Review: Salt - A World History

I read Salt while touring across Bavaria, and it was a surprisingly appropriate read! The book covers the history of Salt's importance, of how roman soldiers used to get paid in salt, and the history of various forms of salt existed throughout human history and the role of salt in preserving food.

It was said that in the markets to the south of Taghaza salt was exchanged for its weight in gold, which was an exaggeration. The misconception comes from the West African style of silent barter noted by Herodotus and subsequently by many other Europeans. In the gold-producing regions of West Africa, a pile of gold would be set out, and a salt merchant would counter with a pile of salt, each side altering their piles until an agreement was reached. No words were exchanged during this process, which might take days. The salt merchants often arrived at night to adjust their piles and leave unseen. They were extremely secretive, not wanting to reveal the location of their deposits. From this it was reported in Europe that salt was exchanged in Africa for its weight in gold. But it is probable that the final agreed-upon two piles were never of equal weight. (Kindle Loc 650)

The Italian mainland was originally much farther away from the islands that are now the city of Venice. The area between these islands and the peninsula of Comacchio was called the Seven Seas. “To sail the seven seas” meant simply sailing the Seven Seas—accomplishing the daunting task of navigating past the sandbars of those treacherous twenty-five miles. About A.D. 600, Venetians started using landfill to extend the mainland closer to the islands of modern-day Venice. The Seven Seas became a landmass with a port named Chioggia. Below it, in a now much-narrowed lagoon, was Comacchio, overlooking the delta of the Po. Ravenna, formerly a port, became an inland city, and nearby Cervia became its port. (Kindle loc 1070)

 Another example: I didn't know that Ketchup came from Indonesia:

Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan. The names of several other Indonesian sauces also include the word kecap, pronounced KETCHUP, which means a base of dark, thick soy sauce. Why would English garum have an Indonesian name? Because the English, starting with the medieval spice trade, looked to Asia for seasoning. Many English condiments, even Worcestershire sauce, invented in the 1840s, are based on Asian ideas...The salt in ketchup originally came from salt-cured fish, and most early anchovy ketchup recipes, such as Eliza Smith’s, do not even list salt as an ingredient because it is part of the anchovies. But the English and Americans began to move away from having fish in their ketchup. It became a mushroom sauce, a walnut sauce, or even a salted lemon sauce. These ketchups originally included salt anchovies, but as Anglo-Saxon cooking lost its boldness, cooks began to see the presence of fish as a strong flavor limiting the usefulness of the condiment. Roman cooks would have been appalled by the lack of temerity, but Margaret Dods adds at the end of her walnut ketchup recipe: Anchovies, garlic, cayenne, etc. are sometimes put to this catsup; but we think this is a bad method, as these flavours may render it unsuitable for some dishes, and they can be added extempore when required.—Margaret Dods, Cook and Housewife’s Manual, London, 1829 Ketchup became a tomato sauce, originally called “tomato ketchup” in America, which is appropriate since the tomato is an American plant, brought to Europe by Hernán Cortés, embraced in the Mediterranean, and regarded with great suspicion in the North. (Kindle loc 2344)

 It covers MSG, the history of salted fish, and the modern use of "natural salt", which ironically has more dirt and doesn't have iodine, which is actually an important mineral that many do not get enough of:

The salt in ketchup originally came from salt-cured fish, and most early anchovy ketchup recipes, such as Eliza Smith’s, do not even list salt as an ingredient because it is part of the anchovies. But the English and Americans began to move away from having fish in their ketchup. It became a mushroom sauce, a walnut sauce, or even a salted lemon sauce. These ketchups originally included salt anchovies, but as Anglo-Saxon cooking lost its boldness, cooks began to see the presence of fish as a strong flavor limiting the usefulness of the condiment. Roman cooks would have been appalled by the lack of temerity, but Margaret Dods adds at the end of her walnut ketchup recipe: Anchovies, garlic, cayenne, etc. are sometimes put to this catsup; but we think this is a bad method, as these flavours may render it unsuitable for some dishes, and they can be added extempore when required.—Margaret Dods, Cook and Housewife’s Manual, London, 1829 Ketchup became a tomato sauce, originally called “tomato ketchup” in America, which is appropriate since the tomato is an American plant, brought to Europe by Hernán Cortés, embraced in the Mediterranean, and regarded with great suspicion in the North. (Kindle Loc 5437)

There's a lot more in this big book, including coverage of the salt mines in Salzburg (the name means "salt city!"), and how much of lower Bavaria was important because of the presence of the salt mines. It even put the mining exhibit and the salt mine visits that we made during the tour into perspective. The book can be a bit repetitive and a bit of a chore at times to read, but I was very happy to have read it when I read it.

Recommended.

Review: Exhalation

Exhalation is the latest collection of Ted Chiang stories. If you're a fan of Ted Chiang, you probably didn't need to know more, and you'd just click through, buy or checkout the book from the library, and read it. Unlike other writers, nearly every Chiang story is a gem.

Outstanding stories in this collection include: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", "Omphalos", "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling", and "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom." I thought the title story "Exhalation" was good, but not as outstanding as the others, but it was nevertheless far better than most stories you'll find anywhere else. I also enjoyed "The Lifecycle of Software Objects," but thought the story went on far longer than it needed to to make his point.

The remaining two stories "What's Expected of Us", and "Prisms" were far less interesting, but nevertheless do not detract from the book. You can pay full price for this book without any qualms.

Recommended.

Review: The Uninhabitable Earth

I'm an environmental pessimist. That doesn't mean I don't do everything I can to avoid increasing my carbon footprint --- I ride my bike everywhere instead of driving when I can, and I do try to avoid flights. (I almost never fly to weddings, for instance, or do weekend trips) I've told friends that I don't expect humans to be around in 200 years, because as a species we seem to be hell-bent on destroying the environment that we live in.

The Uninhabitable Earth makes me look like an optimist. To my surprise, I learned a lot more about the global climate crisis than I already knew:

more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before. The United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992, advertising scientific consensus unmistakably to the world; this means we have now engineered as much ruin knowingly as we ever managed in ignorance. Global warming may seem like a distended morality tale playing out over several centuries and inflicting a kind of Old Testament retribution on the great-great-grandchildren of those responsible, since it was carbon burning in eighteenth-century England that lit the fuse of everything that has followed. But that is a fable about historical villainy that acquits those of us alive today—and unfairly. The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. (Kindle Loc 75)

Think about what this means. You can't blame your ancestors, or the WW2 generation for the climate disasters that are facing the earth every year from now on. It's the responsibility of this generation and of course, the generational cohorts just before us (the silent, the boomers, gen x, and the millennial are all in it together). It means that when Bowen and Boen are entering college and remember that back when they were 7 and 4 it was still possible to do a summer bike tour in temperatures under 100F, they can (and probably should) blame us for doing nothing about our greenhouse gas emissions.

And it's not just about driving. It's also about food wastage and construction:

Fully half of British emissions, it was recently calculated, come from inefficiencies in construction, discarded and unused food, electronics, and clothing; two-thirds of American energy is wasted; globally, according to one paper, we are subsidizing the fossil fuel business to the tune of $5 trillion each year. None of that has to continue. (Kindle Loc 551)

Americans waste a quarter of their food, which means that the carbon footprint of the average meal is a third larger than it has to be. That need not continue. (Kindle Loc 556)

Five years ago, hardly anyone outside the darkest corners of the internet had even heard of Bitcoin; today mining it consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined, which means that in just a few years we’ve assembled, out of distrust of one another and the nations behind “fiat currencies,” a program to wipe out the gains of several long, hard generations of green energy innovation. It did not have to be that way. (Kindle Loc 557)

If the average American were confined by the carbon footprint of her European counterpart, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by more than half. If the world’s richest 10 percent were limited to that same footprint, global emissions would fall by a third. And why shouldn’t they be? Almost as a prophylactic against climate guilt, as the news from science has grown bleaker, Western liberals have comforted themselves by contorting their own consumption patterns into performances of moral or environmental purity—less beef, more Teslas, fewer transatlantic flights. But the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics. (Kindle Loc 567)

These problems are all problems of scale, and it's not enough to do it one person at a time. You have to scale up the solutions. Think about that last paragraph above: the Europeans live well, in many ways better than Americans, with fewer health problems, more income mobility, etc. There's no reason Americans have to live their current lifestyle, but the courage to make that change will be hard to come by: humans don't measure their material progress against absolutes, but against what their neighbors and their friends' lifestyle is. That's why wives compare their husbands' incomes against each other, and people in the office gasp when I tell them that I don't currently own a car and have no desire to change that state. And that's why I'm a climate pessimist: our concern for survival pales against our greed and envy. Consider the millions of people who smoke despite knowing that it's likely to cause a painful death. That's the state of humanity today.

n the modern age, at least, there is also the related tendency to view large human systems, like the internet or industrial economy, as more unassailable, even more un-intervenable, than natural systems, like climate, that literally enclose us. This is how renovating capitalism so that it doesn’t reward fossil fuel extraction can seem unlikelier than suspending sulfur in the air to dye the sky red and cool the planet off by a degree or two. To some, even ending trillions in fossil fuel subsidies sounds harder to pull off than deploying technologies to suck carbon out of the air everywhere on Earth. This is a kind of Frankenstein problem, and relates to widespread fears of artificial intelligence: we are more intimidated by the monsters we create than those we inherit. (Kindle Loc 2434)

At the same time, that this has all happened in one lifetime is also cause for hope: that means it's possible to try to stop it to happening in one lifetime as well, and that we (and definitely our children) will live long enough to face the consequences of our (in)action means that maybe a few more catastrophes will change people's mind. I'm realistic enough to not expect it to happen (I've watched more than one human organization deliberately adopt policies antithetical to their existence)

In any case, I hope I can convince you to read this book. If the book causes you to change your lifestyle and vote to end our current suicide pact with each other, it would have been well worth your time. Recommended.

A Man for All Markets

A Man for All Markets is Ed Thorp's autobiography. It's a great book about how Thorp went from being a mathematician to being the first person to systematize and develop a system for beating blackjack, and then created the modern hedge fund. It's filled with great anecdotes:

We had been told that slide rules would be allowed for the first time this year but that they weren’t necessary. As an afterthought I brought along a ten-cent toy slide rule—all I felt I could afford—thinking I could always do a quick rough check of my calculations if I had any extra time. As I worked through the test I knew every answer. But then the last section of the test was distributed. This part of the exam required many more calculations than I could do by hand in the time allowed. My cheap tiny slide rule was worthless. Out came the full-sized well-machined slide rules all around me. Surprise! Slide rules were not merely optional—they were necessary for anyone who wanted to win. There was no credit given for showing the correct method, only credit for a numerical answer, to a specified level of “slide rule accuracy.” I was sickened by the realization I would likely not place high enough to get the scholarship I needed and unhappy with myself for not preparing by purchasing a hard-to-afford top-of-the-line slide rule. It seemed so unfair to convert a test about chemistry into one about slide rule arithmetic. Be that as it may, I set to calculating by hand as quickly as I could. In the end, I was only able to complete 873 of the entire exam’s 1,000 points’ worth of questions, so this was the most I could possibly score. I knew the top winner typically got 925 to 935, so I had no chance at first place. When my father picked me up I was forcing myself not to cry and could barely talk. In class Mr. Stump could see that I was chastened and obviously had done badly. We didn’t talk about it. I wrote the episode off to my own naïveté. But I did go out and buy the best slide rule I could afford. A couple of weeks after the test, Mr. Stump called me aside to tell me the results. My score was 869 points out of the 873 points I had answered. First place was far ahead at about 930, but second and third place were just a few points ahead of my fourth-place finish. With a good slide rule I could have been first. (Kindle Loc 716)

 And once again, Thorp emphasizes how important public universities like UC Berkeley is to the poor and under-privileged:

The scoring pattern of the chemistry exam was repeated, only this time I was first with 931 points. The second-place winner was fifty or sixty points behind. Surpassing the smug and privileged, I had first pick of the scholarships that were offered, wavering between Caltech and UC–Berkeley. Caltech, my first choice, offered full tuition, but I did not have an extra $2,000 per year for the dormitories and expenses. Pasadena was expensive and I knew of no place nearby within my budget. I simply couldn’t afford Caltech. My UC–Berkeley scholarship, the largest they then gave, was for $300 a year. Tuition, which was $70 a year, was covered separately for me by a scholarship for children of World War I veterans. Berkeley also had low-cost room and board just off campus. Cheaper yet was the Student Cooperative Housing Association, with room and board for $35 per month and four hours of work a week. When I picked Berkeley, I consoled myself with the hope that at least there would be plenty of girls and my social life might bloom. (Kindle Loc 831)

My kindle highlights page from the book is chock full of great stories:

 Most people I’ve met haven’t thought through the comparative values to them of time, money, and health. Think of the single worker who spends two hours commuting forty miles from hot and smoggy Riverside, California, to a $25-an-hour job in balmy Newport Beach. If the worker moves from his $1,200-a-month apartment in Riverside to a comparable $2,500-a-month apartment in Newport Beach, his rent increases by $1,300 a month but he avoids forty hours of commuting. If his time is worth $25 per hour he would save $1,000 ($25 × 40) each month. Add to that the cost of driving his car an extra sixteen hundred miles. If his economical car costs him 50 cents a mile or $800 a month to operate, living in Newport Beach and saving forty hours’ driving time each month makes him $500 better off ($1,000 + $800 − $1,300). In effect he earned just $12.50 per hour during his commute. Does our worker figure this out? I suspect he does not, because the extra $1,300 a month in rent he would pay in Newport Beach is a clearly visible cost that is painfully and regularly inflicted, whereas the cost of his car is less evident and can be put out of mind. (Kindle Loc 4724)

 What's amazing to me is that Thorp, unlike many of his cohorts who made tons of money at Wall Street, decided to fold up his company (which had been brought down not by poor investments, but by poor ethical decisions on the part of one of his partners):

Vivian and I would make the most of the one thing we could never have enough of—time together. Success on Wall Street was getting the most money. Success for us was having the best life. (Kindle Loc 3647)

Clearly, this is a man who's thought through everything, and made good decisions at every step of the way. I hope to get Bowen to read this book one day, because I think that not only does it explain why it's great to be good at math and thinking, but also that many of the most important decisions aren't just about probability and money, but about choosing the right people to partner with.

Recommended!

Review: Stiff

Stiff is Mary Roach's book about what happens to Human Cadavers. If you've read her other books, you'll discover that this one is much like the others: lots of pithy quotations, such as this discussion about the most ecologically pure thing to do with a body:

I used to think the traditional navy burial at sea sounded nice; I pictured the sun on the ocean, the infinite expanse of blue, the nowhereness of it. Then one day I had a conversation with Phillip Backman, during which he mentioned that one of the cleanest, quickest, and most ecologically pure things to do with a body would be to put it in a big tide-pool full of Dungeness crabs, which apparently enjoy eating people as much as people enjoy eating crabs. “It’ll do the thing in a couple of days,” he said. “It’s all recycled, and it’s all clean and taken care of.” My affinity for burial at sea—not to mention crabmeat—was suddenly, dramatically diminished. (Kindle Loc 3292)

That's not to say that the book doesn't cover lots of different topics. Cadavers get used everywhere from crash testing to firearm effectiveness to improving footwear for bomb clearing squads. Many of these applications sound interesting, but as you can imagine,  it takes all her skill as a writer to make a giant ass book about them, because most of the applications are obvious. By the time I was done with the book I was quite bored.

Post Tour Review: Google Pay

At home, NFC payments are at most a minor convenience. The local safeway takes it, but Costco doesn't, and the gas stations and USPS definitely don't. At any given store, there's at most a 30% chance that NFC payments will be accepted, and they are never accepted at any restaurant.

During this year's trip, I switched my Google Pay to a no foreign transaction fee credit card, and to my surprise nearly all stores and restaurants accepted Google Pay. (The lone exception that I remember was the Deutsche Bahn train station) This is a huge advantage for someone with a US credit card in Europe. If you pay with a regular credit card in Europe, even one with an NFC chip built in, the cashier will sigh, look at you in exasperation, dig around for a pen, print out the receipt and have you sign it.

With Google Pay and an NFC receptor, however, your fingerprint authenticates you, and your transaction is like with a chip-and-pin credit card in Europe, except you don't even have to enter a pin. Everybody's happy, and you're no longer holding up the line at the supermarket checkout stand.

No, most hotels won't take NFC payments (I don't know why hotels are an exception), and some places demand cash, but I eventually programmed my wife's phone with Google Pay and she even got out of the habit of bringing a wallet to the store. Even if you don't normally use Google Pay, if you visit Europe, it's worth the effort of setting it up.

Recommended.

Post Tour Review: Continental GP 5000 700x32 tires

Just as I was packing the bike for the Mt Shasta trip, I noticed that the Fairweather by Traveler tire on the rear had wear indicators that were barely visible. The tire had just been rotated from front to rear a month ago, and had seen only 4-5 major rides, so I knew it was unlikely to survive a tour. It was too late to do anything about it for Shasta, but I went and order the Continental GP5000 700x32 tires in time for the Tour Across Bavaria. At $40 per tire including shipping, these tires were the most expensive tires I'd run in modern times. However, I remember never actually managing to wear down a Continental Gatorskin down to the threads, so I figured even their racing tire would be fine.

The picture above are from the front and rear after 372 miles of touring. The rear is significantly worn compared to the front (unsurprising --- the total weight on the bike was in excess of 300 pounds), but could easily get another 400 miles in. The tires handled both gravel and pavement well, and never flatted during the entire trip. At 271g per tire, these tires came in below the manufacturer's spec of 295g, and lighter than the Fairweather tires as well as the Michelin Pro Endurance 700x28 tires!

These will remain my new "go to" tires for the triplet. In fact, I'm looking at switching all my bikes over to various widths of these tires in the future. They might wear a little faster (though again, the triplet is an extreme use case) but have behaved far better than my previous experience with Continental tires. Recommended.

Post Tour Review: Polar OH1+

I  brought the Polar OH1+ on this tour half expecting not to use it. But boy I was wrong. In fact, the worst thing I can say about the Polar OH1+ is that it's too comfortable. There have been days on tour when I would put it on in the morning and forget that I'm wearing it and therefore forgot to turn it on until the bike ride had already started! This is phenomenal, and never happened with the chest strap. The device doesn't have great battery life, but it always survived the day. I find myself using it much more than the traditional chest strap. Highly recommended.

Post Tour Review: Pixel 3A XL

For mother's day this year, I got Xiaoqin the Pixel 3A XL to upgrade her from the (still wonderful) Moto Z Play. Several items drove the upgrade:

1. Much better camera. The debate for the trip we had was whether to pick up a Ricoh GR 3 or to upgrade her phone. The idea was that the phone would be used all the time, while a compact camera might not be gotten out except for special occasions like bicycle tours.
2. More primary storage. I was concerned about the 64GB storage without additional add on SDcards, but I audited her Moto Z Play and discovered she wasn't using more than 64GB in total anyway. And having a simplified storage with less management was better. To augment the storage for movies while off-line, you can get a USB C flash drive to load it up with content. Unfortunately, this absolutely will not work if you're depending on streaming apps such as Google Movies or Amazon Prime video --- those insist on using your internal storage. And clearly, unless you intend to keep that USB C drive plugged in all the time, it's not going to work for music, either.
3.  Improved processor, larger screen, and more RAM. In 2019, I'm discovering that 3GB of RAM just doesn't cut it any more.

The Moto Z Play wasn't waterproof, so that wasn't an issue, and it had a headphone jack as well, so both those issues were a push.

Let's start with the camera. In many situations, the camera provided great pictures:

This picture clearly benefited from the in-camera HDR processing, and the clarity and detail were obvious. I was very pleased by it. By the way, I tried RAW mode and couldn't get similar effects in lightroom from a RAW file, so my conclusion is that RAW mode is a waste of time on the Pixel 3a XL.

Some times, however, you get a pixelated mess, with no idea what happened and how to correct it. It wasn't predictable to me why certain pictures were fundamentally unusable. This didn't happen often, but it was glaring when it did. The Canon G7X II, by contrast always performed consistently, though for best results you needed to tweak the output in lightroom. When my G7X II died during the trip, the Pixel 3a XL became our primary camera. My Moto X4, by contrast, had horrible latency (5s to turn on the camera), and never showed any moments of brilliance.

The phone was always fast and never ran out of battery: despite my wife using Google Maps and turning on voice as her primary navigation (she turned up her nose at the Wahoo ELEMNT and never bothered to learn how to use it), it always survived to get to the hotel. While my Moto X4 would turn off Google Maps whenever I tried to take a picture, her phone never did that. The phone wasn't waterproof, but when we got caught in a thunderstorm all that needed to happen was that the phone went into a zipper in a waterproof rain jacket, and never came out again until after rain was over.

The phone is also light, much lighter than my Moto X4. Some people actually consider this a negative, but a cyclist who weighs every gram will not complain about reducing weight.

I'm usually vocal about my disdain for Google phones by being a poor imitation of an iPhone (no SD card expansion, no headphone jack, expensive storage options, all point to someone at Google HQ suffering from Apple Envy), but the Pixel 3a XL by bringing back the headphone jack and providing a lower entry price (we paid $479 but got a $100 gift card during the B&H promotion), I can actually recommend the Pixel 3a XL. If prices drop sufficiently I might be tempted to replace my Moto X4 with one.

First Impressions: Dell XPS 13 9380

My lifestyle doesn't actually demand a laptop, so I was happy to hang on to my ancient X201 and even replace the keyboards 2 or 3 times whenever Bowen destroyed them. Even when the device went missing, I resisted replacing it. Finally, there was a 15% coupon which stacked with a $150 rebated on an already discounted Dell XPS 13 9380, which I then jumped on at an after-tax price around $750 or so.

If you look around on the internet, you'll see that most reviews of this Dell laptop are of the fully-loaded configuration (i7, 16GB RAM, and 512TB or more of storage, and a 4K touchscreen display). Dell wants the reviewers to say nice things about the device, and of course, sending the highest end SKU for review is necessary because reviewers are used to reviewing high end devices and will benchmark the device against other similarly configured laptops.

Here's why these SKUs are a very bad deal, at least in this model: most thin and light laptops are thermally throttled --- the CPU overheats and then the speed of the i7 drops down to that of the i5 anyway. Even worse, the 4K touch screen drains the battery life, and for me anyway, the whole point of a laptop is for disconnected operation. I have a real desktop at home for serious compute tasks, and the laptop is meant to provide a mobile lightroom editing machine on-the-go for maximizing the use of my time on a plane. I've discovered that while 8GB is pushing it for Lightroom, an extra 8GB would cause me to have to opt for higher end configurations with corresponding decreases in battery life and weight which I am not willing to put up with.

To my surprise, the Dell XPS 13 9380 clocks in at 1168g, or 2.47 pounds, much lighter than the mainstream reviewer's unit weight of 2.7 pounds (probably caused by the touch screen, since Intel CPUs don't increase in weight when you buy an i7 vs i5!). My most common use case in Lightroom is flipping between photos trying to decide which one to pick, and I tried that against my i7-7700k desktop and the two were similar enough in performance that I couldn't tell. (Keep in mind that my i7/GTX 1070 device was pushing 4K pixels while the XPS 13 was only pushing 1080p, so these results aren't as surprising as you might imagine) The power pack weighs in at 144g, and the USA 3-prong plug comes in at 79g, so the total travel weight of the laptop is around 3 pounds. Most of the mainstream reviewers don't even weigh the power adapter, mostly because they're not as weight conscious as I need to be. I'm sure there's a lighter adapter that can charge this device somewhere around, since the Dell adapter is rated at 45W, which seems overkill (though it should charge the laptop in an hour or so). A 20W adapter would take longer but might be much lighter.

The keyboard is very good: much better than the recent Macbook keyboards that I've used recently, which have too little travel to be satisfying for a touch typist. The keyboard does squeak occasionally, which can be annoying, but overall, I'm surprised by how little I miss the X201's keyboard, which was the selling point of the Lenovo Thinkpad series for me. Similarly, I was surprised by how nice the precision touchpad was to use. I still prefer the thinkpad nubbin for precise text editing, but nobody's about to sell me an X1 Carbon with quad core processor for $750.

Battery life is outstanding. For mixed mode use (writing the past 4-5 entries on this blog, including photo selection/placement, interruption by Facebook/Hangouts, etc), 4 hours of use would drop the battery by 30%. A 12 hour battery life for normal use is definitely not hyperbole. Of course, with intensive Lightroom use, I expect the battery life to drop by 50%, which is still acceptable.

All in all, I'm impressed by this laptop. I wish I had it in Spain, which is as high a praise as you'll find from me.

Review: Stuff Matters

Stuff Matters is a book about materials science. It's written by a materials scientist, yet strives to be eminently readable and non-technical. This is both a good and a bad thing. It's a good thing in that anyone can read this book and come away with a good understanding of how important material science is. It's a bad thing in that all the theories and technical ideas have been hand-waved away, so I ended up learning less than I thought I would from the book.

Early on, the book explains that materials science is largely about the electrons in the material, and how they form clouds which enable conduction or impede the flow of electrons as insulators do. But beyond that, there's no sense of how for instance, you would use this information to invent new materials.

I did enjoy all the explanations of the difference between chocolate and cocoa, and why only the temperate regions tend to be the large consumers of chocolate.

In a list of the countries with the highest consumption of chocolate, Switzerland comes top, followed by Austria, Ireland, Germany, and Norway. In fact, sixteen of the twenty countries with the highest chocolate consumption are Northern European. (In America, chocolate is more popular as a flavor than as a bar, with more than half the population saying they preferred chocolate drinks, cakes, and biscuits than any other flavor.) Given the reputation of chocolate as a substitute for sex, it is tempting to draw all sorts of cultural conclusions from this correlation. But there is another possible explanation for the high chocolate consumption in these countries, which is also associated with temperature. In order to transform from a solid to a liquid easily within the mouth, chocolate requires a fairly cool ambient temperature. In a climate that is too warm, chocolate will either melt on the shelf or need to be put in the fridge, which defeats the purpose entirely—cold chocolate gets swallowed before it’s had a chance to melt. (This problem may explain, perhaps, why the Mesoamericans, who first invented chocolate in the tropics, never created a solid bar but consumed it only as a drink.) Moreover, if solid chocolate is exposed to temperatures above 20°C, as a result perhaps of being left in the sun or in a hot car, it undergoes fundamental changes of structure. The changes can be spotted immediately because they result in “bloom”: fat and sugars migrate to the surface of the chocolate and form a whitish crystalline powder, often with a river mark pattern. (Pg. 88)

Other great stories in the book involve concrete, graphene, including other forms of carbon such as diamonds, coal, etc. That I found fascinating, including the discussion about how long it took for carbon fiber to gain adoption in the aerospace industry.

The stories about steel was also interesting. In fact, the whole book is great, especially the details about how steel reinforced concrete works, and the possibility of self healing concrete. There's a lot in this book, so despite the lack of technical details I can recommend it for reading.

Review: The Weather Detective

The Weather Detective is a bit of a bait and switch. I checked it out hoping that it would actually tell me more about weather prediction from a naturalist point of view (rather than just reading weather forecast), but within 40% of the book the topic had shifted entirely into gardening!

But then I read the passage about hailstones and how hail was formed to Bowen and he said: "This is the coolest book ever!" Then I realized that because of my never wanting to spend any time gardening, this book had lots of information that I didn't know about. For instance:

Across Europe, the Earth is no longer in its natural state. Before being settled by humans, the landscape was dense with primeval forests. The closed, dense tree cover was the best possible protection for the fine, loose soil, and all processes took place at a slow and moderate pace under the canopy of beech, oak, or ash. Humans removed this protective layer around their growing settlements by clearing vast tracts of woodland. But this is not all: the early farmers left an indelible mark on the soil when their oxen pulled wooden plows, dragging the topsoil into ridges and furrows. These plows turned over a very shallow layer of soil, no more than 8 inches. The soil below this was smeared by the plow, resulting in a clogged-up layer called the plow sole, blocking the pores in the earth and stopping air and water from seeping through. This effectively suffocated the soil life beneath this layer and meant water could not be fully absorbed after heavy rain. The result was a bathtub effect: after rainfall everything was submerged, whereas in dry periods no moisture could be drawn up from below. Shepherds and goatherds have also wreaked havoc with their livestock over the ages. The surface of the ground has been beaten down by the animals’ hooves, causing further damage to the pores through successive layers all the way to the surface.  (Kindle Loc 1382)

There's a ton of stuff about bird migration, the life of underground tunneling creatures and it dispelled some of my misconceptions about fertilizers and how they work (they don't work by adding nutrients to the soil), and why you shouldn't use too much (and it's not about run-off, it's about the plants growing too tall and then getting squashed by inclement weather).

All in all, I ended up reading the whole thing and not resenting any of the gardening tips. Maybe I'll check out the author's more famous book: the hidden life of trees.

Review: Six Easy Pieces

Six Easy Pieces is a selection of lectures from the Feynman Lectures on Physics. The "easy" part is basically a reference to the lack of math in these and that they can be understood without reference to many of the other sections in the lectures. I was very entertained by the preface, where it was mentioned that while it was intended to be an introductory class, undergraduates kept dropping out but the lecture hall remained full because graduate students and other faculty members started attending!

I enjoyed the introduction, which I thought was a good example of scientific deduction: once you know everything is made out of atoms, here's how you build upon that knowledge. The remaining sections deal with the relation of physics to the other sciences, the conservation of energy, gravitation, the history of physics, and Quantum mechanics.

All the examples are lucid, with a unique view of the systems involved that's different from the typical dry textbook examples, and the quantum behavior chapter in particular takes away all the hocus pocus stuff about observers and basically casts quantum behavior as viewed from an experimental point of view.

Looking at the collected lectures, I can see that there are many chapters which start with differential equations and just roll on from there, so I can see why these chapters were picked out of the entire lecture series. But maybe I should go ahead and try working through the actual lectures to see if my "A" levels "D" was a matter of both immaturity and the inability of my high school physics lecturer to get through to me.

In any case, the book comes recommended and is short and well worth your time to read.

Review: BONMIXC Bike Bell

I don't have any bicycle bells on any of my single bikes, but of course, bells are an important accessory for kids, and Boen started asking for them. I searched Amazon for a bunch, and ran across the BONMIXC bell, which looked simple, easy to install and mount, and might actually make more noise than the dainty Crane Suzu bell that came on my wife's bike.

I was correct on all counts. When it arrived, it took all of 5 minutes to install, 2 of which were spent walking to the mail box and unwrapping the package. It even came with a handy allen wrench so I didn't have to fish one out of the tool-kit. After installing I was astonished by how loud the bell was. Once Bowen tried it, he insisted on getting an identical one to replace his dinky bell. I'm going to regret this because the kids are sure to make a racket.

Needless to say, I bought another one to satisfy Bowen. It's rare that something this cheap outperforms the other high quality "Made in Japan" stuff on Amazon. Recommended.

Review: Gulp

Gulp is Mary Roach's book about your eating and digestive system. It's informative,  humorous, and more than a little gross. It taught me lots that I didn't know, though some of it is just what you might expect:

 The students, most of whom have several years’ experience in the industry, are asked to rank six wines, their labels hidden by—a nice touch here—brown paper bags. All are wines Wagner himself enjoys. At least one is under $10 and two are over $50. “Over the past eighteen years, every time,” he told me, “the least expensive wine averages the highest ranking, and the most expensive two finish at the bottom.” In 2011, a Gallo cabernet scored the highest average rating, and a Chateau Gruaud Larose (which retails from between $60 and $70) took the bottom slot. Unscrupulous vendors turn the situation to their advantage. In China, nouveau-riche status-seekers are spending small fortunes on counterfeit Bordeaux. A related scenario exists here vis-à-vis olive oil. “The United States is a dumping ground for bad olive oil,” Langstaff told me. It’s no secret among European manufacturers that Americans have no palate for olive oils. (Pg 20)

The section on organ meat is great:

 The top slot on the CSPI scorecard, with 172 points, is beef liver. Chicken liver and liver sausage took second and third place. A serving of liver provides half the RDA for vitamin C, three times the RDA for riboflavin, nine times the vitamin A in the average carrot, plus good amounts of vitamins B12, B6, and D, folic acid, and potassium. What’s the main ingredient in AFB’s dog-food palatants? “Liver,” says Moeller. “Mixed with some other viscera. The first part that a wild animal usually eats in its kill is the liver and stomach, the GI tract.” (pg 44)

 Organs are so vitamin-rich, and edible plants so scarce, that the former are classified, for purposes of Arctic health education, both as “meat” and as “fruits and vegetables.” One serving from the Fruits and Vegetables Group in Nirlungayuk’s materials is “1/2 cup berries or greens, or 60 to 90 grams of organ meats.” Nartok shows me an example of Arctic “greens”: cutout number 13, Caribou Stomach Contents. (pg 51)

 There's even stuff about saliva that's interesting:

“If you dribble something on your shirt while you’re eating,” I asked Grime, “does it make sense to dab it with saliva? As a kind of natural laundry presoak?” “That’s an interesting thought.” Dr. Grime carries a Tide stain pen. He does not use his own spit. Art conservators do. “We make cotton swabs on bamboo sticks and moisten the swab in our mouths,” says Andrea Chevalier, senior paintings conservator with the Intermuseum Conservation Association. Saliva is especially helpful for fragile surfaces that solvents or water would dissolve. In 1990, a team of Portuguese conservators pitted saliva against four commonly used nonanatomical cleaning solutions. Based on its ability to clean but not damage water-gilded gold leaf and low-fired painted clay surfaces, saliva “was judged the ‘best’ cleaner.” Denatured saliva, stripped of its enzymatic powers, was also tested and proved inferior to straight spit. (pg 100)

The section on competitive eating is fascinating. But what really caught me is the composition of flatulence. Roberto used to claim that I fart helium. Well, Roach does one better. Apparently we all fart hydrogen!

Like a Manure Pit Display, the human colon is a scaled-down version of a biowaste storage tank. It is an anaerobic environment, meaning it provides the oxygen-free living that methane-producing bacteria need to thrive. It is packed with fermentable creature waste. As they do in manure pits, bacteria break down the waste in order to live off it, creating gaseous by-products in the process. Most voluminously, bacteria make hydrogen. Their gas becomes your gas. Up to 80 percent of flatus is hydrogen. About a third of us also harbor bacteria that produce methane—a key component in the “natural gas” supplied by utility companies. (At least two-thirds of us harbor a belief that methane producers’ farts burn blue, like the pilot light on a gas stove. Sadly, a YouTube search unearthed no evidence.)

The last part of the book is a little gross. It discusses smugglers who use their body cavities to smuggle goods, and includes descriptions of people who died of overdose by swallowing insufficiently protected packages of cocaine. There's a section on animals (e.g. rabbits) eating their own output to extract maximum nutrition from their meals (one pass through those digestive systems isn't enough).

The book is great reading and comes recommended!

Review: Polar OH1+ Optical HRM

This year's Spanish tour highlighted that I really liked using the Garmin Fenix 5X as a head unit, but when it gets mounted on the bars, the unit makes up HR data. I supposed I could just ignore it, but the engineer in me hates collecting bad data. During the tour, I used the Garmin chest strap, but it had a few major problems, chiefest of which was that I simply didn't like wearing it. I browsed various reviews of optical HRM straps that can be worn on the upper arm, and the Polar OH1+ seemed the most useful for my situation, coming with a swim goggle adapter for swimming.

Out of the box for cycling, the device seems much more accurate than the chest strap or the built in Fenix 5X optical HR sensor, lending credence to DCRainmaker's claim that the most important factor in optical HRM accuracy is where you wear it. The better accuracy can be attributed to 2 things: (1) is that the strap is worn under a sleeve, which not only hides it in photos, but also shields it from sunlight, which helps accuracy. It also doesn't bounce like the Fenix would, which given its weight unsurprisingly gives inaccurate results. (Not that the much lighter Vivoactive HR was any better --- Arturo and I liked to call its HRM science fiction data generator)

The better performance over the chest strap is because at the start of a ride, I don't always remember to put liquid on the monitor for better electrical contact, so the HRM would spaz out at the start of a ride.

The sensor itself is a small disc that weighs 5g. The band is 14g, and the charger (which is also tiny and easy to lose) is 8g. This compares very favorably with the Garmin chest strap's 73g. The charger doubles as a usb sync device if you record your HR during a swim session.

I tried it twice while swimming. The first time, I saw blips in the HRM output that puzzled me.

I saw the dropouts and were puzzled. I thought it might have been user error (which happened the first time because I didn't realize how to verify that I had truly started a recording on the device --- look to see that the led blinks twice every 2s). The second time, I tried it again and with better monitoring, figured out what happened:

Every time I did a flip turn, I ran the chance of flipping the unit so that it faced away from my temple instead of monitoring it. At one point, the unit even fell off the goggles onto the floor of the pool, and luckily I saw it! What this means is that for swimming, the unit is strictly useful only for pool use where you have a chance to spot the missing unit and retrieve it. Don't try to snorkel or open water swim with it.

I tried a third time and shifted the unit forward on the goggle strap, and lo and behold, I finally got a clean run of data.

While the unit does pair with the Fenix 5X for swimming and will show you your heartbeat during rest periods between intervals, the Fenix does not maintain a connection with the unit during the workout proper and will not record HR. You have to use the polar app for that! This is disappointing but the swimming is a bit of a bonus anyway, as compared to using the unit for cycling, where it is lighter than its competitors and also a little cheaper.

All in all, I'm keeping the unit. It's useful enough when touring, and despite the glitches it is somewhat interesting to see how hard I'm working during my swim workouts, and is much more accurate than either of the devices it replicates the functionality of. Recommended.

Review: Liquid Rules

Liquid Rules is that rare book: written by a material scientist, it uses a transatlantic flight to motivate the discussion of various liquids and their interesting properties. It starts off with a discussion of the kerosene used to power the jet engine, meanders into the properties of soap (as well as a fascinating history of how marketing and a bacteria scare causes us to abandon bar soap for liquid soaps and body washes --- including a discussion of what makes detergent different from soap!), and discusses how ink in a ballpoint pen differs from the ink in a fountain pen.

It is filled with observations such as this awesome tidbit about the pre-flight safety briefing:

If you think about it, the safety briefing is the one global ritual that we all share, whatever our ethnicity, nationality, sex, or religion; we all take part in it before the kerosene is ignited and the plane takes off. The dangers that the briefing warns us of, such as landing on water, are so rare that even if you flew every day for a whole lifetime, you would be unlikely to ever experience them. So that’s not really the point of it. As in all rituals, coded language, a series of actions, and special props play their part. In religious rituals these props are often candles, incense burners, and chalices; in the preflight safety ritual they are oxygen masks, life jackets, and seat belts. The message of the preflight ritual is this: you are about to do something that is extremely dangerous, but engineers have made it almost completely safe. The “almost” is emphasized by all the elaborate actions involving the previously mentioned props. The ritual draws a line between your normal life, where you are in charge of your own safety, and your current one, in which you are ceding control to a set of people and their engineering systems as they harness one of the most awesomely powerful liquids on the planet to shoot you through the atmosphere to a destination of your choosing. In other words, you need to trust them absolutely; your life is in their hands. And so this ritual, performed before every flight, is really a trust ceremony. (Kindle Loc 355)

 I highly recommend this book. You'll learn something on every page, and it's written well!

Review: Demon

Demon is the last book in Varley's Gaea trilogy. It's a grand finale, with lots of action, set pieces, and a long intro that shows off how bad-ass Cirroco is. The problem with the series is that it was never more than science fantasy. We never do get insight as to how the Titans were created and evolved, and the takeover of the consciousness of Gaea was never explored in any form.

As a series it's very much worth reading, since the characters are interesting (as are the aliens such as the Titans), and the plot as a whole is satisfying. And unlike more modern series, the entire story just ends here, no 10-book epic.

Recommended.

Review: Columbia Montrail Outdry Running Shoes

Last year, Arturo got us a big discount visit to the Columbia Outlet store. I found a pair of Montrail Outdry shoes for a substantial discount and bought them. I should have bought more than a pair, that's how good they are.

I'll contrast them with the Salomon XA Pro 3D Waterproofs. Those are currently on sale at REI but they are crap. They claim to be waterproof, but even a little bit of water will soak right through the uppers and into your socks and then you'll have a squishy hike for the rest of your day.

By contrast, the Columbia Outdry actually works. I've walked into ankle-deep puddles, been caught in thunderstorms, and at no point did these shoes ever fail. If the inside got wet, it was always because my socks were wicking water down into the shoes. (Even the waterproof socks do that, since those are effectively two non-waterproof layers with a waterproof layer in between).

I should have bought more than just one pair of these shoes. As it is now, I wear the Salomons for unchallenging conditions, and save the Columbia for the toughest rainiest outings. How often do you ever see me regret not spending money? That means these shoes are highly recommended.

Review: TaoTronics True Wireless Ear Buds

My beloved LG Tone headset died recently after 3 years of hard use. It appears that the follow on units aren't of similar high quality, so I went looking for new headsets. The TaoTronics won the race because of a feature that I couldn't find anywhere else: the charging case for these ear buds also double as a battery bank for your other electronics!

The case with earbuds comes to 97g. The Anker 3350 mAh battery (same capacity as the earbuds charging case) comes in at 80g. So for 17g more you get a pair of wireless earbuds as well, which is a bargain any way you look at it, especially if you use the coupon code I found (which seems to have expired) to get them for $30 instead of the regular $46. Wireless earbuds are easy to lose, and also easy to damage (e.g., by getting them wet or dropping them), and these are IPX 67 certified, meaning that they're waterproof enough for rain.

The earbuds come with 8 different sized tips for customization, and are just a bit uncomfortable (not as nice as the Moto Hint+ I used to own). The charging case has two seats for the earbuds which are magnetized, so you can't screw up the positioning of the left and right, and even if you did, the charging indicators wouldn't flash, which would tell you that something is messed up. I was concerned that these would be a massive pain to take out and use while cycling, but in practice they weren't bad at all. Certainly the case means much less fumbling than say, the single-ear hook pieces seen in Premium Rush.

The sound quality is just good enough for gym use. The music is listenable, and audio books are just about this side of comprehensible while cycling with only one earbud in your ear. (Don't ride with both ears blocked!) For phone calls, the  response time between pulling it out and answering the call is so long that I've missed a few phone calls because of this, so now I just answer the phone with the handset and then if it's going to be a long call I pull the ear pieces out and plug them into my ears (the transition is fairly easy). For phone calls, it definitely is not as good as the Moto Hint was.

When touring, the most common use case for these is that you're riding around in circles trying to find where your AirBnB is and need to call the owner. These are good enough for that so you can listen to spoken directions over the phone while your host is directing you to their house. The second most common use case is as an emergency charger for your flashing front light, your radar tail light, or your phone. At 3350 mAh these won't charge anything quickly, but is great for topping up your battery lights during a playground stop, or keeping your phone from going dead while you frantically search for a hotel for the night.

There might be other true wireless ear buds with better sound quality, better microphones, etc., but the combination of price and features on this set means I won't bother with others. How long the batteries in the earpieces last is a different story --- I was forced to retire my Moto Hint+ not because the charging case went dead, but because the earpiece batteries could no longer survive a phone call longer than 15 minutes.

In any case, if you're a touring cyclist, get these. Recommended.