I'm a husband, father, author, cyclist, sailor, travel addict, and Silicon Valley software engineer. I've written 4 books and actively review books on this blog.
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We’d packed Xiaoqin ‘s Ritchey Road Logic, Bowen’s Rivendell Roadini, and the Co-Motion Periscope tandem into 4 different bike boxes, one borrowed from our bike club since I couldn’t find another Trico Ironcase at a price I wanted to pay. Fitting them all into the Honda Odyssey as well as the carryon lugguage, we’d drafted Steve Wang into driving us to the airport, where we checked in the boxes with minimal harassment from the United agents.
Arriving in Munich on a warm Spring day, we found the Airport Hilton, where we assembled the bikes, the singles first, then the tandem. There were no hitches with the singles except for my ham-fistedness, which had caused me to rip the brake cable off the Rivendell’s front brake. Fortunately, I’d packed extra cable ends and a pair of pliers so everything got fixed up, On the tandem, I assembled everything only to discover that the drivetrain would derail on every pedal-stroke. Remembering what had happened in 2024, I carefully observed the chainring and found the one tooth that had gotten bent in transit. Taking out the pliers, I bent it back and the problem went away. I was still disturbed and decided I would carry the spare chainring just in case.
Having finished assembly, we checked in It was still too early for regular check-in and of course the Hilton charged us for an early checkin. In addition, they charged us for storing the bike boxes for a month while we headed out for our tour. This was a far cry from my 2018 tour where the Hilton happily stored bike boxes for 3 weeks,
After a quick meal, we headed out for a test ride. I’d laid out a route to the English Garden in Munich but once we headed out we realized that this was too ambitious. In the afternoon heat, Xiaoqin and Boen were both falling asleep. We headed out for about 40 minutes before giving up and turning around. Xiaoqin took a nap while Boen, Bowen and I fought jet-lag nap by taking a swim in the swimming pool. Last time Bowen and I were here the swimming pool was under renovation and we couldn’t use it. This time it was a great pool and we were no longer sleepy after a vigorous swim and hot tub.
Arturo’s flight arrived on time at 5:30pm, after we’d bought dinner and eaten it in the room, so I went down and helped him assemble his bike. His bike box as it was were in two pieces, one for his wheels, and the other for his disassembled frame and fork. With two people, the assembly actually went relatively fast, but when he asked me for my opinion, I told him that the Trico ironcase or the B+W Bike Box II which didn’t require fork disassembly was a better choice given that he frequently had status on his flights and had a 70kg weight limit.
By 8:00pm, I was dead and took a melatonin pill before going to sleep. I’d asked for an airport pickup at 7:30am, but of course, the German taxi service I’d picked had their own ideas about what schedule to follow and texted me that they would only show up at 8:00am the next morning. I went to sleep but slept badly, waking up at 2:00am and struggling to go back to sleep.
Many years ago I first read Aurora Rising under a different title, and I thought it was a police procedural. Re-reading years later, I will
revise my opinion: this is as much of a science fiction adventure as anything
Alaistair Reynolds has ever written. The
setting is the Glitterband, a cluster of 10,000+ habitats all running a common
polling algorithm for democracy. Each little habitat gets to choose how they
live, with some choosing tyranny (without limits), while others proud of their
diligence about policy.
When a threat arises (from a rogue AI), Prefect Dreyfus
starts chasing down leads and discovers ties to the past, including those of
his deputies as well as his previous actions during a previous crisis.
The characters are great, though some of the technology
seems deliberately set in some weird steampunk. (Search engines are called
Search Turbines, and when they can crash in ways that actually destroy the
hardware they’re running on). Encryption of privileged information is done via
biochemistry, with an injection or some form of medicine that over time enables
you to read the documents that were Encrypted.
I love how the reveals work --- you see the current
situation and then only later discover how it came about. I enjoyed the gradual
introduction of the previous crisis, as well as the ultimate solution.
Alastair Reynolds is always worth reading, and in this,
re-reading. Recommended!
7.5 Lessons about Your Brain is a delightfully short collection of essays about the human brain. Each essay is short enough to read in about 15-20 minutes, but they build on each other, so you're best off reading them in order.
The main point of the book is that your brain's job isn't actually thinking. (That's why thinking is so hard!) It's primary job is to manage resources, and in order to do so it has to be able to predict the future. The essays cover how memory works (nothing's actually stored, more like experiences are recreated), how infants learn, and how the human brain's ability to do abstraction can allows the construction of social reality.
What's interesting is that unlike many others, the author believes that you do have choices and free will, but doesn't specify how and why. There's a great section about how the old myths about the reptile brain and the neo-cortex is wrong, and that:
"Sometimes we're responsible for things not because they're our fault, but because we're the only ones who can change them." (Page 81).
It's rare to read a book so well written that a few short pages can cover so much. Recommended!
Moral Ambition is Ruger Bregman's book trying to convince people to stop taking high paying but soul sucking jobs in favor of jobs that matter. I enjoyed Utopia for Realists so I picked it up.
The book starts with the story of Thomas Clarkson, who while doing research in college about the ethics of owning slaves came to the conclusion that slavery was such a scourge that he could do nothing but devote his life to abolishing it. He eventually linked up with the Quakers and obviously the movement was successful in getting the British Empire to stop the slave trade.
The book then goes through other case studies indicating that while most people have a strong moral sense, many people require someone to ask them to do the right thing instead of doing nothing by default. This need for activation leads to clusters of people doing the right thing, but a small well organized group can be much more effective if they're willing to work very hard.
That sounds very much like a startup, so Bregman introduces us to a school in London that incubates and trains non profit entrepreneurs. We see various examples like how Bill Gates essentially funded the malaria vaccine, while a single entrepreneur singlehandedly funded the distribution of several million mosquito nets.
My critique of the book is my usual critiques of do-gooders. The biggest lever you can have is to win the government of the superpower in the world. Unfortunately, it looks a lot as though progressives keep failing to do that, and many of the gains they hope to achieve may actually be rolled back as a result of not focusing on such gains.
Bergman is not naive. He notes that many groups that are fanatically devoted to a cause may not even have sufficient introspection to realize that their cause is not a good one. Another problem for many progressive institutions is the demand for moral purity and refusal to compromise, which essentially means that they're very hard to work with and tend to get nothing done since the purity contests prevent effectiveness.
The book is short and a fast read. I'm not sure I agree with all of it but it deserves a reading. Maybe it'll inspire you to take up an important cause.
The Goal has "required reading for Amazon employees" all over the cover, and was assigned reading for work. It's basically a business process book written in the form of a novel, which I find strange and quite distracting, but since I was getting paid to read it I plowed through and read it anyway.
The POV character is a plant manager for a manufacturer of widgets (it's never even discussed what the widgets are, what they do, and who the customers are --- it's quite clear that this is a business book for managers who should be able to manage anything and don't care about the technical details). The plant is in trouble, always late for delivering goods for customers, and is in danger of being shut down.
The POV character recalls a physics instructor who's become a big name business consultant, and calls him for help. The consultant then guides the POV character through what's obviously Toyota's JIT manufacturing system, identifying the bottlenecks in the production process and then re-orienting the plant in favor of maximizing throughput on the bottlenecks regardless of other artificial metrics such as efficiency on non-bottlenecked machines and processes. Various problems are overcome, some of which are buffering the bottlenecked processes, reducing batch sizes, and thereby reducing latency from order to delivery, which then enables more sales to be made.
Then the author takes everything one more level up in abstraction and designates a process for this type of analysis: (1) identify the goal (2) identify the bottlenecks (3) re-orient everything around the bottlenecks (4) increase capacity around the bottlenecks (5) re-evaluate.
In between all this, the POV character has to overcome his wife leaving him because he spends so much time at work, and goes through epiphany after epiphany over how his egghead acquaintance who's a management consult is so useful.
Maybe the kind of people who don't read real novels but love lean manufacturing think this is a great book. Me, I think the book could have been much better if it had been a history of Toyota's development of the lean manufacturing (JIT) system.
I recently watched the movie adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with Xiaoqin, and I thought it to be a very compelling movie which followed the book quite closely. I'd picked up the entire trilogy while it was on sale, so it was time to re-read it to see what it was like.
To begin with, it's clear that Stieg Larsson an avid reader. Lots of books get mentioned as part of the casual description of scenes in the novel, and some of them are even English novels. The movie and the book match nearly exactly, with the movie able to make the mystery of the swap between Cecilia Vanger and Anita Vanger much more of a visual clue than the book was. The final search for Harriet Vanger was much more described in the book than in the movie, which treated it as an off-camera coda than the book did.
What books manage to do better than movies is to let you get into the heads of the characters, and here Larsson does a great job of depicting Liz Salander's thought processes as well as Blomkvist's. What I really enjoyed is that Blomkvist is a male protagonist who's explicitly not a sexist asshole, unlike many of the male characters in the book.
This book deserved to be a best-seller for its time. It still withstands a reread and I will go on to read the rest of the series or maybe even watch the movies, given how closely the movies followed this first book.
The Nvidia Way is another book about Jensen Huang and Nvidia. It was recommended to me after I read The Thinking Machine, and I found it a much better book. Rather than trying to be a biography of Jensen Huang, this book focused more on his management style and how Nvidia is run.
The interesting thing about a very flat structure is that the CEO has to work very hard. To the point where he would be responding to emails all weekend every weekend. Of course, one side effect of this was that his staff would wait to send status reports on Sunday night so that when his responses came it'd be during the work week so they could do it on work time rather than personal time.
The other comment that kept coming up all through the text were employees commenting on how free of politics NVidia was. The key point here was that NVidia would reassign employees on the basis of priority rather than allow managers to maintain fiefdoms. This effectively made all the managers learn to work with each other and cooperate rather than pick political fights.
Another key point is the lack of planning:
he would get rid of the practice of long-term strategic planning, which would force the company to stick to a particular path even if there were reasons to deviate from it. “Strategy is not words. Strategy is action,” he said. “We don’t do a periodic planning system. The reason for that is because the world is a living, breathing thing. We just plan continuously. There’s no five-year plan.” (kindle loc 2650)
Of course they have plans. No chip manufacturer (even one that does outsourcing) have to have plans, but the willingness to adapt and change those plans within a quarter is key. Another key point that comes across is that NVidia had no magic tricks or short cuts. 60 hour weeks were the norm and people regularly put in 80 hour weeks. That's demanding and probably the culture selects out people who aren't willing to put in that level of commitment.
I particularly enjoyed the way Icahn described how executives get selected for incompetence:
Icahn observed that competent executives often get sidelined in favor of more likeable but less capable ones because of behavioral incentives inside companies. The personalities who ascend the corporate ranks resemble college fraternity presidents. They become friendly with the board of directors and are not threatening to the current CEO. They’re not prodigies, but they’re affable, always available for a drink when you are feeling down. As Icahn put it, these figures (they are mostly men) are “not the smartest, not the brightest, not the best, but likeable and sort of reliable.” (kindle loc 2804)
To the extent that NVidia avoided promoting that kind of person, it all comes down to Jensen Huang. As far as I can tell from reading this book, however, Huang does not have a designated successor or a grooming program for future CEOs at NVidia. It will be interesting to see how long NVidia can sustain it's advantage going forward, since as the book frequently points out, Huang is the longest running CEO of a major tech company in the business, outlasting Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and many other luminaries.
In any case, I was surprised that I found this book interesting even though I'd just recently finished reading an NVidia book. Recommended.
I somehow got it into my head that we should do a backpacking trip in Yosemite for the upcoming memorial day weekend. I tried to get wilderness permits on Saturday but failed --- everything was snatched up when I hit refresh. But I tried again on Sunday, and saw that there were 6 spots available at Little Yosemite Valley which guaranteed a Half Dome permit, so I grabbed them. What many people don't realize is that a wilderness comes with a guaranteed entry into Yosemite National Park the day before, as well as use of the Backpacker's Campground in the valley proper, so even with a 2 day permit starting on Sunday, we got full access to Yosemite for the entire 3 day weekend.
Hotels in the area were expensive as heck because of memorial day, so we opted to just drive in on Saturday morning. Traffic was free flowing and we made it to Yosemite's Big Oak Flat at 11:00am. We showed the Wilderness Permit and Boen's Every Kid Outdoors Pass, we got into the park for free. I noticed that at least 2 cars in line ahead of us were turned away because of the park's new reservation policy, where reservations were needed to enter the park between 6am and 2pm.
Driving into the park, we still had difficulty parking near the visitor center, but eventually found a spot and walked to get the wilderness permit, where we opted to pay $10/person for the half dome permit. We also paid for the backpacker's campground $8/person. With the money we saved from not staying in the hotel, we bought lunch in Yosemite village. I'd forgotten how mediocre the food was and how slow the service was. That's probably the main reason you should bring your own food.
After lunch, we drove to North Pines campground, where there was a 15 minute parking spot so we could drag all our camping equipment into the backpacker's campground. Since we drove the minivan, we could bring both car camping equipment and backpacking equipment, allowing us comfort for our night in Yosemite Valley. When the tent, sleeping pads and sleeping bags were all setup, we drove out to do the newly renovated Bridal Veil falls trail. The falls are nothing short of stunning with the volume of water so high that we got spray even while far away.
It was a short hike, but for returning to the car instead of doubling back Xiaoqin found some trails that looked promising. We didn't realize that much of the trail was still under water because of the high water level, so we had to do several stream crossings as part of the hike. Returning to the car, we drove to our parking spot next to the Curry Village, where we would leave our van overnight.
We needed to walk to the village for dinner anyway, so we hiked to the lower Yosemite Falls along the way, admiring the beautiful trails and views of both upper and lower falls. Dinner was relatively fast at the Yosemite Falls Lodge's food court, and then we took the bus back to the Curry Village, where we took showers before bed.
Getting up the next morning, I realized I'd left our ham and cheese in the fridge at home, so we had to pay a morning visit to the village store for both breakfast and lunch supplies. The store didn't open until 8:00am, but by the time we'd packed everything up and driven over there it was already 7:30am. The alternate breakfast places were all jammed with people so we just made instant noodles and waited for the store to open.
We drove to the special Happy Isles parking lot reserved for people with wilderness permits. (they don't actually check, as far as I can tell) There we repacked our backpacks and put all food in the bear locker. We filled our water bottles, and then Boen had to poo. He ran off before I was ready, but we were reunited when he was done with the bathroom.
We walked up the same Mist trail we had done last Fall, and the Vernal falls now sounded like a jet engine. We refilled our bottles at the Vernal Falls viewpoint, and then proceeded up the steps where we got thoroughly doused by the spray from the falls. Looking behind us we could see rainbow halos, and we got thoroughly soaked. The price of the baptism was the crowds, where we frequently had to stop because the narrow steps could only allow one party at a time through the critical sections.
Past the top of Vernal Falls, the crowd thinned considerably and we stopped for lunch just prior to the bridge. Unlike the Vernal Falls, the Nevada falls trail doesn't go directly under the falls, but even then, we could still occasionally feel the cooling mist from the falls, which was how big they were.
At the top of the Nevada Falls, at the intersection with the John Muir trail, we met the ranger who issued us the permits the day before! He told us that the trail went up a bit more after that and that at Little Yosemite Valley we'd done half the elevation gain for Half Dome. He was right of course, and we arrived at Little Yosemite Valley around 1pm. We were pretty tired. By the time we pitched the tents, fetched water to refill water bottles, and loaded all the food into the bear canister it was 3:00pm. With nothing better to do, we decided to do half dome on Sunday instead of waiting till Monday morning. Boen resisted but it turned out that he didn't understand that if we did Half Dome today we didn't have to do it tomorrow.
The hike up to Half Dome is 3.5 miles, but it's a challenging 3.5 miles because while the approach itself was a challenging 1000', the final subdome was a series of steps, which combined with the cables would go up another 1000'. And of course we were tired from carrying camping equipment to Little Yosemite Valley. When we got to the sub-dome, Xiaoqin picked up a pair of gloves rather than using her biking gloves. The steps were difficult, but Bowen upon seeing the cables said: "That looks scary!" The views from subdome were gorgeous, where we could see snow-covered peaks all around us.
At the bottom of the cables, Bowen and Boen hesitated, but then decided to commit. Once they were committed they made great speed. Xiaoqin followed, and I brought up the rear. I was surprised by how slippery the granite was --- on previous visits I don't remember my soles ever slipping on the rock, and I had relatively new shoes! I then remembered that it had possibly rained the day before, and also the cables had only come up on Friday, so that explained why there wasn't a pile of gloves at the bottom of the cables. What did make everything easier, however, was that there was next to no traffic on the cables as a result of the new permit-based system.
At the top, it was windy, but the kids found snow and ice! It was already 6:15pm, so we quickly took a few pictures and then went back down. I anticipated the descent to be more scary than the climb, but it was also easier and a lot faster. This was where gloves were useful, as you could do a bunch of mini rappels and that made the descent go a lot faster than in the uphill direction.
Descending the steps were even harder than climbing them, since the eccentric motion at the end of a 9 mile hike felt like an insult to the joints. But we met another hiker going down (he said he did half-dome without a permit), and made it to our campsite before it got so dark that I needed to break out my headlamp.
We made dinner, brushed our teeth, and then went to sleep quickly, exhausted by our efforts.
The next morning, we woke up at 6:00am to the sound of birds singing, made our hot breakfast, packed up our camping equipment and hiked back down to the John Muir trail, opting for the longer but less knee cracking descent to the valley. Even here the effects of being here in Spring made for a different experience than last fall. Not only was the top of Nevada falls much louder and faster, the weeping wall didn't just weep, it rained! We made much slower time than we expected because every corner had something to see.
It being so early the traffic was very light, and there was none of the traffic jams we saw the previous day on the Mist trail. We arrived back at the car by 12:30pm, and then had a 1 hour drive to lunch and another 4 hour drive home because of the increased traffic.
The Adventures of Mary Darling is a mash up of Peter Pan and Sherlock Holmes. If you don't remember Mary Darling, it's because she's never mentioned after the kids are stolen by Peter Pan. She's Wendy's mother, and in this version of the story, she too had been stolen by Peter Pan and escaped, but somehow neglected to prepare her kids for Peter's visit.
The version of Sherlock Holmes portrayed by the novel is very modern, viewing the text as Watson's prettying up of Holmes's behavior, playing on the modern readers' viewing of his portrayal by Benedict Cumberland. To be honest, Holmes adds very little to this story, which I thought was a pity.
Mary Darling, of course, goes after her kids like you'd imagine a mother would, and displays an impressive background story that also comes into play. What doesn't work is that if you knew that Peter Pan was going to come after your kids wouldn't you have told them about it?
I've read other Pat Murphy's books like The City, Not Long After, and that book had the benefit of not having such obvious plot holes. Once you get over those plot holes, however, the book's transparent, moves quickly, and a fun read. It's also relatively short so it doesn't overstay its welcome.
I'm pretty sure this book will come under attack if it becomes too successful. As I mentioned, working in Sherlock Holmes to make him look bad just seems a little artificial to me. But I liked the way she broke everything else down about Peter Pan. Worth your time.
After reading Robert Caro's series on Lyndon Johnson, I bought (through audible) the audiobook version of The Power Broker, which is his biography of Robert Moses, who essentially built most of the infrastructure and parks of the city of New York. The book took me 18 months to listen to the finish.
The biography centers around Robert Moses control of various transportation agencies and authorities, generating revenue from bridges, toll highways, and maybe even parks. It's astonishing how he managed to get the laws written such that no elected official could stop him, and he could build with impunity. There are lots of places where he abused his power, and one of the reasons he got away with it for so long was that he never abused his power in order to enrich himself, but rather, to get more power. So he could always legitimately claim that he didn't personally benefit from holding all those posts that generated revenue, he could hand out largesse to an army of contractors, concessionaires, engineering firms, and even restaurant owners.
The book is even handed. When you give someone like Robert Moses the power to ignore voters and elected officials, you get stuff done. Parks were built quickly, as were roads and highways. Unfortunately, Moses was not a fan of public transit or affordable housing, or poor people, or non-whites. So the cost of getting all the done was that neighborhoods full of vulnerable people were bulldozed, and those people became more impoverished. What's interesting was that Moses was politically savvy enough to ensure that the various mayors, etc got invited to the ribbon cuttings of various openings so they could share in the credit for the infrastructure improvements, so there was never any incentive for even the elected officials to oust him.
This book explains why housing and infrastructure built in the USA today is so bad. The backlash to the existence of someone like Robert Moses all but ensured that nothing can get done without tons of oversight. The book is a valuable counterpoint to Abundance, but I hope that the country can get to a point where it can build again.
I enjoyed the book but probably should have gotten it in electronic format so I could read it rather than endure 50 hours worth of listening to it.
I recently got a chance to see Ted Chiang in person at SJSU. He was great, and it triggered me to re-read Exhalation. One of the big themes of the book now that I've heard Ted Chiang in person is the debate over whether we have free will. Interestingly enough, I feel like Chiang's stories actually strongly imply that we do not have free will, while at the talk he gave, he claimed that he's strongly on the side of having free will! The explanation for the apparent contradiction, he said, was that "You actually want to have your entire experience (your upbringing, what you've read, learned, etc) to come to bear on your decisions. Free will cannot exist in an environment where you're just randomly picking between choices." In one of the stories, a character states that you're the result of all your previous choices, so by making a decision to be a kind person, you make it easier for yourself to become kinder in the future. I thought that was a great insight.
Another aspect of the stories that jumps out now that I've seen Ted Chiang in person is that the stories all have some uplifting aspect or even optimism built into the endings. He explained it as being the kind of person for whom it's easy to take the negative view of life, and when he works on a story, he spends a ton of time immersed in it, so he consciously chooses stories where there's some redemption, because it's not good for himself to be immersed in negativity.
The book is great. Every story is worth reading, and not a single one is a dud. It's also a short quick read. I highly recommend it.
The Shape of a Life is the autobiography of Shing-Tung Yau, ghost-written by Steven Nadis, since Yau is not a native English speaker and probably speaks Math better than he speaks English. You come to expect a certain trope when immigrants talk about their stories, like the incredible poverty they grew up with, and the struggle to get an education good enough to qualify for a transplantation to the West.
Yau lives up to this expectation. He's perhaps a little too modest about his achievements, since he portrayed his admissions into the UC Berkeley PhD Math program as being luckily selected by a visiting Math professor at his high school who advocated on his behalf. He astonishingly gets his PhD in a record 2 years, having written a publishable formal proof during the break in between semesters during his first year in graduate school!
Yau, of course, is famous for being part of the Calabi-Yau manifold description, and definitely someone who's made major contributions to the advancement of mathematics. The guy definitely worked hard and he and his wife frequently lived on opposite coasts during their marriage before finally getting to live together at Harvard University.
Yau will disabuse you of the notion that academic mathematics has no politics. The amount of politics he had to deal with as an accomplished and famous mathematician is quite astounding, and the factionalism he encountered in particular as being part of the Chinese mathematical community is even more astonishing, since in that culture, you're supposed to support your mentor and they expect you to be grateful. I couldn't help but think that his problems there was self-inflicted. A lot of his collaborators weren't Chinese, and he didn't have to go out of his way to get involved in Chinese politics.
Another cliche in Chinese American literature is the feeling that you don't belong in either the West or in Asia. Yau does his best to live up to this cliche, including declaring in several places in the book that his heart was in China and he would do his best to bring Chinese academics up to the standards of the West, even though many of the problems of the Chinese mathematical communities are self-inflicted:
the academic system in China is more complicated because major universities are under the control of the government through the Ministry of Education. Leadership changes at universities, which happen periodically, can result in significant upheaval. When new people come in, they don’t want to do what their predecessors agreed to because in that case the successors won’t get much credit. They want to have something new to show their superiors, which means doing something different, even if that means curtailing a successful program and replacing it with an ineffectual one. This introduces an element of uncertainty to operations in Chinese universities that does not exist in their U.S. counterparts. Every university in the United States, to be sure, has its own internal politics—the inevitable squabbles within departments, between departments, and between the faculty and administration. But when the country as a whole elects a new president, that doesn’t usually affect anything at the campus level—unless, of course, major funding cuts or policy shifts are instituted as a result of a change at the top. (page 263)
(Yes, I am very well aware of the irony that the USA is trying to emulate this aspect of the Chinese academic community!)
I will say that as an Asian immigrant who's extremely grateful that the USA invested in him at a time when no private banker would have, I'm astounded at the lack of gratefulness Yau displays in this autobiography. At one point Yau was stateless (no passport since the British consulate took back his right to a British passport after he got a green card), yet the USA continually worked with him to grant him opportunities to travel and return. And obviously in 2024 Yau gave up his job at Harvard to move back to China to join Tsinghua university, which clearly tells you where his loyalties lie. Being politically oblivious, he probably doesn't see this as potentially making things much worse for the Chinese American communities who may not wish to move, but I'm flabbergasted that someone whose material well-being and ability to achieve his potential was only enabled by Western largesse being so entitled about it!
I enjoyed the book, and probably learned a lot less math than I thought I would have (it's written at a layman's level), but I certainly learned a lot more about the old school Chinese immigrant and their attitudes than I expected.
All the reviews of The King's Peace mentioned that it was an Arthurian retelling. It's also Jo Walton's first novel, and it shows. The writing, while workmanlike and readable, isn't as compelling as others, and the use of place names in an imaginary Britain populated with Celtic names doesn't work to give you a sense of place.
The narrator, Sulien, is a large woman trained as a warrior, and at the start of the novel is raped by raiders who also kill her brother. Making a pact to escape, she discovers the rest of her village was also pillaged, and is assigned to ride for help. Finding King Urdo, the Arthur of the story, she joins his military as an armiger, and devotes herself to his forging a kingdom and fighting his battles until he unites the island as a high king and enforces the peace.
This may be an Arthurian-style story, but it's one with a light touch. You'd have a hard time figuring who's the Merlin analogue, though the Guinevere analog wasn't hard. I kept trying to figure out whether Sulien was Lancelot, and it might be she is, but there's no love triangle, though her powress at arms are quite apparent.
There's magic in the book, as well as the well-understood struggle between the new Christian-analog religion and the old Celtic-analog gods. But gods are real, and magic is real, though not the showy type. I enjoyed that aspect but again, it doesn't play a big part in the story.
Ultimately, the biggest weakness of the book is that it drags quite a bit. It certainly doesn't make me want to go out and read further books in the series.
The Thinking Machine is a biography of Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, and a chronicle of the company he led through founding to becoming the megacap stock it is today.
As a biography, it's perhaps not as complete as those of Steve Jobs as you might wish, but on the other hand, it taught me several things that I didn't know about Nvida, not that I knew a lot about them in the first place. For instance, Nvidia didn't have a mission statement, because Huang didn't believe in them. (Kindle loc 1010). This is completely anamolous, and contrary to the hordes of business books touting the value of missions.
Secondly, Jensen has a reputation for yelling at people when they screw up. That's normal, but on the other hand, he values that experience that you were taught and doesn't fire people for screwing up:
“Very rarely does Jensen make significant changes as a result of execution issues,” Halepete said. “He’s very conscious of having an even slightly chilling effect on people’s willingness to take risks and innovate. As a result, his level of forgiveness for even the largest screw-ups is extremely high.” Halepete surmised that the tirades were what Jensen did instead of showing you the door. “He will berate you, he will yell at you, he will insult you—whatever,” Halepete said. “He’s never going to fire you.” (kindle loc 1745)
That sort of thing generates loyalty and breeds a willingness to take risk, so it's not a surprise that Nvidia employees venerate him. The other thing that's special about Nvidia is the span of control Huang has. I've said in Startup Engineering Management that there's no reason the span of control of a good manager should be as small as 6 people, other than that Silicon Valley has an unusually bad management training program (as in, "What management training program?") and so most engineering managers are so bad that they would flail at having to manage more than 6 people. In Nvidia's case, he has 30 direct reports:
As Nvidia grew, Huang maintained an agile corporate structure, with no fixed divisions or hierarchy. The C-Suite was essentially just him, with no COO, no CTO, no CMO, and no obvious second-in-command. Huang didn’t even have a chief of staff. Instead, he had more than thirty people reporting to him directly, most of them given fluid responsibilities under the all-encompassing title of “vice president.” (kindle loc 2261)
Management professors theorized that a chief executive should ideally have between eight and twelve direct reports. Huang now had fifty-five. (kindle loc 3376)
Think about how hard someone like that has to work. He'd have to process information from all 55 direct reports, and then make decisions and possibly direct the work of all of them. It's impressive then that he had time to pivot the company from graphics and CUDA into AI, and the company was able to consistently undervalue the crypto market and consciously downplay it!
Of course, the example that sets on Huang's kids is significant:
Horstmann also observed that neither Huang’s nor his own kids had initially gone into technical fields. “I think they tried to get out of this crazy work environment,” he said. “I think they looked at us, and said, ‘There’s got to be more to life than this.’ ” (kindle loc 1924)
Later in the book, the author reveals that Huang eventually got his kids to work in Nvidia, though not necessarily in technical fields. There's a claim that no nepotism is involve but I wonder how much the author investigated.
All in all, the book was worth reading, though again Nvidia seems to be an extreme outlier amongst even Silicon Valley companies, so I'm not sure you can generalize that you should emulate Huang in not having a mission statement. The real test for Nvida is if Huang steps down and to see if the company collapses without having such a singular person at the helm.
We tried to visit Pigeon Point earlier this year, but a bout of rain with 20+mph winds came in and we moved the date back. The forecast for our new date was that it was going to rain as well, but with much milder weather and brisk but not howling winds we decided to go for it. Indeed, it rained overnight on Saturday, but by breakfast time it was sunny and mild!
Mark Brody had showed up the night before so he could borrow my Revelate saddlebag. He'd not managed to get a spot at Pigeon Point but had found room at Costanoa just 4 miles away. A last minute cancellation freed up room for Arturo, so he could join as well. I unpacked the REI Link Saddlebags for Bowen and Xiaoqin, and we loaded it all on their bikes. I broke out the Ortleib panniers, and Stephan and Otto had gotten a rack installed on their bike as well, and were also using Ortleib panniers which were a wedding gift that they'd been using all these years. Eva would join us for the ride up Page Mill Road.
The climb up Page Mill Road was straightforward though a little on the steep side. We'd given Bowen a 30 minute headstart but saw him right after the Los Trancos entrance at which point he gave himself a boost. I would find out later that he'd pre-bribed his brother to deliberately slow down so he could beat us to the summit. At the summit we saw views of the ocean, took a few photos, and proceeded to barrel down West Alpine road. Stephan and Otto, loaded down with an extra laptop were taking it easy so we decided not to wait for them.
The descent on West Alpine road in Spring is as pretty as anything you'll do anywhere in the world. The corners are broad and the hillsides are lush and green and filled with lupines, poppies, and other flowers. If you're not riding this on a bicycle you'll miss most of it.
At the junction with Pescadero road we made a left turn and proceeded to climb up Haskins Hill, which was very pleasant in the cool air. At the summit there was a team in training support vehicle that offered us a refill, but it was so cool I thought I'd make it till lunch at least on my single water bottle, which had been refilled at the water fountain before the Montebello parking lot.
The descent to Pescadero was a delight, and screamingly fast on the tandem. There were gentle rollers but none of them demanding high effort. Mark Brody caught up to us once we were past much of the descent and we rode along. The Revelate bag was going very well, and he was in high spirits, given that he hadn't done a lot of riding so far this year.
At the Pescadero city limit sign we waited for everyone and then went to the goat farm to see the baby goats and buy some goat cheese. The kids were pretty hungry, so we headed over to Arcangeli's grocery for their famous garlic artichoke bread, buying 3 of those to go with the cheese and prosciutto we'd brought from home. Surprisingly, we polished off all the garlic artichoke bread and went in to buy dinner and breakfast. We ended up with. Sphagetti and sausages, as well as an entire peach pie, and then a loaf of banana bread for breakfast. Stephan and Otto showed up just as we were about to pay for the groceries, but we wanted to go reserve space at the hot tub so we left after letting them know that we'd put in a reservation for them.
Bean Hollow road was surprisingly pretty with more flowers to entertain us on the mild and gentle climb. Soon enough we were descending to the intersection with Highway 1, and then proceeding down the coast with views of the Pacific Ocean on the right. Arriving at Pigeon Point, we went through the checkin process, unpacked, locked up the bikes, made our beds, and then went for a walk.
Pigeon Point Lighthouse is a minor state park, and this year's flowers were nothing short of amazing. We walked around in awe, framing pictures of the flowers with a combination of the Pacific, the lighthouse, and ourselves. I'd never seen it this flowerful before, since Pigeon Point was usually for us an earlier visit.
We made dinner and ate it before our hot tub spot. As we walked towards the hot tub we felt a few sprinkles here and there, but it never turned into rain, not even getting our clothes more than slightly damp. Of course, in the hot tub we didn't even notice. Boen saw a seal bathing on the rock, but it was too overcast for us to care about missing the sunset time --- there wasn't going to be a sunset that evening.
After everyone was done with the hot tub we ate pie. Bowen amazed everyone by reciting 30 digits of Pi in order to win a second piece of pie. Kids amaze you when they do things like this and you never even noticed them practicing or saying that they wanted to do this.
We had an early bed time as the weather forecast had shifted. Rather than the weather improving as the day went, the forecast was that it was more likely to rain later in the day.
Waking up around 6:30am, I made coffee and sliced the Banana cake. Arturo had found ants in the pastry he had bought the day before, but he cleaned it off and ate it anyway. We got everyone cleaned up and ready to go by around 8:30am, and took off against the headwind, pacelining up Highway 1. Once we turned off onto Bean Hollow Road the headwind became much less of a problem.
Arturo discovered he'd left his sunglasses behind so he'd had to turn around to fetch it. But he would catch up on Stage Road. Mark Brody hadn't gotten up early, and so he was far behind. At the Stage Road/84 intersection the San Gregorio store was closed, so we couldn't get refreshments. The kids all voted to go up 84 instead of Tunitas Creek. To my surprise Arturo voted with the kids. "Kings Mountain Road is treacherous in the rain if it's wet!" he declaimed. The traffic on 84 didn't seem too bad, so I was OK with the decision.
Riding up 84 with a tailwind was easy in the light morning traffic. We regrouped at Applejack's in La Honda, where we took a snack break. Arturo warned us about poison oak going up. From there, it was a 3 mile uphill run with much more annoying traffic, including a group of sports cars hell bent on showing cyclists how much more power you get when you're willing to burn fossil fuels. At the Old La Honda road intersection we waited for everyone and put on a jacket, because the sky had turned much more cloudy.
We started climbing after Xiaoqin took off. Boen knew that this was the last big climb so he pulled out all stops, and we slowly reeled her in. As we approached the redwoods near the summit Boen put in another big effort and we put a gap into her. We would later discover that she had had a slow flat on her front. Riding through the redwoods in the fog was gorgeous, and we made it to the intersection with Skyline blvd. After Xiaoqin arrived, we replaced her inner tube, not having found whatever foreign matter had punctured her tube.
We finished the repair just when everyone else rolled up. We split into 2 groups: Stephan and I opting for the longer route going down 84, while everyone else rolled down Old La Honda road. The tandems can go really fast on 84, and with light traffic we were not concerned about impatient drivers. Skyline Blvd was wet, but 84 itself was nice and dry. By the time we got back to Old La Honda road the others were already waiting for us.
From there it was a short ride to downtown Los Altos, but Arturo had neglected to eat so we had to feed him before resuming the ride. Silicon Valley was completely dry, looking like it hadn't rained at all during the time. The ride was uneventful and we had a big lunch after which we went home via our separate ways. It was a great trip!
Stronger is a badly written book about an important topic. The book's subtitle promises to tell you everything about muscles and strength training, but then immediately spends an absurd number of pages explaining what the Greeks thought about the human body and what muscles were. Not only were the Greeks absurdly wrong, it has no relevant to the topic of the book. A decent editor would have slashed a good 30% of this book and it would have been a much better book.
The book spends an inordinate amount of time on two characters, Jan Todd (at one point the strongest woman in the world), and Charles Stocking, another record-setting powerlifter. Their stories are perhaps interesting, but to be honest, anecdotal data is worthless for the typical rank and file athlete or normal person trying to live their life.
The book is clearly biased towards considering strength training to be much more important than regular doctors believe. What's surprising to me is how little research there actually is on strength training, and how recent the studies are (the earliest appear to date from the 1990s). There are interesting studies described in the book, including one study that focused on geriatric residents at a nursing home, some of whom could barely raise their hands at the start of the program. The study showed that even at that age it's possible to build muscle, and the effects are awesome --- some residents went from being in a wheel chair to being able to walk around with a walker. Others went from walkers to just a cane, and some went from needing a cane to not needing one. Clearly, strength training is useful at any age and can help folks.
Where the book falls over is that there's no study of injury rates. My experience with weight training (progressive resistance training is the new medical term that the book taught me) is that as you get older, there becomes a very thin line between sufficient stimulus to get stronger, and too much stimulus which leads to injury. The book doesn't talk about it, there are no studies, and pretty much I think you'd have to hire a professional personal trainer to calibrate you properly and walk you through increasing resistance. That's great if you're rich. Not so great if your schedule can't fit in appointments and stuff like that.
The book is convincing in terms of telling you that you need strength training, and that the importance of it increases as you get older, and that it's never too late to do more strength training. It definitely debunks the regular doctor's advice that "walking is sufficient exercise for anyone." It clearly isn't, and the book isn't shy about telling you. But beyond that, the book kinda just fails.
There must be a good book about strength training and how to do it properly at lowest risk of injury, but this one isn't it.
Abundance is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book about what they called supply-side liberalism. It's an indictment of the systems built in the 1960s and 70s to prevent government abuse that no longer works in today's environments. While the old 1960s liberalism is about being able to sue government in order to stop it from building a freeway through your neighborhood, that same set of rules is now blocking the need to build sufficient housing for people to live in in our most vibrant cities, or green energy projects in order to power the green energy transition:
the story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities. Recognizing that these scarcities are chosen—that we could choose otherwise—is thrilling. Confronting the reasons we choose otherwise is maddening. We say that we want to save the planet from climate change. But in practice, many Americans are dead set against the clean energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar power projects. We say that housing is a human right. But our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new homes (kindle loc 67)
Worse, the inability of government to deliver needed housing, energy, or transportation projects creates an opening for the right wing to claim that government doesn't work, or that the problem is immigrants coming into the country, or to take an axe to the NIH and NSF in the name of cutting taxes.
political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe write that “populists don’t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government—and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective through their own autocratic power.”23 In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won by shifting almost every part of America to the right. But the signal Democrats should fear most is that the shift was largest in blue states and blue cities—the places where voters were most exposed to the day-to-day realities of liberal governance. Nearly every county in California moved toward Trump,24 with Los Angeles County shifting eleven points toward the GOP. In and around the “Blue Wall” states, Philadelphia County shifted four points right, Wayne County (Detroit) shifted nine points right, and Cook County (Chicago) shifted eight points right. In the New York City metro area, New York County (Manhattan) shifted nine points right, Kings County (Brooklyn) shifted twelve points right, Queens County shifted twenty-one points right, and Bronx County shifted twenty-two points right.25 Voting is a cheap way to express anger. Moving is expensive. But residents of blue states and cities are doing that, too. In 2023, California lost 342,000 more residents than it gained; in Illinois, the net loss was 115,000; in New York, 284,000.26 In the American political system, to lose people is to lose political power. If current trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right; even adding Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to the states Harris won won’t be enough for Democrats to win future presidential elections. (kindle loc 261)
The book explores housing, energy, our science funding process, and manufacturing. Much of this is driven by the federal government, which obviously the Democrats can do nothing about as long as they're out of power. But local issues like housing and energy can and should be done by blue states, and the authors point out that they need to be done by blue states.
The book has lots of ideas, and is interesting as well as a quick read. The Democrats cannot keep selling pro-illegal immigration, DEI, anti-Asian discrimination, and antisemitic messages as the voters have showed in the last election that they're not buying it. This book provides a playbook for the Democrats for a compelling, non-zero sum vision of the future, if a brave politician would listen. You should read it.
I don't know how Normal People made it into my borrow list from the library, but when it showed up I read it and found it easily readable and short, so just read it in a few nights.
A combination of a romance and coming of age story, it traces Connell and Marianne, who start the novel as high schoolers and finish the novel having graduated from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. The story of their on-again/off-again relationship is super-cringe, with you wanting to reach into the page and shake the characters for poor decision making or self-awareness over and over again. For instance, Connell likes Marianne so much that when she suggests that he apply to Trinity College as an English major instead of Galway for Law, he does so. Yet when it comes to the equivalent of the prom he asks some other girl out and is puzzled that Marianne treats this as a rejection, even when his own mother (who cleans the house for Marianne's family) storms out of his car after learning what he did!
Anyway, both characters do incredibly silly things, though Marianne's mistakes are much less dumb than Connell's (though her choice in men other than Connell is very much suspect). The book does a good job of exposing readers to the Irish college system. For instance, the merit-based scholarship in Trinity is given through a series of exams, and there's no means testing, so even though Marianne is rich she still gets it. This is a far cry from what you see in American universities.
I read the book to the end, but as with much mainstream fiction, scratch my head as to why people think this is particularly good reading. Young people will make mistakes, and care too much about what other people think, and lack self-awareness. At the end of the novel, the characters still lack self-awareness though at least they've realized that they love each other. The whole thing makes me think of mainstream fiction as a dumb genre. It doesn't even have the insights that Ender's Game or A Fire Upon the Deep engenders.
Careless People is Sarah Wynn-Williams' memoir of her time at Facebook as Manager of Global Policy, a position she herself created and pitched at Facebook before becoming an employee. In some ways, it's predictable --- anyone joining an American corporation during these times of end stage capitalism as an idealist is bound to be disappointed. Anyone who read Lean In and not realize it was a propaganda piece written from a place of extreme wealth probably deserved to be disappointed.
One of the lobbyists, a woman in her forties, pulls me aside to say, “Don’t take the book seriously. It’s just a way to make you feel bad about yourself. Which is what Sheryl does.” She thinks I have stars in my eyes. I’m embarrassed to admit that maybe I do, so I just nod. (kindle loc 1262)
They don’t discuss the real secret behind maintaining their work-life balance, mothering as if they don’t have children: it’s undergirded by their multimillion-dollar paychecks. (kindle loc 1519)
Of course top corporate bosses are hypocritical. Of course those people have multiple nannies. And of course, Facebook enabled and embetted extremist politicians getting into power in both the USA and elsewhere. None of this should surprise you. There's a huge section in the book about Facebook's willingness to break all rules of decency to get into China (it failed), but that's consistent with all the lying people inside Google did in order to get Google to invest in China. (And it wouldn't surprise you that most such people would justify it by saying if they didn't lie, someone else would lie and get paid the ginormous amounts of money to do so)
Ultimately, one of the worst things about entering into a free trade agreement with China was that rather than introducing democracy and encouraging public dissent in China like the neo-liberals thought, the Chinese seized on the opportunity to corrupt American public institutions and used them to serve their political purposes. It was definitely not a good trade.
The book has a ton of juicy stuff, including Sandberg's attempts to get the author in bed (literally, not metaphorically) on a transatlantic flight. It included all the crazy events leading to the author's poor performance review at the end that justified her firing (though she must have signed a nondisclosure agreement given that there's no mention of a severance package).
On the one hand, you read this and nod, knowing that Facebook had always been awful. On the other hand, you can't help thinking: "You pitched your dream job. You got it, and you probably were paid extremely well. What made you think you got to be a do gooder at the end as well?" In the end, the book fully justifies the statement I made once that Remains of the Day is still the ultimate silicon valley story. Kill yourself to work for a boss, never take a day off, and then find out in the end that you were working for a Nazi all along. Sounds familiar? It should. The difference is that in 2025, the Careless People won and you have no choice.
