Review: Airborne Seeker Mountain Bike

Now that I've ridden my Airborne Seeker enough to approach one maintenance cycle, I feel like I can write a review of the bike and do it some justice.

The bike press and some cyclists talk about "catching air". Until I rode this bike, I never actually went fast enough up a ramp to experience it. It's a sublime experience: for one moment, you're completely weightless: a nudge from your body in any direction can move the entire bike. To be able to experience it, you need to trust your bike enough to go fast down an incline that ends in a ramp. It's a great feeling, and I never felt it on my 1993 Bridgestone MB-3.

It took me a while to get there. On my first few rides on the bike, I took every corner gingerly and with concern. The wheels felt big, but having experienced a good 29er, I had faith that as I got used to the bike that feeling would go away. Indeed it did: I'm now taking corners better than I did on my 26" MTB, and tackling pretty much the same obstacles I rode before. I still get a little freaked out on technical climbs, but when I remember that the big wheels roll very well over obstacles and relax, I pretty much roll over anything I can find on the bike.

Dialing in the suspension also made a huge difference: since I'm very light, I had to use the lowest number printed on the fork, and release air from the shocks. Even with the shock locked out the suspension still bobs a little as a result, but not in an annoying way. The 2x10 drive train has made me a convert: I think the 2x10/11 drive trains should be a standard on all future bikes, road or mountain. It's the way to go.

The brakes are said to be the weakest part of the Airborne Seeker. But I'm so light that I hardly put any stress on them. They do warp and occasionally make a zing-zing sound, especially when I hammer through muddy sections or otherwise tax them. But they've been surprisingly silent most of the time: the annoying sounds go away as soon as I ease up and they have not persisted. I will never put disc brakes on any road bikes, but on the mountain bike, I can see them as being potentially more reliable than V-brakes or cantilevers, as well as being easier to maintain.

Pardo once said, "Mountain Biking is the process of throwing your bike off a cliff very slowly --- with you on it, so there's no point anything that's too good." When I went bike shopping, I settled on the Airborne Seeker because its component selection (2x10 drive train, air shocks, gearing, and 29er wheels) could not be found from any other manufacturer under $1500. I was ready to buy it new from the factory, but they were out of stock so I bought mine for $730 shipped on eBay. I now realize that buying an Airborne Seeker is not "settling" by any means. I'd have a tough time finding a better bargain, and it's way more fun to ride than I expected. Even better, when I called up Airborne asking to buy a spare derailleur hanger, they immediately asked for my address and sent me one for free! For someone who bought a bike from eBay used, I did not expect that kind of treatment. I'll give them the thumbs up for customer service any day of the week.

If you can fit one (and find one in stock --- the factory said that they'll have them in stock sometime in spring), I cannot recommend them enough. This is one heck of a great bike. I'm sure other bikes are lighter, etc., but there's nothing else in this price range that comes even close.

Review: Producing Excellence

If you're a parent in the middle class, you've probably read countless parenting books. Most of them are prescriptive, telling you what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and why the advice works. Whether the advice is any good is up for grabs. Producing Excellence is the ultimate parenting book in reverse, beating even Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother for a great list of things not to do to your kids.

The book explores the world of the violin virtuoso who's training for a career as an international soloist. Imagine a world in which:

• Parents regularly pick the careers for their children at an early age (5 or 6 is not uncommon)
• Subject kids to 8 hours of practice a day, eliminating their social life outside of music
• Engage in extreme helicopter parenting, including participation in rigged competitions (every musical competition is pretty much rigged, if you believe this book), selecting music teachers, finding prestigious violins to play (getting such violins on loan takes up an intriguing 10 pages of the book), punishing international travel to get to competitions, garnering sponsorship, and eliminating general education to the point where soloists-in-training cannot conceive of (and in any case aren't prepared for) a career outside music, even in the (common) event that they cannot achieve their goals

As I read this book, I found myself highlighting passage after passage, not just because of how interesting they were, but because of how appalling the process is:

     “I do not need prodigy pupils, only gifted mothers.” —Violin teacher  (kindle loc 1113-16)

Teachers advocate minimum practice periods of an hour to an hour and a half for three- to five-year-old students; two to three hours for six year olds, four or more hours daily by the age of eight. The famous twentieth-century teacher Stolyarsky Piotr Solomonovitch “demanded that his student take the violin out of its case immediately after breakfast and put it away just before going to sleep at night. All other activities, including general education, were expected to be cut to a minimum”  (Kindle Loc. 1240-47)

 I first heard while observing an eight-year-old student taught by a renowned teacher from the Moscow Gnesina School: You know who Niccolò Paganini was? The most important virtuoso of the nineteenth century. You know why he was so famous, so great, and the best violinist of his time? People say that he offered his soul to the devil in exchange for such magical skill that [his instrument] was a magic wand! Niccolò, at your age, had already worked very hard. From the beginning of each day, his father confined his little son to a small empty room and ordered him to play violin. After one hour of work, Niccolò earned the right to breakfast. Then again, he worked until lunchtime. When the father had estimated that Niccolò played badly, he wouldn’t let him eat anything. In that manner the boy worked all day. (Kindle  Loc. 1276-80)

 In another case, the parents of a child were said to have given him slaps on the head, or pulled his ears or hair. Public revelations concerning such practices are rare, yet Ruggiero Ricci, the American violinist, is convinced that numerous child virtuosos are victims of parental pressure or abuse. According to Schwartz, “Ricci was speaking from experience. He describes his father as ‘some kind of musical maniac.’ He had all seven children playing an instrument. ‘I wanted to be pianist, but my parents got me off that jig. They bribed me with fiddles.’ On the whole, Ricci had an unhappy childhood. His father did not hesitate to put pressure on the boy”  (Kindle Loc. 1328-30)

 With testimonials like this, it is no wonder that Amy Chua abused her daughters to get them into Carnegie Hall: she was competing with other parents who were more extreme, more willing to work their kids, threaten them or even physically abuse them. With more intellectual activities like Math, Computer Science, or Physics, once you've mastered the material, all new work is fresh problem solving. Not so with motor skills like violin, piano, or practically any other musical instrument. Even after reaching the pinnacle of their professions, the violin player still needs constant daily practice to maintain excellence:

Kubelik’s biographers reported that he worked twelve hours each day before concerts; on the evening when he performed, his fingers would bleed. Heifetz described his practice as two hours each day, exercises and scales, and several hours of repertoire. (Kindle Loc. 1392-1400)

With STEM fields, achievement in the field is based on publication and citations. If you managed to prove P=NP and published a paper to that effect, no amount of bias or attempts at suppression of your work would succeed. But musical competitions are extremely subjective, with loaded juries. In fact, according to Wagner's book, most of the competitions have a "pay to win" component:

Competitors try to have a master class with at least one jury member. In the case of the observed competition, its organizer created a master class with a jury member just before the event, to allow competitors to “better prepare their performance,” as a jurist explained in his opening speech. For this master class, lessons and accommodation cost over 300 euros. Not all competitors were able to pay this, but all competition finalists had participated in this master class.  (Kindle Loc. 1822-26)

Negotiations of the jury are secret; according to testimonies, discussions are sometimes stormy. According to a teacher who participates in juries, it is always possible to “sway the vote.” Three jurists working together, he says, can control and influence competition results. “I don’t know of any competitions which aren’t backhanded. It is always possible to support or throw out someone before the finale.” An accompanist, speaking with a competitor’s parent on the first day of selections, expressed discontent: “Here, the prizes have already been distributed. It’s a pity, because I have accompanied children who have played very well.  (Kindle Loc. 1873-76)

After the competition, the parent of a losing candidate asked two jurists separately for reasons they did not select his child. Both men responded that the young violinist was very talented and a soloist career was at his fingertips, but that he should change his teacher. Both suggested the young musician would be welcome in their classes.  (Kindle 1905-9)

If you're wondering what sort of parent would put their child through this huge amount of hard work just so as to support a corrupt system where success has very little to do with actual excellence but everything to do with who you know, and the kind of backroom dealing that you would expect from 3rd world banana republic elections, you're not alone. The answer appears to be that the truth behind the classical music industry is carefully hidden from parents, students, and the general public:

Teachers carefully hide the fact that success is rare, even nearly impossible. Professors believe that the parents and their children do not need this information. Without faith in a glorious future as a globetrotting soloist playing packed halls such as the Albert, Carnegie, and Pleyel, how can the teacher motivate young students and their parents? The shadow of failure could dull the enthusiasm and provoke the demobilization of the teacher’s entourage. It is absolutely contrary to the teachers’ interest to speak about the relative proportion of successful students. And so, the teachers continue to support the notion that students’ aspirations are realistic.  (Kindle Loc. 4957-60)

 “The problem with Ivan, and with others who work with children as he does [in the soloist class], is that for every ten students, one will attempt suicide, one will become mentally ill, two will become alcoholics, two will slam doors and jettison the violin out the window, three will work as violinists, and perhaps one will become a soloist.” Although this may be exaggerated, the ratio of success is certainly accurate, and the risks of failure are not unrealistic.  (Kindle Loc. 4962-64)

When students are asked, “Why have you chosen to became a musician?” the response is generally, “I don’t know,” or “It was always that way,” or “I only know how to play.” The lack of knowledge in any other field seems to pose an impassable obstacle. At the end of their education, after abandoning hope of becoming a soloist, the easiest solution is to find a job in the larger world of music. (Kindle Loc. 5329-36)

 The author then discloses that she herself is the mother of a son who was put into this career track before she started her research project (the book was the result of her PhD thesis on ethnology). Her poignant passage upon the realization that she had stuck her son into this low-success-rate career:

 When my position as a research worker opened the possibility for me of seeing my world from a different point of view, I developed profoundly mixed emotions. It was frightening to be more fully aware of a world where competition is strong and the market is saturated. I came to realize the stakes that participants of that world—including my son—were up against. I hadn’t seen how high those stakes were before, because I had embraced the ideology of the world. The sociologist in me was overjoyed—the mother in me panic-stricken. I tried to retreat and find ways for my son to leave this milieu and find another field of study and work. But I failed, for the bonds between him and the soloist elite were too tightly wound for his escape. (Kindle Loc. 5884-89)

 There were many times during my reading of this book where I had to stop because I was so stricken with incredulity and pain. By the time I was done with this book, I became disgusted with myself for having spent any money at all on classical music and thus indirectly contributing to the unhappiness of so many children worldwide. I'm not sure I could in good conscience ever go to a classical music performance, listen to a  classical soloist, or look on the (frequently shared) YouTube videos of "child prodigies" again with the innocence I once had. It's a shame that something as beautiful as music has been turned into a corrupt industry by greed, hunger for fame, and desire for money. What's worse is that the kids who were started on this career path were driven to it by their parents, not because they personally would have chosen the career path on their own. Furthermore, the media glorifies the exceptions who make it (we all know that Lang Lang's father was an SOB who was abusive to his son), while hiding the very human costs for the ones who don't make it.

I also can't help but wonder how rigged the science competitions are: since each submission is effectively a unique research project and it's run by a jury similar to those on music competitions, I wonder how much backroom dealing is involved. At least with the math Olympiads, everyone's given the same problem and has to solve them within the time limits.

All in all, I came away from reading this book sadder but quite a bit wiser. A few principles:

• Any situation where there's a jury determining winners and losers is bound to be unfair. Hence running (no judges) is better than figure skating, and math is better than music. Even though many athletic events are plagued by cheating and drug using, the people involved in those are adults and chose to cheat or not cheat.
• Where possible, choose fields where your results are sold directly to the public, rather than being sold to a narrow band of curators or taste makers. That means pop music is probably (but not much) better than classical music, and self-publishing books is probably better than the crazy system which is book publishing.
• Any kind of democratization of taste that works by disinter-mediating the elite taste makers is a good thing. It's a good thing that people now pay more attention to Amazon's reviews than to "official" book critics like the New York Times review of books.
• The media loves child prodigies. They will show the glories of a kid producing music, but not show the hidden costs behind that performance. And when that kid ages out of being cute, he will be dropped like a hot potato and never be mentioned again. Bear the in mind the next time you see a Youtube video of a child prodigy. Resist the temptation to turn your child into one of those. If you are still tempted, buy and read a copy of this book.

In any case, I enjoyed this book and can recommend it. It's a lot like watching a train wreck: you cringe for the people involved, but there's a perverse fascination in watching nevertheless. And if the book inoculates you against trying to turn your kids into one of those prodigies, that's well worth the (hefty) price.

Borken Spoke

After approximately 10 years and 30,000 miles, on a descent of Page Mill Road, I heard a "twang" sound and heard the sound of metal rattling. I quickly stopped my bike and saw that a spoke was loose on the front wheel. Upon fishing out the spoke, I realized that the spoke had broken where the threads were. I opened up the quick release on my caliper brakes, and rode the rest of the descent at a much slower pace than usual, being careful not to go full speed even on the flat sections.

After getting home, eating lunch, and taking a shower, I took out my spare spokes and found one that matched the correct length. I got out my truing stand, spoke wrenches, grease and tri-flow, greased everything, removed the tire and uncovered the rim tape enough to fish out the old nipple (pictured above) and installed a new nipple and spoke. My inspection of the old nipple indicates that the breakage probably occurred due to some microscopic defect in threads of the spoke, which I could not have possibly detected.

By ear (thank goodness for having perfect pitch), I tensioned up the spoke to match the others on the wheel, and then did some minor truing, upon which I discovered that my wheel was back to being as good as new!

Over the years, I've frequently encountered people who told me that I have too many spokes on my wheels, and that 32, 28, or even 16 spoke wheels are good enough. But when you have a spoke failure, having a lot of spokes on the wheel means that you can ride home safely, and when you repair the wheel everything comes together rapidly and easily. Hence I've never thought to myself: "I wished I had 4 fewer spokes on the wheels" when completing a mountain descent.

I'm forever grateful to Jobst Brandt and David "Pardo" Keppel for helping me out back when I was first building wheels. Nothing man-made can ever be perfect, but the traditional spoked bicycle wheel is still nothing short of amazing.

Review: Thing Explainer

After What if?, I had high hopes for Thing Explainer. This is a large format book, best read on paper: do not buy the Kindle edition, as it requires a really huge piece of paper to fit in most of the illustrations, and I can only imagine that reading it on a tablet or e-ink Kindle device would be an exercise in frustration.

The book's conceit is that Munroe would only use the 10,000 most commonly used English words to label the diagrams, which range from an examination of the Earth's Crust to a tear down of a smart phone to a Nuclear power plant. I call it a conceit because in many cases, using the proper nouns would have helped the clarity of the book, and using the simple words simply made the book more obscure. For instance, calling an engine a "fire box" is more confusing than using the word, "engine." The most ludicrous example of this came when he presents the periodic table of elements. In essence, having a label such as "Metal that Tells Us About the Early Earth" rather than Niobium doesn't help whatsoever.

As a result, the title of the book is a lie. The book can only explain the objects it claims to explain only because you, the reader, already know what it's explaining. If you tried to show this to a child, the poor kid would probably get more confused as a result of the "explanation" than if you actually used big words and answered questions patiently.

All in all, I'm glad I checked this book out of the library. There's amusement in puzzling out what each long chain of sentences in the book is talking about, and the diagrams are great, but there's no way you'd walk away from the book more enlightened than when you first picked it up.

Review: The Half-Life of Facts

I picked up The Half-Life of Facts hoping to get some insight. There's an old joke (repeated in this book) that the medical school exam questions are the same year after year, it's just that the answers are different. I expected charts and statistics, and analysis of whether the large number of researchers in various disciplines have led to an increasing churn of results, and whether that makes the rush to publish more likely to lead to false theories being promulgated.

In practice, this book did little more than touch on bits of those threads, and provided little insight. In particular, it feels like the book's full of anecdotes and stories, rather than statistics and deep analysis. Worse, the author seems to have a very shallow view of technology, blithely talking about Moore's law, not realizing the lack of Dennard Scaling past the 45nm process, for instance, has brought CPU improvements down to a crawl.

I finished reading the book out of sheer bull-headedness, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Review: Mysteries of Modern Physics - Time

I started auditing the Great Courses Physics series on Time by Sean Carroll on a whim. Carroll is a physics professor at Caltech, and a great lecturer even for those of us who had a liberal arts education. For one thing, the topic is a great motivator: understanding the mysteries behind Time and the Arrow of Time, it turns out drives you wanting a better understanding of philosophy, psychology, neurobiology, cosmology, ideal gas laws, the second law of thermodynamics, Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, relativity, and touches on high energy physics and of course string theory.

What astonished me was that Carroll successfully did this using minimal mathematics: he didn't even get around to PV=nRT, but still managed to explain the combinatorial expansion that drives the scientific understanding of entropy and what it means. I think it was Richard Feynman who said that "If you can't teach it to a smart undergraduate, then you don't really understand it," and Carroll's understanding and explanation more than passes the bar.

The mystery behind time, it turns out, isn't that it exists, but that there's a directionality to it. Since physics equations don't actually manifest an arrow of time, we're left with trying to explain it, but Carroll points out that ultimately, the question isn't "why is entropy going to go up tomorrow?", but "why was the entropy lower yesterday, and even lower the day before that", and so forth all the way until the moment of the Big Bang.

Along the way, Carroll takes us through a grand tour of modern physics, touching from gas laws, Boltzman's equation, and quantum mechanics as well as modern cosmology. It's a lot of fun. If physics had been taught with as much energy, literacy, and fun at my high school, I might have been a more interested and motivated student of the subject. And yes, he'll also address questions like: "Why am I always late?", and "Does time really start flowing faster as you get older?"

So yes, watch the series, or forget the video and just listen to it as you drive/hike/run errands. If you've been exposed to the material before, it'll be a great refresher, but if not, I can assure you that the presentation is much lighter and less intimidating than say, Lisa Randall's book. Recommended!

Review: Rise of the Tomb Raider (PC)

2013's Tomb Raider Reboot was a great game, and while I was a little disappointed that the sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider wouldn't come to the PS4 until later this year, I wasn't in a hurry to play this game, and am never in the habit of paying full freight for games anyway. Well, I won a giveaway for a free game code for the Windows version, so I guess this review's coming out a year or so early.

Abstraction kills performance. Nowhere is this more obvious than in cross platform video games. My desktop PC, even though it was built in 2009, should in theory run circles around the PS4 and the XBox one. The CPU is a quad core i7 with hyperthreading, clocked at a GHz more than what's in either of those consoles. The GPU is a Radeon 7870, clocked at over 1GHz, a 25% increase in clock speed over what's in the PS4, which in turn has 50% more stream processors than the XBox One. By all rights, my desktop PC should be running any game with better graphics and faster response time than any of the consoles.

In practice, running Rise of Tomb Raider on the above machine required me to turn the resolution down to 960p and turn off several features that are turned on by default on the XBox One. Whenever I run a CPU/GPU monitor on the machine, it showed that the GPU is fully utilized, while the CPU basically pegs one core while the rest of the cores are idle. But because that core is being turbo-boosted, my machine's fans are fully spun up whenever the game is running, even during the cut scenes. In effect, my machine sucks down more power (about 300W) while producing a lower quality image than the XBox One. To get a better experience, I'd have to spend at least $300 on a graphics card, which would cost more than buying an XBox One. On top of that, when you're done with a game on the PC there's no way to resell the game to someone else, so while my PS4 games occasionally have a negative cost attached (i.e., I resell the game for more than I paid for it), there's zero chance of that happening on a PC game. I can definitely see why despite predictions of doom for dedicated game consoles, they're still selling very well.

During my review of The Witcher 3, I speculated that the SSD on my desktop PC would result in reduced loading time. Rise of the Tomb Raider put paid to that speculation: game startup times were north of 45s (the same as the Witcher 3 on the PS4), and that load time was repeated every time I used fast travel. A reload due to a death was fast, however, which made me happy but I don't think the XBox One would have been any slower.

OK, enough about the mechanics of PCs vs consoles. What about the game? If you enjoyed the Tomb Raider reboot, the sequel is more of it. As an action adventure game, it's a lot of fun, borrowing mechanics from RPGs, open world games, as well as the 3D platforming and linear sequences found in the Uncharted series. The game's McGuffin, a search for the fountain of youth is a bit too much of a cliche, but the story itself is not bad: we get a romp through various beautiful scenes (though the impact of that scenery was muted for me by a 960p resolution on a 27" monitor that's 12 inches from my eyes), lots of shooting, some stealth (though my Lara Croft never stealthed through anything when she could shoot through it), and of course, environmental puzzle pieces that are a hallmark of the series.

Just like with the Batman games, we get various equipment made available to us over time during the game, and with each upgrade, more parts of the environment become accessible, along with more goodies. Lara Croft herself has a skill tree where you can upgrade her during play, and customize her moves. If you actively seek out some side missions and pick certain correct skills early (some of the skills gives you bonus experience points throughout the game, so if you grab them early you level up very quickly), which makes the game much easier. (In fact, it's so much easier that this is one of the few games I played on normal and never felt like switching the difficulty level down)

Despite the entire experience being more polished (and also bigger: the game's 20 hours instead of 13, there are 9 tombs instead of 7, etc., etc.), I felt like the game didn't quite live up to its potential. Most of that is due to the writing: the Tomb Raider reboot made you feel sympathy for Lara in a way the sequel doesn't. While a lot of the game's emotional impact would have been very strong if you were attached to Lara's family, the game's writers didn't spend any expository time (or player-directed game time) to making the player understand the relationships and what they meant to Lara. As a result, you never connect to the secondary characters the way Joel and Ellie connect in The Last of Us, or even Nathan Drake and Sullivan or Elena connect in Uncharted. Similarly, despite the huge amounts of CPU/GPU available to Square Enix, they chose to make most of the experience focus on Lara Croft exploring, hunting, or fighting by herself, instead of having a companion character help out. The net result is that the game's missing the magic touch that Uncharted or even The Witcher 3 provides.

I don't want to give you the impression that the game's unenjoyable: it is, and in a direct way that The Last of Us isn't. It's just that it had the potential to be more, and I feel like Crystal Dynamic's team always took the conservative choice instead of the ambitious choice with every aspect of the game design, which ultimately hurt the game.

Nevertheless, it's a AAA blockbuster type experience that never overstays its welcome. It's recommended, but I wouldn't go out of my way to buy special hardware so you could play it earlier.

Review: The Intelligent Brain

I'm of two minds about Great Courses' The Intelligent Brain.On the one hand, the first 10 lectures of this 18 part series is great, giving me a view and insight into intelligence research which I'd not had exposure to before. For instance, I'd always thought of IQ testing as being like the SATs: it's effectively a test of how good you are at taking IQ tests. What Professor Haier provided is insight into how an IQ test is composed, and what it actually means.

Effectively, an IQ test is a battery of tests that seeks to define the boundary of various mental abilities. Each subsection of tests seeks to test one facet, but all subsets have a positive correlation to what researchers call g, which is general intelligence. This highlights several things:

• Since it's impossible to test for g directly, we can only glimpse at it via factor analysis.
• IQ score aren't an absolute, but are only relative to the rest of the population. An IQ score doesn't quantify anything.
• IQ scores are fairly stable in adult life.
• When it comes to IQ, you really find out that life isn't fair. People with higher IQ are healthier, have better jobs, make more money, are happier, and live longer.
• The Multiple Intelligences stuff has no empirical evidence to support it. And that doesn't bother Howard Gardner!
• IQ has a highly heritable component. In fact, the research studies in existence indicate that identical twins have IQs that converge over time, rather than diverging as you might expect!
• Different brains work differently, and what gives one person high IQ could be a completely different subset of abilities that work differently from another individual who has similarly high IQ. Men and women, for instance, demonstrate different brain areas that are correlated with high IQ, so a man and a woman with the same IQ score still could have brains that work differently.

This is all great stuff, and the lectures on Race and Gender differences are full of data and are potentially very controversial, but Professor Haier does a great job of just stating the facts, and then separating that from his personal opinion. The problem is, the amount of research is very very small, since nobody wants to risk doing research on such controversial topics, and there's a severe lack of funding on intelligence research. (Though apparently China has a huge team dedicated to doing intelligence research at the genetics level, so that might change once there's an arms race)

The lack of funding shows in particular with some of the studies cited: in many cases, the sample size is pathetically small (33-66 people is very very subject to poor sample bias). In one case, he cites a study he did on video games that apparently didn't even have a control group! Fortunately, the results I listed above a drawn from wide-ranging IQ test and studies that have huge samples and population (in one case the entire country of Ireland!), which means that those results are pretty reliable.

As such, I can recommend the series, especially the first 12 lectures or so. And it's hardly Professor Haier's fault that the state of the field is abysmal. Perhaps we can hope for an IQ arms race that will lead to more funding and progress in this field.  Though unfortunately watching the presidential primaries this year makes me fear that we're descending into Idiocracy instead.

Review: Dark Intelligence

Dark Intelligence is Neal Asher's new Polity novel, set after the Polity/Prador wars of the "Gridlinked" novels. True to form, it's not really science fiction, but really an action-thriller, with lots of big explosions, planet-busting weapons, and planetary AIs.

One of the big problems with post-singularity work is that stories that are interesting to people fundamentally have to be about people, and a post-singularity AI isn't human enough to be either comprehensible or easy to identify with. The conceit then, is that either humans are AI pets, deployed only as a front to other species as an interface (as in the Iain Banks' Culture novels) or that for some unfathomable reasons, human type brains can occasionally be so smart and interesting that they are of value to an AI.

Dark Intelligence starts with the latter premise, with Thorvald Spear awakening after the war, and immediately deciding that he needs to go after a rogue AI that had committed all sorts of atrocities during the war. Of course, that justifies him in performing all sorts of atrocities as well, and we learn that Spear isn't just any old unreliable narrator, but that he himself might be some form of construct.

With this plot, we get a romp through the Polity/Prador neutral zone, an exploration of the crab people, and some drone intelligences, but mostly a lot of exposition and high action sequences. It's fun, but one is left thinking: "Did you need a novel to do all this? It could easily have been a short story." The characters are simple and not really developed, though the plot is. And of course, the rogue AI that's at the core of the story only gets viewed from external sources, so we get a very incomplete picture.

The cover of the novel bills itself as the first part of a trilogy, but I'm not sure I'll bother continuing. Read it only if you've enjoyed past Asher novels.

Review: Scientific Secrets for Raising Kids Who Thrive

Invariably, whenever I read or review a book on parenting, the comparison is to John Medina's Brain Rules for Baby, and the comparison highlights how bad parenting literature usually is. Scientific Secrets for Raising Kids Who Thrive is the only exception to this I've encountered for years, and I think it's a must-audit.

Professor Vishton is a faculty member at the College of William and Mary, and not only is he a great lecturer, his presentation is outstanding. The scientific approach part of the title is not a joke: for every assertion he makes, not only does he tell you the results, he provides the details behind the experiments, the methods scientists used to distinguish correlation from causation, and detailed analysis of "why" the assertion is true.

All this would be worthless if the results weren't actionable or interesting, but they are. Here's a sampling of various issues I've not encountered in other parenting resources:

• The Montessori method has actually been shown to be more effective at teaching math, language, and executive function (and hence social skills) than traditional methods. The approach can be scaled up to older kids and not just pre-school. The control in this case was a school in a school district in Milwaukee where kids had to win a lottery to enter the school. This random selection process allowed researchers to isolate the study to the teaching method.
• The primary factor identifying success in Math is whether kids understand fractions by age 10. This is a strong result, indicating that if your child doesn't understand fractions by then you need to take aggressive remedial approaches.
• On a related point Math is one of the few skills where an early advantage sustains itself: in other words, a child who's advanced in math at kindergarten keeps that advantage over time, whereas a child who walks or runs early doesn't necessarily sustain that advantage over time.
• The more parents help with a child's homework, the less successful the child does in tests in school. A parent's role should be limited to providing a space to study, keeping distractions to a minimum, and letting the child figure things out by himself.
• Learning is extremely contextual, so much so that providing different study areas actually helps. One reason why homework is useful is that they encourage students to study in a different location than the school.
• 3 sessions of 20 minutes of study is more effective than 1 60 minute session. If you can't do 3 separate periods of 20 minutes, rotate subjects at 20 minute intervals.
• Unstructured play time is important, and is correlated with increased creativity and social skills. The benefit of this is lost if the parent even provides a suggestion as to what to do, so it's important to let the child direct this play time, even at the cost of letting him be bored for a time.
• If you want kids to be pro-social, it's important to avoid using incentives to encourage pro-social behavior. Using extrinsic incentives undermines the child's natural instinct to be helpful for its own sake, and ends up backfiring.

Unlike any other parenting book (even Medina's), Vishton covers the effects of a second language, why it was originally thought that bilingualism was a bad thing, and why the recent shift in understanding. He also addresses Amy Chua's Tiger Parenting approach, and explains why the authoritative approach is better than the authoritarian approach, and the costs of the Tiger parenting approach on the child. (This lecture, along with the above notes on unstructured play time, helped me understand why I encountered so many high achieving students who had trouble making simple decisions, but in keeping with this review, that's just my personal observation/anecdote, and hence unscientific)

Needless to say, this audio book from The Great Courses wins my highly recommended rating. If you can't be bothered with any other parenting resource, listen to this audio book (there's also a video version, but it's unnecessary, though nice to have for the section on Montessori math). I say this despite being an avid reader and therefore prejudiced against acquiring information via any other method. This one is just too good to pass up.

Review: The Rosie Effect

The Rosie Project was a delightful novel, so much so that I immediately placed a hold on the sequel, The Rosie Effect at the library. The reviews for the second novel weren't nearly as great as the reviews for the original, and some even told me to avoid reading it as it was dreary.

This is inevitable, as the first novel ended with a marriage, and in all stories, that's always attached with a "and they lived happily ever after." That's a fantasy, of course, as in real life, as Yishan Wong notes that even successful marriages involve a lot of conflicts.

Since The Rosie Effect is about post-marriage and a baby, it's reflective of these conflicts, though of course from the point of view of Don Tillman. In characteristic fashion, Tillman explores and investigates the idea of having a baby, and this gets him into hot water in more ways than one. Since the novel is written from his point of view, he's bewildered by society's (and his wife's) negative reactions to his attempts to explore this space, and muddles through as best as he can.

There are scenes that look like they were written to be in a sitcom, with a setup and then an unexpected delivery. They're funny, and of course in the end we realize that the man with Asperger's is a far better person than most of the normals in the novel.

The minuses is that to get these situations to happen, lots of setup is required and we get some very unlikely events as a result.

This is not as good a read as the original, but it's not unreadable, and had enough fun moments to justify my continued reading to the end of the book. While I hesitate to attach a "recommended" tag to this novel, it's nevertheless not as bad as some of the reviews would have you believe. Of course, whether a merely "OK" novel is worth your time is a different story.

Review: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

One chapter in Peopleware that always resonates in my mind is the chapter on "Spanish Theory Management":

Some years ago I was swapping war stories with the manager of a large project in southern California. He began to relate the effect that his project and its crazy hours had had on his staff. There were two divorces that he could trace directly to the overtime his people were putting in, and one of his worker's kids had gotten into some kind of trouble with drugs, probably because his father had been too busy for parenting during the past years. Finally, there had been the nervous breakdown of the test team leader. As he continued through these horrors, I began to realize that in his own strange way, the man was bragging. You might suspect that with another divorce or two and a suicide, the project would have been a complete success, at least in his eyes.

Elon Musk is a biography of the man, and if you weren't aware of the era that both books were written in, you might well suspect that Elon Musk was the manager Tom DeMarco was referring to. Consider this: in this book alone, he scolded an employee for attending the birth of his child instead of attending a work event. He repeatedly set impossible schedules, and then push employees past the breaking point and then discards them:

“Elon’s worst trait by far, in my opinion, is a complete lack of loyalty or human connection,” said one former employee. “Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter without a second thought. Maybe it was calculated to keep the rest of the workforce on their toes and scared; maybe he was just able to detach from human connection to a remarkable degree. What was clear is that people who worked for him were like ammunition: used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded.”  (Loc. 4911-15)

At one point, he even fires his administrator who'd been with him for more than 10 years:

Brown often felt like an extension of Musk—the one being who crossed over into all of his worlds. For more than a decade, she gave up her life for Musk, traipsing back and forth between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley every week, while working late into the night and on weekends. Brown went to Musk and asked that she be compensated on par with SpaceX’s top executives, since she was handling so much of Musk’s scheduling across two companies, doing public relations work and often making business decisions. Musk replied that Brown should take a couple of weeks off, and he would take on her duties and gauge how hard they were. When Brown returned, Musk let her know that he didn’t need her anymore, and he asked Shotwell’s assistant to begin scheduling his meetings. Brown, still loyal and hurt, didn’t want to discuss any of this with me. Musk said that she had become too comfortable speaking on his behalf and that, frankly, she needed a life. (Loc 4926-32)

There's also a section where Jeff Bezos poaches one of SpaceX's employees by doubling his salary. Characteristically, Musk, rather than consider whether he underpaid that employee, thinks that Bezos and the employee betrayed him.

Keep in mind that I'm sympathetic to Elon Musk's goals and background. Not only was Musk a huge science nerd and programmer, he also played D&D in his youth, and of course, if electric cars replace the internal combustion engine, the world would be a much better place. I also enjoyed the section on Musk bringing startup-style mentality to the aerospace, which apparently needs a huge kick in the pants and massive cost-cutting.

What's unfortunate about this book is that Ashlee Vance treats Musk's approach to engineering, scheduling, and design as being par for the course: that abusing employees, creating impossible schedules through optimistic CEO-level views on how long something ought to take was the only way for Elon Musk to achieve his goals and get his results.

Imagine an alternate world in which Musk was a better leader: it could be that instead of having a large number of rocket failures and massive amounts of drama, his rockets could have had fewer test cycles, and finished in approximately the same amount of time. Of course, maybe launching something without drama and having it work properly the first time wouldn't merit a book.

In any case, it's worth reading the book, as it does provide a behind the scenes look at Tesla and SpaceX that's entertaining and interesting. But you do have to read between the lines to see a few interesting underlying principles:

• Certain non-tech related fields like Space/Aerospace and Cars are ripe for disruption by Silicon Valley startups. In particular, fields that have fossilized and gotten used to fat margins and inefficiency workflows are vulnerable to attacks from Silicon Valley.
• Ironically, part of this attack is due to the ease of exploitation of the underlying workforce: nobody who's actually a good mechanical or aerospace engineer enjoys working under the bureaucracy of the entrenched businesses. You can therefore lure such people to work for you at below market pay and work them hard for an extended period because you offer effectively more responsibility and freedom of action than the bureaucracy. When those people burn out, replace them with more fresh graduates. This is known as the EA model of HR management.
• If you succeed, you'll get lauded in the business press, and then have books written about you.

This is obviously excessively cynical, and as noted above, I do agree with Elon Musk's goals, and think that in the coming battle between Silicon Valley and Detroit, there's no question Detroit is going to lose. But it's still sad to see obnoxious business practices praised and lauded as though there aren't better alternatives.

Nevertheless, read the book, and see if you agree with me. Recommended.

Review: Nalgene ATB Bottle

The last couple of months of mountain biking has been great. I've gone from being terrified to being able to do 2-3 foot drops and jumps. My gear, however, has gotten dirtier and dirtier: despite the "drought", it's been a relatively wet California winter, and I've done enough stream crossings and puddle crossings to soak my shoes right through multiple times.

As previously mentioned, the usual mountain biking solution of using a hydration pack just doesn't work for me at all. I hate having anything on my back for a bike ride, and philosophically, I've always thought that it's crazy to carry something on your body when it can be carried on the bike.

The Nalgene ATB bottle comes with a cap that closes over the drinking nozzle. You'll probably be surprised to find out that I've done extensive searches but this is the only water bottle that seems designed to keep your drinking nozzle free from dirt, mud, and horse poop. None of the other bottles that are similarly protected will fit into a standard water bottle cage.

What's more important, the cap is easily flipped open and drunk from while riding, and then closed back up. I was using that feature one day when I pushed the cap in the wrong direction, and pop, off went the cap and it disappeared from the trail without a trace!

I can't complain about Nalgene's customer support though! I sent them an e-mail, and a new cap is now on its way. While I think that some sort of retaining cord should be designed into this bottle, the fact that it's the only one available that fits my need means pretty much that I'll keep using it, and be more careful about the cap next time.

Recommended!

Review: The Time of Contempt

As mentioned in yesterday's review of The Witcher 3, the video game in this case is much better than the source material. I picked up The Time of Contempt in order to see if the second novel (as opposed to the first two books, which were mostly short stories) was any better, but unfortunately the answer is no.

Andrej Sapkowski loves run on sentences. Whether this is an artifact of Polish and a resultant translation I do not know. What's wacko about the book is that Sapkowski chooses to emphasizes relatively unimportant scene. A scene about Dandelion crossing a river could take 3 pages long with no effect whatsoever on the plot. Alternatively, a scene between Geralt and Yennefer would be reported at once remove, from the perspective of Dandelion and Ciri spying on them from a place where they couldn't even hear the conversation. It all makes for a very disjointed approach, and a story where payoffs are very few.

I'd recommend skipping the books past the first two, and I won't bother reading any further books in the series.

Review: Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (PS4)

In recent years, I'd pretty much given up on CRPGs as a genre. They pose multiple problems from my point of view:

• The typical CRPG "grinding" mechanic is onerous and leads frequently to player abuse. It's one thing for a game to boast 50 hours of game play or whatever leads to good advertising copy, but if it's 50 hours of "rinse & repeat", I consider that player abuse. (I consider A Song of Ice and Fire "reader abuse" for similar reasons)
• The length of time it takes to complete a CRPG is excessive. Now, if you're 9 years old and only have money for 1-2 games a year, that's a feature. But if you're a busy parent, or have hobbies other than sitting down in front of a computer or console, CRPGs frequently over-stay their welcome. And if you end up rushing through the story because you just want to be done, then frequently those CRPGs don't have much more than the 15 hours of real game play.
• The amount of work required to master the mechanics and min-max your character frequently takes you out of immersion from the game world, and you find yourself doing quests to level up. Alternatively, if the game scales the challenges to your level, you find yourself running to stand still, and discover that no matter how powerful you get you're never going to be high enough level that the final challenge is doable if you don't have the reflexes of the above-mentioned 9 year old.

I say this despite being (as far as I know) still the record holder for the longest running D&D game at Google. In a moment of weakness, however, I found a copy of Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for sale over the holidays and picked it up. One of the main reasons for playing games mostly on the console is that if you're unsatisfied or dislike them, you can easily re-sell them, and if you're good at shopping for sales, you might even discover that you can buy games, play them, and then sell them used for more than the price you paid!

Little did I know that once I started the game it would push all other games on the PS4 aside, and become the only game I wanted to play for the entire period of the main story. The game deals with the issues I listed above through a number of techniques:

• The game's an action RPG. What this means is that while the game mechanics are there, you almost never have to min-max your character: how you manuever and fight during the action sequences also has a dramatic effect on your character's effectiveness. It also helps that the game doesn't let you create characters from scratch: you pretty have to play Geralt of Rivia, and you get to decide which of his abilities to emphasize, but there's no excessive freedom. I played through the first act of the game in pretty sub-optimal configuration, and only got serious about maxing out capabilities in the second act. This meant that my early game was challenging: there were more than a few fights where I had to load and reload the game after dying in order to get past an encounter. Those made me wish I'd bought the game on my PC, where an SSD would have rendered loading times moot or irrelevant, but the reality was that my PC is 7 years old and I probably wouldn't be getting more than 20fps on the PC on medium settings (which would look horrid at 1440p) anyway.
• There's no grind. Every quest in the early game is meaningful, and even when the game throws you 3-4 main story quests at you, and you tackle them in a random order, they come together and weave tightly into a narrative which converges to your goal. This is beautiful story-telling with great game play at work. In fact, the quality of the stories and side quests (none of which are the usual "fetch an item for me" quests which litter other CRPGs) so enthralled me that I did every secondary quest I could get my hands on during the first part of the game, only abandoning that in the city of Novigrad when I'd "over-levelled" to the point where certain side quests would net me very little XP. Even then, I finished nearly every secondary quest that wouldn't get me killed repeatedly before heading off into the islands.
• The time component is huge, with How Long to Beat estimating 44.5 hours to complete the game, which seems about right. There was one occasion in the third act when I thought I'd built up to the climax, and instead realized I had several more hours to go before the actual climax. But I didn't mind: the story's good, the game play's a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the characters and the choices.

The game's so full of denouements that they're scattered all throughout the third act of the game rather than being clumped together at the end. I thought that was very well done, providing resolution as to the fate of various characters Geralt had interacted with earlier in the game.

Overall, the game feels very much like one that a DM would layout without regards for character levels: it feels very organic, and even in the early game you can end up at a location where monsters would wipe the floor with you.

What about objections from the previous games? The first witcher game was notorious for giving you in-game rewards for sleeping with various women. That's been done away with: the romances and relationships in this game feel a lot more mature, and yes, there's a love triangle, but the consequences are much more real than in the first game. I wouldn't let the first witcher game's approach deter you from trying this game. While there are indeed sex scenes, and I could imagine that someone might try to get their version of Geralt laid as frequently as possible, the game does a great job of only delivering those only because of actions you directly chose: you could easily play a very Puritan/Victorian version of Geralt.

What's most important is that the RPG part of the game isn't neglected. Yes, it's a computer, so your responses are distilled down into conversation trees and dialog choice selection. But this is where the game being a "Geralt-simulator" makes is stronger: you're never given a dialog selection that breaks character for Geralt, and your dialog/decision choices shape the ending in ways you would not expect, but are despite that, very reasonable and have you thinking that of course, that's how it would work. Do yourself a favor and don't read any spoiler/walkthroughs. The choices you make have an impact on the ending and it's better to go through at least your first playthrough blind and then read about the choices you can make (or watch them on youtube) later.

Rather than opt for a "good-vs-evil" approach to game play, the story is actually interesting. My Geralt, for instance, was always stuck in a situation where he had to decide who was telling the truth and who was lying. Early on, this was fairly easy: you could pursue the truth and eventually collar the person who was lying. As the game progressed, however, the nuances of the story became more complex, until by the time I got to Crookback Bog, I was no longer able to tell who was lying, and in fact, made a poor decision at one point because for whatever reason, I thought that the witches were the world's version of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Having re-read some of the books recently, I realize that this is entirely within the world's setting: the books' short stories loved to make some allusion to commonly known fairy tales and then put a twist into it, either by running the logic of the fairy tale to its conclusion, or by making the nature of the beast different from the stories. I was very impressed that the writers for the game managed to invoke a similar bent in the story. Certainly by the end of the game, my version of Geralt had gotten fooled and cheated by many of the other characters, and had become very distrustful of pretty much everyone except for Ciri, the adopted-daughter who's a McGuffin for the main storyline.

The game's cutscenes are incredible. In fact, some of the most beautiful moments in the game occur during the cut scenes, and I loved the scenes between Geralt and Ciri or Geralt and Yennefer. These are as beautifully rendered as any movie. What blew my mind was that I could hear the PS4's fan spin up to speed during those scenes, and then realized that these scenes are rendered in-engine (so that the character's clothing, etc reflected your choices and load-out of the moment), complete with all the foilage, draw-distance, etc. If you're the type to take perverse pleasure in using every iota of CPU/GPU power on your machines, this game will not disappoint.

The game is not without flaws: on the PS4, loading times are long, about 45 seconds if you die, and fast travel costs a similar amount of time. (The game's rock solid though: suspend/resume has saved me a ton of time, and the game crashed only once) The early levels are very challenging, and the potion/bomb crafting system is wonky: I'd frequently find myself with no idea how to find a component needed to craft an item, or find schematics for a high level item that required a lower level item that I didn't have schematics for. The game doesn't do a great job of telling you which quests aren't going to be doable past a certain point, so I'd sometimes choose to proceed along a story only to be immediately notified that "Such a Quest has failed!". Fortunately, the game does a good job of auto-saving, so I'd be able to load up the game and then play that quest before going on with the main story, but if I hadn't been alert enough to see those messages (which appear for only a fraction of a second!), I might have gotten very disappointed at the ending/resolution of those storylines. At least every cut-scene is skippable, so if you never have to sit through long expositions more than once.

All in all, the game is excellent, and deserves its Game of the Year accolades. In fact, having read a few Witcher books, I'd say that the game's much better than its source material (Andrezej Sapkowski's a terrible writer --- he loves run-on sentences and spends a lot of time on minor scenes, while frequently summarizing important scenes when you'd rather have detail).

Sometimes while playing a game on the PS4, I'd think: "Well, this is nice and pretty, but it's not fundamentally any different from what the PS3 could do." I never thought that of The Witcher 3. It makes full use of the power available on modern consoles and PCs, and it delivers a stunning experience. So much so that I'm tempted to pick up the DLC for the game, something I hardly ever consider.

Highly Recommended.

Review: Blood of Elves

Blood of Elves is the third book in the witcher series, but the first novel. The previous 2 books were essentially series of short stories. This novel, however, cannot possibly stand alone, so it looks like the author went from writing short stories to launching an epic fantasy series.

Things to like: the sequence where series learns magic from Yennefer is a delight. Intimate, small scale, yet detailed and evocative. It's quiet, without the silliness often found in Harry Potter or modern notions of schooling and how it should work. The training of Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea is better, but not nearly as intimate.

Things to dislike: the politics feels cut and pasted together, and the world doesn't seem real. (This is in contrast to the computer RPG, which feels much more real than any other virtual world depicted) Geralt doesn't seem to do very much.

I'd pass on this but since it does provide excellent background for the computer RPG, you'll enjoy it if you're enjoying the RPG.

Review: Sword of Destiny

I was playing The Witcher 3 on the PS4, It's an exceedingly good RPG (and I'd actually avoided RPGs in recent years as they tend to be massive time sucks --- a holiday sale caught me and for a change I'm really glad I broke my rule about RPGs!), and has sucked up all the play time on the PS4 as a result. But in one of the side quests, I ran across a seeming anachronism, and found myself wondering if it was there in the source material.

Since the material's drawn from the novels, I went and re-read The Last Wish, and then went on to Sword of Destiny. Sword of Destiny wasn't available in English until recently, as since it was touted as the missing book between The Last Wish and Blood of Elves, I'd elected to stop reading the series as a silent protest to the publisher for doing something stupid. It's a collection of novellas, and does provide background as to many of the characters in the game.

And yes, the book does exhibit some of the anachronisms displayed in the game, so the source material is indeed faithfully reflected in the game. The world depicted in the novels is perhaps similar to the ones depicted in Tolkein, except with a heavy dose of cynicism. That's not a bad thing, as the author (translated from Polish) clearly can't write in the high language of Tolkein, but has a good voice for depicting battles, and has world-weary attitude in his characters that makes a fun contrast.

Is it as good as Tolkein? No. But it does provide a good contrast, and provides a fun read in short spurts. Recommended.

Review: Wormhole

Wormhole is the last book of the Rho Agenda trilogy. Like the Saturday morning cartoons it's modeled after, it's a novel with 3 teen heroes who try to save the world. The storyline's simple and straightforward, but at this point with 2 books worth of escalation, the heroes are practically demi-gods, and unfortunately, this means that there's never any sense of credible threats to what they can do, even after they've been captured. In fact, the novel even goes as far as to acknowledge that in the thoughts of one of the supporting characters.

The ending is predictable, setting up for a sequel series. It does its best to not damage or eliminate any of the threats, and leaves as many doors as possible, despite some of the options available being more intriguing than the route the author took.

Set your expectations accordingly, and you'll enjoy this book as a little romp through Saturday morning fantasy land. Otherwise, I'd give it a pass.

Review: Focus - The Hidden Driver of Excellence

Focus is, ironically enough, a singularly unfocused book. I checked it out of the library because I thought it would cover the mechanical aspects of how focus works on the brain. Instead, it's a rambling treatise covering (via second hand), various topics from concentration to head-start, to systems thinking, leadership, and global climate change.

Goleman cherry picks examples to illustrates his points, ignoring all the nasty little details that pretty much contradicts what he says. This is particularly annoying, especially when he loves to name drop big companies like Apple and Google. He swallows the information he's given from both of those companies with zero skepticism whatsoever, claiming therefore, that Apple invented the GUI. This is English major style journalism at its worst.

Not recommended. I listened to this as an audio book, and kept going in hopes of a pay off eventually, and the only pay off I got was when the book ended and I didn't have to listen to any more of this drivel.

New thoughts on gearing

For years, I resisted switching from 8-speeds to 9-speeds. I wasn't willing to upgrade until 9-speeds had become reliable (early 9-speed chains were nasty: Lisa and I not only broke a chain on a shift, but tore off pieces of the aluminum chain ring as well). With the arrival of the triplet, however, I was forced to switch to 10-speeds. Not that more speeds ever did much for me as a tourist: unlike a racer, I didn't need little jumps between gears, and friction shifting was more than adeqaute for me, even on 9-speed drive-trains.

Having recently gotten back into mountain biking, however, I'm seeing that I should have kept track of drive train evolution in the mountain bike business rather than looking at road offerings. Unlike road bikes (and like tandems and touring cyclists), mountain bikes frequently shift under load, have to put up with dirty conditions, and need strong wheels, so evolution there has direct applicability to those of us who don't race. Even better, mountain bikers regularly climb super steep stuff, and so need very low gears that only tourists tend to use.

The most significant change in the mountain bike drive train has been the introduction of 2x10 or 2x11 gearing. What's happened there is that with the introduction of wide range (11-36 or 10-42) cassettes, mountain bikes no longer need triple chain rings in order to have a good range of gears. Going from a triple to a double is huge! Your front derailleur no longer has to do as much work, you no longer risk chain suck (I've torn off more than one front derailleur due to chain suck).

The typical mountain bike would use a 22x34 or 24x38 front chain ring coupled with a 11-36 rear cassette. (10-42 cassettes exceed $100, and are typically paired with a single 30t chain ring). This grants you a lower gear than the traditional 24x34 touring drive train, while granting a 93 inch high gear, which is more than adequate when touring. Not only does losing the 3rd chain ring reduce shifting headaches, you also lose weight on the bike. You also gain the ability to use double chain ring indexed shifting (via STI, for instance) if you are so inclined. The double chain ring STI setups are much more reliable than the triple setups, and also don't have issues with trimming. The only downside I can think of is durability: smaller chain rings will wear faster. In practice, replacing chain rings every 3 years instead of every 5 is no big deal.

The 1x11 drive train, by contrast only grants a middling lower gear and has only an 81 inch high gear, which isn't adequate for touring. In fact, even for just mountain biking it probably isn't practical either, unless you're very strong or it's combined with a very light bike. I tried it during my Santa Cruz factory demo, and it was barely usable then, but it wouldn't be sufficient for any of the seriously painful climbs that I'd want to ride without making my knees hurt.

In short, if your existing touring bike drive train works, there's no need to switch, but when building a new touring bike or replacing a drive train, the new mountain bike drive trains are a much better fit than the road components traditionally used on touring bikes. As 10-42 cassettes drop in price, the new double chain ring mountain bike setups offer the same wide range gearing as the older triple setups, with lower weight and more reliability. There's no reason to ever consider a triple chain ring setup for road touring again.