Review: Playstation 4 Platinum Wireless Headset

I have a 5.1 surround system attached to the Playstation 4, but sometimes, it's just not practical to use it. When Amazon had a lightning sale on the Platinum Wireless Headset, I decided to give it a whirl.

The idea behind the headset is that a proprietary USB dongle plugs into the PS4, which than mixes the sound in such a way as to grant you virtual 7.1 surround sound using just the two speakers clamped to your ear. It sort of works. There's a toggle that lets you turn this on and off, and whenever I turned it on, the audio sounded just a bit more airy. But I'd be damned if I could pinpoint where the sound was coming from --- the sound stage was tiny.

Surprisingly, the USB dongle works on the PC as well, though only in stereo mode. The same applies to the PS3.

What got me to return the product, however, was that the headset does indeed clamp onto your head. After about half an hour, I wanted to take that off. Ultimately, the improvement in audio quality just didn't make up for the cost and discomfort. I switched back to using the Sennheiser PX100 instead at 1/5th the cost.

Review: Babylon's Ashes

Babylon's Ashes is the 6th "Expanse" novel. The previous novel, Nemesis Games, ended in a bad place, with the plot hanging in the middle of a cliff-hanger. This novel does not suffer from that problem. In fact, what's interesting about the book is that this would be a natural stopping point to stop reading the series.

The threads from all the previous plots are resolved, though not necessarily in a very satisfactory fashion. For instance, the motivation for the Earth attack in the previous book wasn't very sound in the first place, and that the people who would be motivated into supporting such an action would even raise an eyebrows in the relatively milder event of this novel seems unlikely. As such one of the major events in the novel, the betrayal of Marco Inaros' fleet captains, just felt out of character to me and never felt real.

Similarly, the ending of the book, with a pulling out of the hat of an interesting feature of the gate from the Solar system felt very much like a deus ex machina.

From the authors' perspectives, they probably felt like they fulfilled their initial promise to deliver the story of mankind's migration from the solar system. It's just not as convincing as I hoped it would be. I expect not to continue reading any Expanse novels beyond this point.

Review: Now - The Physics of Time

I'd previously audited Mysteries of Modern Physics - Time and found it interesting. Then I watched Arrival and it sparked a discussion about time with my wife. Then I saw Richard Muller's Tachyon Murder quora answer and that got me to check out Now - The Physics of Time.

I sort of expected it to cover the same material as Sean Carroll's lecture series, but this book has several advantages over Sean Carroll's lecture series, not least of which is that it's fairly recent (2015) and has more up to date information. Muller also has a completely different perspective than Carroll, and approaches things very differently from Carroll.

For instance, Carroll's lecture series spends a lot of time covering entropy, and basically comes to the conclusion that the arrow of time occurs because of entropy. Muller disagrees with this theory or approach. His primary objection is that this explanation doesn't provide any falsifiable ways of proving the theory. And of course, local entropy on Earth (powered by the sun as an energy source) doesn't always increase.

Muller makes 2 key points: the first is that the physics approach to describing the universe is necessarily incomplete, not just because we have incomplete knowledge, but also because of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. In a world where we can't even predict when the decay of an atom could occur, determinism seems out of the question and the existence of free will is a strong possibility. The implication is that this means that there's no perspective in which all moments of time are equal: the now is a special time because if you have free will you can then change what will happen in the future.

The second point is that space is constantly being created by the expansion of the universe. His conjecture is that time is also continuously being created by that very expansion. He provides several approaches to falsifying this theory, though sadly he doesn't state whether there are experiments that aim to falsify it in the future.

The book's journey is quite fun, and an interesting read. There are a few places where Muller gets repetitive (especially in the philosophical section where he discusses determinism vs free will), but overall, I particularly enjoyed his descriptions of the experiments that were used to confirm both relativity and quantum mechanics. These are particularly good ways to illustrate how science works and made for great reading.

Recommended.

Review: Medical School for Everyone: Grand Rounds Cases

I really enjoyed all the "Medical School for Everyone" series from the Great Courses, so I was happy to add Grand Rounds Cases to my collection. The same doctor is the primary lecturer for all these audio courses, so there's no concern for the listener that he may be paying for the same material multiple times: as far as I can tell, there is no overlap between all the audio books in the series. Each book/course covers a completely different set of cases.

When I read Algorithms to Live By, one of the interesting stories from the book was how simple mathematical algorithms (no machine learning magic needed!) did a better job of diagnosing patients than even the very experienced doctors who helped to come up with the diagnostic criteria. This set of audio courses is a good antidote to that sort of thinking: in particular, many of the cases covered challenge the doctor not because the diagnosis between differentials (the medical term for diseases/conditions that can match a particular set of symptoms) is difficult or ambiguous, but the extraction of the medical history from the patient required finesse, delicacy, and social skills. For instance, one patient was reluctant to admit to her history with alcohol, misdirecting the medical staff. The need to gain a patient's trust is what convinces me that even if AI was successful in distilling all medical knowledge, to properly substitute for a doctor would require the development of empathy and understanding. That seems to me a much harder job than merely providing an accurate diagnosis when given symptoms.

All of the cases are interesting. Not all of the patients survive, but all are worthy of the half hour or so the lecturer provides. You may or may not want to be a doctor, but by listening to these lectures and the descriptions of the doctor/patient interaction, you'll almost certainly be better equipped to talk to your doctor or be a better advocate for a loved one.

I am reminded of the day when we discussed a possible surgery for my father after he had a fall which turned out to cause bleeding in the brain. The neurosurgeon we discussed the case with looked at the CT scan and told us that the problem could resolve itself, or it could quickly need surgery. We opted to wait but my father deteriorated and we brought him into the hospital via the ED. Afterwards, the neurosurgeon told us he didn't realize that the CT scan was for a recent fall, and that he had given us advice on the basis that this was an old scan! Having listened to this lecture I now know that we should have been on the lookout for this sort of assumptions by a doctor, and summarized the medical history immediately on first contact with the doctor so he wouldn't be prejudiced by his assumptions. In this particular case the situation was rescued only because his primary care doctor looked at him that very afternoon and told us to rush him to the ED right away!

In any case, I think this course/audio book could very well save your life or the life of your loved one. It's well worth your time to listen to it, and if you can, get your spouse/significant other to audit it as well for the day when he/she might have to advocate on your behalf!

Highly recommended.

Review: Hanes Men's Ultimate X-Temp Lightweight Performance Boxer Brief

For the longest time, my go-to brand for travel underwear was Ex-Officio. The fabric is very breathable, dries quickly, and lightweight. You could bring 2 pairs on a bike tour and they would dry quickly enough that you never had any days where you would have to put on wet underwear. They weren't very durable, however: 30 days of wear and the elastic would stop being so tight, and eventually they'd look like they'd been worn by someone with twice my waist! Keep in mind that hand-washing the underwear on bike tours meant that I never put them in the laundry or dried them in a dryer, so I really babied these things!

I found a deal where I could get the Hanes Ultimate X-Temp briefs at a good price. To my surprised, they weighed even less than the Ex-Officio (by 30g each, they were 70g while the Ex-Officios were 100g!). They weren't as breathable as the Ex-Officios, but dried as quickly, and as a benefit, provided good support --- you could ride a bike wearing them and they wouldn't chafe. But the bees knees are that they're much cheaper than the Ex-Officios (1/3rd the price) and more durable! I'd been wearing them on a regular basis and sticking them into the laundry and dryer like any other pair of underwear and despite having put in 2 years into them they still show no signs of wear!

I paid the Hanes the best compliment I can give to any product recently: when my regular Costco-branded cotton underwear started wearing out, I bought new Hanes without waiting for a discount (to be fair, the discounts were rare!). Highly recommended. Don't bother with the Ex-Officios, heck, don't bother with the cheap Costcos either!

You know you're a nerd parent when....

• All the other kids start counting from one, and your kid's counting from zero, because that's how programming languages usually start indexing their arrays from.
• Your son asks mommy, "Mommy, I don't know how to tie knots. You better sign me up for a knot tying class."
• He says, "That kid can only count with his fingers. This other kid can count using his brain."
• He said to me after I demonstrated a piano piece to him: "How come you didn't practice and you can do this piece?"
• One day, he was struggling with Rush Hour. I made him go swimming to take his mind off his frustration. The next day he solved the puzzle. He said, "After swimming, while sleeping, I worked on the problem while dreaming."
• Instead of saying, "I need to memorize the song," your son says, "I need to download it to my brain."

Review: Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality

I enjoyed the previous Great Courses work by Robert Sapolsky that I audited, so I picked up Biology and Human Behavior. I feel like the subject had great promise, but Professor Sapolsky under-delivered.

For instance, early on in the lecture series, Sapolsky stated that the Blue Whale Axon has a neuron that's so long as to be about 30m long! Wow, what a cool fact. To me, that immediately brought out all sorts of questions:

• Why does it have to be a single cell?
• What were the evolutionary pressures that drove this? Does anything ever go wrong? Why isn't this considered "a single point of failure?"

But Sapolsky never brings it up again, and in fact, there's relatively little to indicate that this has any relevance to human behavior.

Another interesting factoid that came up later on: While studying a tribe of baboons in Africa, members of the tribe started raiding the local tourist safari in search of human discarded food. The members that did so were the least socially connected members of the troop and also the most violent. Then those members caught tuberculosis and died, which effectively meant that the rest of the tribe was now composed of much fewer males, all of which were socially well adjusted. The culture of the tribe completely changed, and new male members added to the tribe (this form of tribal member exchange is apparently the norm) would get acculturated to the new culture, which was matriarchal. The mechanism of assimilation wasn't through imitation and teaching, but through the females of the tribe bestowing favors only to well-behaved males. Sapolsky asserts that if a single such generation shift can lead to lasting cultural change, there's no excuse for genetic determinism when it comes to humans. I then waited for a follow-on example of such single-generational cultural change in humans... and it never came!

I feel like the entire course consists of lots of little places like this, with many missed opportunities to pursue interesting venues of thought but very little follow up. The material itself is interesting, but somehow I felt like I'd heard it all before in my various readings over the years. The examination of human behavior was also limited: Sapolsky focused almost entirely on violence. Near the end of the series he claims that this selection was because while most other problematic  behaviors were unmitigated problems (e.g., schizophrenia), violence could have potentially positive impact on genetic survival and reproductive fitness, and so was a fit subject of study. I immediately thought to myself, "So's bipolar disorder, and to me that would be a much more interesting subject of study!"

This is the first Great Courses series that I'm disappointed by. It was still worth a listen, but perhaps some of the other audio books would be more interesting to you.

Review: Lucifer Book 3

Lucifer Book 3 resolves the story of what happened in hell after Lucifer abandoned it. We get a glimpse of hell, as well as Lucifer's plan to survive his duel with the angel. At no point do you ever feel like Lucifer is in any danger. The graphic novel is more about how he's going to get there.

After that, we get a resolution of the story of Elaine Belloc's 'soul and the recovery thereof.

The entire story was pretty lackluster. I stopped reading book 4 and never got around to writing this review until I realized that my library book had come due.

In Memoriam: Sweesam Na 1942-2017

My father was born in Gerisek, Malaysia, a kampong (village). He was in a family of 7, and his own father died while he was very young. Stories from that period was that he was so poor he and his brothers shared a pair of shorts. When the older brother met the younger brother on the way home, he'd take off his shorts and give it to the younger sibling to wear to school.

Moving to Singapore in his 20s, he had 3 sons and went from being a laborer to a driver to running his own business. With that, he supported 3 sons. He didn't enjoy being in the US when we immigrated. But he still moved here after he retired to be with his grandkids.

The last few years have been challenging. He survived 2 strokes (both of which were caused by falls), but despite that learned to Snorkel at age 72, and just a few years ago was still carrying Bowen around in a baby carrier.


When I arrived at the house on Sunday, I heard my cousin's littlest baby crying, and so thought everything was going as usual. Then my mom told me that he's choking. My two cousins held him up while I grabbed his belly and heaved. I did so repeatedly and saw something on the floor but nothing more came out. We called 911, and when they arrived I had to lie down because I was exhausted.

They had to lever out the food and used an AED. By the time he hit the ER there'd been irreparable damage because of a heart attack. The ER doctor told us that our dad was dying, and that if it was his parent he would not go for heroic measures to keep him alive as he would never be able to breathe without a ventilator again.

We took him off the ventilator at noon on February 2/27/2017. He passed away at 4:10pm. He is survived by 1 brother, 2 sisters, his wife, 3 sons, 2 grandsons, and 1 grand daughter.

Review: Nemesis Games

Nemesis Games is the 5th book in the Expanse series. It's the first novel in the series that doesn't standalone. You could presumably read any of the previous novels without any of the preceding ones, but this novel would simply have not much impact (or even make much sense) without the context of the preceding novels. Furthermore, the novel doesn't even resolve the situations it sets up, ending on a cliff-hanger for the next novel!

Having said that, this is the first novel that I feels fulfills the promises the authors (yes, James Corey is a pen-name for two authors) made at the start of the series, which is that the Expanse is ultimately the story of humanity's expansion from the solar system to the rest of the galaxy.

The previous novels set the stage: a star gate has opened up to the rest of the galaxy, and the mad land-rush has begun. The barriers to humanity's expansions have fallen, and the alien menace that wiped out the civilization which created the star gate is nowhere to be seen.

With all that in place, of course, humanity will find a way to screw it up and make a mess of things. The crew of the Rocinante has about 6 months to wait for their ship to be repaired and restored, and so each of them (except Holden) outsource the repair job and head out to reconnect with their respective pasts. This is a welcome break, since we've never actually gotten actual character development with everyone other than Holden in previous novels, and the authors take their time to give us a detailed glimpse.

Of course, when all hell breaks loose the crew comes together, but only just in time to set up for the inevitable 6th book in the series.

As far as novels are concerned, it's the first novel in the series that I would consider recommended. Unfortunately, you pretty much have to read all the previous novels to make sense of it.

Review: Pediatrics Grand Rounds (Medical School for Everyone Series)

Parenting books are mostly extremely badly written. But Dr. Roy Benaroch is a real doctor (a practicing pediatrician) and I enjoyed the Emergency Medicine audio lectures so much that I thought this would be a hoot.

Nearly every lecture in this 24 lecture series made me wish I'd audited this series before I became a parent. It answers so many great questions that I'd had and does so in practical, case-study type format that treats each patient complaint as a mystery, some with serious implications and some without:

• How does sleep training work, and how quickly can you do it? (it's turns out the cry it out methods are faster than the alternatives)
• Why are vaccine schedules set the way they are? (turns out that this is driven by medical studies and periods of vulnerability)
• What serious birth defects do existing prenatal screens detect, and which types slip through? 
• Why is folic acid important?
• What's the best way to discipline your kid? How do you properly do a time-out? (It turns out consistency and immediacy is key --- if you can't impose the punishment immediately, it's better to ignore it than to mention it and not follow through)
• Cancer is the leading cause of deaths among children between 1 and 9, but leukemia is surprisingly treatable (80% survival rate).

One might think that listening to this series would cause you to become paranoid and hypochondriac, but in my case I just felt very grateful that all our visits to the hospitals and clinics have been relatively complication free.

This is not to say all the case studies in the series have happy endings. Some of them don't, and one of the episodes might be very distressing if you're sensitive. Dr. Benaroch is very careful in calling it out in case you want to just skip that episode, so I wouldn't let that deter you from listening to the series.

Unlike Emergency Medicine, I didn't manage to get any of the diagnosis correct on the case studies (except 1), so that meant the series taught me something new in every episode!

Highly recommended. And if you're a new parent, contains valuable information about how to interact with your physician and how to make the best use of your time.

Review: Your Best Brain - The Science of Brain Development

I'm a sucker for anything by John Medina, so when I saw that he actually had a Great Courses program called Your Best Brain, I picked it up hoping that it wouldn't be too much of a repeat from say, Brain Rules for Baby.

It turns out not to overlap with the book very much at all, which is great! The major thesis of the program is that your brain is a physical object, and therefore is subject to all the laws of physics and chemistry, along with the rules set by evolution. The net result is that a lot of the times, Medina explains something through the thought experiment of thinking about what man's ancient ancestors on the plains of the Serengeti had to face, and what problems the brain evolved to solve.

The coverage then starts from Neurons and Dendrites, and then moves on to the major areas of the brain. Each lecture ends with practical tips on how to optimize your brain. Most of them are no brainers, like: "get enough sleep! Just a few hours of sleep debt is enough to make you behave like you're drunk!"

Other interesting tips:

• If you need to learn something for a test, try to do the learning in an environment as similar to test conditions as possible.
• Memories work best via repetition, but not cramming. And all nighters (as you would expect from the above) are a no-no.
• Classic teenage rebellious behavior is a Western phenomenon. In most non-Western cultures, you do not get teenage rebellious behavior unless/until the kids in those cultures have been exposed to western media.
• Elizabeth Kuber-Ross's ideas about the stages of grief ("denial//anger/bargaining/depression/acceptance") is BS. For most humans, the response to grief is resilience.
• Get 150 minutes of aerobic activity a week to optimize brain function. Yes, that means Garmin's Vivoactive HR's "intensity minutes" approach is completely correct.

All in all, the course is great, and I can recommend it. Well worth the time.

Review: Lucifer Book 2

In the previous book, Lucifer managed to create an entire new multi-verse out of the current Cosmos. In Lucifer Book 2, the repercussions of it are brought forward as folks race towards the new multiverse to establish a foothold. In this book, Mike Carey reveals that yes, the DC Cosmology is entirely Judeo-Christian based, with the name of the universe's creator being Yahweh.

And this isn't the God of the New Testament, this is the God of the Old Testament. Jealous, petty, and probably appropriate for the age of Trump as president. Not only does he view Lucifer as the adversary, he views disobedience as reason to punish innocents as well as the guilty. We never do get to see Yahweh's face.

There are a few side stories in the book about the new world Lucifer's created, some of which are actually very well done (involving time differentials between the two cosmologies). Lucifer's still a sympathetic character, but it's also very clear that he's entirely self-centered, willing to sacrifice others to achieve his aims.

Comic books are fast, easy reads. This one was available easily on Hoopla. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered making a trip to the library to pick it up. I'm not in a hurry to keep reading on to the rest of the series, however.

Review: Cibola Burn

Cibola Burn is the 4th Expanse novel. In the third novel, James Holden manages to open up the star gate through which other systems can be accessed, and of course, true to American Frontier form, squatters from the outer asteroids immediately zoom through the gate in order to claim land and territory. An official UN science expedition arrives months later, and the squatters resent the presence of official authority enough to start a pre-emptive attack.

Of course, any human venture into a new frontier would result in massive chaos, huge amounts of selfishness, and eventually our protagonist Jim Holden is asked to show up and mediate between the two sides. Events escalate from there and he and his crew have to deal with the planet trying to kill them, the two sides trying to kill each other, and the mystery that's in Holden's head trying to get him to do what it wants him to do.

From the overall arc of the novel series perspective, the meta-plot and story is advancing at a glacier pace. The novel itself sets up tense situations, but shies away from actually resolving them in a realistic fashion --- the authors treat each scene like a cliff-hanger in which the crew of the Rocinante is expected to survive, thereby draining tension from the novel. There's relatively little character development, and the main villain is horribly unrealistic.

Not recommended.

Review: How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition

How to Listen to and Understand Great Music is misnamed. It really should be labeled: The structure and form of Western Music. I don't really fault Professor Greenberg for this: it's quite clear to him that "Great Music" is restricted to those composed by Dead White People. I'll admit to mostly being a music philistine: I hated my piano lessons as a kid, and rarely understood the point of Mozart. I labelled all instrumental-only music as "classical".

Well, Professor Greenberg taught me a lot:

• "Classical" music is actually a misnomer. There's "Baroque", "Classical", "Romanticism", and "Modernism." These labels apply to various epochs roughly corresponding to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Debussy. Each of these epochs had unique characteristics that were reflected in the music. I was actually surprised that I could learn this because at one point during the program Greenberg played a piece of music and asked the listener to guess what epoch it came from and I actually got it right.
• Beethoven really does sound different from any composers before him. His music, unlike that which came before, actually does represent extra-musical content. I tested this by playing a Beethoven symphony to Bowen, who did promptly ask: "What does this music mean?" Which is not a question that usually comes up with other instrumental music.
• Professor Greenberg is a fan of Opera. Despite his immense enthusiasm, I still can't stand it. Despite his picking what he thinks are great musical pieces to listen to, I'm afraid I agree with one of the characters in John Steakley's fabulous novel: "Opera is for vampires. The living prefer rock and roll."
• Life during the middle ages was tough. One of the composers had 20 children, out of which only 2 survived to adult hood. Many of them died young (Mozart at 35), and even when they were alive had poor health and frequently the medical care hurt them. Greenberg did not shy from providing excellent coverage of the composers' lives, which made them far more interesting as people than I would have thought.
• The piano technology got hugely better from the 1600s to the 1800s. That's why in Mozart's symphonies, whenever the piano played the rest of the orchestra had to pipe down: the piano simply wasn't loud enough to compete with the other instruments in the orchestra. By the time you got to the 1800s the concert grand could hold its own against the orchestra and the symphonies written then didn't have to pipe down the rest of the orchestra as much. I wished Greenberg covered more of this since it would have been interesting to see what other technological changes in instruments affected composition.
• Dance music (waltzes, etc) is not considered "Great Music", so I don't ever have to listen to them even if I was a music snob.

Conclusions that Greenberg didn't mention but that I drew for myself:

• The various forms of music (e.g., Sonata Form) were really designed for music that was written in a pre-recorded era. That's why, for instance, Sonata Expositions frequently feature repeats of the themes. In a pre-recording era, you weren't going to listen to a piece of music repeatedly on demand, so each musical piece would have to repeat its themes during the exposition so the audience could hold it in their heads. This practice doesn't stand up in recorded music, since if you were to listen to the pieces repeatedly (e.g., if you listened to any of the numbered symphonies more than once a week), the expositions quickly become boring and feels like the composer's condescending to your intelligence. Greenberg vehemently demands that repeats be played exactly as written (and there's definitely a purist approach where that's correct), but I can definitely see why these already long pieces can't compete with shorter musical forms (e.g., Rock & Roll), which evolved in an era where recorded music that can be (re)played on-demand is the norm.
• Classical music was used as the catch-all for Western instrumental music forms because it was the pop music of the day. The middle class was starting to happen, which meant that regular people could become amateur musicians and learn to play well enough to demand easy-listening pieces.
• The need to express individuality and originality drove composers from Beethoven onwards to slowly abandon the traditional forms of instrumental music. What makes most modern instrumental composers unbearable to most people (e.g., Schoenberg) was when composers completely abandoned tonality.

I learned a surprising amount over the 42-lecture listen. The biographies of Beethoven, Listz, Tchaikovsky, and other composers were fun and added a lot of life to people behind the music. There were several pieces that I'd never heard before that I made notes to hunt down to listen to, and of course, I discovered that I'm a Beethoven fan and not a Mozart fan.

Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that Great Music should be restricted to those instrumental pieces constructed in the past. Certainly for today's "repeated listening" environments, I think many popular music genres out-compete the so-called classics for good reason. Nevertheless, if you have the time, I'd definitely consider Professor Greenberg's lecture series well worth a listen.

Review: Lucifer Book 1

Lucifer is a spin-off off of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. In that book, Lucifer gives up his reign in hell and decides to retire to Earth to enjoy his days. Of course, life is never that simple, and in this volume 1 we get to see what happens when heaven comes calling and asks him to do something in exchange for a passage.

Writing Lucifer couldn't have been easy: in this incarnation he's not really evil, but he effectively has to have unlimited power in this book. As a result, author Mike Carey contrives repeatedly to put him into situations where he's not the most powerful being alive, but has to trick his way into winning (which again, is not a problem for the former Archangel).

DC Universe's cosmology is a mish-mash of everything at best, and incoherent at worse. This allows Carey to get away with all sorts of situations where he essentially gets to make up the rules as he goes along, playing with your sympathies for the devil, so to speak. You also do get to feel sympathy for his subjects and the secondary characters in the book, since the blow-back from the main plot really affects them the most.

All in all, it's entertaining enough. It doesn't quite rise to the level of the Sandman, but I'm guessing if that's your standard you should read Fables and then stop.

Review: The Undoing Project

The Undoing Project is a biography of the relationship between Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky,  Kahneman, of course, was the Nobel Prize winner (and author of Thinking Fast and Slow), who together with Amos Tversky, pioneered prospect theory and many other pieces of behavioral economics. Their collaboration created a revolution in the future, and they were rightly feted with all sorts of prizes.

What's interesting about this book is that it doesn't just cover their theory, which you can do better by reading Kahneman's book. It mostly covers their relationship, the context their friendship started and was sustained by, and the eventual falling apart of their friendship, which was described by their spouses as being much worse than a divorce. The context of their lives turned out to be extremely important to their theories and the eventual persons they would become, and a shift in environment later led to their falling apart.

Academia (like any other organization, including large corporations) have a hard time with true partnership and collaboration. As a result there was a tendency in academia to favor Tversky (the more extroverted of the two) over Kahneman. A natural assumption would be that envy was what destroyed the men's partnership, the book makes a convincing case against such a simplistic view.

The subjects of the book are treated with respect, and I'm very impressed that Michael Lewis didn't try to draw any generalization from their unusually intimate collaboration. I came away from the book with much better insight into what drove them. As a bonus, the book also features Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, so you get to see what the legacy of Tversky and Kahneman are in today's world.

All in all, the book was captivating and insightful. It's the best book I've read so far this year and I highly recommend it.

Review: Abaddon's Gate

I think I've figured out how to read The Expanse series of novels, of which Abaddon's Gate is the third novel. It is also clearly an original intended "end" of the trilogy, though like any modern author, when you get success in a series, you'll just churn out as many follow up novels as your readers can stand. The series works if you stop pretending that it's science fiction, but instead consider it to be space fantasy. Most of the mysteries and items of interest bend or break the laws of physics, and probably will never be explained to the satisfaction of an Alastair Reynolds or Stephen Baxter novel.

Taken from that perspective, the first two Expanse novels were readable, but not great, since their characters weren't developed well enough, but the "space opera" aspects were sufficiently well done that the ending of the second novel compelled me to put a hold on the third novel. In this novel, the mystery is that of the direct consequences of the first novel have taken fruition and now takes the form of a space station known as "The Ring."

Consequences of the events of the first novel also put Jim Holden's ship in jeopardy, and we get a situation in which Jim, haunted by the ghost of the other protagonist in that novel, on a collision course with The Ring. The characters by this time are well established, and no longer the caricature that they mostly were in the first two novels. Holden no longer comes across as a pure ideologue through the plot device by which his natural tendencies are favored instead of being idiotic.

As an action/adventure/suspense novel the story works well enough that I found myself enjoying the novel. The plot is unfortunately still predictable, but would make for good TV.

Recommended as an airplane novel.

Video Game Reviews

• Gears of War 4 (PC)
• Enemy Unknown Plus (PS Vita)
• Tearaway Unfolded (PS4)
• Skyforce Anniversary (PS4, PS3, PS Vita)
• Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (PS4)
• Batman: The Telltale Series (PS4)
• Nex Machina (PS4)
• XCOM 2 (PS4)
• Life is Strange (PS4)
• Batman Arkham VR (PSVR)
• Spider-man (PS4 Pro)
• The City That Never Sleeps (PS4 Pro)
• Monsters 2 (PS4)

Review: Seveneves

Seveneves is Neal Stephenson's book about planetary disaster. The premise behind the book is that an unknown agent bursts the moon into the 8 fragments, and the resultant collisions between the fragments eventually comes down on earth as "hard rain," resulting in ecosystem wide destruction and loss of atmosphere and water.

The first part of the book feels a lot like traditional, Heinlein like science fiction, tales of technological feats, derring do. Elon Musk even makes an appearance in the form of an analog. Of course, the events of the past year have probably convinced you that even in the face of impending total disaster and destruction, humans would never behave as nicely as those in a Heinlein novel, and to Stephenson's credit, they don't. Politics abound, intermixed with technical heroics, and humanity is reduced in size as a result of self-serving actions until its not clear that there's going to be humanity left by the end of the book.

This is a typical Neal Stephenson novel: you're going to get massive multi-page info dumps in the middle of a story to explain the technical details behind the technology, which may or may not be interesting to you. If you don't like Stephenson, this novel is not going to change your mind, and in many ways, it's nowhere as interesting as Snow Crash. Characters are caricatures, and the last third of the book is incredibly unbelievable, as we're asked to believe that the remnants of the first part of the book are capable of rebuilding civilization without being at each others' throats over past behaviors.

So: bad science (at least, if the moon were to blow up in such as a way as to kill the Earth, it's unlikely we'd have time to launch any sort of crash survival program!), unbelievable plots, and pretty stereotyped characters. But it's still the most readable Stephenon since Cryptonomicon. Mildly recommended.