Review: The Party - The Secret World of China

Westerners tend to have a very un-nuanced view of China. For instance, when Burton Malkiel came back from China, he was over-flowing with enthusiasm for China, complete with starting up a new fund, and taking all the signs of economic development that he saw there as a sign that capitalism had taken over China in a big way, and conflating capitalism with democracy in the way that only naive Westerners do. He was not completely wrong, but he was missing all the nuances that those of us who grew up in Asia saw.

When Steve Grimm reviewed: The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers, I checked it out from the library since it promised to be a book that was not about the naive-un-nuanced view of China so often touted breathlessly in newspapers and magazines.

I was not disappointed. All the stories are there. The story behind the poisoned milk fiasco? It's there, and yes, it's tied to the 2008 Olympics in a way you might not expect. I wonder if the IOC ever considers that it has blood on its hands when it agrees to host the Olympics in places where there is not a long history of democracy and human rights. The fact that Baidu offers companies a chance to censor its search results are also covered. The Great Leap Forward and its cover-up? Documented in detail here. Why was reunification with Taiwan so hot a topic in the late 1990s/early 2000s and then now is almost never on the radar? Documented here, with all the subtle details that many Westerners over-look. Corruption and graft? All here. The story behind why Shanghai's skyline was completely rebuilt? Someone I know recently posted that she could not see any buildings in common between 1980 and now in Shanghai from a picture of the Skyline --- she naively attributed that to rapid economic development. The reality is far different and explained here in detail.

I grew up in Singapore, and saw first-hand how capitalism does not automatically lead to democracy, even though it can and does lift people out of poverty, which is in general a good thing. It's always annoyed me that Westerners (ABCs included) conflate economic freedom with liberty, without realizing that there's a second model at work in Asia, where economic freedom comes with strings attached. When Google went to China, I deliberately kept myself out of that effort. When Google left China, many people I know thought that it was a bad move. I personally applauded it as a willingness to stand by principle, with a nuanced understanding of the what's going on there that only Sergey Brin, with his experience growing up in a totalitarian regime, could have made happen.

All in all, I consider this a very important book. If you're a naive Westerner or ABC, you owe it to yourself to read this book carefully before visiting China and taking everything you see at face value. While I agree with Brad Delong that we do not want to go down in history as trying to prevent the lifting of millions out of poverty, especially in Asia/China, I think a good understanding of this book will lead you to realize what a Faustian bargain international trade is, and you will eventually come to agree with Dani Rodrik's view as expressed in One Economics, Many Recipes:

Think of labor and environmental standards, for example. Poor countries argue that they cannot afford to have the same stringent standards in these areas as the advanced countries... Democratic countries such as India and Brazil can legitimately argue that their practices are consistent with the wishes of their own citizens, and that therefore it is inappropriate for labor groups or NGOs in advacned countries to tell them what standard they should have... But non-democratic countries such as China, do not pass the same prima facie test. The assertion that labor rights and the environment are trampled for the benefit of commercial advantage cannot be as easily dismissed in those countries. Consequently, exports of nondemocratic countries deserve greater scrutiny when they entail costly dislocations or adverse distributional consequences in importing questions.

Needless to say, this book is highly recommended. Well worth paying full price for.

Review: The Engineer Reconditioned

Neal Asher's Gridlinked was a lot of fun, so I checked outThe Engineer ReConditioned from the library to see if his short stories were up to par.

The opening story, "The Engineer" explores the discovery of a survivor of an extinct civilization. I enjoyed the story quite a bit, even though it was quite predictable what would happen. The clash of causes explored was entertaining, but did not have sufficient time to develop.

Then there came a sequence of "Owner" stories, effectively stories about a super-human intelligence that controls a planet that humans have chosen to settle on. These are much less compelling, as the "Owner" always feels more like a deus ex machina than a proper story hook. These are acceptable. There's also a time travel story that is OK, but not even close to being as good as Palimpsest, still the best time travel story I've read.

Finally, there are two stories about parasites and religion. Asher has a low opinion of religion (as do I), so I'm not sure how well these will go over with anyone who doesn't already agree with those views. Nevertheless, the parasites are at least interesting, though I suspect the source material is more interesting than Asher's stories.

All in all, I can't recommend this book. I think Asher needs novel-length space in order to strut his stuff and ideas. What I particularly dislike is that his ideas are cool but it's also quite clear he's not a scientist and hence can't explain any of the "super-science" he uses and relies on as plot devices, so I would classify him in the "thriller" genre rather than the science fiction genre.

Review: Cutting For Stone

I was told to read Cutting for Stone for a good novel about Ethiopia and Surgery. Literary novels are always hard for me to read: many times they seem more about stringing together pretty words, rather than telling a story in straightforward fashion. Fortunately, Abraham Verghese is actually a doctor and professor at Stanford, and the writing is pretty straightforward and doesn't usually attempt to be lyrical, though there are allusions to "magical realism", a genre that I dislike.

The story is told from the point of Marion Stone, part of a set of conjoined twins that was born to a nun in a (fictional) hospital in Ethiopia. The nun dies during childbirth. The father, a master surgeon with a deadly horror of personal relations, runs away from both his sons, who are then adopted by the community surrounding the hospital. The rest of the novel is about the twins, both of whom grow up to be surgeons, a woman that Marion loves, and the twins (non-)relationship with their runaway father.

Sprinkled all through the novel is witty medical aphorisms. For instance, "What treatment is administered solely through the patient's ear?" "Words of Comfort." There are many details about being a doctor and being a surgeon, but nothing too visceral or discomforting. This is much more tame than the typical Richard K. Morgan novel, for instance. I suppose if you are a careful reader you might come away with a knowledge of Ethiopia. For me, it's all so much background story arranged to fit the story. The medical stuff is the fun part: as Stephen King says, people (myself included) love reading about other people's professions.

My big criticism about most science fiction is that it's all about the ideas, plot, or universe, and the writers are usually terrible at developing believable three dimensional characters. The problem with literary fiction is that it's all about the characters. Strip away the witty medical aphorisms and the details about the process of becoming a surgeon, and you realize that the book's themes and ideas are empty. Now, the surgical stuff is really really good, and for some people, the Ethiopian stuff is worth the price of admission. The characters are good, it's just that the plot is nearly non-existent.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the novel, and it's obviously a great achievement. Given the author's background and the notes, you can be assured that all the medical stuff is up to snuff and you're not getting a simplified view of a surgeon's world. Mildly recommended.

The "Tiger Mom" Parenting Controversy

The blogosphere and quora controversy over Amy Chua's "Tiger Mom" parenting article has reached a fever pitched in the part of the internet where I sit. As a non-parent I normally would try to stay out of this discussion, but since I grew up in Asia and had such a parenting regime, I feel qualified to make a few notes about this.

But first, a note from the author of the article (via Christine Lu):

I did not choose the title of the WSJ excerpt, and I don't believe that there is only one good way of raising children. The actual book is more nuanced, and much of it is about my decision to retreat from the "strict Chinese immigrant" model.

Note that the Quora responses come from people brought up in America under the Asian model. There's a huge amount of negativity about this "hot house" environment for bringing up kids from Asian Americans. I can believe it. If I had been brought up in Asia like this, I would have been comparing myself to the non-Asian kids who had the freedom to do what they like, and then resented my parents for not being as cool as other people's parents. The truth is, many middle class kids in Asia were all brought up like this, and not knowing any different, there's no resentment. Note that this "hot house" environment is not unique to Asia. Plenty of non-Asians have used this method to develop high achievers. The book, Talent is Over-rated, for instance, describes a Hungarian couple which deliberately set out to raise 3 daughters to become grandmasters in Chess, just to prove a point about how education should be handled. They succeeded, and while their kids eventually gave up Chess, they were hardly scarred for life. Similarly, I know plenty of non-Asian parents who obsess about getting their kids into the right daycare, the right Montessori school, or the right prep school. My favorites are the ones who spend gobs of money on an expensive school district for their home, and then decide that even that expensive school district is not good enough and send their kids to private schools. And of course, in the field of sports, non-Asian parents seem to be exactly what Asian parents are as far as academics is concerned. I have no doubt to my mind which emphasis is most likely to lead to a productive member of society.

If the environment was solely responsible for such emotional/psychological scarring, then Asia should have an incredibly high crime rate/suicide rate. I think the real cause in this case is the huge contrast between that "hot house" environment and what the rest of America values. Certainly, myself and my two brothers are emotionally well-adjusted and our family doesn't show any of the psychological scars and resentment between ourselves and our parents that many of those who visit Quora describe.

It all depends on your goals as parents. One of my friends recently told me over lunch about his philosophy behind parenting: "Your kids will turn out fine, so my goal is to enjoy my time with them while they are kids." Many Asian parents would be horrified to hear that, since their goal is to raise high achievers. I remember having a conversation with a Netscape millionaire in the late 1990s. This was a man who'd arrived from Taiwan with just the clothes on his bags and a suitcase of cash, and was now successful by anybody's standards. He said to me, "My kid has a trust fund, so now I have to make sure she has a work ethic." My response to that was, "That's absolutely the wrong goal for her! She doesn't have to work if she doesn't want to, so what's going to make her life miserable is if she is a poor judge of people! If someone cons her out of her trust fund, then all the work ethic you inculcate in her will not keep her from being unhappy." (No, I don't know how to teach you how to be a good judge of character, but the point is: work ethics, etc aren't the most important things in life)

Ultimately, I don't think that the "hothouse environment" is something every parent should strive for, but it's clearly useful for some parents, and it works for some families in some environments. For me, it was more helpful than hurtful, and I'm sure for others the inverse was true, but it certainly doesn't merit the kind of hysteria one way or another that the internet forums appear to approach the subject.

Google Docs Fail

I've been selling digital editions of An Engineer's to Silicon Valley Startups by simply e-mailing the files to customers. The compressed version of the book is only 800KB, so it fits easily as an attachment via e-mail.

Independent Cycle Touring, however, is a graphics and layout heavy book. The highly compressed version of the book came to 11MB. This exceeded the 10MB attachment limit of gmail and other online services. Furthermore, it would use up my gmail quota in rapid order, not to mention the cumbersome nature of attaching a file to every e-mail sent.

My initial thoughts was to simply upload the file to Google Docs and Spreadsheets as a PDF, and then add users to the access control list with each sale. Not only would this eliminate the need to send e-mail attachments, it would also allow me to update the book online and have all my customers immediately have access to the latest version of the book! What's not to like about that?!

This worked well during the beta-period, and during the initial launch period. However, over the holidays something broke Google Docs and Spreadsheet, and Google stopped allowing me access to my own file! I would get a "This web-site is not available" whenever I tried to click through to my book. OK, maybe I exceeded the access control list limit or some such. I uploaded a new copy. Same thing! Since I had paying customers, I was in a bind.

Fortunately, a startup named Dropbox offers very similar service to what GDrive was originally intended to serve. Unlike Google's product, Dropbox works for my own file and has a bigger free quota than Docs and Spreadsheets. Even better, each customer that installs Dropbox gives myself and him free disk quota. Even better, rather than use the web-interface to upload, I can just drag and drop new versions of the file on disk. I'm pleased as heck.

I've often said that it's a good thing that big companies screw up. Otherwise, startups won't be able to compete. And Google: you might want to consider having a "file a bug" button somewhere on Docs and Spreadsheets. Otherwise, the only way I know how to file a bug is to write it up on my external blog for everyone to see. In the mean time, my guess is I will continue to use Dropbox to distribute the digital version of Independent Cycle Touring.

Independent Cycle Touring has Shipped!

Today, I got 2 big boxes from my postman containing the print edition of Independent Cycle Touring. If you've pre-ordered your copies, the book has gone out and you should receive it in your mailbox in 1-3 days (6-10 days if you're overseas).

Thanks for pre-orders. As of now, the price for the paperback is $39.99 and the price for the paperback + digital edition is $49.99. Those of you who pre-ordered got the digital edition for free!

If you've contributed to the book, rest assured your copy is on its way!

Review: Gridlinked

If you've read many of my book reviews, you'll note that I complain quite a bit of the characters found in many science fiction novels: I think that they are largely wooden with very little humanity in them, more like puppets driven by a plot. Gridlinked was Neal Asher's first novel, and he solved this problem by having the protagonist, Ian Cormac, be someone who was "gridlinked" for so long that he's become in danger of losing not only his social skills (like most of us geeks), but also his humanity as well. As a result, Asher can portray his protagonist with all the puppet-nature that he demands his characters have to serve his plot without fear of such criticism.

The plot is kinetic, spanning multiple star systems, meeting various non-human entities, with lots of weapons ranging from big guns to intelligent shuriken deployed at one point or another at nearly every form of sapient and/or intelligent being in present. The result reads like a summer blockbuster of a movie: lots of loud explosions, plenty of "wow" moments as horrible beings slam at each other, and a plot that seems almost lifted out of a Western. The world building is provided in dribs and drabs, usually as entries from one encyclopedia or text of one sort or another that head chapter entries. My problem with this world is that I just don't see how it could possibly have room for human heroes --- it seems to me that the kind of trouble-shooter Ian Cormac would have to be would be replaced by the kind of Android ultra-terminator style robots that seem to be all over the book.

What, then, kept me reading? Well, the action never stops. You are kept on the edge of your seat wondering what trick the author will think of next to keep one character or another alive. One scene has a character attempting suicide only to accidentally set off a sequence of events that ensures her survival. The weapons are pretty darn cool, if improbable. In other words, this is exactly the kind of guilty pleasure you can indulge in if you're about to get on a plane on vacation. I have no doubt I'll be loading up the Kindle with more from Asher for my next flight. Nevertheless, if you're looking for a deep read, with the kind of reflection that Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon has, there's none of that here. Read Morgan instead. Asher is Tom Clancy for the pocket-protector crowd, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Mildly recommended.

Movie Review: 非诚勿扰

非诚勿扰 2 so caught my attention that I checked the prequel from the library. Sequels are rarely better than the original, so if I liked the second movie, 非诚勿扰 should have been even more impressive, right?

The opening sequence was indeed funny, but not in the way the sequel was. Then the initial half of the movie degenerates into a sequence of "in search of the right woman" dating scenes. While these are entertaining enough, and even cleverly written (there's one scene where a friend introduces our lead actor to a recently widowed woman that just had us giggling), at this point we're introduced to the lead actress.

I was quite puzzled as to why I didn't like the movie as much, but I think I know why now. The protagonist is extremely smart and observant: he sees what's wrong with his leading lady right away, and walks out on her multiple times. Then we are led to believe that he's willing to take a trip to Hokkaido, treats her cruelly, and then becomes devoted to her? Nothing adds up. Ok, human beings don't always add up, but as someone once said, the difference between real life and fiction is that I expect some consistency from fiction. One theory could be that the sequel had a larger budget than this movie, and hence the sight-jokes could be better implemented. Thinking over the script though, I don't see how a bigger budget would have made this movie better.

Is the movie worth watching? Yes. It's still better than expected for a romantic comedy. But the sequel was definitely much more impressive in terms of writing. The photography is nice, but it's quite clear that the director did not make full use of Hokkaido's gorgeous scenery, which properly belonged to the characters. It's just that if I had watched this movie first I probably would have waited to watch 非诚勿扰 2 on DVD rather than seeing it in the theater, and that would have been a loss. Nevertheless, recommended.
[Note: I watched this movie with only Chinese subtitles turned on, so I can't speak to the quality of the English subtitles. One of the coolest things about the movie is that it makes no compromises about languages. The Japanese people speak Japanese, the Chinese people speak Chinese, and the one non-Asian with speaking parts speaks in both English and Japanese. Hence turning on subtitles is useful even if you are fluent with Mandarin.]

Review: Cryoburn

Cryoburn (The Vorkosigan Saga) is Lois Bujold's latest foray into the Vorkosigan saga, her hyper-kinetic space opera hero. Unfortunately, it was not her best work.

Scarlet wrote a thorough review of this book a while back, so I'll outsource most of the criticism to her. The book didn't grab me plot-wise or emotionally, and we see precious little character development, either of Miles or any of the supporting characters. We don't even get the little thrill that we should get when Miles solves a puzzle. Even the setbacks were too easily resolved. Unlike other novels, where Miles gets put through the wringer, he solves all the problems far too easily.

Unlike Scarlet, I didn't see the ending coming, but it wasn't much of an emotional punch. Not recommended. Bujold is a brilliant writer, and you should start elsewhere in the series for really good reading.

Movie Review: 非诚勿扰 2

I'm really skeptical of romantic comedies. They tend towards cliches, and when I see the "2" which means it's a sequel I'm doubly skeptical. Yet the movie theater I was in at 1:00pm had nearly every chair filled on Christmas Day! Granted, Cupertino has a large Chinese population, and it was a rainy day, but that drew my attention.

I'll try not to spoil the movie, but if you are the type who's easily spoiled, don't read any further.

The opening sequence is a surprise: a divorce ceremony, complete with all the pomp and grandeur devoted to wedding ceremonies in other romantic comedies. Then the next sequence is a little confusing to those who did not watch the prequel, despite the opening "catchup" exposition. The meandering plot features not very much by way of surprises, or even character development, but smack in the middle is another great sequence featuring a wake for someone who's not dead (it is a fantasy of mine --- why waste all the good things you'd say about someone for only after they're gone?). The script's dialogue is fast paced and fun, but I'm not sure how the English subtitles were translated: I was too busy with the dialogue and scenes to pay attention to the subtitles. There's definitely a healthy amount of cynicism and snide remarks in the movie, which earned it my respect despite the genre.

All in all, I guess I'll have to find the prequel and see if it's just as entertaining. Recommended, though if you were to wait for it to come out on DVD, there's nothing that requires watching it on a big screen. In fact, in some scenes the cinematography and photography seemed to be overly grainy, which is a surprise in this day and age.

Lenovo Customer Service Rocks

My X201 developed a sticky key. By itself, it wasn't too bad, but it was annoying. Since it was under warranty, I decided to give Lenovo a call yesterday. I was given a choice: send the laptop back, or they'd send me a replacement keyboard. I opted for the latter after being told that all it took was unscrewing 4 screws on the bottom of the machine.

I was amazed when I opened the front door this morning to find the keyboard already waiting for me: they had shipped it next day air! 15 minutes later I have a laptop with a new keyboard and no stuck keys. The box came with a return tag so I could return the old keyboard at no charge. Amazing.

Two thumbs up for customer service. There's no question that my next laptop will also be a Thinkpad.

Review: Motorola Power Adapter Micro USB Rapid Charger

My Motorola Droid is a power hungry beast. Despite plugging it into my car with a micro-USB charger, the battery would not stop draining, leading me to carry a spare battery all the time, especially when planning to use the phone to provide turn by turn navigation. I thought this was the phone's fault, and just lived with the inconvenience. Then I learned that the phone drew 750mAh while navigating. I looked at my current charger and saw that it was outputting 500mAh. When I saw the Motorola Vehicle Power Adapter MicroUSB Rapid Rate Charger on sale for $3, I jumped on it. This charger puts out 950mAh, which would be plenty even for iPad users. Trying it for the first time a couple of days ago, I finally saw the phone actually charge while driving!

Note that this charger will not solve the other problem with charging the Droid: if it gets too hot, the charging circuitry shuts off to keep the battery from over-heating and exploding, so on long drives in the summer, you probably still have to carry a spare battery. But for now, I'm pretty happy with this charger. Recommended.

Review: The Facebook Effect

Despite the huge amount of hype surrounding Facebook, I still get occasional questions from engineers asking me if I think Facebook would be successful. Perhaps if they had read David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect, they would already have anticipated my answer: "Facebook is already successful, and whatever happens next, that success will not go away."

The book starts with a story of how political organizers have used Facebook to effect a change in the world. I think that's the very definition of success for any kind of startup: the product it has created has changed the world. Netscape, for instance, didn't make the kind of money Google and Facebook ever made, but it also changed the world, and the founders at Netscape have parleyed that success into important roles, including one described in this book.

The Facebook origin story has been documented in lots of places, including The Social Network. Kirkpatrick goes beyond that, however, and covers several other social networks, including Friendster, ConnectU, and of course Orkut and its predecessors. He even has a plausible theory as to why Facebook succeeded over all the others, though of course as a non-engineer he discounts the importance of the design and engineering efforts in letting Facebook scale beyond many of those competitors. I knew Facebook had a solid engineering team when they hired Jeff Rothschild, and several other folks that I had worked with in previous startups, but the numbers I had heard in 2007 were nothing short of astounding: Facebook was serving at that time 5 times Google's daily page views with 3% of Google's machine infrastructure. That's 5 times all of Google properties, not just search. You can dismiss Facebook's problem as being easier than search (and I will dispute that: search serving can be treated as being fundamentally stateless, while Facebook has a lot of state), but just the sheer volume and efficiency is impressive.

All this history is there. The investments, the hiring and firing of various insiders (though obviously, some of the most juicy gossip can only be heard from insiders), but of interest to most people will be page 272-273, where various financial numbers are disclosed about Facebook's business. They add up to some very impressive numbers, and the entire chapter puts paid to many myths and answers questions about how Facebook makes money. I'll admit to being surprised at some of the answers myself! I'm starting to think that despite having a track record of advising people to take a "smaller" package at Facebook over a "larger" package at Google, I might still have under-estimated how much potential is still to be unlocked over at Facebook (meaning that yes, earlier this year when I bought some Facebook stock at $7 a share I should have bought more).

The book does cover many of the fracas between privacy advocates and Facebook's founding and management team. It should come as no surprise that I side with Facebook on this: given how most people happily sell their purchasing habits to their local grocery store for $0.50 discounts on milk and other items, I have yet to see behavior which reflects that people actually believe in privacy about information they put online. If you don't want it spread around, it doesn't belong online.

All in all, I should have bought this book and read it earlier this year, rather than waiting in line at the hold queue at the library. Recommended.

Review: Fables #14 - Witches

Fables #13 was a disappointment. Fables Vol. 14: Witches, however, has started a brand new story arc, with a new villain, some very funny moments, and a light-humored interlude. Willingham is back on form! Many characters have changed and evolved, and we get to see aspects of some of the old witches in the stories that we did not know about before. Very well done.

One thing I do not like is that the Fables now seem to have more politicking around than they did previously. That's only to be expected, since they've already had one overwhelming success against the adversary, but you'd think that having Fabletown demolished would knock some sense into the characters. I'm also sad that my favorite characters don't seem to be playing a role in this new story arc.

Nevertheless, I am very happy to put Fables #14 back onto the recommended list.

Review: The Golden Gate

The Golden Gate is a novel in verse. That means each paragraph is written in the form of a sonnet, including the author's bio and the introduction. This is a pretty impressive feat by itself, though there are times when you could sense that the poet would choose to twist the characters or places around to fit the rhyme. For instance:

Not speaking, with a finger tracing
The unseen lines from star to star.
Liz turns. They kiss. They kiss, they are
Caught in a panic of embracing.
They cannot hold each other tight
Enough against the chill of night.

If you read this out loud, it doesn't work as verse: the line breaks and sentence structure works against the rhyme and rhythm. The entire book is full of such false poetry, which fail to work when read out loud. If you want brilliant writing, The Things They Carried is full of examples of how well-written prose outperforms workaday poetry, especially when compared against The Golden Gate, despite the harsh and unpleasant nature of Tim O'Brien's stories.

Unfortunately, neither the characters nor the plot rescues the novel. Ultimately, I feel that The Golden Gate is a lot like El Mariachi: the question isn't whether El Mariachi was a great movie, it's that a watchable $7000 movie could even be made at all! Similarly, I feel like The Golden Gate is an extreme test of whether a modern audience can tolerate poetry long enough to tell a story. The story is cliche and quite uninteresting, but that it can be done at all is impressive.

The only saving grace of the book is that even the author could not sustain the writing of such doggerel --- for poetry, it's a relatively quick read, and fortunately, just as easily forgettable. Not recommended.

Independent Cycle Touring, Final Proof approved!

After the fiasco last week with the pages being completely off and the interior being completely screwed up, my heart was in my mouth when I saw that the latest proof had arrived. To my delight, I could find nothing wrong with the proof, so now the first print run of Independent Cycle Touring has been ordered. Given the vagaries of shipping and the Christmas rush at Amazon, I have no idea when I will get the books ready for shipping. However, if you order the paperback copy now, you'll get an electronic copy right away for reading! Once the physical books show up, there will be an extra charge for both the paperback and electronic copy.

With this approval it is now finally safe for me to register the book with the copyright office (the copyright office wants two copies of the book shipped to them within 30 days of registration). Historically it takes about 4-5 months to get a copyright certificate. It also costs about $35 in addition to the two copies of the book.

Once again, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported the book!

A Taxonomy of Cameras

For whatever reason, people always ask me for camera recommendations, as though I have enough time to research and integrate all the cameras in the world and select them. The truth is, I am not a gadget freak, and my equipment selection is largely a result of legacy lock-in: I have a large collection of Canon lenses, for instance, which means that I'm not buying into any other SLR system any time soon.

I've said this hundreds of times, and I'll say it one more time. Before spending money on equipment, spend a little bit of time (and money) on education. Get a copy of John Shaw's Nature Photography Field Guide.

All cameras that I am about to recommend have RAW mode capability. What this means is that the camera is capable of capturing all the data picked up by the sensor and dumping it into storage. This is like shooting a color negative: a lot of information is captured, more than can be shown on a computer screen, so you'll need software to process the output from the digital sensor into something that can be shown on screen. I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3, which is designed for a photographer's workflow. I cannot recommend free software such as Picasa or iPhoto. Picasa's workflow was designed around JPG, and bogs down tremendously on RAW files. iPhoto has scalability problems. Neither have the tools that Lightroom has for rescuing badly over-exposed photos, adding in ND Grad filters after the fact, or a reasonable tagging/captioning system. The software pipeline determines the final quality of the image, and is responsible for your ability to shoot whatever you want in various different lighting conditions without having to carry a bunch of different filters with you, so it's important not to skimp on this.

Point and Shoots

Everyone knows what a point and shoot camera is. My currently recommended point and shoot for serious photography is the Canon PowerShot S95. The important thing that separates this camera from its competitors is the user interface. Rather than clumsy buttons that have to be pushed/held/pushed, the S95 has 2 dials that let you adjust aperture and control for exposure compensation at the same time. In tricky situations where you want manual exposure controls this is the camera to beat. As a pocket sized camera it's easily carried wherever I go, and now that everyone else has switched to phone cameras, photos from the S95 look nothing short of outstanding. You can read my full blown review of the S90, which was the S95's predecessor.

Interchangeable Lens Rangefinder

The big limitation of a point and shoot is sensor size. Sensor size matters a lot. The optics and the physics involved is such that the larger sensors always outperform the smaller ones. If you size up the sensor in a point and shoot, however, you have to size up the lens, and so the whole camera becomes bigger. To get the most out of the improved sensor, however, you should stick a better lens in front of it. Since the physics of lenses is such that you cannot design a one-size-fits-all lens that performs worth a damn, it makes sense to build an interchangeable lens mount so you can put different lenses on the camera depending on what you want to shoot. (For you disappointed SLR owners, yes, that means the 18-200mm lens you've slapped onto your body is under-performing the cheap $300 24-85/3.5-4.5 lens I bought 10 years ago and sold to another googler for $150)

The prototypical camera for this class of cameras is the Olympus PEN E-PL1. The Micro Four-Thirds standard is supported by Olympus and Panasonic so you can buy interchangeable lenses from either manufacturer for this standard and it will work. You can see that the PEN is about the same size as the Canon G12, but will outperform it in all conditions by a substantial margin because of the larger sensor size and better lens. For the price difference it is a no brainer to go with the Micro Four Thirds cameras. Sony also makes the Sony Alpha NEX NEX5A/B Digital Camera which is of the same class. I've never so much as touched one but Pengtoh raves about it.

Digital SLRs

An SLR is a Single-Lens-Reflex camera. The "reflex" refers to the mirror that sits in the optical path, reflecting light coming in from the lens into the penta-prism which then gives you an upright view through a view-finder. When you press the shutter release, the mirror flips up (the reflex action) and the optical path switches to exposing the sensor to the incoming input. The "single" part is in contrast to Twin-Lens-Reflex cameras, which are an obsolete design that nobody really cares about any more. Why is the mirror important? The previous two classes of cameras do not have a purely optical path for you to view the image before shooting. That means that you are generally restricted to viewing the image on a relatively low-resolution LCD screen. That does two things. First, in bright light the screen becomes useless and you are now effectively shooting blind. That's acceptable if you don't care about the results, but the whole point of carrying anything but a cheapo point and shoot is that you do care about the results, and the viewfinder/mirror optical path solves that problem. Secondly, the viewfinder, by presenting a high resolution image (better than 1080p!) lets you do precise filter placement so you can see exactly what the filter does.

For instance, when shooting a rainbow, what you want to do is to use a polarizer so that you can eliminate the specular reflections from it. This makes the rainbow appear stronger and is far closer to what your eyes see than an unfiltered image:

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

You can try applying a filter to an interchangeable rangefinder camera, but you will find it difficult to judge the results on the screen. Point and shoots don't even take filters without a lot of work.

For seriously tricky light when ND grad filters are a necessity, nothing short of an SLR would be useful. Precise placement of the ND grad filter can only be accomplished with the lens stopped down to shooting aperture, and an optical path with which to see the image. That's why I don't own an interchangeable rangefinder camera: there's no situation which a rangefinder works where a point and shoot wouldn't do an equivalent job.

Note that DSLRs come in 2 classes: full frame sensor cameras and crop sensor cameras. The full frame sensor cameras use a sensor the size of a traditional 35mm film. The crop sensor cameras use a sensor that's about half the size. Since size matters as far as image quality is concerned, my approach was to wait until full frame sensor cameras reached sufficient quality for me to switch from film to digital. That happened in December 2008 when the Canon EOS 5D Mark II was released. I personally can't be bothered to carry an SLR that's anything short of full frame (after all, why carry a full 35mm lens and use only half of it?!!), but if you're not as fanatical about image quality as I am, the crop sensor cameras can be a good choice.

Conclusion

There are other types of cameras not covered above. View cameras, for instance, are a classic landscape photographer's tool. But very few people are willing to carry such cameras, and as someone who enjoys traveling fast and light, even the DSLRs are sometimes too cumbersome.

The sad thing about all this is that most people have gone to crappy phone cameras, none of which will capture in RAW mode, or even produce sharp pictures because the unprotected lenses are usually smudged with fingerprints and the auto-focus mechanisms suck. The nice thing though, is if you actually pay attention, learn a little bit about photography, and even carry the cheapest camera in this article, then you stand a good chance of producing photos that will wow your audience who have been trained to expect crap pictures.

Regardless, you should pick the camera to suit your purpose. If all you do is shoot baby pictures, get a point and shoot or an interchangeable lens rangefinder. If you want to play tripod artist in the dying light of the day and are capable of achieving technical mastery over your equipment, then a digital SLR will let you express your creativity and vision without placing limitations on what you can or cannot do.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

For more information, see Philip Greenspun's on-line textbook on Photography

2011 Book Reviews

Index Page for Books read 2011


The Books of the Year for 2011 have been selected
Fiction

• Surface Detail
• The Golden Gate
• Cryoburn
• Gridlinked
• Cutting for Stone
• The Engineer Reconditioned
• Shadow of the Scorpian
• The Skinner
• Prador Moon
• Cowl
• The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ
• Blood Music
• The Immigrants
• Pump Six and Other Stories
• Pegasus
• The Lifecycle of Software Objects
• Troika 
• The Sultan of the Clouds
• The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queen's Window
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
• Feed
• The Last Wish
• Assassin's Apprentice
• His Majesty's Dragon
• Throne of Jade
• Queen of Arlin
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• Monster Hunter International
• The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Dreadnaught
• The Dragon Never Sleeps
• The AI War: The Big Boost
• Blood of Elves
• The Long Run
• The Last Dancer
• The Cold Commands

Non-Fiction

• The Facebook Effect
• The Party: The Secret World of China
• Writing Fiction for Dummies
• The Box
• The Victorian Internet
• Peopleware
• The World Without Us
• Brain Rules for Baby
• Outliers
• Battle Hymn of the Chinese Mother
• Nurture Shock
• In The Plex
• The Story of the Giro D'Italia
• Why We Get Fat
• Presimetrics
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Steve Jobs
• I'm Feeling Lucky

Comics

• Fables #14: Witches
• Fables #15: Rose Red
• Ex Machina Vol 1-6
• American Born Chinese
• Jack of Fables #2-4
• Girl Genius Omnibus #1

Review: Surface Detail

The last two Iain Banks books I read, Whit and Transition were merely OK. But Surface Detail is a Culture novel, so like a GOU hell bent on destruction, this fat novel swept all my other reading aside for several days while I enjoyed re-entering Iain Banks' utopia.

Most fictional utopias are anything but, but Banks' utopia is genuine. I would really enjoy living in it. Furthermore, Banks' utopia is idealistic: the goals it espouses would generally be ones I would agree with. You would think that with 8 novels already set in this universe, Banks would be running out of ideas, but each novel manages to work in a new concept. This time, the focus is on virtual reality and the idea of downloading consciousness into it. Banks uses this concept to play out how traditional western religions would make use of it and effectively argue how morally indefensible such uses of virtual reality is.

The plot has multiple strands, some more important than others, all eventually converging at the end in a big bang. Some of the strands were deliberate misdirection, fizzling out without actually impacting the main story-line. As usual with Culture novels, the most interesting characters are the machines: the ships' Minds, and the interaction between them effectively run the plot and the story, leaving the human characters effectively as puppets. It takes a talented writer to make all this work without leaving the reader feeling cheated, but fortunately Banks has it in spades and deploys all of it here.

All in all, this is a great book to start the 2011 reviews with. If every book I read in the coming year is as much fun as this, I'd be very happy. Recommended!

Berkeley Hills Redux

After the fiasco from 2 weeks ago, I've been raring for a re-match of the Berkeley Hills ride. Mike Samuel wanted to show me his new tandem, so we negotiated for a meeting at Rockridge today. Well, Mike waited until the night before to put together his S&S coupled tandem, which resulted in a complete fiasco to the point where he could not show up.

The folks who did show up: Greg Merritt, Yoyo Zhou, Tracy Ng, and Matt Vera. Eva Silverstein carpooled with me up to Rockridge BART. It was overcast with very low fog when I left my house in Sunnyvale, but by the time we got to Rockridge it looked like it was going to lift. Nevertheless, by the time we started riding it was still foggy and there was none of the brilliant views we got two weeks ago.

From Berkeley Hills

Tracy and Matt had showed up expecting an easy ride, but with the tandem missing and Greg present, the pace went up several notches! We hammered up to the intersection with tunnel road, waited a few minutes for Tracy and Matt, then hammered up Tunnel road, and waited some more, and then took off on Grizzly Peak Blvd, where we finally got some sunshine!

From Berkeley Hills

Unfortunately, the fog returned once we descended into Tilden Park, and Inspiration Point provided no inspiration for us, being completely fogged in as well.

From Berkeley Hills

Greg had to leave at this point, and Tracy looked like she had been run a little ragged, so I provided directions to the Lafayette BART station, and the group was now down to Yoyo, Eva, and I. We climbed the 3 bears in overcast conditions, and Eva got her first on-the-road flat tire. The fix didn't take long, but in the process we discovered that the cone springs on her quick release had been reversed. No wonder the wheel wouldn't go in like it was supposed to!

By the time we climbed pig farm hill the sun had slowly started to come out. Reliez Valley Road was a fun descent as usual, and the rollers to get to Reliez Station Road was just as fun. Entering the bike path, however, we were greeted by a full dose of sunshine. I had never seen the bike path this pretty: leaves were strewn all around, and our tires made a wonderful crackle sound as we rode through them. The afternoon light lit up the yellow leaves all around us, and the earlier fog seemed to have depleted the bike path of other users, allowing us to enjoy it almost all to ourselves. I was almost sorry to leave the bike path for Moraga Commons, hungry as I was.

After lunch, we proceeded up Pinehurst, a beautiful road surrounded by redwoods, and still wet from the morning fog as it would not see sun all day. When we got to Skyline we were impressed by how pretty it now was. We could see all the way across the bay, and see San Francisco, the Golden Gate, and the Bay all under a marine layer that was white. It was stunning. We stopped for several pictures but the images do not do the reality justice:

From Berkeley Hills

We got down Tunnel road for more pretty views and got back to the car around 4:15pm. What an amazing ride. I've now banished the ghost of all the failures to make it up to Berkeley for a ride this year!

A Setback

What I hoped would be the final proof of Independent Cycle Touring arrived. Unfortunately, it looks like a layout error early on in the book caused all the pages to be flipped left/right. This is of course unacceptable, so I've forced InDesign to not allow pages to float, and reset the book so the right thing happens. I'm ordering a new proof as soon as the approval process is done.

If you've pre-ordered the print edition of the book, well, there's good reason I gave all preorders access to the PDF version of the book first!

Books of the Year 2010

I've historically posted my books of the year post after the year was over, but this misses the Christmas shopping season, so this year, I'll provide my books of the year recommendations now, and start the 2011 book list from the next book I review.

All in all, this has been a great year for reading. I got in about 57 books (58 if you include the below-mentioned book of the year), which is a bit more than a book a week. This is on par with the previous year despite my not having a full-time job. But keep in mind that I also wrote a book or two this year, and there were some times when I was just burned out on reading or writing. I'll also note that I don't review magazines or periodicals that I read.

I'll cheat for the overall book of the year and point folks to Hyman Minsky's Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. Due to the timing of last year's "Book of the Year" recommendations, it just missed the cut, so I need to name it again. If you don't understand the term "Minsky moment", this book will explain it to you in spades. Runners up in the non-fiction category include: The Big Short, ECONned, and Chasing Stars. In particular, Chasing Stars is definitely worth a read if you want a good understanding of how important the environment is for nurturing performance.

On the fiction side, the best book I read this year was Perdido Street Station. I don't usually recommend a book when I'm unable to get past the first chapter the first time I tried it, but I'm glad I gave it a second (or was it third) try. Once I got into the plot China Mieville's writing drew me in and sucked me in as though I was watching a movie. It also helps that Mieville has a huge vocabulary, and is good at coining new words that let you understand what he means right away. If like me, you couldn't get past the first chapter of Perdido Street Station the first few times, try The Scar, his second novel. It's a bit of a slower start, but it too does provide the sense of wonder that science fiction and fantasy is supposed to give to us in spades. In general I had a bad year for fiction this year, and the only other book that I think is worth a read is The Windup Girl. Sure, the science is probably all wrong, but the characterization and correct depiction of South East Asia makes this book a great read.

Finally, I'll echo previous years' recommendation for Fables. If you haven't read it, you just don't now how good comic books can be as a narrative form.

Review: Sway

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior is a book by the same folks who wrote Click. If by now you're thinking that I should be burned out on Neuroscience/Irrationality books you are absolutely right. I'm going to have to stop reading books like these for a while.

Unlike Priceless, however, Sway is short and contains many little items that I wasn't aware of in other books. It does go over some old stuff, including the sunk cost fallacy, loss aversion, and other very human foibles. However, it also includes some new experiments I hadn't heard about. One particularly memorable experiment has an experimenter posing as a student taking a survey of hikers who have walked across one of two bridges: a swinging bridge, and a traditional stable one. After interviewing the hikers, the experimenter would give her phone number to the hiker. Two interesting results came out of the experiment: the majority of the hikers who called the experimenter came off the swinging bridge. The hypothesis was that the adrenaline rush and closeness to danger made the hikers much more attracted to the experimenter. Thus the experiment was repeated but this time the experimenter only approached the hikers after a few minutes so that the adrenaline rush would die down. Indeed, the number of calls dropped. The experiment was repeated with a male "surveyor", and he got no calls. (Presumably, all the hikers were male) This explains why men try to get women to see horror movies with them on dates.

What's even better is that the book does provide antidotes to the kind of fallacies that it introduces. A particularly important one is the role of a devil's advocate and introducing dissent into the picture. Fundamentally, an organization that has at least one dissenter, even if the dissenter was also or obviously wrong provides cover for other (possibly more clear-sighted) dissenters to raise their objections rather than following group-think. This is particularly important when stakes are high, and appears to make the majority think harder about their decisions and in some cases, mitigate some of the worst errors. This is an important result, because as we've seen in How the Mighty Fall, the first step on the road to failure is an inability to acknowledge that you could be wrong. Naming an official "devil's advocate" as part of the decision making process would go a long way towards mitigating or preventing such problems.

All in all, a short book, a quick read, but lots of little gems. Recommended.

Review: Priceless

I picked up Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) in the hopes of better understanding how pricing works, and how to tell if I've mis-priced my books, for instance. I was a little bit disappointed, despite the fact that the book overall, is a good read and has valid and interesting points.

Why? A lot of it is that I've read too many books recently referencing Kahneman and Tversky, to the point where Priceless just feels as though it's rehashing the story behind the excellent work of these two gentlemen. Looking at just this year's reading list, Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and to some extent ECONNed have all covered similar ground. Yes, I understand loss aversion, yes I understand anchoring, but no, you're not telling me how to really take advantage of it, except to the limited extent that I already do.

The book is composed of many short chapters, each of whom can be read independently in little bite-sized chunks. While this is great for those with a web-based attention spans, that makes the narrative lose coherence, as there is frequently no linkage between chapters. By itself that's not a fatal flaw, but the result was that I felt like I was getting a cliff's note version of several other books I had already read.

All in all, while I enjoyed the book, I find the other books previously mentioned were just a little fresher. I guess this book is the victim of its timing. Nevertheless, if you've not read any of those books mentioned above, I can recommend this one.

Review: Click - The Magic of Instant Connections

While on my recent trip through the Canadian Rockies, I found myself meeting one person after another and having long and interesting conversations with them. Halfway through the trip I had a chat with a friend of mine, saying, "Hey, I'm pretty good at meeting people." "It took you this long to figure that out?" shot back the reply. When I ran into Janice who had similar experiences in her life, the two of us wondered what it was that made it easy for some people to connect, and whether it was something that could be learned or taught.

Click is a book about such instant connections. It's a really short book: I got started on it this morning and it took no more than a couple of hours to read. The authors claim that instant connections are made more easily possible by five factors:

(from Zachary Burt's review of the same book)
Some of these are within your control. For instance, choosing to be vulnerable to someone else by revealing something about yourself is entirely your decision. To some extent having the environment be something conducive to a connection is also something of a choice: I deliberately chose to stay in youth hostels, for instance, because it put everyone staying in one into the same frame of mind. Other factors seem to be something nearly everyone does: we try to find similarities to one another, and obviously, it's hard to make a connection with someone who's not near you (Google understood this by always shuffling teams to be in close proximity to one another).

What's fascinating to me is the chapter on people who seem to be able to click with everyone all the time. The authors refer to these people as having "high self monitors." In other words, they are social chameleons, able to adapt themselves to any situation and person by expressing sympathy and empathy with them in ways that are appropriate to the social context. High end politicians and fashion models have these, and my PCP is also someone who is like this. Unfortunately, whether you can train yourself to be "high self monitoring" is not covered in the book. I think it would be very exciting to see if such abilities can be trained, given the evidence in the book about how well high self monitors do in their careers in terms of success and flexibility. For instance, high self monitors apparently also change jobs more frequently because their skills are more portable.

All in all, this short book is a quick read the packs a ton of information in a short space. The problem with this book is the lack of depth. In particular, one of the examples is a comparison survey between married couples who met with an "instant connection" and those who didn't. What's missing in that case is to see how many of these "instant connection" marriages failed versus the less dramatic connections. The authors apparently did not realize that there's a significant survivorship bias in the survey they studied.

Nevertheless, despite the flaws, this book is highly recommended. The chapter about how to get teams to gel so they can achieve high performance makes this book a must-have on any manager's bookshelf.

Review: Being Wrong

I really wanted to like Being Wrong, a book about that very human foible. The book opens with a description of the superior mirage and how it destroyed the career of Scottish explorer John Ross. With that opening I hoped for more exposition. I wanted to see a taxonomy of errors. Even better, I wanted a good explanation of how and why we frequently got things wrong, and whether there are ways of making sure that we can correct ourselves. I got the former but none of the latter.

The problem with error is that it's just like getting your homework wrong: there are infinite ways of doing so. Even Kathryn Schulz's book can only get so far as to explaining what sort of errors occur and how they occur. She explores illusions, wholesale destruction of a model of the world (e.g., Alan Greenspan's admittance that his model for how markets could self-regulate was wrong), and religious conversions. She even explores probably the most expensive common error: divorce. But it's all at a shallow level: there's no exploration of how Greenspan's error became the dominant paradigm for policy-making, for instance. She doesn't even discuss the folks who managed to predict which couples would divorce and which won't in her chapter on divorce.

Ultimately, the book praises human error for being a natural result of having minds that can quickly make decisions and have the power to imagine alternate realities, true or not. But that's hardly consolation for those of us who have to make decisions and live with the consequences. As such, I consider this book mostly a waste of time, even though there were individual pieces in the book which were interesting. The author simply wasn't able to cover the topic to my satisfaction.

Independent Cycle Touring is now Launched!

From Drop Box

As of right now, Independent Cycle Touring is now available for sale in both digital and paperback formats. The paperback book needs to go through a longish approval/proof process, but unlike a "real" publisher, I don't have to hold up the digital sales just because the paper process is slow. Note that the book was designed primarily for paper, and reads best in that format (lots of color photos, and I make full use of 2-page spreads). The digital version would be useful if you're carrying it on a Kindle when touring and just want to use it to refer to something.

I used to tell people that Raising the Bar was the best book on independent cycle touring ever written, but was usually mis-shelfed under "Business" in the bookstore. Well, this book won't be mis-shelved, but it won't be available at a bookstore either!

For a limited time (i.e., until the printed versions actually make it to me), and since I cannot guarantee delivery by Christmas time, all sales of the print edition will come with a digital edition right away, so you can enjoy the book while waiting for the paperback.

To purchase the book (or view the sample) visit Independent Cycle Touring.

Alls Well That Ends Badly

It was a gorgeous, beautiful day when Eva and I headed up Tunnel road to do th Berkeley Hills ride. It was a clear day, and the view at the Tunnel Road emergency preparedness exhibit was nothing short of stunning.

From BayArea

We stopped there to shed clothing and then proceeded to climb tunnel road at a good clip.

From BayArea

At the top, we turned left onto Grizzly Peak, and I stopped to put on gloves only to find that I must have dropped them on the climb. Not to worry, it was a beautiful day and I could do without gloves for a bit. Riding along Skyline, we had a stunning panoramic view of the Bay, including San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and many other sights. Very different from the Skyline we were used to in the South Bay. We even stopped for a picture:

From BayArea

I wanted to spend more time on Skyline so we eschewed South Park Drive to descend Golf Course road, then Shasta, and onto Wildcat Canyon. All this was in the shade so my hands were a bit cold by the time we got to inspiration point, but sticking my hands under my jersey did the trick.

Descending Wildcat Canyon, I discovered that the temperature had warmed up a bit. We then started up Bear Creek Road, and on the last of the three climbs met Greg Lutz, one of the 15 co-founders of AutoDesk. AutoDesk was one of the few completely boot-strapped startups, and I was flabbergasted when Greg mentioned that they had started with only $60,000 in funding, all from the co-founders.

Unfortunately, while climbing Pig Farm Hill, my rear derailleur hanger chose at that point to split itself into two and my chain went into the spokes (some my spokes are still kinked), and the derailleur was now hanging off the chain instead of doing its job off the derailleur hanger. There was no question that I could not continue the ride, but Eva at this point flagged down a passing SUV and we asked for a ride to the nearest BART station. The driver (a florist) was fortunately not in a hurry, helped us load both our bikes into his car and then drove us to the BART.

Eva and I then had a leisurely lunch and then drove back home. What a bust! I am not having any luck with bikes this year!

From BayArea

One More Cover

My friend Scarlet came up with what I think is the best front cover yet. Thanks Scarlet!

From Drop Box

Review: Look Me in the Eye

Look Me in the Eye is the second of two memoirs from Asperger's victims that Cynthia got me to read. Reading two books rather than just one was important because you get very different views from the two authors.

For instance, Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day goes into great detail into his cognitive processes when solving a problem, or memorizing a number. His description doesn't match at all my cognitive processes, so I could not relate to what he does. Robison's memoir, however, focuses on events and emotions, and those are very relate-able. In one passage, he describes his reaction to massive disasters:

I have what you might call "logical empahty" for people I don't know. That is, I can understand that it's a shame that those people died in the plane crash. And I understand they have families, and they are sad. But I don't have any physical reaction to the news. And there's no reason I should. I don't know them and the news has no effect on my life. Yes, it's sad, but the same day thousands of other people died from murder, accident, disease, natural disaster, and all manner of other causes. I feel I must put things like this in perspective and save my worry for things that truly matter.

As a logical thinker, I cannot help thinking... that people who exhibit dramatic reactions to bad news involving strangers are hypocrits... they don't seem very different from actors and actresses --- they are able to bust into tears on command, but does it really mean anything?

I wonder how many people feel that way, and whether that's a distinguishing feature of Asperger's. In some ways, the world would be a better place if people routinely reacted like that: terrorism would have less of a grip on people's imaginations and hence be less effective. But disaster relief would be much less forthcoming!

Later, as he gets better at dealing with people, he discovers that the intense focus which made him a genius at designing circuits, electronics, and mechanical devices faded as he became more and more as an extrovert:

As I recall my own development, I can see how I went through periods where my ability to focus inward and do complex calculations in my mind developed rapidly. When that happened, my ability to solve complex technical or mathematical problems increased, but I withdrew from other people. Later, there were periods where my ability to turn toward other people and the world increased by leaps and bounds. At those times, my intense powers of focused reasoning seemed to diminish...Some of my designs were true master pieces of economy and functionality...And today I don't understand them at all... Those designs were the fruit of a part of my mind that is no longer with me. I will never invent circuits like that again.

Is price of being "normal" being unable to be a genius? Yet I know lots of very smart people who are far from having Asperger's. The one thing that they have in common with Robison's description is that they have to be inward focus in order to be creative and to produce. I certainly find that even the presence of another person (unless it's another photographer intent on his own work) when I am engaged in photography makes it harder for me to concentrate and do creative work. Similarly, many writers call writing a lonely task. If that's the case, then perhaps Asperger's is just a more intensely focused version of what we find in routine geniuses.

The lessons in this book are important: Robison points out over and over again that his technical skill was not as important as the people skills that are valued in large organizations. He got less and less happy as he was moved away from creative engineering pursuits into management, until he eventually quit his job as a director of R&D to become a car mechanic. He laments over and over again that his inability to read people leaves him blind to opportunities that exist, as well as dangerous situations in the office. His description of how an executive took credit for his work reminds me very much of this recent thread on quora.

Finally his section on marriage and his relationship with his wife is hilarious. He calls his wife "Unit 2" for instance, since she was the middle of 3 sisters, and has a brilliantly logical view of mate selection that does eventually come to the conclusion that it's too complicated for him to figure out.

All in all, this book was engaging, entertaining, and I think should be on the "must-read" list for any engineer and their significant others. Recommended.

Even more covers

I'm on a cover roll here. My brother asked for more examples.

From Drop Box

From Drop Box

From Drop Box

From Drop Box

More Covers

Wow, I should have put up my candidate covers before. Here are 3 more covers. Comment away! People asked for brighter colors. So here's yellow:

From Drop Box

Then someone asked for brighter pictures with no clouds:

From Drop Box

From Drop Box

Enjoy!