for various space-faring races, and you've got a super-woke novel that probably will not age well.

The part about being slow gods is where there's an advanced machine sentience in the story that's been providing all space faring races with predictions of 99% accuracy, and the protagonist of the novel is manipulated by this advanced machine intelligence in order to bring down the Shine. This is awesome wish fulfillment, but as good fiction it failed for me even though I agree with most of the politics behind the novel.

Review: Do Hard Things

 Do Hard Things has the subtitle that it's about how the conventional idea of toughness is wrong. I picked it up expecting some wishy washy reference to literature like grit (which has long been debunked), and was very surprised when it turned out to actually say a ton of sensible things. (Management books, like parenting books tend not to be sensible) For instance:

Authoritarian parenting leads to lower independence, more aggressive behavior, and a higher likelihood for substance abuse and risky behaviors. In sport, the controlling, demanding style also fails. On the athletic fields, it’s linked to lower grit and an increase in emotional exhaustion, burnout, and fear of failure. (kindle loc 151)

I've read a number of parenting books about how authoritarian parenting is wrong, but none of them ever actually wrote down what the consequences were! The author, Steve Magness, turns out to have been some sort of high level running coach, and so his emphasis is on athletic performance rather than say team management.

My high level summary of the book is that building a high performance team depends on two things: selection (who you hire or recruit into the team), and how you nurture the team (how you manage the team once you've hired them). His point is that a lot of the conventional wisdom is about boot camp building toughness, but the reality is that boot camp is about weeding out people (i.e., selection), and after that the military actually works on giving its soldiers the tools to succeed before putting them through the punishing programs (i.e., there's quite a bit of nurturing and management going on). Mistaking the selection process for the management process is what causes people to think that authoritarian parenting or dictatorship style management works. From a manager's point of view, you should be tough during the selection process (i.e., your interview process should be rigorous, thorough, and tough), but once you've built the team, other parts of management become more important.

Contrary to our old-school expectations, developing toughness doesn’t involve training camps from hell or exercise as punishment. It doesn’t involve cruel, demanding bosses with little appreciation of the individual. It doesn’t involve strict, one-way-communication parenting with little feedback from your child on their needs. As my good friend Brad outlined when explaining what he’d learned in his first few years of parenting, “At any moment, your child can go from fine to a fit. After a long day, it’s easy to want to yell at them and tell them to grow up. But, especially with young kids, you have to realize that the emotions they’re feeling are real. Even if they’re inconsequential. It requires all the patience in the world, but I try to ask myself, how can I meet them at their level, explain it, and use it as a teachable moment. Yelling at them, exerting excessive control, all that does is teach them to be afraid of you. Why would I want to ingrain to only listen because they’re afraid of me?” (kindle loc kindle loc 3218)

 One of the most important pieces on this book is something that almost no other management books mention, which is the importance of eating with your team:

Gregg Popovich is the legendary coach of the San Antonio Spurs. When it comes to creating a team culture, he’s the envy of just about every coach, CEO, or leader out there. His players rave about the bonds they still hold with their teammates years later. One player recently said, “I was friends with every single teammate I ever had in my [time] with the Spurs. That might sound far-fetched, but it’s true.” One key to such cohesion? Team meals. Popovich dinner stories are almost apocryphal. Three-hour meals, with Popovich expertly choosing the wine and food. Tables arranged so that the players maximize interaction. Popovich eschews the NBA tradition of jetting out of the city straight after a game, and instead, the Spurs go straight to a meal and stay the night. No set agenda other than time together, and certainly no ropes courses or other contrived team-bonding activities...You can’t force cohesion or unity. It doesn’t come from trust falls, gimmicky bonding activities, or forced interaction. It comes from being real. From allowing people to lower their defenses and feel comfortable enough to be who they are. You can’t force it. All you can do is create the space for it to happen. The magic wasn’t in Popovich’s team dinners. It was in his creating space for genuine interaction...If you are at a company get-together or dinner and everyone is looking down at their phone, you’ve created the wrong environment. (kindle loc 3326-3363)

I've always had a low opinion of those fake bonding events, and here's one guy who understands that ropes courses, trust falls, etc aren't worth money compared to just freaking sitting down and eating with your team on a frequent basis.

The actual part of the book about management comes from asking your people to have a realistic sense of what they or cannot do, giving them control over which outcomes they want to achieve and how to achieve them, and then providing a way for the team to work together. It's really that simple, but so few managers successfully do this, out of a misguided sense that management is about yelling at people and trying to get the to do what they don't want to do.

This is a great book. If you want to learn how to manage (or parent), you owe it to yourself to read this book.

 

Review: The Gone World

 After reading There is no Anti-Memetics Division, I went to ChatGPT Pro and asked for other books like it that I might have missed over the years. It gave me a bunch of books I'd already read, as well as books I'd already bounced off of, but one book that hit was The Gone World, published in 2018 and apparently won a few awards but somehow never got my attention.

The book revolves around Shannon Moss, who is an investigator for crimes related to the navy. The background and backstory is heavy on science fiction, however, positing that the Navy had discovered a way to traverse both deep space and time. The rules of time travel are as follows:

1. You can only travel forward in time, but not backwards in time.
2. Jumping ahead in time grants you access to a universe that hasn't happened yet and might never exist. Each forward jump therefore gives you a unique universe, that may never be repeated.
3. Returning to your own time, you aged normally depending on how much time you spent in the universe you were in. You can bring back information or people (the latter is rare), but none of the evidence is admissible in court.

What's happening in Moss' experience is that there's a world extinction event in the future, which causes the death of humanity. What's disturbing is that that extinction event keeps getting closer and closer into the future. But that's not her job. Her job is to investigate crimes, and one multiple serial murder is happening, at which point she gets involved.

Given her affiliation with the navy, she gets to jump forward in time to get an idea of what happens. At this point the story flips back and forth between being a crime thriller (will she rescue the girl in time), complete with an insane serial killer villain, and a science fiction time-travel story (can we save the world). For many books and writers this would be too hard to mix together, but somehow this story works. We get recurring characters, visiting them in multiple timelines, some of whom are victims and some of whom become villains. Moss herself at one point discovers that she might have caused the death of one of her friends due to her using an identity while time traveling.

The book is impressively well plotted, though there are a few plot holes, and the ending was great (the post-ending was anti-climatic, but appropriate). This is a great book. Not as good as There is no Anti-Memetics Division, but still excellent and well worth your time.

Review: Voice of the Whirlwind

 I’m generally a fan of Walter Jon Williams. His worlds are quite well constructed, and his characters interesting, many quite nuanced. Voice of the Whirlwind is set in his Cyberpunk universe. The protagonist, Steward, is a highly trained super soldier fanatic who’s brought back to life after his Alpha (the original) died. Apparently, the brain backups weren’t made frequently, so he has a memory gap and has to figured out what his Alpha was up to when he died.

If this sounds very familiar, it’s because Richard Morgan’s much more successful Altered Carbon had a similar setup. What made Morgan’s book more successful? First, Takeshi Kovacs narrates the novel, which makes the entire voice and presence much more immediate and visceral. Secondly, Morgan’s style is much better: rather than trying to be cyberpunk, Morgan went for a Raymond Chandler cynical hardboiled attitude.

Finally, while Stewart seems devoice of passion, Kovacs is nothing if not passionate, even if cynical.

The world that Williams introduces is complex, but there’s a lot of explicit exposition that has to happen for you to “get it.” The initial setup takes too long, and while the action goes fast once Stewartd figures out what happened, because of the third person narrative, you never understand why he should have cared in the first place.

To be fair, Williams wrote this book many years before Richard Morgan wrote Altered Carbon. I think it suffered from too much cyberpunk and its datedness shows.

 

Review: How to Win A Trade War

 How To Win A Trade War is a breezily written, conversational book about trade economics. At its best, it provides cool statistics about trade that you didn't know. For instance:

When the EU dropped barriers to trade in services among its members, it became easier for, say, Polish plumbers to accept contracts in France at lower wages, costing their French competitors work. One study found that unemployment in particularly exposed areas rose and over ten years later still hadn’t fully recovered. (kindle loc 243)

There's also an acknowledgement uncommon amongst economists that increased trade leads to the current deplorable right-wing movement in politics:

 British voters in places where jobs were more vulnerable to Chinese competition were more likely to back Brexit. In the 1990s, Democratic President Bill Clinton pushed through the controversial NAFTA trade deal to warnings that liberalization would destroy American jobs. While trade wasn’t billed as a very important issue in subsequent elections, the US voters most exposed to imports from Mexico responded by shifting toward the Republican Party. Then there was America’s “China shock.” Regions more exposed to import competition from China saw TV viewers shift to Fox News and campaign contributions to moderates drop. Polarization increased (elite lefties are just as capable of being hostile toward free trade as those on the right). But only the Republicans gained vote share where it mattered. In 2016, the effect was big enough to tip the vote and bring President Trump into office. (kindle loc 1344)

It's amazing that only Republicans gain vote share whenever free trade is involved. There's a lot of support in this book about how China misbehaves by deliberately subsidizing its state owned enterprises to ignore profitability. Effectively, Chinese companies get to ignore price signals and continue overproduction of goods as a way to retain or increase jobs.

 The final grounds for suspicion related to the response of Chinese companies to normal market dynamics. Even when demand was depressed, China’s production steamed ahead. The Chinese ramped up their shipbuilding capacity as world trade volumes collapsed by more than a fifth between 2008 and 2009. And their steel exports grew by 76 percent (that’s a lot) between 2021 and 2024 to their highest level ever, all while global demand for steel fell by 5 percent. When prices fall, that is the market’s way of telling producers that they should curb supply. When the Chinese didn’t want to hear the message, the burden of adjustment fell on the rest of the world. (kindle loc 1920)

To be honest, it's not just economists that should hang their head in shame for not pointing this out loud and clear during the 2000s. It seems to me that military strategists are also behind the 8 ball. Western countries losing shipbuilding capability should have rang alarm bells all throughout NATO but apparently nobody did (or even said) anything.

Finally, the book talks about how to properly compensate people who lose their jobs from free trade:

The US experience offers one more conclusive piece of evidence on how to support workers affected by trade-related disruptions. Trade Adjustment Assistance was a program designed to help workers hurt by imports to find new jobs. It was small and doesn’t exist anymore. (The United States works hard to sustain its reputation for having a terrible social safety net.) But for older workers, it included an interesting component: wage insurance. If you lost your job and found a new one at a lower wage, the government would top up 50 percent of the difference for up to two years. In effect, the government was subsidizing workers’ adjustment to their financial shock. A study of the program found that eligible workers were much more likely than their ineligible counterparts to find a job quickly. That cut government spending on unemployment benefits and raised income tax payments so much that the scheme paid for itself. (This is what is known as a “wow” result.) Awkwardly, the scheme didn’t effectively encourage people to switch industries altogether, maybe because eligible workers were a little older and less keen to embark on a whole new career. And because it helped workers after losing their jobs, it probably wouldn’t encourage workers to switch jobs before a trade war broke out. But as a shock mitigation program, it’s worth a look. (kindle loc 2424)

If you think the book is snarky, it's true --- the authors try very hard to keep things light-hearted (a little too hard, in fact), and I think the book could have been shortened significantly if the authors weren't trying to be so cute all the time.

In any case, I enjoyed the book and found it a good use of my time. Recommended. 

Review: Our Dollar, Your Problem

 Our Dollar, Your Problem is Ken Rogoff's book about the dollar's primacy as the global currency. How did it come about? How does the US benefit from its use as the primary currency? And what are the burdens that the US bear because the rest of the world feels obliged to hold such dollar reserves. Ken Rogoff was the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, so he's credible and knows what he's talking about.

In this book, you get inside baseball about how the decisions of the international organizations are run:

“When there is a dispute between two small nations, the UN steps in and the dispute disappears. When there is a dispute between a small nation and a large nation, the UN steps in and the small nation disappears. When there is a dispute between two large nations, the UN disappears.” (kindle loc 2319)

Rogoff makes many claims that will be surprised by. For instance, he thinks that the exchange rate control that China imposed was not responsible for the huge Chinese trade surpluses:

the exchange rate undervaluation story misses perhaps the most important device the Chinese authorities were using to keep their economy so hypercompetitive: the steady migration of millions of people each year from agrarian rural China to its cities and manufacturing centers. The real problem that Western economies were facing was a never-ending stream of impoverished rural Chinese being lifted out of desperate poverty each year through the chance to work in the productive city centers. Exchange market intervention might have contributed to the supposed undervaluation of China’s currency, but it was likely secondary. (kindle loc 3155)

 In other words, the real economy is what's driving Chinese trade surpluses and insanely competitive prices, not just exchange rate intervention. Similarly, while the US does gain some benefit from being able to borrow in its own currency, the benefit is not that big compared to the real drivers of the American economies and the wild deficit financed spending of both parties.

Interestingly enough, Rogoff spends a lot of time knocking down the idea that deficits don't matter and that interest rates would stay low forever. The thing is, he could have published this book in 2019 before the pandemic and then really made good on his predictions, instead of waiting until 2025 to do it. He never comes out and say why interest rates would rise (is it because the world is running out of savings? capital controls?). In any case he does congratulate himself for predicting the increased interest rates of the post pandemic world (partly due to high inflation), but he also notes that it was never a given that the dollar would last as long as it did as the world's currency:

Had Russia liberalized its economy in the mid-1960s, had Japan not allowed itself to be browbeaten into a destabilizing currency appreciation in the mid-1980s, had France not insisted on including Greece in the euro in 2001, or had China moved to a full-fledged floating exchange rate regime in 2010’s, the dollar would likely still be on top, but perhaps not nearly to the extent it is today. In any of these alternative realities, U.S. interest rates would probably be higher; the dollar’s exorbitant privilege less. (kindle loc 5283)

In any case, I think Americans by accelerating the decline of the dollar's dominance (by electing officials who appear hell bent on decreasing the world's dependence on the USA) are in for a shock over the next few years when the rest of the world realizes that the American market will be superceded by those in Asia.

 

Review: First Light - Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time

 First Light is a book about how the first stars formed, and how they're quite different from our sun and the stars being formed today. I read it on a plane and it was relatively light and didn't keep me from napping when I needed to.

The earliest stars were formed when most of the universe was either Hydrogen or Helium. By definition there weren't other elements since those had yet to have been forged in the hearts of stars.What I enjoyed about this book is that it takes pains to reveal mysteries that we still don't understand:

It wasn’t until the 1930s that it was realised that this absorption line was not due to a new element at all, but was instead a different form of the already familiar element, iron. Iron usually has 26 electrons and is associated with a well-known set of absorption lines. If we take away some of those electrons (we ionise the iron), then those absorption lines change. The absorption line linked to the mythical element coronium was identical to the absorption line produced by an iron atom that has had 13 electrons removed. Removing electrons is no easy job and requires very high temperatures to create high-energy collisions capable of dislodging electrons. To remove 13 electrons requires blisteringly high temperatures, indicating that the corona is millions of degrees Kelvin compared to the comparatively chilly 5,800K photosphere. So the Sun does indeed get hotter as you venture into the corona, an entirely unintuitive situation. Perhaps the high temperatures are produced by complicated magnetic fields violently throwing charged particles up from the photosphere into the corona, or perhaps bomb-like explosions called nano-flares throw heat up into the atmosphere. The theories are being narrowed down, but the Coronal Heating Problem remains an unsolved quandary. * * * It might disappoint you that I haven’t been able to tie up the Coronal Heating Problem in a neat and satisfying way. It’s annoying not knowing the answer, isn’t it? And surprising considering the resources we command. We have built probes that have travelled all the way into interstellar space, and Hubble can see well outside the Milky Way to a multitude of other galaxies. We understand how our Universe evolved, even right back to having a solid theory for its creation, the Big Bang. Yet we still race to exploit every bit of scientific understanding we can from seven minutes of totality, just as scientists were doing in 1925, albeit now with more advanced technology. We add to our knowledge in one sense (the corona isn’t made of an unusual element – it’s just really hot!), then add to our questions in another (wait, how is it that hot?!). I will admit that the Coronal Heating Problem was fairly new to me at the time of the Great American Eclipse. As an astrophysicist studying the first stars, it hadn’t ever occurred to me to pay much attention to the nearest star – the mundane, predictable Sun. (kindle loc 406)

 The book describes how it's taken years and they've still not discovered a generation 1 star (one that has a very low percentage of non hydrogen/helium). That's because those very old stars were mostly very big and hence had a short lifespan. In addition, to look for those old stars you have to look back in time a long way,

Recommended

Review: There is no Antimemetics Division

 I bought There Is No Antimemetics Division thinking that I'd read it on a plane flight, but no such luck! As soon as I got a couple of chapters in, I just had to keep reading until I finished the novel.

The book is properly described as a Cthulhu Mythos horror, drawing from the same genre of horror about "unspeakables", "unmentionables", and other types of horror. But it's written by a software engineer, and so is rigorous and academic in ways that H. P. Lovecraft could never match.

Imagine a world in which there are creatures that are anti-memetic. A meme is an idea that wants to spread to as many people as possible. An anti-meme is something that wants to be a secret (for instance, your password is an anti-meme) These creatures would want humans to see past them, or to forget them if they ever glimpsed them, for either innocent or nefarious purposes.

Just like in Charlie Stross's laundry series, this novel is written around an organization that's been built to deal with anti-memetic creatures. How such an organization would operate, what tools and research methods it would use, are slowly revealed in the course of this novel. At first, the novel seems to be a collection of vignettes, or short stories about individual episodes in this setting. As the novel develops, however, you start to see a theme and see various holes in the organizations, along with certain mysteries. The writing is tight, fast paced (the book's only 267 pages long), and in many cases so many words are blacked out that it would be impossible for you to fill in the blanks! That's part of the book's structure.'

The book does have several holes. For instance, I cannot understand why you would have a recurrent/repeating meeting in an organization that has to deal with creatures that could erase your memory. That seems bad. For another, by the end of the novel, the author (Sam Hughes,aka qntm) has written himself into such a corner that the resolved ending feels lackluster and insufficient.

Nevertheless, the book is short, it's cheap, and the writing and plot are all well thought out and compelling. Highly recommended. Probably the best fiction I read all year!

Review: Frieren Vol 11-14

 Going into Frieren Vol 11 I finally got to the point where Macht is killed and the heroes are victorious over a "midas touch" demon as well as Solitar. We then go into an extended time travel sequence where Frieren swaps places with herself from prior to the series beginning (i.e., during the quest to destroy the Demon King), and gets to use her knowledge from the future to help her previous party overcome immediate challenges while they help her return to the future.

I thought this was a great sequence, and well setup to see both how much and how little Frieren herself has changed over time.

Unfortunately, the series came to a hiatus after Vol 14, while ending in a particularly bad place with the shadow assassins plotline coming together. The problem with Japanese Manga is that they're high on filler (lots of pages where nothing essentially happens) and so by the time you get substantial events you're 14 volumes into a series that wasn't finished. The characters also have a tendency to pontificate about their secret techniques while fighting, which is pretty unrealistic but I guess with manga there's no other way to get to know the characters' innermost thoughts!

Reread: Lord Valentine's Castle

 Humble bundle had a collection of Robert Silverberg's books on sale, and I had fond memories of Lord Valentine's Castle, so I bought them and started reading the book I had fond memories of. The book feels a bit cliche now, with an amnesiac protagonist wandering around and then getting picked up by a group of jugglers when he demonstrates talent juggling.

Over time, he discovers that he's the rightful ruler of the planet, via dreams. The rest of the book is his quest to be restored to his rightful position. The setting of the planet of Majipoor itself is a character, but we never get any explanation as to why the planet is so big but so density challenged (characters in the book do refer to the lack of heavy elements on Majipoor, so the author was aware of this), or how the planet got settled, or how the various mechanisms of population control work (how do dream sendings work, why did the society appear to lose all advanced technological knowledge).

The book does spend a lot of time on juggling, and it ends up being key to many scenes in the book. On the other hand, the battle sequences are lackluster and anti-climactic (very similar to The Sandman). I enjoyed the book (it's not one of those where it's no fun to read as an adult), and having 30 years or so between readings meant I did get surprised by many plot twists, including the one at the end when we discover who the villain was.

Regardless, it was a fun read and now I get to re-read all of Robert Silverberg's other books.

Review: Frieren - Beyond Journey's End Vol 6-10

 I kept checking out Frieren - Beyond Journey's End from the library, even though the books are quite slow moving, and sometimes the writer seems to have written himself into a corner. Getting to the end of the "Class 1 Mage" saga, the author seemed to change his mind on having a Battle Royale type reality show face-off and had each candidate interviewed by the master wizardess (who's an elf who knows Frieren). The decisions seem purely arbitrary, but at least it gets the story moving.

We get a continuation of the journey across the continent, with a bunch of side quests, but the story becomes more interesting as we see Frieren in action against demons, and an explanation that demons are completely a different type of sentient being with no emotions but seemingly evolved to prey on humans. That's interesting, but no explanation on the origins is forthcoming. As always, humans get the short end of the stick --- they don't live long enough, and all the non-humans are immortal. Makes you wonder how humans came to dominate the world, since according to the explication in the books, living longer accumulates magical energy (mana).

Finally, we get a long story arc about a demon that turns things into gold via a midas touch like spell. By the end of the 10th volume things still aren't resolved. We reach a climax where things have gone maximally bad for the heroes when the volume ends, keeping you wanting to reach for the next book.

Re-read: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest

 The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest was the last book in the Millenium trilogy that Steig Larsson wrote before he died. The first book in the series was like a locked room mystery (though its setup was unlike any I'd seen). The second book started like a police procedural and ended up being a thriller. This last book started out like an espionage story, ran through the middle like a courtroom drama, and ended like a thriller. It's great, intense reading, and never fails to point to how women are treated even in Sweden, which to my mind is one of those Northern European countries that consistently seem to have it together.

Lisbeth Salander, the girl referred to in the title of all the books, plays a mostly passive role in the story. Picking up where everything left off in the second book, that's entirely reasonable, since there's only so much you can do while recovering from brain surgery. The plot revolves around her background, however, and all the events that led up to the first book are revealed. Blomkvist returns, and does behave a lot like the protagonist of the novel.

The book has aged quite a bit since 2010 when it came out. For one thing, back then, the United States still felt like a democracy where the rule of law mattered. Today, I would be very surprised if a novel came out with a sentence like this one:

Armansky had Blomkvist’s copy of Lidbom’s book An Assignment, and he was reading it with gathering astonishment. If this were the United States a dozen or so senior Säpo hands would have been arrested for obstruction of justice and forced to appear before a public committee in Congress. In Sweden apparently they were untouchable. (kindle loc 18671 in the kindle omnibus edition which is no longer sold!)

Nevertheless, the clue that the book is fiction is that everything ties up neatly, the bad guys are found (and revealed to be incompetent), and there's a happy ending of sorts. Like many franchises, this one sold too well to leave alone, and the publisher found another novelist to continue the adventures of Lisbeth Salander. A sample came with the book but after reading Larsson's writing it's clear that whoever followed him just doesn't have what it takes.

Re-read: The Girl Who Played With Fire

 I hadn't read The Girl Who Played With Fire for so long that it felt like a fresh novel. While the first book introduced us to Lisbeth Salander, this second book is her origin story. It's setup at first as a mystery novel, with a couple (who're introduced to us with sufficient detail to make us care and want to identify with them) who gets murdered early on, along with a character from the first novel (whom Salander has good reason to want to murder). There's a media circus that brings Salander to the public eye as a psychotic villain, and then we get what seems to be a police procedural novel about hunting down Salander.

Of course, from the first novel we know that she's a heroine (or maybe an anti-heroine), and while she's mostly missing from the first half of the novel when she's re-introduced to the narrative the pretense of a police procedural falls away and we get a full on thriller. The plot twists and turns are well done (including the reveal of who Salander's father is), and fair (i.e., I felt like there were plenty of clues and when the reveal happened I thought "oh wow, the clues were there all along")

The main character of this novel appears to be Mikahlle Blomvist, the journalist from the first novel, living like a private investigator. The book is full of references to that. I can see why this book took the world by storm when it was published. The only caveat I have is that the book ends with a cliffhanger/resolution that automatically leads into the third book of the series. Good thing I bought the series as a completed trilogy and can dive immediately into the third book!

Review: The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions

 The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions showed up in my kindle library, probably because another family member checked it out from the local library. I read it in a handful of days because it was relatively easy to read (no equations), and mostly covered stuff I already knew, from Newton to Einstein to Hubble to the Big Bang Theory.

Towards the end of the book, as she discusses the Big Bang theory, I started getting into stuff I either didn't know or didn't remember, such as the origins of Inflation, and the confirmation that the Big Bang Theory is correct mostly because of the proportion of the light elements that are present in the universe.

Helium, deuterium, and lithium nuclei are formed. The cosmic quantities of these elements are set, along with that of hydrogen, whose density has decreased as a result of the formation of helium. If we were to calculate how many of these elements were produced by nucleosynthesis, we would find astonishing results. The mass ratio between hydrogen and helium that we still observe in the Universe today is exactly that established in those first 3 minutes. For every three hydrogen atoms, there is one helium atom. This is one of the most surprising confirmations of the Big Bang theory. Without primordial nucleosynthesis, the amount of helium we observe in the Universe today could not be explained. (kindle loc 1218)

Cosmology is great fun, because it's astonishing how much we've been able to discover about the universe from mostly being Earthbound, and the astonishing idea that so much of what we know about the expanding universe will become unknowable in the far future, once the last external galaxy has been expanded out of our light cone.  We truly live in interesting times!

Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm

 Philip Pullman rewrites a selection of stories from the Brothers Grimm. These aren't embellishments, as far as I can tell he didn't add any new twists to the original or expand on the story. The tone is "just so", the way fairy tales are written, and each one is at most 5 pages of reading material. He doesn't go into what his selection criteria is (the criteria for the last one is explained, however!),  and it seems to be a mixture of the classics (Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel) and some stories that particularly catch his fancy.

I enjoyed most of them, and obviously the original tales frequently had bite that the Disney version don't. What gives these stories more meaning are the notes that Pullman attaches to the end of each story. In many cases these notes provide a deep look at the symbology or the origins of the story (including a retelling of Ali Baba that leaves out the last bit!)

Review: From Star to Superstar - the Asian American Guide to Elite Colleges

 From Star to Superstar is a guide for Asian Americans for college applications. While demographic transition is likely to make colleges easier to get into in general, the opposite is true for the elite colleges, which draw from an international pool of students and are generally immune to US demographics. This book acknowledges the unspoken truth of college admissions, which is that Asian boys are at a particular disadvantage, suffering from both internal competitions (schools use a quota system to places a ceiling on how many Asian kids they are willing to admit), and from artificial barriers (originally introduced to limit the number of Jews in colleges and now redeployed to protect college campuses from over-performing Asians) such as personality scores, holistic review, and video submissions (that way even if you don't have an Asian name, just looking Asian can tank your application).

With this in mind, the book takes a multi-prong approach. Of course, academics is a given (hey, if you're Asian, this is expected of you, and at a higher level than your non-Asian peers). Then, you've got to demonstrate service that shows impact, leadership that demonstrate values (not just being president of school societies --- that might work if you're non Asian), essays, recommendations, and interviews.

Over and over again, the book covers much the same material in Cal Newport's book, How to Be A High School Superstar, but because it's got the word Asian in the title, my suspicion is that more Asians will read it. The basic thing is that your extra-curriculars have to demonstrate impact, and you have to actively cultivate your school teachers (and other adults) to be able to provide you with a recommendation and testimonial that reinforces the story you're trying to tell the admissions office.

There's also a section on tailoring the colleges you apply to your strengths, as well as taking an unconventional rather than direct approach to your major. (e.g, applying to be in Information Science instead of Data Science or Computer Science)

If you read this book, you'll come away with an idea of how much effort it takes for an Asian kid to compete and get into an elite school. You might even get angry about how all this additional side-work is a misallocation of resources that could be used elsewhere (e.g., maybe kids could spend more time outside or something). If you think this, rest assured that there are elite colleges elsewhere that don't make you jump through these hoops. It's just that none of them are in the USA (University of Waterloo, Cambridge, Oxford, ETH). But of course in those cases, you might actually have to study hard and do well on exams. But hey, if you're Asian, maybe that would fit your strengths. Having lived with those systems I'm actually quite relieve that I didn't quite have to do the holistics process back when I was applying to colleges. I probably wouldn't have gotten in.

Review: Racing Through The Dark

 It's easy for me to be cynical about professional cycling as a sport. When I read that the speed of the current top racers are higher than during the EPO-doping era, I find it hard to believe that the sport is clean. Racing Through the Dark is David Millar's memoir about his cycling career. Like many professional athletes, he graduated high school and proceeded to aim directly for a career as a professional bike racer, with a half-hearted application to an art school only as a backup.

David Millar must have been extremely talented, because by his account, he did not dope and in fact, won many of his races clean, including his debut at the Tour de France. His account of his descent into doping was largely a story of being influenced by the culture, first, with teammates injecting themselves with vitamins and iron for recovery (interestingly enough, with no scientific studies showing that this was better than eating or drinking those nutrients), and with his team, Cofidis, deliberately turning a blind eye to drug use, employing metrics and bonuses that paid of with race results. Of course, at that time all professional cycling teams were like that, so it wasn't as though you could join a team that was clean.

The book was written and published before Lance Armstrong confessed to being doped up when winning his 7 Tours and being stripped of his title. Millar confesses that he didn't know one way or another whether Armstrong was doping, though he must have heard rumors.

Ultimately, Millar served his suspension and returned to racing, though much older. He describes his work and advocacy of anti-doping agencies, as well as his struggles against the French tax authorities because his agents had setup tax avoidance schemes on his behalf. I thought the book was well worth reading, and depending on how you view his credibility, makes it seem like it is possible to race professionally and win against dopers with good results. Then again, even if he was doping, he would lie and say that anyway, right?

First Impressions: Santa Cruz Blur

 Competitive Cyclist/Backcountry was offering a 2024 Santa Cruz Blur C at $4300. That in itself was a good deal, but what sealed it was that they offered an upgrade to T-type transmission for $800, and I would get to keep the old non-T-type parts for converting one of my other bikes, which I've been wanting to do for quite some time.

I will commend Backcountry for their excellent customer service. The bike arrived with a broken cassette, 

and they promptly sent me a new one, and paid for a local bike shop to do the cassette swap and also tweak the derailleur.

The bike showed up, I waxed the chain, and took it up Table Mountain/Charcoal Road. While the bike is a good 4 pounds lighter than my old hardtail from 2014, I'm not sure I could tell the difference in weight. The big differences are the AXS transmission shifting system, which shifts perfectly every time and don't get stuck in a gear like my old bike, and the remote lockout. I had no idea what a remote lockout was when I bought the bike, but now that I have one I love it!

The remote lockout lets you twist your wrist which pulls a cable to turn off suspension on both front and rear at the same time. I found myself using it all the time, disabling suspension on a fire-road climb and then turning it back on for every descent. The result is I felt way less beat up on this bike than on my older hard tail.

My big complaint about the bike is the same as my complaint about most stock bikes -- the gearing is simply way too high. I would have preferred if the bike came with 30t or 32t chainrings instead of 34. As usual, bike manufacturers spec bikes for strong 25 year olds, not people who have creaky knees and much prefer spinning up mountains than mashing up them.

Regardless, I set PRs on several downhills on my first run on the bike, indicating that yes, not having rear suspension was holding me back on descending. I also executed several jumps, which meant that the bike wasn't too heavy to get air time!

I guess I don't need to return this bike!

Review: Frieren - Beyond Journey's End Vol 1-5

 Frieren - Beyond Journey's End had a premise that I found intriguing, so I checked out 5 digital volumes from the library onto my Kindle Scribe.

The graphic novel volume starts with the end of a big adventure = the Elf mage Frieren and her fellow adventurers have defeated the Demon King and brought peace to the land. They are hailed as heroes, and part ways. Frieren, being an Elf, does not age or die, but her companions are two humans and a dwarf, so she attends her funeral.

The cleric in the party tricks her into adopting his mentee as her apprentice, and she embarks on a new adventure. The story starts slow, and you get the impression the Freren seems to be an unmotivated (by human standards) sort of person. Since she lives forever, she can effectively take her time and tarry at places for years at a time in no hurry.

As the backstory emerges, however, you start to see that she's no ordinary mage, for instance, suppressing her mana aura deliberately so that she appears weaker than she is. You discover that she was the apprentice of a legendary mage.

Like all Japanese graphic novels, a lot of the story is told in pictures instead of words or dialogue, so pages can fly by without a single word. I assume that the story was serialized in one of those weekly compendium magazines, so there's no hurry on the storyline. The story arc about demonic magic took more than a volume to cover. The story arc about getting a mage certification took more than a volume and still isn't done when I put down volume 5.

The characters are slow to evolve, so you have to give the series time to read (hence at least 5 volumes before I tried writing a review). It's a good enough read that I will keep checking out more volumes from the library as they become available.

More Everything Forever

 More Everything Forever is Adam Becker's critique of the future as touted by our current batch of billionaires --- Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman. These billionaires frequently tout a future of space travel (colonizing Mars), or uploading into cyberspace (immortality) or any number of exotic fantasies rather than solving the immediate problems here on Earth now: poverty, inequality, and climate change.

The book goes into the billionaires ties to the Effective Altruism movement, which the author is clearly disdainful of, for good reason. The math that the EA movement uses to justify concentrating on AI safety instead of solving immediate problems for humans who are alive today comes in for particular scrutiny.

the fact that they’re primarily worried about existential threats in the first place is the other problem: once a threat has been deemed existential, it’s impossible to outweigh it with any less-than-existential threat in the present day. In determining which threats count as “existential,” much ends up depending on estimations of risk, estimations that—apparently—aren’t informed by the best available science and expert opinions. “MacAskill falls into the trap of being ‘foolishly wise,’” says Watson. “Wise fools [are] those who recognise the limits of their knowledge and therefore are able to take some account of what they don’t know. I think of the opposite as the foolish wise, very clever people whose erudition and wide book-learning lead them however to inadequately account for the ‘unknown unknowns.’”20 Despite these important mistakes at the core of their worldview, Ord, MacAskill, Sandberg, Bostrom, and the rest of those who work at Trajan House aren’t fringe. The building itself is testimony to how influential their views are and how successful their movement has been. It screams of money, from the corporate office furniture to the snack drawers filled with cruelty-free chocolate bars.21 Financial records show a little over $75 million in donations to Effective Ventures in their 2021 fiscal year alone, most of which came from Open Philanthropy (kindle loc 2918)

Bit by bit, the author demolishes the arguments the billionaires use to justify spending massive money on a Mars effort for instance. Even a post-nuclear apocalyptic Earth is likely to be more habitable than Mars, for instance. Unlike Earth, Mars doesn't have an atmosphere or magnetic field, so you get a direct hit of radiation on the surface --- so underground is probably the only place to live. But the soil itself on Mars is poisonous! Mars as a backup location for the human race is basically a fantasy.

  But “when the asteroid hit 66 million years ago it was a nicer day than today on Mars—otherwise no animal life would have survived,” says Peter Brannen, author of The Ends of the World, a survey of mass extinctions on Earth. “So we better learn to live here. This is it.”83 Our existence is proof Brannen is right: despite the horrors of that day, mammals survived, as did birds, fish, and many other vertebrates. No mammal could survive unprotected for more than a few minutes on Mars. “We’ll never trash this place so bad with nukes or climate change that somewhere else is a better option,” Brannen concludes.84 Or, as Martin Rees, cosmologist and Astronomer Royal, puts it: “It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. We’ve got to solve these problems here. Coping with climate change may seem daunting, but it’s a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. No place in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest. There’s no ‘Planet B’ for ordinary risk-averse people.”85 If you knew, right now, that another asteroid was bearing down on Earth like the one that hit sixty-six million years ago, and if you were offered the choice of staying here or going to a base on Mars like the one Musk wants to build, staying here would be the far better bet. Everyone here would probably die, but without supply missions from Earth, everyone on Mars would definitely die. (kindle loc 4392)

Then there all the science fiction ideas that the billionaires go for, such as unlimited growth (and exponential growth if possible) for humanity, the technological singularity, and all these "end-times" type of destiny for the human race come under scrutiny. In every case, the math doesn't make sense.

 This is painfully apparent in the way Jeff Bezos talks about geniuses of the future. He dreams of one thousand Mozarts and one thousand Einsteins among his trillion humans living in space. But he’s neglecting the potential Einsteins and Mozarts that are living and dying in poverty right now. If Bezos really wants a dynamic civilization, he could invest in solving the problems that we actually face. He could tackle the enormous levels of wealth inequality in the world today. He could put all his resources into fighting global warming, which will also have unequal impacts around the world. Instead, he’s going to space—and he thinks that’s the best and most important thing he can do with his money. (kindle loc 4452)

 If growth in humanity’s energy usage were to continue at the same rate past the four-hundred-year mark, in 1,350 years we’d be using all the energy produced by the Sun; 1,100 years after that, we’d be using all the energy produced by all the stars in the Milky Way. And about 1,250 years after that, 3,700 years from right now, we’d be using all the energy produced by all the stars in the observable universe.44 If Bezos believes that ceasing to grow our energy usage must lead to a culture of stagnation, he’d better get used to the idea. Sometime in the next 3,700 years—only about 80 percent of the present age of the Great Pyramid at Giza—humanity must stop growing its energy use. And it’s probably going to happen much sooner than that (kindle loc 570)

Finally, the best argument against the technological salvation via singularity is this:

 Most of the greatest problems facing humanity right now—global warming, massive inequality, the lurking potential for nuclear war—are not driven by resource scarcity or a lack of technology. They’re social problems, requiring social solutions. Increased energy usage, increased technological prowess, or even an increase in the amount of “intelligence” brought to bear on these problems (whatever that might mean) isn’t likely to solve them. These are political problems, problems of persuasion and justice and fairness. Negotiating durable ceasefire agreements isn’t something that AI is likely to help with; sending vast numbers of humans to space won’t end violence in the Middle East; doubling humanity’s energy consumption isn’t going to fix political polarization in the United States or stem the rise of fascism worldwide. If we want a future that puts people first, we need to recognize that there are no panaceas, and likely no utopias either. Nothing is coming to save us. There’s no genie inside a computer that will grant us three wishes. Technology can’t heal the world. We have to do that ourselves. (kindle loc 5187)

Overall, I wish the book was better written. In many places its meandering, and takes a long time to get to the point. But the book is a great antidote to the techno-optimists, and reminds us that just because some smart people get fabulously wealthy doesn't mean that they aren't subject to the same wishful thinking (the author goes into "Engineer's disease") that affects all of us at one point or another.

 concentrated wealth has eroded democracy in the United States and around the world. Peter Thiel has aided that erosion with his support of Trump and other far-right politicians. The antidemocratic ambitions of tech billionaires extend through Sam Altman’s power fantasy of his own ascension to king of the world straight to the permanent galactic fascism of Marc Andreessen. While those specific visions are implausible, the fact that billionaires harbor such dreams is an indication of the risks that we as a society are taking by allowing billionaires to happen. They will keep looking for ways to extend their control over the world unless they are curtailed. Their dreams are dreams of endless capitalism of the most brutal sort, because they know that such a system would allow them to win still more money and power. This is another reason it’s difficult to imagine a future other than the ones they promote: as the saying goes, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But eventually—and probably sooner rather than later—the present growth-obsessed form of capitalism must come to an end. And it can end without ending the world, as Ursula K. Le Guin reminded us. “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”81 (kindle loc 5241)