Review: 5 Centimeters Per Second

After the previous bout of extremely heavy going books, I needed a break. Amazon was selling 5 centimeters per second for $1, so I picked it up, not knowing that it was a Makoto Shinkai movie that was then adapted back into a graphic novel.

After the previous books I'd read, this felt like a whole novel about first world problems. The plot is that Takaki Tohno makes friend with a girl in elementary school. Their relationship develop, but one of them moves away. In a highly romantic scene, Tohno takes a series of long distance train to visit her before his family moves to a remote island in Japan accessible only by plane. That journey cements their relationship in his mind, and colors all his future relationships with women.

The novel comes with no deep insights, no quotable scenes, and way too many cliches about relationships. Maybe if you're a teenager living in a first world country the novel would be a reminder that you're not the only one out there who understands that pining away for a lost love is painful. (Not that there aren't enough pop songs covering that topic) I guess the moral of the story is that it's silly to do that. The novel does work better in a context of Asian culture, where much is made of that silent longing, and an antidote to that is needed.

The best thing about the novel is that it doesn't have a made-for-hollywood happy ending. If you read that as damning with faint praise, that just about sums it up for the comic.

Review: Educated - A Memoir

I read Educated - A Memoir with the way I rubber-necked a major car accident: with bated breath, a desire to look away, but never able to tear myself away from the page. The author, Tara Westover, grew up in a suboptimal environment. Her parents were Mormons, but of the paranoid, insane type, rather than the Stephen Covey type. Growing up, they were not allowed to go to school: her father considered all things government to be the manifestation of Satan, and their home schooling was limited to reading the bible.

Westover was taught to despise womanhood, and the word "whore" was bandied about for any woman who dressed even a little bit more provocatively than say, a member of the Taliban. She was continually abused by her father and one of her brothers, both violently and psychologically. She was never even taught to wash her hands or pay attention to personal hygiene, or go to the doctor, with herbal remedies being the method of choice.

Two days later a package arrived, express from Idaho. Inside were six bottles of tincture, two vials of essential oil, and a bag of white clay. I recognized the formulas—the oils and tinctures were to fortify the liver and kidneys, and the clay was a foot soak to draw toxins. There was a note from Mother: These herbs will flush the antibiotics from your system. Please use them for as long as you insist on taking the drugs. Love you. I leaned back into my pillow and fell asleep almost instantly, but before I did I laughed out loud. She hadn’t sent any remedies for the strep or the mono. Only for the penicillin. (Kindle Loc 3473)

The book does offer a glimpse of how resilient human beings can be. Despite this upbringing, all the kids survived, even the one who had multiple head injuries, few of which were seen in the hospital. Even more amazing, 2 of them schooled themselves enough to get ACT scores high enough for admissions to BYU, and Tara herself not only survived the environment, but thrived enough to go to Cambridge on a Gates Fellowship and was accepted into the PhD program.which included a visiting fellowship at Harvard.

Even after these achievements and convincing herself that she had self-worth outside of the crazy family she was born in, she had a tough time escaping that legacy: her family gas-lighted her enough to convince that she was crazy, and that all the childhood abuses she'd suffered were imagined.

Together with Hillbilly Elegy, these books have convinced me that there's no redeeming value in the racist, sexist ideology that so dominates the conservative republican party today.

I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward. (Kindle Loc. 2954)

This book comes recommended, but be warned that you'll need a strong stomach to finish it.

Review: Spring Chicken

Spring Chicken is Bill Gifford's book about life extension. Karl Pfleger recommended it on the ex-Googler's mailing list, and since it was easily available at the library via Kindle checkout, I gave it a try. It's a reasonably good book. Let me see if I can summarize what I learned in the book:

• Many of the popular life-extension schticks are basically big business scams. They try to push expensive therapies like Human Growth Hormone, which is suspect and may lead to increased probability of cancer.
• Aging is to some extent a cellular event. That means many things that you think might be good for you might not be. For instance, anti-oxidants might actually undo the effects of exercise, so over-supplementing on vitamins might be bad for you.
• Reservatrol got a lot of press but apparently its effects were mostly only seen in mice which were engineered for susceptibility to diabetes and obesity. Those results do not generalize to humans.
• Diet: you know this stuff: more fruits and vegetables, less meat, and less carbohydrates. The jury is still out on calorie restriction, though some results indicate that intermittent fasting is easier to stick to, which makes it much more likely to be usable.
• Exercise is a miracle pill. You probably already know this. It is the one guaranteed way to improve mental capacity and reduce or even reverse aging at the cellular level. :

One well-done study found that merely walking twenty minutes a day was enough to slow or reverse the decline in cognition of patients who had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s—something few drugs have been able to achieve. (Kindle Loc 3531)

• Telomeres supposedly indicate longevity, but a large study of more than 4,500 people found that, if you control for unhealthy behaviors like smoking and alcohol abuse, there is no link between shorter telomeres and mortality. (Kind Loc 1866)

All in all, a bunch of surprising results, and totally worth my time to read the relatively short book. We still haven't found any radical life extension technology yet, and it's not for the lack of trying. But we do know how to make the life that you do have more healthy and enjoyable, and that's a good thing! Recommended.

Review: Barking up the Wrong Tree

Barking Up The Wrong Tree has great marketing copy. The back of the cover and the book's description on Amazon talks about how all the usual advise you have about working hard and getting good greats and being nice is wrong, and how this book will have all the secrets that you need to become truly successful.

It doesn't take much statistics to peruse the book and realize that the author plays frequently upon the difference between what most people view as "success" and what he extremely outliers in success is. Basically, you or I might think that being a doctor, a pharmacist, or a top ten percentile software engineer's pretty good. Eric Barker instead tries to convince you that you should only settle for being right at the top, along with all the extreme situations that puts you into.

For instance, he uses Ted Williams as an example, noting that he was successful in many aspects of his life, not only having been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Fishing Hall of Fame. But then he reveals that his personal life was not quite so great, having had 3 divorces in addition to many acrimonious relationships with the team he managed.

Again, the study of extremely successful people is fraught with danger. In particular, there's surivorship bias, which the author does not discuss: many people might have tried the same approach and failed miserably, but the one guy who gains success through unusual luck or circumstance would get undue press. That doesn't mean people who try the same strategy in the future will have a similar degree of success.

The one piece of good advice I found in the book is the same advice you would have gotten from John T Reed's Succeeding, which is that it's a heck of a lot easier to change your environment than it is to change your personality, so you should find environments that play to your strengths rather than trying to change who you are.

All in all, a book that goes for the shallow approach to success. I recommend reading John T Reed's Succeeding instead.

First Impressions: Garmin Edge 25

My brother's wife Kim gave Bowen her 3 year old Vivoactive. It was in amazing condition. with almost perfect battery life, but it took all of 3 months for Bowen to destroy it. When asked, he didn't even know how he'd managed to crack the screen so hard that the waterproofing failed. I sadly came to the conclusion that if Bowen were to have a bike computer, it should have been one that stayed on his bike, and not on his wrist.

The Edge 25 on an eBay sale came down to $95. At that price, it would have been cheaper to have bought one and moved it from bike to bike rather than the old-style wired bike computers that I'd been buying and installing, and it would have been less hassle too.

The unit is very very cute, and simple to run. Unfortunately, it comes with a charging cradle instead of a micro-USB or mini-USB charging cable, meaning one more thing to carry (and lose) while touring. One feature that it had that I didn't expect was that it actually allows you to download routes to it for club rides! The usual instructions didn't work, but someone had figured out that if you converted a GPX/TCX file to a FIT file it would work. The UI is confusing, though, since you can start a course, but the unit wouldn't record a GPS track unless you also started the GPS recording manually. Of course, it wouldn't reroute if you got off-course, nor is it actually useful for touring.

The battery life is a claimed 8 hours, and we did a 7 hour ride on Saturday with no problems. The big difference between the Edge 25 and the cheaper Edge 20 is that the Edge 25 will pair with the Garmin speed and cadence sensors, which I have a nice collection of but unless you already own those you should probably go for the cheaper unit, since neither has a barometric altimeter, resulting in Bowen recording significantly more climbing than I did, despite the two of us being on the same bike. Though again, for a little kid, the cadence sensor might actually be useful in telling him when to shift.

Unlike the higher end units, the Edge 25 will not automatically resume a ride if you turn the unit off without saving. It will boot with no memory of previous rides and might even lose rides if you just turn the unit off without saving the ride.

The charging interface is strange, since if I plugged the device into a wall charger, it would power the device on (useful for pairing with a tablet and uploading tracks), but then there's no way to view the device's charge status to see if it's finished charging.

I'm of 2 minds about the unit. First of all, I'm well bought into the Garmin ecosystem, so it was unthinkable to even switch brands for my son's GPS. And this is the cheapest Garmin unit you can find, short of a used/refurbished Vivoactive, which would have the problem of being wrist mounted and getting killed by Bowen. On the other hand, it's a very limited device. On the other hand, by the time the battery dies, Bowen would probably have moved on, and an 8 hour ride is probably as much as you can expect a kid to ever do. But if you weren't already bought into the Garmin ecosystem I suspect that there are cheaper devices (though probably not nearly as polished) for your kid to play with. Now you might be tempted to buy a more expensive unit, such as the Wahoo or the Edge 520 Mapping Plus, but those come with their own problems, and batteries in these units should be treated as consumables, so there's probably no longevity when it comes to getting something that your kid will grow into anyway.

Ultimately, the unit is a good compromise, and I should probably have gotten one years ago when I first started installing computers on Bowen's bikes instead of buying a wired computer for every one of those things.

Review: Atomic City Girls

I read Atomic City Girls because of Amazon's recommendation algorithm, probably because I'd also read Hidden Figures. To my surprise, unlike the other book, it's a novel, not a non-fiction account. The story takes place in Oak Ridge, which unlike Los Alamos, hasn't really been documented as far as I can tell: other than a couple of stories in Richard Feynman's memoir, I don't remember much discussion about it.

The story revolves around June Walker, her roommate Cici, and a few other characters who arrive just as Oak Ridge is ramping up. Each chapter is headed by actual photos of Oak Ridge and the various posters reminding everyone to keep their lips sealed about what they were doing, even though in practice, most of the employees were apparently kept in the dark about the bomb they were building.

As novels go, the characters seem kinda wooden, more as vehicles to tell the story of Oak Ridge rather than people with their own volition. The romance between June Walker and her lover (a former assistant professor from Berkeley) seems awfully contrived, though the rampant nepotism of that era rings through. There's a side plot involving the civil rights movement, but not really enough is told of that facet to make it a major part of the story.

I kept reading hoping to suddenly find some non-fiction account that would reward my perseverance, but alas, none was found.

Review: The Nature Fix

I really wanted to like The Nature Fix. The entire book is about how getting out in nature cures all sorts of ills that are endemic in city dwellers, ranging from depression, ADHD, happiness, or even (in one chapter PTSD). Unfortunately, the book ends up reading a lot like a massive commercial for outfits like Outward Bound, which have always felt just as artificial as any of the corporate "team-building program" outfits I'd ever seen.

Most of the problem is that the author, Florence Williams isn't a scientist herself, but a journalist. That means her interviews of scientists in the book are shallow. There's barely any consideration about the size of the studies being done (most of the studies seem too small to draw any conclusion from, and the larger ones seem to be based around self-reporting!), or how to control for a Placebo effect.

This sort of thing hits the zenith when she visits Singapore, where the city state has recently built artificial trees. Yet she herself pointed out in earlier chapters that Singapore is one of the countries in the world that have massive rates of myopia, all traced to kids spending less time outside than in other countries in the world. This sort of easy gullibility permeates the entire book and undermines her thesis.

Perhaps the strongest part of the book is the section on ADHD:

“ADHD got its start 150 years ago when compulsory education got started,” said Stephen Hinshaw, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “In that sense, you could say it’s a social construct.” Not only will exploratory kids feel bored and inadequate in conventional schools, he said, the constrained setting actually makes their symptoms worse. (Kindle Loc 2999)

 If, as the research suggests, outdoor free play is so important to kids’ physical and mental health, you might expect to see evidence of illness during this seismic generational shift indoors. And in fact, that’s exactly what you see, although it’s impossible to draw a direct line to a particular cause. The stats are alarming: Preschoolers are the fastest-growing market for antidepressants in the United States. More than 10,000 American preschoolers are being medicated for ADHD. Teenagers today have five to eight times more clinically significant scores for anxiety and depression compared to young people born in the 1950s. Since 1999, the U.S. suicide rate has increased for nearly all groups, with the steepest rise—200 percent—among girls ten to fourteen years old. (Kindle Loc 3100)

But again, we don't see any evidence that increased outdoor time would reduce diagnosis or suicide rates. There's a lot of pontificating, so to speak, but precious little science, and next to no evidence.

I'm the last person in the world to advocate against spending time outside: if you ask me, I think  most Bay Area parents under-emphasize time spent outside and over-emphasize academics. But if you're going to approach the thesis English-major style, you're not going to do the outside movement any favors.

Review: The Modern Scholar: Tolkein and the West

I was climbing Kings Ridge Road with the Western Wheelers on the tandem the other day. Right at the top, the pastoral scenery was glorious, my son was singing and telling everyone how much fun this was. Racers on some sort of timed event were passing us, but every one of them gave us a thumbs up. I found myself saying, "This is why people have kids, because if you're lucky, you get one like this one."

Indeed, Bowen's letting me recapture a bit of my childhood. From listening to the Hobbit with him to now listening/watching pieces of The Lord of the Rings and playing D&D, I'm reliving the part of the past when I first discovered the fantasy world that Tolkein created. But it also comes filtered with an adult perspective: that these books are deeply and fundamentally conservative and nostalgic in a way that I don't always agree with.

When I saw The Modern Scholar: Tolkein and the West go on sale on Audible, I picked it up for its excellent reviews, since it might make a good companion for the novel. (And there's that bit of me that says that I should also teach my son to read more deeply than the surface plot and characters in the novel, and for that to happen I myself have to understand the book at a deeper level)

Professor Michael Drout comes across as extremely earnest and of course, a Tolkein enthusiast. He points out several things that immediately hit me:

• Tolkein is probably the most widely read poet in the past half century, since a lot of the book is in verse, and most books of poetry can't even come close to selling as well as his book.
• Tolkein comes from academia, and the techniques of academic textual analysis and philology are deep in the book, in ways that I never realized. The parts where the characters go into full on verse? The part where Sam Gamgee speaks poetry that he couldn't have known? That's in the grand tradition of the study of Western Literature, where scholar after scholar might have come across the text and modified it, or written in the margins, and inserted stuff that might be out of place just because he/she knew something and thought it appropriate. That's why the language in the book is the way it is, and the pieces of the text disjointedly so.
• There are repeated poems in the book, some of which show up in different versions, and it takes careful reading to discover why. The reader isn't meant to realize this, but this is used to evoke a sense in the reader of the change that has happened between the start and the finish. Prof. Drout mentions "The Road Goes Ever On and On" as being one that shows up 4 times, and the last 2 times is different from the first 2.
• The sense of loss in the novel, The Lord of the Rings isn't solely about nostalgia. It's also a reflection of Tolkein's work as a philologist. Apparently, Western Literature has lost many stories and tales which are only known about because of references to them from works that survived. That sense of loss that Tolkein felt professionally also led to the themes of loss and corruption in the novel.
• The last third of the Hobbit is a huge confusing mess, unlike the children's book it's intended to be. It's complicated enough that the multiple betrayals, negotiations and ultimate reconciliation can be viewed as the taking over of modern values over the ancient, honor-bound cultures that existed in Western Civilization before then.

There's much much more in the lecture series. Books covered individually are: The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, the Two Towers, the Return of the King, the Silmarillon, and Unfinished Tales. The lectures were so compelling that I found myself listening to the series from beginning to end, almost in a binge in just a week. It was entertaining, fun in a way I didn't expect to be, and now I feel better equipped to answer more questions from Bowen. In fact, I wonder if he'll find the analysis of The Hobbit interesting.

Highly recommended.

Review: Homo Deus - A Brief History of Tomorrow

Sequels are rarely as good as their example, but I've had good luck with non-fiction, as long as the author picked a completely different topic instead of rehashing the same-old same-old. Unfortunately, the title, Homo Deus should have given me a clue.

Sapiens was a great book, covering Humanity's past and the rise of civilization. Homo Deus is Harari's attempt to predict the future. Let me try to summarize his argument in this book:

• The rise of civilization was a result of human organization: human beings learned to believe the big myths (such as the existence of money, god, or the social order) in order to organize to create big projects (like irrigation, the pyramids, or expensive exploration).
• The rise of science and technology created conflicts between the scientific enterprise and religion ("everything we know is already in the holy book"), and demanded a new "religion" that reflected the new reality: humanism.
• Humanism values the preciousness and uniqueness of human experience. Hence, one man one vote, equality under the law, democracy, and the emphasis on freedom.
• The further development of science and psychology means that the human experience is no longer unique: how can you say that you have a unique self if a drug or electrodes placed in your brain can modify your experience so distinctly that you're no longer the same person?
• The new religion that reflects this reality is "dataism". Collect and use data to choose which unique self you want to be, and share that data with the internet so everyone can learn from and use that data.
• Alternatively, our AI overlords and algorithms might make that selection for us.

I won't claim that the above 6 bullet points summarizes the whole book, but safe to say that the above is enough for you to decide whether it's worth your time. If someone else had summarized the book like this before I read it, I don't think I would have needed to read it.

Review: Law School for Everyone

Nearly every lecture in Law School for Everyone is great and worth listening to. The first section of the lecture series (there are 3 different lecturers) is one Criminal Law, and the cases used to illustrate how criminal law works are current and relevant, ranging from the shooting of Trayvon Martin to the OJ Simpson case.

The second section is about civil procedure, which sounded like a boring subject until the lecturer produces an example that might be relevant to you: a drunken house guest slips and falls on your doorsteps, and then returns home to sue you from another state. What do you do? From there, we get a good idea of how the federal courts work vs the state courts, and how jurisdiction works.

The final third of the series is about torts, which again is interesting, using studies ranging from the famous McDonald's Coffee lawsuit to Merck's famous Vioxx pharmaceutical mess. The lecturer does not just stop at discussing what is law and what isn't, but also includes detailed references to public policy, including why the law is the way it is: for instance punitive damages are meant to account not just the incidence where the bad guy was caught, but all the other incidences that they were not, or where the potential plaintiffs didn't bother pressing a suit. That's why they're typically so high.

I learned a lot listening to this lecture series (for instance, most criminal cases are a matter for the state, not the federal government, and how plea-bargaining became the most common tool in the AG's arsenal). It's very much worth your time. It's rare that something is so entertaining and useful at the same time.

Amazon's customer focus blows my mind

Amazon's customer focus blows my mind, especially as someone who knows how the sausage gets made at big companies. One day, I was watching an Amazon rental movie at home. Bowen would come and interrupt me, I'd pause the video, play with  him or answer his question, and then unpause. This happened so frequently that day that I eventually gave up on the movie.

The next day, I got an e-mail to the effect of: "We noticed you had poor quality video last night. We're giving you your money back."

This blew my mind. Somewhere at Amazon, there was a project to detect poor quality streaming and refund customers. The ROI on that project was negative: if the project succeeded, Amazon would lose money. Google for sure doesn't do this. Neither does Apple, as far as I know. It just boggles my mind that anyone would greenlight a project whose entire purpose was to return money to its customers.

My guess is that ultimately, the ROI must be positive, because even cheapskates like me notice excellent service and will buy more from Amazon as a result. But good luck getting big data to pick up on stuff like that and justify a costly software engineering project. I am in awe.

Running a 1 on 1 campaign for your kid

It's no exaggeration that Bowen likes D&D. He's mapped himself into D&D stats. He's turned Defense Grid into a D&D game. He'll play it at home with dice, and he'll play it on the back of the tandem using me as a randomizer.

After his first session with a now semi-regular D&D group, he wanted to roll up a fighter, and asked when he could play it. It turns out that back in 1992, TSR published a bunch of second edition modules in the HHQ series. These were designed for one on one play and came in the 4 major classes: Fighters, Wizards, Thiefs, and Clerics. One of the nice things about the 5th edition of D&D is that conversion is fairly straightforward, and the monster manual does most of the work, including even "leader" type characters that can be used straight out of the book.

It's fairly straightforward to download the PDFs from the internet, and given that these adventures are long out of print, you don't even have to feel guilty about downloading and using them.

Well, it took him 2 sessions, but he managed to get his 2nd level fighter to 3rd level and then TPK'd his party by walking into a bandit lair (after taking care of the sentry) and attempting to talk to the leader and losing surprise. I'm was very surprised that Bowen took it very well: no moaning or whining as you would expect from a 6 year old.

Here, however, are a few tips for parents running this for their little ones:

• Start them off high. If the module says, "for 1 character of level 2-4", just start the kid off at 4th level. I started him off at second because I thought it'd be a good idea for him to get used to his character's powers one level at a time. But even at 3rd level, one mistake in the game could kill you. (I roll dice in the open, so there's no fudging --- that's the way I've always played, and I wouldn't play any other way) A high level character would at least let the child make one or two mistakes without being penalized.
• It's great to have NPCs help, but don't let the NPCs lead the PC by the nose. All decisions should be the players'. This seems really hard, since the child will always ask, "What do I do next?" The correct answer is: "This is D&D, not some computer game. YOU decide what you want to do next."
• Always ask the kid: "Is this what a Neutral Good character will do?" if his character is about to step out of alignment. The D&D alignment rules are there to help guide character behavior, so make use of them.
• It's ok to deceive the kid. Some of the characters he or she meets are going to lie to him and manipulate him for their own ends. RPGs are great venues for exposing your child to that type of behavior (and teaching him to spot those issues) in a safe, controlled environment that's relatively low stakes. Far better for him or her to learn these things in a D&D game than in real life.

D&D is a lot of fun, and I hope to see Bowen solve problems in more interesting ways in the future. He seems equally inspired by the NPCs he meets as by the characters he read about in books. I'm having fun with Bowen, and these 1:1 adventures written back in 1992 are surprisingly good.

Review: OfficePro Electric Pencil Sharpener

If you have kids in the house, you're going to have a ton of pencils, and usually the regular kind: mechanical pencils aren't nearly as good for kids (the sharp points break off too easily, and kids press too hard and cause paper to tear when using them), and cost a lot more when the pencil inevitably breaks. With the regular wooden pencils, you have to sharpen them.

Over the years, we've tried a bunch of different pencil sharpeners: the hand-held kind (breaks easily after abuse), the rotary kind (too finicky to mount and not portable), and everything in between. None of them have given satisfactory results. The OfficePro Electric beats them all, and by a significant margin.

The sharpener is powered by 4 AA batteries, which would be a pain to replace if they wore out rapidly, but it turns out that they don't. The sharpener demands that you put pressure and hold it still while the rotary blades inside work. That's great. If the kid lets go, the entire pencil rotates and the pencil doesn't get sharpened, no harm done. When the sharpening is done it stops automatically but unfortunately, Bowen pushed so hard that he broke the thing.

I guess you can't make anything so robust that a 6-year old can't break it. I'd still recommend getting one, but you do need to supervise your kid while he's using it.

Review: Neurotribes

Neurotribes is a book about the history of autism. The author points out that autism has been around probably for as long as humanity has been, and the autistic portion of humanity has probably made outsized contributions to technology and human progress.

The book starts off ominously, following a couple who had an austistic child and then tries to do their best to "cure" him. They visit doctor after doctor, eventually running out of real doctors and then visiting cranks instead, falling into the usual traps of becoming anti-vaccine and it seems like the entire book is going to turn into an anti-science rant, when until finally, one of the "doctors" takes one step too far:

On the Rosas’ next pilgrimage to Los Altos, the doctor inevitably brought up chelation. But this time Craig challenged him. “Wait a second,” he told the doctor. “You’re telling me that the recommended course of action for a low reading of mercury toxicity is chelation?” “Yes,” the doctor replied. “And the recommended course of action for high mercury toxicity is chelation?” The doctor nodded yes again. Finally Craig asked him, “Is there any sort of outcome that would contraindicate chelation?” And the doctor said, “No.” (Kindle Loc 1261)

After this long-winded introduction apropos of nothing, the author finally starts telling us about Henry Cavendish and other famous scientists in history who were probably autistic. The thing is, if you work in technical fields, it's wouldn't be difficult for you to recognize parts of yourself in some of these stories:

His grandfather, William T. Price, made a fortune by shrinking the design of diesel engines so they could fit into trains and trucks. At Cornell, Price was known for giving lectures in short pants and was described by his classmates as a combination of Sherlock Holmes and A. J. Raffles, the gentleman thief created as the anti–Sherlock Holmes by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung. After graduation, he embarked on a bike tour of Europe, returning just a couple of days before his wedding. Price was confused that his fiancée was upset; hadn’t he come back in time as he said he would? (Kindle Loc. 4101)

 From here on we have a history of the discovery and categorization of autism as a disorder, first by Hans Asperger, and later by Leo Kanner, who took pains not to give Asperger any credit. This part of the book is very likely to teach you to have very little faith in the "science" of psychology, as all sorts of theories were promulgated with no scientific testing. Children would be seized from their parents and institutionalized, and all sorts of nasty experiments performed on them. Blanket statements would be made about such afflicted children which would later turn out to be completely unwarranted.

Part of the book explains the rise and increase of autism: the diagnostic criteria was deliberately broad, and later broadened even further (once it was broadened accidentally, when the word "and" was replaced by "or" during the editing process). The motivations of the clinicians and psychologists involved were (somewhat) noble: the idea was that the broadened criteria would make it easier for parents to get state help and assistance for their children. (The author doesn't point out that this also makes more money for the clinicians and psychiatrists involved, who would be the ones collecting state money for administering such therapy) Much of the criteria seems so broad that nearly anybody who has a hobby he likes and is knowledgeable would be considered autistic.

But I did enjoy the section of the book where he reverses the situation, and points out how neurotypicals (NT) would be considered if autism was the societal norms:

By autistic standards, the “normal” brain is easily distractible, is obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail and routine. Thus people on the spectrum experience the neurotypical world as relentlessly unpredictable and chaotic, perpetually turned up too loud, and full of people who have little respect for personal space. (Kindle loc 7657)

In this case, anybody who dislikes loud parties (e.g., the typical Silicon Valley holiday party) would be considered autistic. But I never found any attraction to alcohol, loud music, and spaces where you can't even hear yourself think, but the world must be full of them (or at least, the party organizers who run Silicon Valley parties must be full of those people) or parties would actually be interesting to me.

The book is a long read. I got quite a bit out of it, especially the historical portions, and was never bored. Recommended.

Review: LG E42.5" UHD 4K monitor

I normally like to wait for a bit before reviewing electronics, but there's a limited time deal on the 43UD79-B monitor ($530), so I'll make an exception.

I've used wide-screen monitors like the Dell 3818 before, but I've found them to be impractical if you're a writer or programmer: the extra width might give you multiple side-by-side windows for comparing photos or viewing graphs, but when you are writing, it's the amount of text you can fit in vertically that matters. So when I thought about what was practical, the standard 4:3 ratio is what you really want, along with a big screen.

4K is not useful on TVs because of the viewing distance. But 4K is great for computer monitors. With a big screen like the LG 43" display, you can use the screen without turning on resolution scaling, giving you huge amounts of text for writing. The screen comes with 4HDMI inputs, 2 of which allow for 60fps when driven by say, an Nvidi GTX 1030 (yes, I had to upgrade my wife's Optiplex 790 so it could drive a 4K display) , and a display port input as well as a USB-C alt-mode-capable input. The device won't switch automatically between them, requiring you to push "OK" on the remote (yes, the monitor comes with a remote!) in order to flip between inputs.

I was skeptical of the remote at first, but it's turned out to be much better than the usual buttons at the bottom or sides of Dell's monitors, which respond slowly (if at all) to text input and are frustrating to use. The monitor also comes with speakers, which lets you declutter your desk by eliminating the speakers.

Like all screens, your first impression upon unboxing it is that "it's huge." But by the next day, you're going to think: "all the other screens are so small! How the heck did I get anything done on them?" It is amusing that the various collection of monitors in the house show their age by the kind of connectors available on them: DVI-D inputs are no longer provided on the modern monitors, and one monitor actually has a VGA-input, and composite-video input which are no longer found at all anywhere. All this in the space of 10 years. It looks like mini-display ports are going to go next.

By far the worst feature of a 4K screen is that compression artifacts such as those imposed by Google Photos are readily visible. I used to think that Google Photos did an acceptable job of compressing pictures, but now that I regularly see those same photos on a 4K screen I no longer think so: edges that are even a bit off look blurry, and faces don't have the same clarity that you can clearly see from the original Canon RAW file and/or the Lightroom uncompressed JPG output. I'm glad that I have a decent backup solution for my RAW images, as I'm pretty sure I will have to re-render many of them to not be annoyed by looking at them on the 4K screen. I'm doubly happy that I have high resolution cameras and don't go through life shooting pictures of my kids with crappy cell phone cameras. I'm afraid the price of a monitor this good is that the limitations of your photo gear will become readily apparent, and you'll have to buy better cameras to keep up.

I'm red-green color-blind, so I can't comment on color accuracy. If you care about it, use a color-calibration tool.

It's very rare that the cheaper device (the LG 43" monitor) outperforms and is more practical than the more expensive device (the Dell 3818), but this is clearly the case here, especially if you use your screen for real work (programming, writing, photography). If you fit into one of those categories, take advantage of the current prices and get one (and if you're a manager of a team of programmers/writers, you owe it to your team to buy one for every member of the team --- this is one of the best bang for the buck upgrades you can get for your team, right up there with SSDs back when they were first introduced).  If you don't like buying from Amazon, Costco has it for a bit more ($550). Given Costco's longer warranty coverage that might be worth the extra $30 anyway.

Monitors last forever (though my HP ZR2740W had to be replaced under warranty once), so it's not worth replacing them unless something dramatically better comes along. It looks like the LG 43UD79-B is that something. Recommended.

Review: Ottolock

I'm afraid that I'm the kind of person who doesn't really believe in locks. For instance, even on my expensive bikes, I usually use a cheap Wordlock ($4.25) instead of a fancier lock, reasoning that I'm not parking my bike anywhere where thieves can get at it.

Then I saw the Ottolock ($55), which is about the same weight as the Wordlock, but is essentially a zip-tie that's has the nice property that it can be cinched up pretty tight and be more rigid than the traditional coiled cable lock. When not in use, it can also be used to secure something to your bike like a zip-tie.

My first impression of the lock was less than good: the first version I got from Amazon locked up, prompting a customer support call from me to the manufacturer. Surprisingly enough, someone picked up the phone at 5:30pm on a Friday, and sent out a replacement that very day! She even through in a mount for the lock, which I must confess I've never used. So I can't say enough good things about the customer service.

I think I know why the lock breaks: there's a button on the side of the lock. You need to depress it when zipping the zip-tie part of the bike through. If you don't do so, the lock might assume that you're tampering with it and then it will refuse to open. So you do have to follow the instructions on the lock pretty well.

In terms of security, I'm not sure it's any more secure than the cable lock. I haven't tried attacking it with a pair of bolt cutters, but I'm pretty sure the lock won't withstand one. Having said that, as I've said I'm pretty sure I've seen a ton of bikes stolen with their Kryptonite locks still hanging on to the front wheel, indicating that a lock that you'll carry and use properly is much better than a lock that you won't be able to use correctly.

My biggest issue about the lock is that someone tampering with it and failing to steel the bike could very well lock up the lock to the point where you'll be the one looking to find bolt-cutters to cut your bike loose. Then again, at that point you'll be glad that the lock wasn't too secure anyway!

I'm not sure I can fully recommend the lock. It's pricey (10X the price of a Wordlock) and not super secure. However, as a reusable zip-tie that somewhat doubles as a lock, it's somewhat useful. That might be damning with faint praise, but that's just about what the device deserves.

Review: Turo Car Rental

Unfortunately, our Honda Fit got totaled in a crash earlier this year. (I won't say how, who or why, but nobody got hurt) It's by far my favorite car ever, but it's not really suitable for bringing the triplet around, and we have a Tesla 3 on order, so in the mean time we would just make do with our one remaining car and the Turo Car Rental service. So far, it's working out.

Turo is simply "AirBnB" for cars. But for someone like me with specialized needs, it's actually quite a bit better than the typical car rental company. You see, the Triplet is a pain to put into any other car: you'd have to dismantle it and stick it into the car, and then reassemble on the other end. This adds a good 30 minutes to the ride, which is a significant amount of overhead. There are only two cars that can fit the triplet inside the car: the Chrysler Pacific/Town & Country/Dodge Caravan (they're all the same car with different brand names), or the Honda Odyssey. Good luck trying to rent either of those at a typical car rental company: they'll promise you a mini-van and you might end up with a Sienna, which requires a full disassembly.

We usually end up renting a Chrysler/Dodge because those have seats that fold down into the floor, while the Odyssey would require actual removal of the seat, which most owners wouldn't do for us. The triplet (or tandem) would then fit all the way down the middle aisle of the car (with the front wheel, rear stoker pedals and seats removed --- just like the Honda Fit), provided the van had the center console removed. (The center console is actually easy to remove as well) In tandem configuration you don't even need to remove the center console. We can then install 2 kids on the middle seat (with the tandem in between, which doesn't actually reduce conflict as much as you think it would), adults in the front row, and another single bike (4 cyclists, remember?), and luggage for a weekend trip, as well as tools, etc. for the bike.

Most owners use a remote key drop: some as high tech as an app on your smartphone that connects to the car and unlocks it, and some as low tech as simply hiding the key in a location that's disclosed to you. Prices vary: in practice, we've been able to get mini-vans for about $50 a day, which is a very good deal: typically for 2-nights of hotel, the costs of the hotel costs quite a bit more than the transport.

My suspicion is that if we were to do these trips very often (which can happen as Boen gets older and can survive rides longer than 30 miles without falling asleep), then it would be worth the money to buy the Pacifica Hybrid: not only would the hassle of riding to the car pickup be eliminated, but you'd get much better gas mileage. But even if we were to drive the triplet somewhere every weekend (52*50 = $2600), Turo would remain significantly cheaper than owning the car itself ($40K after federal rebate, and you'd still have to pay for maintenance and insurance!). The cars available on Turo are significantly older than what would be in a car rental business' rental fleet, but riding the flat part of the depreciation curve is the main reason why they're cheaper.

Again, we're an unusual family: most people would be driving their kids to school every day in the mini-van, and would get much more use out of a motor-vehicle than we would. But even if you were a normal family, Turo would enable you to drive the smallest car practical for day-to-day use, and switch to bigger cars only for the times you really need them. That's no small amount of savings, and it also reduces your carbon footprint significantly.

Needless to say, I'm now a Turo fan and can recommend the service. Use my link to rent a car from Turo and you'll get a $25 credit! (I'll get a $25 credit too!) Recommended.

Wealthfront's Customer Service

Recently, someone pointed me to the wired article about the risk parity fund that Wealthfront introduced and asked me why I wasn't even concerned enough to think about it? The honest answer is that Wealthfront has great credibility with me because of the way they handled customer issues in the past, so when I saw the risk parity e-mail I just said to myself, "This is Andy Rachleff introducing something cool, and I don't have to think about it."

Here's what happened 2 years ago, which has made my wife and I Wealthfront investors, instead of just customers who got a really good deal. Turbotax had indicated that our tax bill would be significantly reduced if we contributed to our IRAs. My IRA was with Vanguard, so I just did that. My wife's IRA was with Wealthfront. She initiated the process, but Wealthfront sent a confirmation e-mail that required that she click on a link to complete the process. Since we were traveling, she ignored the e-mail and forgot about it. The result was that her IRA contribution didn't go through and we were forced to file an amended return.

When Wealthfront found out about this (which happened to other customers, not just us), they were very apologetic. We got phone calls asking how they could make it up to us. They offered other customers a permanent waiver from fees, but since we already had that, their solution was to ask if we'd like to get stock options in Wealthfront instead. Yes, at this point, you're probably thinking about the irony that Wealthfront had screwed up, and the net result was that we ended up buying their stock and giving them money, but if you know anything about me and my wife, you know that it takes a very special company (with exceptional customer service) to get us to put money in.

Nevertheless, since I got prodded by a friend of mine, I contacted Andy Rachleff to ask about his response to the wired article. His response impressed me: Risk Parity is essentially taking academic research and bringing it to the masses. The idea is that lower volatility securities have higher risk-adjusted returns in the long run. The reason why bond funds have always returned lower is because they're much lower risk. So how would you take advantage of this? The answer is to use leverage: borrow money to buy bonds, multiplying the risk (and the returns). If you know me, you know that I'm allergic to borrowing money, but in this case, what's happening is that Wealthfront is borrowing at wholesale rates and the yield on the bonds exceed the interest the Risk Parity fund is paying, so there's no risk of being forced to sell if the bond market crashed. The expected return on this maneuver is high enough that at the 20% cap Wealthfront expects your overall returns to improve. The reason for the 20% cap is that tax loss harvesting is a big feature in a Wealthfront account, and there's no reasonable alternative for Wealthfront's Risk Parity fund to tax loss harvest into.

Wealthfront just announced yesterday that they're cutting expense ratios on the Risk Parity fund in half (to 0.25% from 0.5%), to avoid accusations that they're using the Risk Parity fund as a hidden profit center. The expectation is that cost savings from increased scale would also lead to further reductions in expense ratios in the future, just as Vanguard fund has done.

So, in response to people who're asking the question: would I still recommend Wealthfront? My answer is: "Yes, whole heartedly." I'm happy to be both a Wealthfront investor and customer. They've been very good about both fixing mistakes, and introducing features in their products that make money for their customers. I intend on adding more assets to my Wealthfront account in the future.

Review: The Sun is Also a Star

The Sun is Also a Star is a romance detailing the meeting and one day encounter between Natasha and Daniel. Reminiscent of Before Sunrise, Natasha's family is facing deportation and they have just one day to go through all the phases of a relationship, including the attraction, intensity, and of course, the lovers' quarrels and argument.

The cynical person in me wants to call this a paint-by-the-numbers romance. But it's "paint-by-the-numbers" via opposites. For instance, to make the boy and girl break stereotypes, Nicola Yoon makes the boy the poet and romantic and the girl the data-scientist wanna be. Like Nicola and her husband, the Natasha is Jamaican and Daniel is Korean. (Just in case you're wondering, there's probably a lot of autobiography in this novel: Yoon majored in electrical engineering at Cornell, and herself married a Korean American)

Daniel cites the study mentioned in the New York Times article about ways to make people fall in love, and proposes that Natasha and he perform that experiment. Woven about this narrative are side-glimpses into the lives of the people who touch them (and whom they in turn touch). There are a few wise glimpses into American society depicted by the novel:

America’s not really a melting pot. It’s more like one of those divided metal plates with separate sections for starch, meat, and veggies. I’m looking at him and he’s still not looking at me. (Loc 1620)

Ultimately, the book is short and enjoyable, not outlasting its welcome. To the extent that it feels youthful and shallow, it's probably because its protagonists have never done any bike touring:

When they do finally pull apart, it’s with a new knowledge. They have a sense that the length of a day is mutable, and you can never see the end from the beginning. (Loc 3920)

Perhaps most people who're giddy about falling in love are that way because it's the only intense experience in their life where one day can be made to last forever. The book is slightly mar'd by an ending that's too similar to Your Name, but otherwise can be recommended as a quick easy read that won't strain you while you're recovering from a cold your kids just gave you, or as an easy airplane novel.

Review: Captain Marvel: Caro Danvers - The Ms Marvel Years

One of my goals of buying a Kindle Fire HD8 was to read more comics, and to some extent, that's been fulfilled. Marvel regularly has sales that bring down the cost of books like Carol Danvers - The Ms Marvel Years to $1, and given that the library doesn't have the book, I don't even feel guilty buying it even if I don't read it.

The problem is, the book wasn't any good. A glance at Ms Marvel's list of powers indicates that this is a hero with distinctive possibilities: energy absorption and reflection seems like a great unusual power that in the right hands could be used creatively and intelligently. The problem with the book is that "creative" and "intelligent" seems out of the question for the main character. Her primary weapon seems to be her fists, and every problem seems to be resolved by beating things up. Even her ability to shoot photon pulses out of her fingers is seldom used or prove ineffective.

The book is huge, at 432 pages. But in the end, the character is just too boring for me to want to read more about her. Wikipedia quotes: " "she's now the House of Ideas' premier heroine"" I can't imagine what their B-list is like.

Not recommended.