Review: Sigma Sport BC5.12 Bike Computer

I decided that it would be fun to stick a bike computer on Bowen's bike. GPS units are now so cheap you can get the Pyle Bike Computer for $60. I was seriously tempted to pick that up, but on second thought decided that I had enough devices to charge as it was, and a child's bike computer only exists for fun value (and so I can actually check on things like chain wear at appropriate service intervals), so the $15 Sigma Sport BC5.12 it is!

The device showed up, and being familiar with previous models, I wired it up and had the magnet ready to go. To my surprise, the wheel size on the manual didn't go all the way down to the 14" wheels on Bowen's bike, so I had to manually measure the circumference of the bike and convert to mm to enter the data. I was also surprised that the battery on the device was dead, but fortunately I have a stash of the CR2032 batteries sitting around, so I just popped a new one in (yes, I popped the old one in and out just in case the device had gone into "deep sleep", but nope, it was dead as a door nail) and the bike computer was in business. Sigma estimates the battery life of these things to be in the 1 year range, but in my experience, I've never worn out a battery before some other accidental damage took out the wiring of the device.

Bowen was excited to try it and immediately took it out for a ride. My first thoughts was that I'd made a horrible horrible mistake installing the bike computer on his bike. He paid so much attention to it that he almost hit a stationary car! My constant yelling at him eventually got through to him, however, and he stopped paying much attention to the bike computer after that. Now it's just a fun thing for him to look at when he stops, though on occasion, he'll decide he wants to see how fast he can get going and really let her rip so he can see the numbers go up. Fortunately, I can still run fast enough to keep up and grab him if he gets in trouble, and intervals are supposed to be good for you, right? (For what it's worth, his top speed's somewhere around 10mph, which is a full on sprint for me)

So, the device works, and seems reliable. But the wisdom of putting it on a 4 year old's bike is questionable. I wouldn't do it unless you're confident you can keep up with the kid. Fortunately, his recent crashes (not the fault of the computer) have made Bowen quite a bit more cautious when cycling than I expected.

Recommended. But yes, you need to roll a wisdom check before you put it on a kid's bike.

Review: The Second Ship

The Second Ship is the first book in The Rho Agenda trilogy. Given that it's in the Prime Lending Library, it was no effort for me to checkout the book and start reading.

Overall, the book reminds me of decent Saturday morning kids series cartoons. 3 teenagers while exploring find an alien ship, and while exploring the ship, discover super-powers and a nefarious government plot headed by an evil scientist. Along the way, they encounter super-villains, love interests, NSA agents (who are for a change not immediately bad guys), and of course, evil high school teachers.

The science, such as it exists in the book, is plausible, and not immediately insanely stupid, as long as you squint a bit and suspend your disbelief on account that this is basically a Saturday morning cartoon novel.

Fun, but I wouldn't pay money for the book. If you're already a prime member, just check it out from the prime lending library.

Misunderstandings

A few funny misunderstandings between Bowen and I this summer.

At the end of the summer holidays, I was worried that Bowen wouldn't want to go back to school. (I needn't have worried, but the sight of kids crying in the school parking lot when I dropped him off during summer school put the fear into me) I told him the night before: "You can go the hard way, with me dragging you screaming and kicking into the car, or you can go the easy way." The next morning, he woke up, got himself ready, and said, "I'm ready to go to school the easy way --- on the bike!" He thought I was telling him that the car was the hard way and cycling to school was the easy way.

By the end of the summer, all the outdoor activities we'd been doing had me pretty tan. One day, Bowen said to me, "Daddy, why are you brown?" "Because of all the time I spent in the sun. I don't always wear sunscreen, either." "I want to be white!" I did a double-take. "I want to be white like mommy!" "Oh, you mean you want to be pale. OK, you can wear sunscreen and not spend too much time in the sun." For a minute I thought he didn't want to be Asian. Phew!

Review: Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

After reading the magnificent A Spy Among Friends, I checked out Double Cross from the library, hoping for repeated success. I was disappointed.

This is not to say that it's not a good story. The problem is that it's not comparable in importance to the story behind Bletchley Park (referred to as "Most Secret" throughout the book). Essentially, the book describes the operation (known as Operation Fortitude) to fool Hitler and his command staff that the attack on Normandy on D-Day was a distraction for bigger invasions in Norway and to the South.

To feed fake intelligence into the German military, the M.I.5 created a bunch of double agents, and was so successful that it essentially controlled every German agent that the Nazis had sought to place in the country. So effective was this system that not only did the Germans fall for Operation Fortitude, they actively funded the double agents who were feeding them misinformation.

While all this was important, mid way through the book what you realize is that M.I.5 could not have even attempted a deception with this magnitude without the constant feedback provided by Bletchley Park. Essentially, M.I.5 could see the information it had fed into the system pass through the German chain of command, and map out how effective the deception was.

Furthermore, later on in the book we see that the reason for this incompetence wasn't that M.I.5 was all that great, it was because the Nazi intelligence service was filled with people who were lining their pockets and siphoning money from the German agents. In the end, you get a story full of the essentials of James Bond: seduction, gambling, lots of liquors, and even parachuting behind enemy lines. But none of it would have been possible without Bletchey Park.

It's a fun read, but ultimately I felt empty at the end of the book.

Review: Ex Machina

I don't usually review movies on this blog, but I'll make an exception for Ex Machina, a delightful science fiction movie about AI written and directed by Alex Garland.

Let's face it, most science fiction movies are summer block busters: the goal of the movie is to provide spectacle, and not move the viewer or engage the mind. Ex Machina, however, aims to do both, which places it in a special category indeed.

The story revolves around Caleb, who's a programmer for the world's most popular search engine. He wins a lottery to visit the founder of the company in his secluded home, which turns out to be a research facility where he (Nathan) is working on a strong AI. Caleb discovers that his true purpose is to determine if Nathan has succeeded in his creation. (The movie uses the phrase Turing test, but in reality, the way it's administered is completely wrong --- but I'll forgive this movie the technical error, since it's quite clear that both Nathan and Caleb understand what the real Turing test was, and why they're approaching it differently)

I won't go into the details of the plot: it's excellent, and well worth your time to watch the movie. There are just a couple of plot holes in the movie, but the story is told well enough, and the outcome unpredictable enough, that these plot holes only become apparent after you're done ruminating over the show and have thought about it enough. Most of the technical conversation and language, however, is correct and plausible.

The movie is slow: there aren't any action set pieces, just lots of people (and an AI) talking. The special effects are restrained and under-stated, and the outdoor scenes are shot in Norway, which renders it unfamiliar enough to me that it looked different from the usual North American shot movies. And if you're a busy parent, Ex Machina is great because it's a 108 minute story, not one of those 3 hour epics that make it impossible for you to watch in one sitting. That said, Ex Machina is rated R for violence and nudity.

I didn't hear a lot of hype about the movie (wikipedia says it was shot for $15M and made $36M in the box office). As such, you've probably not heard of it, but if you're a science fiction fan (or perhaps, if you've worked for the world's most popular search engine), give it a shot.

One note: The movie's available in SD or HD on Amazon Instant Video. I picked the HD version (which streams in 720p), but to be honest, there's very little in the movie that depends on HD. Unfortunately, most of my movie viewing in recent months has been in Blu Ray at optimal viewing distance, which meant that Amazon's 720p stream looked disturbingly like SD to me.

Review: The Last Child in The Woods

I really wanted to like The Last Child in The Woods. I grew up in Singapore, in a city where door-to-door inspections have eliminated the Anopheles mosquito. Growing up, we hated visiting Malaysia, where mosquitoes were still prevalent and would make us itch. Our Malaysian cousins had all sorts of bite marks and nasty stuff on their legs, and we had no desire to become like them. My first camping experience as a kid was so unloved by me that I never considered camping again until I was in my twenties. I only became an outdoors person when recreational hiking and commuting cycling brought me into contact with so much natural beauty that I said to myself, "There must be more out there." Once I realized that as an adult I could plan my own trips around what I liked rather than being dictated to like a child, my enjoyment of the outdoors increased a million fold.

The Last Child in The Woods is about nature-deficit disorder. It's an entirely made up syndrome, and the author admits as much. After all, lots of children (especially those from Asia) grow up without any appreciable contact with nature (much like myself), but when given the opportunity as adults, do learn to enjoy the outdoors. The author cites many studies that demonstrate the calming effect of nature exposure to children with varying disorders (such as ADD), but then extrapolates that to include healthy, normal children. This is questionable and there's not a shred of evidence in the book to lead to that conclusion!

Then I ran across this passage:

One might argue that a computer, with its near-infinite coding possibilities, is history’s deepest box of loose parts. But binary code, made of two parts—1 and 0—has its limits. Nature, which excites all the senses, remains the richest source of loose parts. (Kindle Loc: 1261-63)

I don't know if Richard Louv could have destroyed his credibility or demonstrated his ignorance more.

This is a pity, as I agree with much of his complaints about American society and its approach to play and nature. For instance:

Typical Americans spend 101 minutes in their car daily, five times the amount of time they spend exercising. They also take fewer vacation days and work harder than the Japanese or Europeans. (Kindle Loc 1705-6)

I deplore the disappearance of see-saws from American playgrounds because of liability lawsuits. I definitely think that most American cities have little character and definitely aren't as livable as the European cities I've visited. I certainly agree with many of his prescriptions for building a more liveable, green, and environmentally friendly city, where kids get to build tree houses, and children falling out of those said tree houses and breaking body parts wouldn't cause multiple lawsuits and a media frenzy.

The reality, however, is that parents, if they truly cared about the issue, have a lot of control over what trips they take their kids on, and how they portray recreation with their children. For instance, I visited the Montebello OSP Backpack Camp expecting Bowen to be the youngest kid there. He was instead the oldest, with several 1-year olds who were ferried into the campground by dads on Mountain Bikes. I certainly do my best to take Bowen on trips where driving isn't the primary mode of transport as much as possible. There's tons of evidence that building aerobic capacity also improves intelligence and performance in school activities, so this sort of thing isn't even contradictory to being a tiger parent, if that's what you're after.

But Richard Louv chooses instead to wring his hands over declining membership in the Sierra Club, and the graying of hairs and reduction of outdoors activities in the Boy/Girl Scout organizations. The Sierra Club, especially the Loma Prieta Chapter here in Silicon Valley, is famous for fighting against Mountain Bike access to trails, so it's not a surprise that the later, more cycling-friendly generation of outdoors people no longer consider them a friend, but find other ways to express their environmentalism and love of the outdoors. And the less said about the Boy Scout organization's reputation, the better.

All in all, I'm very disappointed in the book. If you're an outdoorsy dad trying to convince your wife that all this hiking/camping/cycling/sailing is good for your kids, the evidence in this book is thin and unconvincing even to me, let alone your wife. If you're looking for help in advocating for more greenery in urban spaces, the book undermines its own credibility in enough places that I'd be leery of citing it if I were faced with determined opposition. I hope the outdoors advocacy literature has people who have more coherent arguments than Richard Louv. But in the end, maybe it doesn't matter: the last time Bowen took friends with him camping, they all became fans of camping, so he's not going to be the last child in the woods.

ANT+ vs BTLE

I had no idea that ANT+ vs BTLE was politically charged until I continually ran across people online who were "anything but Garmin", mostly because of BTLE support. Since I'd always been a Garmin user, I never even gave the issue much thought.

Garmin owns ANT+ by virtue of buying Dynastream Innovations, which organized the ANT+ Alliance. Apple, of course, has many engineers on the steering committee for BTLE. What this means is that even though Apple's hardware contains ANT+ compatible antennas, Apple will never support ANT+. (Interestingly enough most Sony phones actually support ANT+, since Sony doesn't care enough to disable the support) Similarly, even though many Garmin devices use an SOC that support BTLE, Garmin deliberately only enables bluetooth for phone connections.

In practice, what this means is that you're committed to ANT+ if:

• You have sunk thousands of dollars into ANT+ power meters. (newer power meters will also presumably support BTLE)
• You have plenty of legacy ANT+ hardware that still works (e.g., old Garmin computers, watches, etc)
• There's an ANT+ sensor you care about that doesn't have a corresponding BTLE version. (e.g., the inertia-based speed/cadence sensor, which are miles better than the magnet-based versions)
• You have a need for a single transmitter going to multiple head-units, which is something that BTLE doesn't currently support. (BTLE currently only supports Star network topologies, so only one head unit per slave)

The last use case is actually a big deal for me, since I have a triplet/quad which will at some point have multiple head units connected to the wheel sensor.

In practice, I've found that unless you're a casual cyclist, the battery life of a smartphone is such that any serious bike ride would rule out using a phone as your primary head unit (not to mention the lack of water-proofing on the phones). The question is whether Garmin will continue to own the serious athlete market or whether the anything-but-garmin crowd will win.

Review: Year's Best SF 10

I checked out Year's Best SF 10 froom the library prior to a trip, but read it mostly because all the stories in it were new to me. The first three stories, Sergeant Chip, First Commandment and Burning Day were outstanding, but then to my dismay the rest of the collection started wandering into fantasy instead of science fiction (though James Stoddard's The Battle of York was delightful). Then Ken Liu's The Algorithms for Love (爱的算法) finally provided some good reading, and the last few stories by Robert Reed, Neal Asher, and Brenda Cooper rounded out the collection with some excellent reading.

The collection isn't a waste of time, but I found myself skimming through quite a few lackluster stories or stories out of genre. Worth checking out of the library before a flight, but not worth going out of your way to buy or find.

Review: Lightroom 6

I actually upgraded to Lightroom 6 a while back, but waited until I did a couple of trips with large amounts of photography before writing a review to get a realistic view of what it does, and which features I turned out to use a lot, and which I thought I bought it for but didn't end up using.

I'd skipped Lightroom 5, mostly because it included zero features that I thought were useful to me. Lightroom 6, however, featured several features that I thought were potentially ground-breaking:

• Photo-Merge: including merge to Panorama and merge to HDR. I hadn't been experimenting with HDR, but prior to Lightroom 6, I was using Microsoft ICE to stitch images. It got to the point where I used a pre-set to automatically export and merge using Microsoft ICE via the command-line. The benefit of Lightroom doing it all internally is that you end up with a RAW merged file, which means that you can use ND grad filters and other tools uniformly across the final image. This is huge! Suffice to say that I would have paid the upgrade price (albeit reduced because of an employee discount) just for this feature alone.
• Face recognition. I gave up tagging all my kids photos manually because it was too much work. It'd be nice for this to be fully automated.
• Performance. While my i7 920 is still faster than most machines out there (very impressive given its age --- but mostly an indictment of how laptops have taken over the world), I also have a high end GPU sitting in the machine that's just begging to be used. Lightroom 6 promised to make use of this otherwise idle silicon. More performance is always good!

So in practice, how did these features fare? Face recognition was an obvious bust. Turn it on, and let your machine chug for a day, and come back and discover it's still not done. The face-recognition software seems to be single-threaded, and doesn't make full use of the CPU or GPU.

GPU acceleration was also disappointing. First of all, it crashes a lot on the 7870. I finally found some article on the internet on how to configure the driver so Lightroom stopped crashing. However, I'm not sure I noticed any performance difference: I'm guessing my machine was already fast enough, and the acceleration didn't do much for the batch jobs I use (bulk-export, import of photos). Where I thought it might help a lot would be on my wife's Surface Pro, which didn't have quite enough CPU power so Lightroom was frequently laggy, but in practice, I didn't notice much difference there either.

Photo-Merge, however, paid for the upgrade all by itself. I found myself using it a lot, and even better, the UI is designed right. You select a few pictures and hit the Merge button. The machine chugs for a bit and delivers you a preview. If you like the preview, hit the "Merge" button, and the merge happens in the background, using spare cycles while you go on to do other editing tasks! This is pretty amazing. The resulting merged image was frequently too large for Facebook (not a surprise) and also taxed the Surface Pro to the limits when loaded into RAM. But that's what I want. The same image on my desktop took appreciably no extra time to load and was subject to all the manipulation I wanted.

There are other nits in the UI that have carried over from previous versions of Lightroom (for instance, when you shell out into Photoshop to do some editing, it creates a second copy of the picture but doesn't place it next to the original for easy selection/culling). But by and large, I'm happy with this upgrade. If you don't already use Lightroom, moreover, and you want to be a serious photographer, there's really no other tool out there that does what Lightroom does (believe me, I've looked). There's good reason why many photographers go to the trouble of building a machine just so Lightroom flies. It's too indispensable a part of a serious photographer's workflow to forgo. If you trouble yourself with any camera other than your smartphone, then you owe it yourself to spend a fraction of that camera's budget on software to get the most out of it. Recommended.

Review: A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

Truth is stranger and more interesting than fiction. Nowhere else is it more (and better) illustrated than in this book, A Spy Among Friends. While I've never been able to make it past the first couple of chapters of Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I picked up this book and could not put it down until I finished it a day later. I abandoned all my other books, and even stopped playing Arkham Knight, which is as eminently playable (and addictive) a video game as I've encountered since Sleeping Dogs.

The book is about Kim Philby, probably the most successful spy of modern times. Infiltrating M.I.6 before World War 2, he became a well-regarded agent, and repeatedly promoted up the ranks until he became M.I.6's liaison with the CIA in Washington, and at one point was tipped to become the head of M.I.6! His contacts and betrayal of both secret services led to internal purges and damaged the trust between M.I.6, M.I.5, the CIA, and FBI, not to mention sending multiple agents into awaiting Russian Troops and counter-intelligence officers. While doing so, Philby managed to collect the OBE.

This all in itself would make an exciting story (though one you would have mostly read about in books such as Declare, or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). But Ben Macintyre places everything in context accurately, and is not afraid to draw conclusions and read between the lines of various memoirs, providing accurate quotes that back up his analysis.

We get a good understanding of how Philby was undetected for so long. Fundamentally, the old boys network worked in such a way that no one thought to consider someone who was so obviously English in upbringing and background could be a mole. At every point in Philby's indoctrination into the secret service, for instance, the only background checks were: "Do you know his family?"

Even worse, when evidence that Philby was a Soviet agent emerged (after two already-known spies defected without being apprehended by M.I.6 because of being tipped off by Philby), M.I.6's "young turks" (the group of agents with World War 2 experience who had been promoted into being section chiefs) closed ranks and defended Philby, with nobody slapping surveillance on him. Sure, Philby was ejected from the service for a time, but then later re-hired into Beirut by one of his old friends, Nicholas Elliott. In fact, when Philby was finally unmasked by evidence, Elliot volunteered to interrogate him, and deliberately left the door open so that Philby could escape to the Soviet Union. Macintyre suggests that this was deliberate, in order to avoid an embarrassing public trial in the UK demonstrating the incompetence of M.I.6 and discrediting the old boy's network, and reviewing the evidence that he provides, this does appear to be the case.

More than Philby's story, however, we get several little titbits here and there that loom larger than life. That scene in James Bond where James Bond arrives in a wet suit, strips it off and has a tuxedo underneath? That's real. (Ian Fleming did work for M.I.6 at some point) The high risks, high stakes missions? Those were a product of World War 2's influence on the Young Turks, where their successes made them feel like they could do no wrong, bypass controls and checks, and launch operations (many of which were exposed by Philby to the Russians) would backfire and fail repeatedly on larger and larger scales. Unlike Bond, however, these operations were never successful because the opponents knew what M.I.6 wanted to do and could prepare for their agents to arrive.

Reading this book makes you understand several things:

• The glamorous James Bond and spy novels (even Le Carre's), have done an excellent job of white washing how incompetent M.I.6 and the CIA actually are. Repeated operational failures did not alert them to the possibility that their internal security was compromised. Until I read this book, I had no idea how badly run the agencies were, and how at every level at every agency employees resisted the idea that someone as charming as Philby could have been a double agent.
• The old boys club approach to intelligence was a massive failure. Not only did it mean that people were recruited without extensive background checks, it also meant that once you were in, you had a clique of fellow agents who were so homogeneous that they would naturally blab to each other about everything, which effectively meant that even a single mole could do a huge amount of damage to the organization.
• Not having effective oversight of intelligence agencies mean that even when mistakes are made, the spies themselves will lie or dissemble or even resort to giving high level double agents to the enemy in order to protect themselves and their organization. People who lie for a living are unlikely to give up the habit just because they've been discovered to have been wrong. That makes spying and intelligent agencies suspect. In fact, at one point Macintyre quotes an intelligence officer making the assessment that all operations in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, were in fact in the negative: M.I.6's cadre could have all sat on their collective bottoms and they would have been more effective!

All in all, this was an excellent read and very much worth your time. It'll also save you a ton of time from not having to read (or watch an adaptation of) John Le Carre. So grab it and dig in.

Review: The Curve of Time

Scarlet told me to read The Curve of Time after finding out about our trip to Desolation Sound. My local library didn't have a copy, so I was forced to buy a used paperback from Amazon.

The author, Muriel Blanchet was left a widow in 1927 in Victoria on Vancouver Island. She had 5 children and a 25' motor launch with an oar-powered dinghy. With that in hand, she became one of the first authors to write about the area around Desolation Sound and the Sunshine Coast in that era.

Apparently, most of the writings was intended for women's magazines, so her style is very short on details. She tosses out names of places in the area, but there are no maps, no charts, no illustrations. There aren't any recommendations: "Here's when you go, here are the local quirks" are apparently not of interest to readers of those magazines of that time.

As a result, I got about mid-way through the book before realizing that she wasn't a fully competent boat handler. She dragged anchor multiple times, several times requiring moving the boat in the middle of the night. And these aren't high wind conditions we're talking about. One might think that the anchors of those days might not have been as good, but later on in the book you realize that can't be so since on days when she'd used the anchor successfully, it was quite capable of holding the boat in the storm. And of course, motor boats are way easier to anchor than sailboats.

Of course, questionable decisions always make for better stories than "clear sailing and good weather." But her questionable decisions come early and often. From going camping at 6000 feet armed with only a blanket, to abandoning her kids on a beach in bear country to go fishing (though maybe if I had 5 kids I might be tempted to do that since I could afford to lose one or two), or climbing up above Princess Louisa Inlet with her children only to have the path behind her crumble down into the water, it's a demonstration of how resilient human beings are: apparently all of her children survived!

It's interesting with the passage of time to see all the things we are aware of now that we weren't back then. She thought killer whales were dangerous (they're not). She thought nothing of her son's concussion after he fell off a balcony (we know that's dangerous today). All throughout the book is breezy, almost cavalier about exploration and travel: at no point was she pressed for time, and she could have waited out any storms in the area in sheltered conditions as long as they had enough food.

Ms. Blanchet was obviously very resourceful: she fixes her own engine, fishes for dinner, and in several places rows the dinghy to tow the boat or kedge the anchor. The times when she does something that doesn't make sense (such as leaving a sheltered anchorage in the middle of a storm for no reason) leaves me scratching my head.

I'm not sure I would have gained much from the book by reading it before my trip. The book's of interest to those who'd like to see what the place was like back in the old days, and as an example of "Free Range Parenting" it's definitely worth reading. But other than that, I find it hard to recommend it.

Review: Why Nations Fail

Why Nations Fail tries to ask and answer several questions:

• Why are certain nations rich or poor? Is it a matter of history?
• Why do some nations stay poor, no matter what the World Bank, or the number of Live Aid events occur?
• What are the ways nations that are previously poor can become rich?

Why Nations Fail espouses a theory as to how countries become wealthy and innovative. The idea is that such countries have inclusive/pluralistic political and economic institutions. Such institutions:

• enforce property rights
• make everyone equal under the law
• prevent seizing of properties by government or its agents
• prevent an elite minority from seizing institutions and operating the country or an economic resource for its own benefit and profit
• forces groups of special interests to compromise and jealously guard against the possibility of usurpation of the institutions

Countries that are poor have extractive instituions. These institutions effectively allow an elite to effectively seize all the gains from the economic output of everyone else in the country. Furthermore, the extractive institutions are self-perpetuating, meaning that if a coup or revolution replaced the elite with another set of people, the new elites would be tempted to maintain the extractive institutions rather than replacing those institutions of more inclusive ones.

Most of the book illustrates this by recounting various histories, which include detailed histories and explanations of:

• Why South American countries ended up with extractive instituions.
• Why North America and Australia, despite being English colonies, ended up with relatively pluralistic institutions (the native population of both areas were too sparse to enslave, and indentured servitude was not possible when you can just run away and join the natives)
• Why the southern (former-slave-owning) states in the USA caught up economically after the civil rights movement
• How Botswana became an exception in Africa: having inclusive political and economic institutions and therefore having a great standard of living compared to its neighbors

Do I find these illustrations convincing? Sort of. Certainly the story is compelling. What I dislike about the social sciences, however, is that even with an over-arching theory like this one, the authors don't really generate any predictions that determine whether or not their theory is right. For instance, one theme that the authors kept repeating is that China's current growth is under an extractive regime, and they draw (appropriately) the parallels between China's growth and Russia's growth in the 1950s and 60s. (Remember, back then, even Western economists thought that the Communist states could have higher growth than the capitalistic states)

Rather than predict when that growth would slow, and that it would slow because extractive instituitions foil innovation (when anything you build can be taken away from you at any time, why work so hard), they do not provide a time frame. They write in wishy-washy terms, saying that they might be right, but the Chinese could (for whatever reason) build more pluralistic institutions. This is very unsatisfying.

Furthermore, the authors don't provide any prescriptions worth speaking of. None of this: "If you do this, this and this, you can break out of the extractive institution cycle and put your country onto a path towards prosperity and inclusiveness." They do do a good job of pointing out why development aid doesn't work, and neither does the Washington consensus prescriptions: If you don't root out the structural problems in a country, no amount of tinkering with economic policy will work. Finally, I don't think they did a good job of covering any of the Southeast Asian Tigers: Taiwan, Singapore, etc. The book covers Japan and Brazil, but Singapore and Taiwan to my mind started with authoritarian/absolutist regimes but managed to transition into first world class economies. While it could be argued that Taiwan is now a full fledged democracy with pluralist institutions, Singapore probably would not qualify.

Nevertheless, despite the flaws, the book is very much worth reading. If you think about it, they're taking a deep approach to historical and economic analysis that nobody else is doing. Previous analysis of poor countries have always left me thinking: "These people in charge of poor countries aren't stupid: they know that markets work, and that if you eliminate corruption people will be better off. So why are they still poor?" It turns out the answer is: "The people in charge aren't stupid: they know that by keeping their population poor and ignorant they can extract the fruits of their populations' labor and live like a king, even if it's bad in the long run for the country." That sort of incentive-based thinking is much more effective and explains, for instance, why companies that get big also become inefficient (and also incidentally become less innovative in the long run). After all, the typical person in a large organization is always going to what's best for him, rather than what's best for the organization.

Recommended.

Review: Carbide Tipped Pens

I'll admit that when it comes to science fiction, I like the really hard stuff. Alastair Reynolds, David Brin, Arthur C. Clarke, etc. So when I saw that Carbide Tipped Pens billed itself as an anthology of hard science fiction, I checked it out of the library.

Now, what hard science fiction writers don't usually excel at are characters. But in a short story, you're just not going to miss it. The best story in the book, however, is Eric Choi's "She Just Looks That Way", which is an excellent psychology-based story.

The rest of the stories are milder, maybe with some traditional science fiction problem-solving stories. There are a surprising number of pessimistic stories, which is unusual for the genre.

There are several stinkers all tucked in right at the end of the book. "The Yoke of Inauspicious Stars" annoyed the heck out of me: if I wanted to read Romeo and Juliet, I'll read the real thing, not a science-fiction precis/pastiche thing. If you do get a copy of this book, stop reading at the story and pretend that the book ended there and you'll mostly be happy with it.

4 bad stories out of 17 is a pretty good track record for any short story collection, so I'll recommend this, especially if you're after light reading or frequently get interrupted while reading. The elephant in the room, however, is that Tor has chosen to price this collection at an insane price ($13.49 paperback, $14.99 kindle, and $21 hard cover). That made me glad I checked it out of the library. I would have felt cheated at full price.

Review: Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman

I try my best not to re-read books. But somehow Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman made it into my kindle library (probably in an attempt to use up Amazon credits before they expired), and wow, what a great book.

What comes through with the book is how much fun Feynman had with his life, coupled with how much hard work he was willing to put in (starting from first principles) compared to other people in his life.

For instance, I love the story where before he went to Japan, he painstakingly learned Japanese, because that's what his department chair told him to do. Then he shows up there and discovers that nobody else learned Japanese, including the department chair! But because he had learned Japanese, he happily engaged in life there: negotiating a release from his Western-style hotel so that he could stay at a Ryokan, for instance. It's good fun, and it's great reading.

Another story from his book that resonated with me was when he got roped into being on a committee to evaluate California's Math textbooks. Well, nobody else on the committee bothered reading the books, but he did! So he ended up being the only person on the committee who could explain why certain books sucked and were wrong, and which books were at least not completely broken. I remember being on Google's intern conversion committee for an international office. Nathan York and I would end up being the only people on the committee digging into the source repository to see what the prospective employees were doing. In doing so we uncovered outrageous acts of intern abuse: interns assigned to demo projects (i.e., code that would have hard coded data in the program), interns assigned to pair program with each other so the mentor wouldn't actually supervise, teach, or actually do any work related to interns, etc. We were apparently the first people to actually try to verify that what intern supervisors said the interns were doing was actually the work that was done!

In any case, the degree of intellectual honesty and hard work that goes into what made Feynman the man he was comes through, despite the book's breezy tone and sense of humor that permeates the entire book. It's worth reading, and re-reading carefully. Highly recommended.

How parents become boring people

I noticed that families would tend to just do the same trips over and over again. For instance, when I spoke to Horizon Yacht Charters, they told me that most of their bookings worked this way: family charters a sailboat, does a perfect week or two in the BVI, get off the boat and then immediately book next year's trip.

Back then, I thought to myself, wow, I could never do that. I always want to see new places, do new things. Why would I do something that I've done over and over again?

Well, it's beginning to dawn on me that parents become boring people for good reason. Take for instance, my BVI trip last year. It was a challenging trip for many reasons: the boat's engines broke multiple times, and I had to dock on one engine multiple times. We got a line in the propeller, and had to deal with it for half a day. But it was never less than fun, and I was never stressed out. Why not? I knew the area. I knew where everything was in the Virgin Islands, and I was always convinced that we were safe, even when it got uncomfortable at times. Thanks to previous experience, I even knew which harbors had doctors, and where I could find that perfect little sandy cay where we could have an entire island all to ourselves for an entire morning.

Compare and contrast it with the Greece trip, or my recent British Columbia sailing trip. In Greece, I had to return the boat in 3-5' waves, in the dark, and with nearly everyone on the boat sea sick. In both cases, the problem was in not knowing the area well: if I'd had access to decent weather forecasts, I wouldn't have headed out to the Cyclades when we did, and if I'd had known what weather was like in the Desolation Sound, I wouldn't have bothered with a sailboat. Both of these places would have been serviceable destinations with prior experience and suitable equipment, but you wouldn't see me rushing to plan another Mediterranean sailing trip or another visit to Desolation Sound. Why? Both places have unpredictable weather. If I lived in Seattle or Vancouver, and I could just grab a boat and go when the weather was nice, I'd do it for Desolation Sound. But of course, during peak summer months, all the charter boats are booked up weeks if not months in advance, and during the rest of the year good luck getting weather clear enough to avoid winter storms.

The problem as well is that neither places feature the fantastic water clarity and amazing sailing facilities (consistent wind, great collection of mooring balls and anchorages, and amazing resorts) that the BVI provide. What about the rest of the Carribean? Having sailed in St. Vincent, St. Lucia and the Grenadines, I'd be enthusiastic for another visit to that area. The deterrents? Getting to those areas are really difficult, requiring a large number of transfers and ridiculously long flights. Until the vapor-ware St. Vincent International Airport opens (it's been delayed all the way from 2012 to 2015, and no one I know has any confidence that it will actually ever open this year or any other year), getting there with two pre-schoolers in tow wouldn't just exhaust bank accounts, it would exhaust the human limits of the parental units. Even after getting there, some of the sailing distances are long enough that you'd need to motor long distances or sail at night.

It's one thing to sign yourself up to a "death march", "death ride", or crazy wind conditions while trying to return a boat in nasty weather. Putting your 4 year old and your wife through those same conditions, however, feels like the next level of insanity, while putting your marriage at risk. You certainly don't want to be one of those people turning their kids (and wife) off away from the outdoor life because you didn't know how to make it comfortable for them. I largely succeeded in getting Bowen to enjoy camping (he cried and asked to go home first thing in the morning during his first camping trip), and I wouldn't want to undo any of that work!

Every time I try a different location for an adventurous vacation and trip, I feel like an idiot: here I am, lugging the entire family up there for the fabled 80F waters of Desolation Sound, only to arrive and discover that the 80F water is maybe an inch thick, and the place has weather inimical to actually sailing. This is not to say that we didn't have fun and it wasn't pretty, just that I felt stupid for trying something new when there are places on the planet that I know are superlative, where I'm so familiar with the area that I can do everything cheaply and cope with any situation with relative ease, and where I don't feel like an idiot.

So that's how parents become boring people. A few more times of getting punished for wanting to try something new, and I bet I'm going to end up like those people who get off the boat in Tortola and immediately book next year's vacation at exactly the same place, with exactly the same charter company, doing the exact same itinerary. It's not the end of the world, and it certainly beats the crap out of jumping to your death trying a new stunt that nobody else has done (at least he left his kids alive). But it does make one feel like a deathly boring person.

Review: Writing Great Fiction

Every so often I get one of those Great Courses catalogs in the mail. The prices are usually tempting, but audiobooks aren't a great medium for me: I prefer reading (I can read many times faster than I can listen to someone talk). Finally, when a $6.95 deal came along for Writing Great Fiction, I decided that for the price I could give it a shot.

It took me close to 4 months to listen to the entire course, and I have to say that I'm impressed. I've long been the kind of person who understood a topic better by understanding the implementation, rather than being the kind of person who could understand the theory all by itself. For instance, I understood continuations better when I realized that it was simply allocating the activation record on the heap rather than on the stack.

Similarly, this course can be treated as a set of instructions for writing fiction, but I chose to treat it as a discourse on the implementation into fiction, which gives insight about how great fiction is constructed. For instance, I find "stream-of-consciousness" novels a complete bore and cannot bring myself to read more than a couple of pages of Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway, but James Hynes' analysis of the techniques behind those novels as well as why they're considered great made them completely comprehensible to me. (It also absolves any remaining need for me to read those books)

Similarly, he analyzes Anton Chekov's short stories, and uses examples from Alice Munro, J.R.R. Tolkein, Dashiell Hammett, Herman Melville, and James Ellroy to make various points about how to go about constructing a plot (and explains what the difference is between a character-driven story and a plot-driven story), writing dialogue, the use of first and third person narratives, and when to use narration versus painting a scene in detail. As with many college classes, he provides writing exercises at the end of each 30 minute lecture, in case you want to try your hand at some of the techniques he describes.

This is probably a great English literature class for those of you whose mind is like mine (i.e., prefers implementation over declaration/theory). I'm now even more sorry that my public University had so few spots in its creative writing courses that I was never able to snare one of the spots in those classes. While James Hynes might not be a great novelist (I never read any of his novels before starting this), he's a great instructor and quite capable of providing multiple examples for each techniques

The android Audible app (which I used to listen to all 12 hours of this course/audio book) is very well done. It remembers the state of your listening, and lets you resume precisely from where you left off at any point. I listened to this course on my android phone while hiking or doing other activities. It made a nice change from listening to music or NPR broadcasts.

Highly recommended, even for those of us who may never write a novel. This gives me more confidence to pick up one of those "Great Courses" at a good price the next time I find a deal.

Review: Finders Keepers

Finders Keepers is Stephen King's literary thriller about crimes that come back to haunt us. The novel opens with a murder of a writer and the subsequent consequences, including the disposition of the murderer and his unpublished novels. The book then skips forward 20 years to a boy who finds buried treasure (which turns out of course to include the unpublished novels), what he does with the proceeds.

The plot is then complicated by the murderer getting out on parole (Stephen King does his research impeccably: his killer matches every profile described in Mindhunter), and wants to repossess what was formerly his. The boy and the murderer cross paths, and mayhem ensues.

I gather that this novel is part of a trilogy, but I didn't read any of the other parts and didn't mind at all. The series characters don't play a big part in the tension of the story, and they're introduced adequately with a few references to past events that sufficiently summarizes their trauma.

As with every Stephen King novel, it's impeccably readable, and at no point is the plot interrupted by useless details. It's a great summer read, and one I can recommend to anyone.

Review: The Rhesus Chart

My brother sent me a copy of The Rhesus Chart, because he saw my review of The Annihliation Score and thought that The Rhesus Chart was a much better novel that didn't deserve to be skipped. You know what, he's right. I shouldn't have skipped The Rhesus Chart.

The Rhesus Chart is the laundry series' take on vampires. Unlike the Anne Rice or Stephanie Meyer novels, Stross depicts the vampires as blood-sucking investment bankers, which is far more appropriate than the usual depiction in literature.

The novel moves along at high speed once past the initial denouement and set up, and Stross is at his best when juxtaposing computer science with the occult. The integration of vampires with the laundry is fun in a typically British way, but Stross doesn't use the comedic potential as well as he could have.

The climax of the novel happens in the last 10% of the book, and worse, the most exciting part happens off-stage as it were. (My guess is that Stross tried to dramatize it and couldn't do it convincingly) Nevertheless a much more fun read than the following laundry book, though as other observers have stated, giving the protagonist so much power at the end of The Rhesus Chart probably meant that Stross had written himself into a corner as far as Bob Howard (the protagonist) is concerned.

Recommended.

Review: Woom 2 Child Bike

It's no secret that I'm a cycling enthusiast. A cycling enthusiast cares not just about his own cycling, but also whether his kids are going to enjoy cycling. The standard technique nowadays is to start with a balance bike. We started with a Strider, but in retrospect, the ones with air filled tires like the KaZAM would be recommended: lower rolling resistance is a big deal for a small kid.

As a result, it took us a while to motivate Bowen into playing with his strider, but by the time he was 3 and a half, he looked pretty competent with that thing. He was very close to the max seat height on the saddle, however, so it was time to get him a new (real bike).

I went with the WOOM 2 this time. There were several reasons for this choice:

• I didn't want Bowen to have to start with a coaster brake. Have you seen adults struggling to start a bike by pawing the ground like an angry cow? You get that habit by learning to ride with coaster brakes, where you can't lift the pedal appropriately and push down on it in order to gain speed. The WOOM website lets you purchase a wheel with a freewheel attached instead of a coast brake.
• The WOOM 2 has 2 hand brakes. Hand brakes are reliable ways to stop the bike no matter how long or steep a descent is. Coaster brakes aren't design for continuous difficult descents.
• The bike is designed to be relatively light. Even so, at 15 pounds, the WOOM 2 is half Bowen's weight. If you weigh 132 pounds, that would be like riding a 66 pound bike. I do that all the time, but it's less fun than a 24 pound bike. Nevertheless, it's as light as I can manage without building a custom bike for a 3 year old, which would be prohibitively expensive.
• The bike comes in a 14" wheel size. Bowen's currently right in between the 12" and the 16" wheel sizes, so 14" is appropriate, but otherwise difficult to find. A non-cycling family might simply buy a bigger bike so he would "grow into it.", but enthusiastic cyclists know that even a 1cm difference in adjustment in the wrong places can easily cause problems, and so if a 14" bike was appropriate, you wouldn't buy a 16" bike.

In addition to that, I added a kickstand to the order, since Bowen loved the kickstand on the quad. When the bike arrived, I discovered several things:

• They forgot to gave me the coaster brake wheel, which was fine by me. They even pre-emptively gave me a $19 credit so the freewheeling kit turned out to be free.
• They pre-installed the kickstand. This was nice.
• They gave us a free bell, which Bowen loved.
• The V-brakes are a major pain in the neck to adjust properly. I've long had an acrimonious relationship with V-brakes and cantilevers, and this bike did not endear me to them.
• The bike came with solid axles and nuts and bolts instead of quick releases. This made it a major pain when I had to fix a flat tire, but replacing the nuts and bolts with quick releases would have been impractical because I'd have to replace the solid axle as well. This is not a bike designed to easily facilitate field repair, which was disappointing. After all, the kind of parent who'd order a $300 bike for a 3-4 year old isn't likely to be too dumb to use quick releases properly.
• The bike is clearly over-built. Comparing the size of the tubes with those of my adult bikes, it's clear that it would take several generations of kids riding this bike before fatigue would be an issue. The bike will probably survive a few crashes at kid-friendly speed with no incident. There are several touches that had me scratching my head: there's a water bottle mount on the bottom of the down tube, but a bottle cage mounted there would probably interfere with steering. There are rack mounts on a bike that's so small that you couldn't find a rack that could mount there, and even if you did find one, there are no panniers that wouldn't interfere with pedaling. [Update: WOOM has informed me that in 2016 they will sell fenders that mount onto the rack mounts, which justifies the existence of those rack mounts. Racks will also be possible on the 16" and larger bikes]

Bowen loved the bike (it was his favorite color), but did not like the pedals. So I removed the pedals, and he scooted the bike over to the local middle school, whereupon I put him on a gentle incline, reinstalled the pedals, and had him roll down the incline to get started. Once he could put his legs on the pedals while the bike was moving, he quickly discovered that the pedals would let him move the bike without ever having to put his foot down. From then on, he never wanted the pedals off the bike again.

For a couple of days, he only ever wanted to start the bike on a descent, but we kept telling him: "Raise the right pedal, look straight ahead, push the pedal hard, and then you'll be moving." By Day 3-4, he was able to do U-turns, ride figure 8s, and (as long as we didn't tell him that's what he was doing) start on a slight uphill incline. We're still working on getting him to use the brakes, but at this point, he's pretty much riding a bike for as long as he likes without any trauma. (He fell a couple of times, but they were always low speed falls) By Day 6, he could ride to the middle school with me running interference in traffic and telling him to stop whenever a car drove by.

Having observed him throughout the learning process, I noted a few items:

• The bike is easier to ride than other kids' bikes because of an unusually low bottom bracket. The bottom bracket is so low that Bowen regularly scrapes the pedals while riding on an unevenly canted surface. This is an appropriate trade off, but I judge it unlikely that the plastic pedals will survive more than a couple of years of such constant abuse. Be prepared to replace those pedals regularly. And yes, if you substituted clipless pedals for the plastic pedals they're less likely to scrape, but try as I might, I've yet to find SPD-compatible shoes that are Bowen's size.
• The kick stand is too stiff for him to use independently. I frequently have to set or reset his kickstand for him. On the other hand, the quality of the kick stand is such that it'll never set itself on its own and cause a crash.
• The single speed gear ratio makes it tougher to get started up hill, but does encourage him to spin the pedals if he wants a high speed. That's pretty good.

All in all, comparing how Bowen's doing against his friends and classmates, I'd say we made the right choice. Other kids his age who've graduated from balance bikes into bicycles with training wheels, for instance, have gotten so many bad habits that they found a two wheeler un-rideable. Since we have a second son who'll make use of this bike after Bowen out-grows it, we get to amortize the (expensive) bike over 2 children. Finally, I hope that the resale value will be decent, as it's likely that the prices of these bikes new would provide a sufficient price umbrella such that the used market wouldn't take a big hit. As such, while WOOM offers an upcycling membership that would reimburse 40% of the bike's cost when your kid grows out of this one, it's probably equivalent to you selling the same bike on Amazon, eBay, or Craigslist at 50% off.

All in all, if you have a 3-5 year old, I'd recommend the WOOM over other equivalents due to the above-mentioned reasons. We'll probably return for a WOOM 3 when Bowen outgrows this, unless some other manufacturer provides similar features for a better price while correcting the defects I alluded to above.

Review: Arkham Knight

It's no secret that I'm a fan of the Arkham Batman games. They're fun, and do a great job of simulating Batman. I was put off from buying Arkham Knight early, however, because the reviews indicated that the game included too much time with the Batmobile. But a price glitch at Bestbuy got me Arkham Knight at $16, so I grabbed it and started playing.

The game is beautiful. When I first booted up Arkham Asylum a few years ago, it looked so good that I was shocked. (That's what happens when you don't play video games for a while) Strangely enough, Arkham City didn't impress me as much: my expectations had already been reset, and I sit way too close to the monitor for the graphics on my relatively weak GPU to impress me.

Arkham Knight, however, was written for the latest generation of consoles (so much so that the PC version had major launch issues and had been pulled from the shelves until the end of October), and it looks gorgeous. The first fight I had as Batman felt fast, fluid, and responsive. In fact, the game didn't even so much as hiccup until near the end, where driving the Batmobile would cause framerate slow downs. I didn't know how much of this was due to the game having been running continuously for days (using suspend and resume) while I finished it. The sound design isn't just beautiful, it's fully integrated into the game. For instance, one of the markers for a side quest is guided by Opera music. With 5.1 surround sound, where the music comes from tells you where the side quest can be found. The game makes full use of surround sound and benefits greatly from it.

With 3 previous Arkham console games before it, Arkham Knight does away with lengthy tutorials and dumps you right into the action. I won't say much about the plot, except to mention that I'm enough of a rube that the identity of the Arkham Knight did surprise me despite the heavy hinting and foreshadowing of his identity. The story itself is well-written: we explore Batman's psyche, history, and his relationships with the Gordons, the previous Robins (Nightwing makes an appearance and the banter between Wayne and Grayson is great to listen to), and of course, the villains of the piece. What's impressive about this game is that not only does it use all the background the comics (and previous games) provide, it's also not afraid to make massive changes to the milieu, creating its own story and give you surprises before tying it off with its own stamp on how the Batman story ends. If you played this game (like I did) with the expectation that they'll stick to canon and not make any changes, you'll be surprised on many occasions, and they'll be pleasant surprises. You find yourself thinking: "Of course! Those two characters were always going to hookup." But of course, that never happened in other versions of the Batman story!

The game play itself is excellent. One of my complaints about Batman cartoons and comics is that the villains always get to ramble on and on while Batman seems to do nothing. Well, in one of the first scenes of the game, a villain rambles while you remote control the Batmobile to come and blast the bejesus out of the villain in the middle of his speech. The game doesn't even prompt you to execute this piece fun and expects you to figure out that you can do this.

The detective mode brings back the best feature of Arkham Origins: the crime scene reconstruction and evidence scanner. Not only does it really make you feel like the Dark Knight Detective, the game's smart enough to use it sparingly: only one side quest really makes use of it, and the main storyline only does it once.

The Batmobile, while fun at first, does grate a bit. There's something wrong with a Batman game in which you have to race the Batmobile. The Batmobile also turns into a tank for battles, which would itself be a fun game, but after 10 hours or so you do get pretty tired of yet another tank fight, though there are variations that make it interesting. You end up spending most of your upgrade points on the Batmobile not because you like it, but because you'd like to finish the tank fights faster so you can spend more time being Batman. If not for the excessive use of the Batmobile, this game would be highly recommended. Of the new Batman features, the one I like the most is when you get to fight with a sidekick, and get to execute team take downs. Great fun, and I wish there were more of those!

Overall, the worst aspect of the game is the amount of padding stuck into it. While Arkham Asylum had no padding, and Arkham City felt long but didn't have required side quests, Arkham Knight has side quests galore (I finished 5 of them and still weren't close to done when I arrived at the main storyline ending), and many of them are just tedious repetition. Your primary motivation for going through these side quests is that they provide additional upgrade points for Batman. Once you've upgraded Batman sufficiently to clear the game, the content itself isn't sufficiently attractive to clean up, especially in the case of the Riddler. Clearly a case where AAA game makers feel like they have to "provide more content" at the cost of story coherency or variety.

Nevertheless, Arkham Knight is as well designed as games go. The puzzles aren't unfair, and the graphics and sound are gorgeous. Well worth the time. Recommended.