Review: American Born Chinese

I read that American Born Chinese is so far the only graphic novel to have been nominated for the National Book Award. That blew my mind, since graphic novels rarely get that kind of recognition.

The book is short and a quick read (30 minutes or so). It starts off with 3 separate threads, the first of which I realized (with a groan) that was a mere retelling of the opening of the classic Journey to the West. The second tells the story of Jin Wang, who starts elementary school at an American school and despite having been in San Francisco all his life, is treated like a foreigner. My impression of American schools from popular media is that it's a traumatic experience, especially if you're a nerd, but being a short graphic novel means that Gene Yang only really touches on this at the most shallow of levels (like "I hear that Chinese people eat dogs."). The final thread tells of an American, Danny, whose Chinese cousin Chin-Kee visits and embarrasses him by being extremely Chinese.

The threads all tie together at the end, and we get a neat little resolution that turns the entire book into a nice little parable ("Learn to accept who you are"), but left me wondering why it became a National Book Award finalist. While it wasn't a waste of time, I'm not sure I gained any more insight to how the American Born Chinese experience is all that different. Mildly recommended.

Review: Norton Ghost

Windows Image backup does the right thing in the majority of cases --- if your replacement hard drive is as big or bigger than your old hard drive. Unfortunately, if you own an SSD and it dies, what you'll usually do is to drop in a HDD that's bigger, RMA that SSD, and then try to restore from backup from the Windows Image backup and then discover that it doesn't work.

The solution, according to my brother, is Symantec Norton Ghost 15.0 (1 PC). The price is fairly cheap, and it was easy to setup and test. Now that I have the SSD back from OCZ, I had a chance to test drive it.

The verdict: it works, mostly. What it does is to restore your drive from the image, but for whatever reason, it refused to restore the boot sector. Fortunately, I had the Windows Recovery Disk sitting around, and when I inserted that and told it to fix the boot sector it did so without any fuss. Result: one fast PC with SSD.

I hate recommending products like this (partially working products are lame), but there's really nothing else out there that will do the trick, so there you go. And yes, one more SSD RMA, and I'm just going to sell my SSD on Craigslist.

Startup Engineering Management Beta Program Closed

Due to overwhelming response to yesterday's post about Startup Engineering Management, I have all the beta-readers I need for now. (And yes, the feedback has been coming in, and I'm very grateful for everyone who's sent me e-mail)

Needless to say, I'm inspired by the response and will proceed with the project. Thanks to everyone who has participated. I may reopen the program later as rewrites and revisions warrant.

I know the web page originally said June 18th was when I would close the beta, but when beta-signups got to the point where they were almost overwhelming I had to change the plan. I honestly had no idea I'd get this much response.

Independent Cycle Touring presentations

Independent Cycle Touring, in some ways, is the book that I spent 18 years cycling in order to learn how to write. As a cycle touring book, it includes everything I've learned, but as a writer, I honestly have no idea how to sell the book, other than a traditional book tour. Unfortunately, traditional book stores attract literary types, not outdoor types. Bike shops, on the other hand, usually attract racer-wannabes, rather than tourists.

One of my favorite outdoor stores is REI. I've been an REI member since 1992, before my very first bike tour, when I bought tents, sleeping bags, and to the bemusement of my parents, started to learn how to pitch and strike these fancy high-tech American tents in our front-yard. I am very pleased to announce that I've arranged with REI to tour most of their Bay Area stores and give a presentation about my recent adventures in Europe. This will not be a rehash of material already in the book, and is timed so that I would be back from a trip through the French and Swiss alps and will (hopefully) have fresh pictures to share.

If you're an REI fan and live in the Bay Area, mark your calendars for the appropriate stores. Registering for the talk/presentation is free. Thank you very much to Polly from REI for helping me organize this. A full calendar of events will be posted on the book's Facebook page.

Independent Cycle Touring in Europe:

Imagine pedaling through quaint mountain hamlets in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, past fields of wildflowers in Germany’s Black Forest, along the shores of lovely lakes near Salzburg in Austria, or high above the Mediterranean in the French Pyrenees… With its diverse landscapes, vast network of roads and cycle paths, and bike-friendly accommodations, Europe is a fantastic cycling destination. Tonight, independent cyclist and guidebook author Piaw Na will share his expertise on planning bike tours in Switzerland, France, Austria, Germany, Italy, England, and Scotland. Piaw will cover the nuts and bolts of organizing an independent tour, including route-planning, seasonal considerations, lightweight gear, training, transporting bikes on planes/public transit, navigation tools, accommodations, and more. Following the program, he’ll sign copies of his new how-to guidebook, Independent Cycle Touring: Exploring the World by Bicycle. If you register for this free presentation at www.rei.com/stores, we will hold a seat for you until the scheduled start time. Seating may be available at the door, even if registration is closed.

7 pm–8:30 pm, Tuesday, August 2 at REI Marina

7 pm–8:30 pm, Wednesday, August 3 at REI San Carlos

7 pm–8:30 pm, Tuesday, August 30 at REI Berkeley

7 pm–8:30 pm, Tuesday, September 13 at REI Fremont

7 pm–8:30 pm, Wednesday, September 14 at REI San Francisco

7 pm–8:30 pm, Monday, September 19 at REI Saratoga

7 pm–8:30 pm, Thursday, September 29 at REI Mountain View

Beta Test My Next Book!

My next book has reached a critical juncture. It's called Startup Engineering Management, and you can read all about it (including seeing a free sample) at the above link. At this point, all the content is mostly there (though if I'm missing content please let me know about it!). While I've tried to get proof-readers by giving free copies away, that's not worked very well --- I've learned that people who get something for free don't attach very much value to it. So what I've decided to do is to offer the advanced reader copy at a massive discount. At $4/copy, there's not much room to cut the price further, and you're not out very much money if you dislike the book. I'm offering this for a limited time, and will decide whether or not to put more work into the book (more content, table of contents, index, cover) if the response is positive. If you provide feedback that affects the book substantially, I'll give you a free copy of the final book. If you provide any feedback at all, you'll get to upgrade to the final version at a substantial discount.

I've decided not to use Kickstarter this time. Even though I'm a fan of the site, it's not like I'm going to need a ton of money to finish off the book. The question is whether the book has an audience at all.

Because the book is being offered at such a discount (albeit in rough form --- I've found several grammatical sentence agreement issues already even on a rough read-through, but will hold off fixing it until I figure out whether the book will sell), I am requiring that you disclose your e-mail address so I can add you to a mailing list for reader surveys, etc. I won't sell the mailing list or spam you, I just want honest, direct feedback, and I can't ask for it if I don't have your e-mail address.

With that, go ahead and visit the book's web-site, and if you like what you see, buy!

Review: Feed

Feed is the second novel in my current Hugo Nominees reading list. It's a surprising good novel, even though the subject matter was for me a turnoff.

First, it's a Zombie novel. I feel like Zombies have been way over-exposed in the media. Even worse, one of the characters is named Shaun, as in Shaun of the Dead, a movie that didn't do anything whatsoever for me, and felt really silly. Third, the main narrative voice is a dead-panned cynical young journalist stereotype. Veronica Mars did that really well, but Mira Grant didn't do quite so well.

Then there's the world. Grant does a little better than her characters in constructing a post Zombie-apocalypse world. Many things are well thought out, including frequent blood tests, the CDC's improved status in that universe, the need for licensed journalists to carry firearms, and varying degrees of false positives on testing kits. There are several places where it's obvious that Grant, like many science fiction authors, doesn't actually have a good grasp of science, technology, or even marketing, but this is forgivable: it's quite obvious from the start that Grant's writing a throwaway airplane read, not literary fiction.

The plot involves a very close brother-sister pair who blog for a living and get selected to follow along a presidential hopeful in the campaign of 2040. Then there's a zombie outbreak that turns out not to be an accident but an active act of terrorism. The journalists investigate the secret and figure out who the bad guys are. Then they pull a series of bone-headed-stupid moves that ends in tear-jerker scenes that by no rights should have been necessary. But if you read it with your brain turned off it's not such a bad book.

While this novel would make for a great airplane novel, or a gift for your Zombie-obsessed nephew, I don't see it as a serious contender for the Hugo. If the Hugo was nominated by a committee I would say the committee would need its head examined. If SF fans end up voting for this novel and it wins over say, The Hundred Thousand Kingsdoms, then it would be a travesty. At $9.99, there's probably cheaper beach reads for your summer vacation. Nevertheless, it's so far more readable than the other two nominees that I have left to read.

Review: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

This is part of a series of reviews for the Hugo awards. One of the other novels, Cryoburn, was already reviewed and found wanting, so I was apprehensive about having to read novels I wouldn't necessarily like.

Well, the first, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms blew me away. It's not science fiction; it's fantasy, but not the elfy-welfy fantasy that populates the bookstores nowadays. It's bold and imaginative in a way I haven't seen for a while. If more novels were like this the world would be a better place.

The protagonist of the story, Yveine, is called away from the "uncivilized" kingdom she rules to Sky, the center of all the hundred thousand kingdoms. There, she learns that she's to be designated an Heir to the Kingdoms. Except that there are already 2 other Heirs, and they're out for blood.

That sounds very mundane. But this is not a human empire. It's a theocracy enforced by the reality of gods. Sky's inhabitants control the very gods themselves, and the politics and possibilities are all tied to the war between the gods that led to this situation and we get shown drip by drip how the situation both corrupts the gods and how this power in turn corrupts humans.

If that was the only theme in this novel it would have been enough. N.K. Jemisin works in feminism, atheism, the proper use of power, and love in this novel. There's a reveal nearly every other page, and little of it is predictable, even though every reveal makes sense as a piece of the greater puzzle. Despite this being a long book (432 pages in the dead-tree edition), it doesn't feel like as the plot and action moves at a breathless pace. In a brilliant move by the publisher, Orbit, the Kindle Edition is $2.99. At that price, forget about the library and just buy it. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I now look forward to reading the rest of the Hugo nominees if they are of similar quality.

My Hugo Votes

Best Short Story
Ponies, by Kij Johnson. The shortest of the lot, and a brilliant portrayal of children's cruelty to one another.
Won the Nebula, and deserves a Hugo.
Best Novella
The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window, by Rachel Swirsky. A great opening, a good story. Not quite science fiction, but good enough. I'd vote for The Lifecycle of Software Objects as a runner up.
Best Novelette
Plus or Minus by James Patrick Kelly. Close one between this and Emperor of Mars by Allen Steele. I tipped Kelly's story instead because I think it reflects a good sensibility about genetic engineering: you might eventually be able to engineer your kids, but you still won't be able to get them to do what you wished them to do.

Novels and Graphics Novels will get reviewed separately. Needless to say, all these stories come recommended, especially since I'm breaking my rules about reviewing short stories.

First Impressions: Garmin Edge 800

My Garmin GPS 76CSx works as well today as it did when I got it years ago. The Achille's heel of the product, however, is the bike mount. Despite mine and Pardo's best efforts, the mounting was arcane, and unreliable. On rough roads, the GPS unit would work itself loose.

So when the Garmin Edge 800 GPS-Enabled Cycling Computer showed up as an item eligible for this weekend's promotional sale for 15% off, I jumped at it. Note that just as with the Edge 500, it's cheaper to buy the unit separately from the other items in it, even if you want everything in the bundle. In my cases, I already had the cadence unit and HRM strap, so it made no sense to buy the bundle. I also ordered the Garmin City Navigator Europe NT for Detailed Maps of Eastern and Western Europe (DVD). The DVD is useful for people planning routes, but if all you plan to do is Dynamic Routing, you can buy the chip for slightly less hassle. If you're not a Windows user, I'm not sure how useful the DVD would be.

The unit weighs in at 98g, 40g more than the Edge 500's 58g. Being a color display, the battery life is also reduced, at 15g. Some friends described the UI as being arcane, but coming from the 76CSx and the Edge I found it intuitive, though I found the touch screen UI a little bit balky. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it prevents accidental shifts in display, etc. The screen isn't as visible in bright sunlight as the Edge 500, but you can turn up the brightness, though with a corresponding decrease in battery life. Since the battery itself is bigger, it takes longer than the Edge 500 to charge up, but 2 hours seemed to do the trick from 40%. The Find City feature seems easy to find, and of course, has the "Spell City" option which I love, which never made it into the GPS 76CSx.

What I wasn't prepared for, however, was that Garmin majorly upgraded the connectivity with the PC. My Edge 500 sometimes took 10 minutes to download all the data to the PC. With the Edge 800, the download is nearly instantaneous. This was a pleasant surprise and very welcome, since I'd gotten used to the setting the synchronization window off to another display while I did other stuff or went for a cup of coffee.

Since I haven't bothered with US maps yet, I can't say how well routing works. Needless to say, Garmin's units at their worst outperform Google Map's bicycle routing any day, especially if you reprogram the GPS unit. The key for me is whether the unit would corrupt its own boot sector in the middle of the trip like the Edge 705 is the big question that I hope to find out during this year's tour.

In short, if you're an Independent Cycle Tourist, the Edge 800 is a no brainer compared to the Edge 500. Recommended.

Review: The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queen's Window

The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queen's Window is the fourth of my Hugo Voting Packet reads. This is the best of the bunch that I've read so far, with themes touching on magic, betrayal, love, and the justification of coercion.

A woman shaman's betrayed while serving her people and her soul placed into a magical totem for re-summoning. Her subsequent summonings, responses, and view of a fantasy history grants us the views of a very flawed narrator and her response to the world around us. The narrator is reliable but unflinching in who she is and what she is about, and overall this is a very entertaining read. The ending's a bit clichéd, but that's unimportant to the story. Highly recommended.

Review: The Sultan of the Clouds

Continuing on my Hugo Voting Package, next up is The Sultan of the Clouds. Geoffrey Landis is an honest to goodness scientist, and he gets all the science rights in this one. How would you construct a city in Venus, the "hell planet"? Could you terraform Venus? What would be the result? Landis answers all these questions in this novella while giving us an interesting society.

The big science fiction tropes here are cloud cities, sky pilots, and a damsel in distress. The story left me wanting more, and in a good way. Recommended. (The link points you to a free PDF, kindly posted by Asimov's Science Fiction)

Review: Troika

I'm slowly working through the Hugo Voting packet. Alastair Reynold's Troika was next in the pipe. If you've read any of Reynold's previous stories you'll be impressed. (I recommend starting with Revelation Space)

Troika is set in a fictional Soviet Union, one very different from the one which we know now. An obviously alien object has been injected into the solar system on a wildly eccentric orbit, and a manned expedition has been sent to explore and investigate it. The results of the expedition sends one of the cosmonauts mad, and we see another one escape to try to tell his story to a dis-credited astronomer.

The plot and story is interesting, but the characters are not, and the conclusion feels empty. Upon noting that the piece first showed up in Godlike Machines, I realize that the problem is that Reynolds was writing to spec. Definitely not one of his best works. Not recommended.

Review: The Lifecycle of Software Objects

I don't usually review works shorter than a novel, but this year's Hugo voting package included Ted Chiang's The Lifecycle of Software Objects. I reviewed Chiang's earlier collection Stories of your life and raved about it.

The novella is about digital entities (digents). It details a startup's creations of them as pets (tomagochis), the relationships between the trainers, the pets, and each other, and the eventually failure of the host companies and what happens to the digents.

This is a Ted Chiang story, so all the angles behind the technology are well thought out. The technology involved, the use of open source technology to help speed up adoption and development are all there. There's a very mild romance that leads nowhere (come to think of it, Chiang's stories rarely have any romance at all), but for me, the ending kind of falls flat. You expect a climax and resolution but instead you get a fade-away.

Nevertheless, even medicore Ted Chiang is still very good fiction, so I'll recommend this novella.

Review: Something Ventured

I got a chance to see Something Ventured as part of UC Berkeley's alumni events. It's a movie about the early days of the venture capital industry. One of the executive producers was Paul Holland, who was at Pure Software the same time I was and then became a venture capitalist.

Part of the story is well known to many: the defection of the traitorous eight from Shockley Labs (because Shockley was hell to work for), and then the start of Intel when Bob Noyce was denied his promotion by Fairchild Semiconductor. When I tell entrepreneurs that they should strive for a culture that promotes from within, I often remind them that their engineers do have a choice to work for other companies or start their own thing, and denying good people promotion opportunities is a good way to create highly motivated competitors, and lose good engineers. This movie shows how that was a driver even in the early days of Silicon Valley.

The stars of the show are of course the venture capitalists. The producers and directors had access to legendary VCs: Don Valentine, Arthur Rock, Tom Perkins, and some legends of the early days of Silicon Valley, Mike Markula, who was Apple's second CEO, Noland Bushnell co-founder of Atari. The most poignant story came from Sandy Lerner, who was pushed out of the company she co-founded, Cisco. The movie shows the story from both Lerner's side and from the perspective of the VCs, and entrepreneurs should definitely find a way to see this movie to see why Facebook, for instance, was structured the way it is.

Holland says that he had this movie made as an archive of what it was like in the early days of venture capital, and to a large extent it has succeeded. It's definitely made the multi-billionaires accessible and personal in a way no other history of the valley has done. Holland points out that this movie has been very well received largely because unlike other documentaries of the current era, you're unlikely to walk out of the movie pissed off and ready to fight "the man."

The movie is unlikely to open at a movie theater near you, but since Holland knows Reed Hastings of Netflix, you're likely to be able to put it on your Netflix queue in the near future. I recommend that you do so if you have any interest in Silicon Valley history.

My Backup/Restore Nightmare

Ok, we've established that Solid State Drives fail frequently. But the computer now feels slow without solid state drives, so now we have to learn how to deal with it. Fortunately, unless you're Google, you can't afford terabytes of SSD storage anyway, so all you have is your OS and your key applications.

On my desktop, I have a 1.5TB data drive, and attached to that a 1.5TB external USB drive to store image backups. Backups go to the external drive every night using the Image Backup Utility. When my OCZ Vertex failed, I restored from this to my old Western Digital 500GB drive just fine. It worked like a champ with one glitch: rather than restoring to the full 500GB partition, it restored to a 107GB partition, just as though I was on my SSD. At first I didn't like it and then I realized that this was pretty smart: it ensures that I can restore to the 107GB SSD when it comes back from RMA.

OK, so the RMA returns, and I install it onto my PC. I insert the Windows Recovery Disk, I try a restore from image and I get an error code (0x80042412) with 4 suggestions as to what could be wrong, including a reference to the Windows Recovery Environment. After trying everything to no avail, I finally google the error code and discover that it's because I'm restoring to a 120GB disk from a 500GB disk, even though the 500GB disk had only a 100GB partition.

Fortunately, Microsoft did the right thing and let me rollback the image back to the night before the OCZ Vertex crashed, which meant that I could restore my state roughly to where I was 10 days ago. But what about my saved data files? Never mind, I still have the 500GB Western Digital, so I cannibalized my external USB enclosure and stuck it in. Guess what, Windows takes the disk offline because it matches the diskid on my C drive!

I dig into the Windows DiskPart utility and learn to online the disk. Then I bring back that drive online and can copy my data over. The entire process took well over 3-4 hours, and I'm going to recharge my power screwdriver from all the use screwing and unscrewing hard drive screws.

My brother claims that Symantec Norton Ghost 15.0 (1 PC) will do the right thing and let me restore to a smaller drive from a bigger one, so the next time my OCZ Vertex dies, that's what I'll do.

Definitely not something I planned to do this afternoon!

Review: OCZ Vertex 2 SSD

Roberto Peon and Pengtoh had both raved about their SSDs, so when a good deal came up on the OCZ Technology 120 GB Vertex 2 Series SATA II 3.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD3-2VTX120G, I jumped on it. 120GB is enough to install most programs, and still have enough space for the occasional video game, as long as you don't try to get more than one or two big games installed at a time.

The machine, once everything was installed boots fast. 20s boot times were not uncommon, and once you logged in, the browser would just open up in a snap. I didn't realize how quickly I'd gotten used to how fast it booted until my SSD failed last week! Fortunately, I had weekly image backups on Windows on Sundays, and the machine crashed on Monday morning. The image restore went smoothly, unfortunately, the Dropbox process got confused between drive reassignments and duplicated everything I had on Dropbox. I'm untangling the results from that disaster. Needless to say, I cannot recommend Dropbox as a back up solution since if you screw something up on one machine, you get screwed everywhere. Fortunately, Dropbox does let you retrieve previous versions of a file.

Once I figured out that it was my SSD that was having the problem, I went through OCZ's RMA process. What a disaster. It took two days for OCZ to get back to me with an RMA number. Then it took a day for them to receive the disk. Then another 2 days for them to ship me one, and I finally got my new disk back today. Installing the replacement SSD was problematic, since it shipped unformatted. As a result, I've had to make a new windows install, and then recover that way.

The net net: it took 10 days, but my machine is finally fast again. Would I do the SSD upgrade? Yes. Would I buy the same SSD? No. I'm more likely to get an Intel 320 Series 120 GB SATA 3.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid-State Drive - Retail Box SSDSA2CW120G3B5 for my laptop. My experience with OCZ has definitely soured me on any more of their products, benchmarks not withstanding.

Review: Pegasus

I rarely write negative reviews of books because I usually give up reading them before getting to the end. Unfortunately, Pegasus is one of the ones that fooled me into thinking there might be something worth reading. I remember liking previous McKinley novels such as The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown.

Pegasus is ostensibly a story about a girl and her horse. Uh, Pegasus. Pegasi are an intelligent group of beings that have formed an alliance with the humans against incursions of more belligerent creatures. Traditionally, the rulers of both races have been bonded at a young age as one of the terms of the alliance. Sylvi, the heroine of the story, however, finds that at her bonding she can actually talk to her Pegasus. This is unprecedented and leads to her visiting the Pegasi in their homeland, despite opposition from the magicians who fear that their prior jobs of interpretation between the two races will be at risk.

That's it. That's the entire plot. Nothing happens while all this exposition takes place. Worse, the story ends at a cliffhanger as the real story begins. Why all this couldn't be summarized in a prologue I don't understand. The positive reviews on Amazon discuss the world-building, but I don't see any world-building in the story: there's no ecology of the pegasi, since if they were on the verge of being driven extinct how could they have existed in the first place? Most of what we see has to be taken on faith. We don't even see why there's a dependence between humans and Pegasi.

All in all, I wrote this review to warn you away from reading this book. Highly not recommended.

Culture

I recently ran across a couple of articles about Google. The first was an interview with one of Jaiku's co-founders. The second was an assertion that Google needs to hire people other than engineers. Then there's the common assertion that big companies (such as Google) don't innovate enough, and finally there's the phenomenon that I've always wondered about, which was that Microsoft at its height of influence had the entire valley in fear, while startups in the valley today (and elsewhere) seem to thumb their noses at Google with impunity. One startup I talked to said to me, "Google is incapable of moving fast enough to compete with us even if they wanted to." In this blog post, I'm going to attempt to tie together all of these threads and make them coherent. Feedback, of course is always welcome.

First, it's a myth that big companies do not innovate. One of my favorite books on the topic, How the Mighty Fall, shows that even failing large companies throw more money at innovation, not less. Google's continuing to innovate on multiple fronts in distributed computing, self-driving cars, image processing, and countless other areas that has computer science faculty leaving their tenured jobs to join Google. In fact, if there's one thing that Google is really good at, it's the ability to bring computer science research from academia and make it real in products for millions of people. Google voice actions, for instance, required gobs of data, statistical machine learning, and fast servers to do what it does. The need to do so is now driving Apple to build large data centers despite Apple's notable failure at network and cloud computing. This is an area that Google has a decisive advantage and it must drive Apple nuts. Similarly, Google navigation on the phone requires a huge investment in cars that can crawl the world's streets and send back imagery and image data, coupled with investments in smart routing algorithms, not to mention the ability to stitch together all that data and turn it into maps. I have no doubt that further innovation on the front of real time data processing will enable Google to stay way ahead of the competition.

Then where does Google fail? I think it's not instructive to look at outright failures here, but to look at how Google's approach is completely different from the competition. The most popular feature of Facebook is photos. If you think about Facebook as a photo site with a few other features I think you'll not be far wrong. Why is Facebook photos so popular? It's got crap resolution, not that great a user interface, and is uninteresting. The answer as detailed in The Facebook Effect is tagging. If you look at the act of tagging, there's no real computer science involved: the amount of image processing required is minimal, since the user is the one providing the information about where the faces are. The Google answer here is to spend millions acquiring Neven Vision and then to integrate it into PicasaWeb and Picasa. Not only was this expensive and late (as compared to merely copying Facebook's hacky Face tagging feature), it proved to be nearly useless. Early versions confused people's faces enough that you couldn't trust it to run without a verification (even Google today doesn't let you do this). Further more, the "tagging" didn't copying another important Facebook feature: that of notifying your friends that they were tagged in a photo. Since all that data is locked away in the privacy of one person's account, you couldn't share, improve, and get better. And nobody used the feature. Here's the thing: the guy who did the tagging feature at Facebook probably got lots of recognition for it. Even if some smart engineer decided to simply copy Facebook's feature at Google, it would be very likely that he would be blocked at launch, or that he would simply not be recognized for doing this important work! The concept that a smart hack could be far more important than a computer science breakthrough does not exist at Google!

Once you realize this, several things fall into place. For instance, it explains why PicasaWeb's storage pricing in the early days was insane (it was something like $20 for 6GB per year). While sites like SmugMug, etc., could help defray storage costs by selling photos and revenue sharing with users, copying that feature would not have been an important computer science breakthrough, so Google never did it. While other sites made photographers happy by allowing them to change the background of their photos, Google never did it --- you wouldn't get recognized for doing this. Letting Picasa do something easily useful like stitching together photos automatically wasn't important, because that was a solved problem. This explains why gtags is still a 20% project despite a large number of engineers inside Google depending on it for productivity --- there's insufficient computer science content there for it to get engineers behind it. An alternative project with much more computer science content (and requiring correspondingly much greater resources) was funded and staffed instead.

Orkut, for instance, never got sufficient engineering resources behind the property despite the founders clearly saying that it was an important product for similar reasons. And of course, startups thumb their nose at Google because while most startups do not have the resources to put together GFS, Bigtable, or a major computer science breakthrough, they mostly have no problem coming up with and implementing great applications such as FourSquare (no computer science there), Farmville, or even finding alternate revenue sources for their great photo site. Google, by contrast, isn't hungry enough for that, and at this point, even if Larry Page wanted to change Google's culture to make it capable of recognizing such contributions as being important, there would be too much resistance from the upper ranks of the engineering organization that he probably could not make it happen.

This shows how important corporate culture is to the kind of projects Google should and should not undertake, and my guess is this is why Paul Buchheit made the statement that Google will land on the moon before it beats Facebook. Google certainly has all the engineering and product capability to do social products. Its missing the cultural capability, and that's what matters in this race.

Review: Pump Six and Other Stories

Pump Six and Other Stories is Paolo Bacigalupi's collection of short stories. You can buy a DRM-free ebook version from Baen's Webscription website. I reviewed Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl last year, just before it won the Nebula Award for best novel of the year.

The stories in this collection are varied: two of them, The Calorie Man and Yellow Card Man come from the same world as The Windup Girl. Many of the stories are dystopian, covering mankind's recovery from or descent into a darker age, with either technology being lost, or being slowly doled back to humanity as it "matures." Conflicts over water, food, and loss of knowledge are common themes. No stories come from the "space flight meet aliens" genre of science fiction.

One unusual story, The People of Sand and Slag, depicts a world of nano-technology made real, where humanity gains freedom from the ecosystem and body plans the evolution provided us. The result is not pretty, and in this case I think Bacigalupi's vision is too pessimistic (something that's an unusual accusation from me!). The title story, Pump Six by contrast drags us into a world very similar to that of Idiocracy, where giant sewer systems built by corporations of years past can no longer be repaired because such corporations built themselves out of business. As someone very familiar with bit-rot, I can assure you that we are not at risk of something like this ever happening.

Two stories cover the nature of childbirth. Pop Squad postulates that in a world of immortality, the only way to prevent overpopulation would be to tie the immortality to sterility. The consequences as depicted in the story seems false though. Small Offerings takes us into a world in which environmental toxins are so rampant that unusual measures have to be taken for normal reproduction.

There's only one story that's not science fiction. Softer is a character study about a murderer about to turn into a serial killer. It's also by far the weakest story of the collection.

All the stories are well written with good characters, though as pointed out above, the postulates are sometimes suspect, and perhaps the consequences as well. As with The Windup Girl, use of non-English languages, etc., is done to perfection. All in all, while not as good a read as The Windup Girl, this collection is still recommended.

Review: Nurture Shock

Someone suggested that I read NurtureShock after reading my review of Brain Rules for Baby. Coming in right after Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, this turned out to be excellent timing.

For instance, if you read Quora or other internet forums, it's filled with whining about being raised in such a hot house environment. The section on Praise explains why (contrary to the whiners) Asia isn't filled with suicidal overachievers:

the moms were told their child's actual raw score and were told a lie---that this score represented a below average result... The American mothers carefully avoided making negative comments. They remained fairly upbeat and positive with their child. The majority of the minutese weree spent talking about something other than the testing at hand, such as what they might have for dinner. But the Chinese children were likely to hear, "You didn't concentrate when doing it," and "Let's look over your test." The majority of the break was spent discussing the test and its importance. After the break, the Chinese kids' scores on the second test jumped 33 percent, more than twice the gain of the Americans. The trade-off here would seem to be that Chinese mothers acted harsh or cruel... While their words were firm, the Chinese mothers actually smiled and hugged their children every bit as much as the American mothers (and were no more likely to frown or raise their voices).

(Chua, in her book leaves out any reference to this literature.)
What about Chua's strict rules, like no sleepovers, etc? Bronson and Merryman dig a little further, and finds a couple of researchers, Drs. Nancy Darling and Linda Caldwell. Surprisingly enough, permissive parenting is actually less effective than strict, disciplinarian parenting.

Darling found that permissive parents don't actually learn more about their child's lives. "Kids who go wild and get in trouble mostly have parents who don't set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do. But the kids take the lack of a rules as a sign their parents don't actually care---that their parent doesn't really want this job of being the parent."l... Pushing a teen into rebellion by having too many rules was a sort of statistical myth.

As with Brain Rules, the book's peppered with references to actual research and real studies about what's going on. A lot of it is counter intuitive. For instance, the section on childhood obesity pins the phenomenon neither on food/nutrition or exercise. The section on teaching self-control covers Tools of the Mind, a fascinating program for kids to gain control over their cognitive abilities, leading to incredible improvements in behavior as well as performance in school. Other chapters cover racism, lying, and IQ testing and its failures. One busts the stereotype that only childs are less socially capable than children with siblings. The book rounds off with research on how to speed up language skills in infants.

This is all fascinating stuff, and much of it is actionable. I consider it a good companion to Brain Rules, and a great follow up to Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Highly recommended.

Review: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

After all that mess in the media about The Tiger Mom Controversy, I didn't expect Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother to be fun to read but it was a lot of fun. Chua can definitely write with sarcasm and wit, and some of her antics as a mother are to be read to be believed.

Funny thing is, while I agree with her stance on discipline and learning (Western-style education, for instance, is not very good at getting good enough at basic skills so that higher level skills can build upon them), I'm the kind of person who finds classical music pretentious and silly, so I find it amusing that she would devote so much of her energy (and her daughters' energies) to classical music and then call it "traditional", given that none of her choices of instruments would ever be a traditional Chinese instrument. She even discusses her distaste for Chinese musical traditions in the book! Then, even though she only speaks Fujian (she calls it Hokkien, because she doesn't even know Mandarin, let alone pinyin), she has her daughters learn Mandarin while celebrating their Jewish heritages with Bar Mitzahs.

One particularly poignant story has her rejecting her daughters' birthday cards as not being well made enough. She definitely sent her message to her daughters on that one, but I'm not sure it reflects a lot of self-awareness as a person.

I am amazed by the amount of energy Chua has in bringing up her children. She has two daughters practicing 2-3 hours of music a day, in addition to scoring straight As. She stays on top of everything, and does an insane amount of driving and spends huge amounts of money on lessons, travel, and so on and so forth. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have the energy to do so.

Irregardless, I think the book was light fun reading and very entertaining. Chua's generated a lot of controversy out of the book, and claims she was misquoted (I don't think so, by the way), but as long as you have a sense of humor and an active sarcasm detector when you read this book, you'll find it enjoyable. Recommended as light airplane reading.

Mt Tam Wilflower Hike

 

Yoyo Zhou, Tracy Ng, and I got to the Mountain Inn trailhead at 8:40am, and got started almost right away on the hike. The goal for me was to do an extra long hike on what was promised to be a beautiful spring day, 80F weather, and long clear views. Those clear views became apparent almost right away.

From Mt Tam State Park May 2011

The hope was to see some Spring wildflowers. I don't know if we were too early or too late, but the hoped for wild expanses of flowers along hillsides did not materialize. We did see lots of flowers here and there in the shade and in the trees though.

From Mt Tam State Park May 2011

From Mt Tam State Park May 2011

The hope was to do the entirety of the Dipsea trail, but because of the heavy rains, mudslides had washed out part of the trail, and wiped out an entire bridge, forcing us to detour alongside a road in places, which did not look like it was in any better a shape.

From Mt Tam State Park May 2011

I had not done the southern section of the Dipsea trail before, and I'm glad I finally got around to it. We had glorious views of San Francisco and the Environment:

From Mt Tam State Park May 2011

From Mt Tam State Park May 2011

Finally, as we approached Stintson beach, we got fields of poppies and wildflowers as promised.

From Mt Tam State Park May 2011

Returning via the Matt Davis trail, we got shaded hiking through most of the climb, and then emerged into the hills once again for long views of the bay, and a couple of rangers toting a chainsaw:

From Mt Tam State Park May 2011

The southern portion of the Matt Davis trail yielded beautiful views of Oakland, Angel Island, and Treasure Island. I'd never seen this section either, and the number of sailboats dotting the Bay gladdened my heart.

From Mt Tam State Park May 2011

By the time we got back to the car, my Garmin read 15.9miles while Yoyo's read 16.1 miles. I had auto-stop on and he didn't, and I think that made the difference. A gorgeous hike with the same amount of distance as half dome and slightly less elevation gain but much better scenery. Highly recommended.

Mad Men Season 4

At 13 episodes a season, Mad Men manages to keep the quality of its writing high, and Mad Men: Season Four was not an exception. What's special about the series is that each episode jumps forward by months, so you have to fill in pieces yourself. At this point, the characters are all fleshed out, even the unlikeable ones, and it becomes quite possible to predict who will do what.

I thought at the end of Season 3 that the show had gotten into a rut. Season 4 gets out of it, and depicts quite nicely the problems of a startup. Not everything goes well, but one would not expect it to.

One interesting note is that this series illustrates clearly that Power is the defining context for relationships and philandering. Good stuff.

Review: The Immigrants

The Immigrants is a novel set in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area. For some reason, San Francisco has yet to have its Raymond Chandler, (Wallace Stegner's amazing Angle of Repose notwithstanding) and unfortunately, Howard Fast isn't all that great a writer.

However, I found the book itself compelling reading. It follows the story of Dan Lavette, who as a young man was orphaned by the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. While he lots his parents, he made a ton of money with the boat his father left him, ferrying people to and from Oakland during and after the days of the disaster. With this, he expanded his fishing fleet, and eventually became a transportation tycoon, along the way picking up a beautiful wife, a mistress, business partners, friends, and enemies. The book ends right after the 1929 Great Depression started, granting a view through the broad sweep of history that the book encompasses. This was a time of history when cutters gave way to powerboats, when railroads were the principal mode of transportation. World War I and its after-effects were widely felt, and inflation became widespread.

What kept me reading was that the author clearly knew the San Francisco Bay Area really well. We get exposed to San Mateo, Menlo Park, Sonoma County, and the environment all during a period of time when $12/day was a princely sum. We get a good view of how hard it was to be a Chinese immigrant during that era. We get to see the prohibition and some of its effects. The weakest part of the novel are the characters. The protagonist, Dan Lavette, is barely fleshed out. His relationship with his estranged wife is described in a few bare sentences, so one is left having to make the leap from the passionate courtship to the estranged marriage with no way to connect the dots. Even the author's attempt to create a non-stereotyped Chinese woman is still weakened by his need to bend everything to his plot, resulting in a barely believable thing for an otherwise strong willed character to do. Ultimately, one sees Lavette as a "Mary Sue" character, one who right until the edge of the Depression, makes all the right decisions with the benefit of hindsight.

If you want literature, read Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. Even for an airplane novel, The Immigrants is fun enough, but leaves one feeling empty. I'm unlikely to bother looking at the rest of the 6 book series.

Review: Ex Machina Volumes 1-6

Ex Machina is a comic book about a superhero who talks to machines. Sounds like an interesting, if not all that exciting hook. Well, it turns out that he wasn't a terribly competent superhero, and after several years of being treated like a vigilante, he gives up and runs for Mayor of New York City.

The series starts with Mayor Mitchell Hundred having won the election and having to deal with the usual crisis of running a big city. We get introductions to his side-kicks and assistants via flashbacks, which means that we get his origin story bit by bit, as well as gradual exposure to his past, but the characters themselves have already lived through all the kooky capers that come with being a caped crusader. Well, he doesn't wear a cape, but the political cartoonists draw him with one.

The politics in the story is interesting, and of course, Mayor Hundred ran as an independent (the story doesn't get into his campaign), so he gets to pissed off both liberals and conservatives with his political stances and decisions. As of Vol. 6: Power Down, we still only have a hint as to where his powers come from, but we've at this point explored gay marriage, death penalties, September 11th, and other facets of politics in a generally liberal city. Probably the most unrealistic part of the entire series is the idea that a Civil Engineer might ever want to and succeed in politics.

All in all, an excellent series from what I've read so far. I guess I'll read more of it when I get a chance. Recommended.

Review: Blood Music

Blood Music is Greg Bear's classic book on nanotechnology and the "Gray Ooze" threat. The plot is implausible, including the break through that leads to self-aware nano-tech cells in the researcher's bodies gaining consciousness. The characters are stiff stereotypes who seem barely human.

The book dates itself. For instance, the Cold War is assumed to be an active part of political dynamics, and of course, there's mention of the World Trade Center. The ending of the novel is also similarly weird, with the human race saved by a reinvention of physics as a function of conscious observers.

While the ideas at the time were new, this book illustrates clearly that ideas alone are insufficient for a novel to withstand the test of time. Not recommended.

Review: Fables 15

Fables 14 started a story arc that was interesting and got me to pre-order Fables Vol. 15. Rather than attack the story arc directly, Fables 15 first meandered into Rose Red and Snow White's relationships, providing us with some insight about why Rose Red had it in for Snow White for so long. The premise is a bit convoluted, but we do get a darker view of the Seven Dwarfs out of it, which is not a bad thing.

The climax comes along at issue #100, which indeed was a fascinating and exciting fight, but turned into an anti-climax at the end of issue 100. I was a bit disappointed, but given the last major story arc took well over 70 issues to run, I'll give Willingham the benefit of the doubt. We get a few hints about how special the mundie world is, but nothing significant comes out of it.

All in all, an exciting story, with several interesting developments. Recommended.

Review: Outliers

Outliers is an interesting counter-point to Talent is Over-rated. The big thesis behind the book is that context matters to success. Success doesn't always just comes from being smarter, being harder working, or even just coming from the right background.

We start off with Hockey players in Canada, and discover that due to the selection process, top hockey players tend to come from those who were born earlier in the year. That's because they're physically bigger and therefore more able to compete during the selection, and training takes care of the rest. I now have to wonder whether this applies to intellectual development as well.

Then we romp through a series of other stories, one examining plane crashes and cultures of deference, one exploring how Jewish law firms rose to the top in New York City (it was all about hostile take overs), exploring the success of Asians in math. The last story has a great followup, about KIPP's approach to education. Taking a page from Asian schooling systems, they have school from 7:30am to 5:00pm every day, send kids home with lots of homework, and have Saturday schooling! Sounds like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? Except that these are inner city schools desperately giving poor under-educated kids a chance at college --- and they succeed! Sounds like hard work is the key to success after all, or at least, to being able to lift yourself out of poverty.

All in all, a quick and entertaining read, and shows the Tiger Mom Controversy for what it is: a paper tiger. Recommended.

Review: Brain Rules for Baby

After Brain Rules, I've become a John Medina fan. I will read anything he writes, and to my surprise, he wrote Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five, so I naturally put it on hold at the library and read it.

Medina has a healthy disrespect for the common myths and folklore about kids. Baby Einstein DVDs? Worse than useless, actually harmful. In fact, any TV before the age of 2 is considered harmful. Listening to Mozart in the womb? No evidence of improved IQ. The stuff that works is stuff that's difficult for people to do: good nutrition, aerobic exercise, and stress reduction. Exercise, in particular is traditionally considered dangerous for pregnant women.

The relationships chapter is particularly sobering. Conventional wisdom, for instance, says that having a baby can rescue a marriage. Medina debunks that very nicely:

83 percent of new parents experience a moderate to severe crisis during the transition to parenthood. These parents became increasingly hostile toward each other in the first year of the baby's life. The majority were having a hard time.

Medina goes on to explain why the conflicts happen, what causes the problems, and provides a simple solution proven by research:

When you first encounter somebody's "hot" feelings, execute two simple steps:

1. Describe the emotional changes you think you see.

2. Make a guess as to where those emotional changes came from.

In effect, if the wife felt she was being heard by her husband, the marriage was essentially divorce-proof. I had heard of John Gottman's studies on marriages before, but had never looked into the actual studies. Medina summarizes the results and provides concrete things to do. This section of the book's worth paying full price, even if you never intend to have kids.

Other parts of the books are equally impressive. For instance, the difference between praising of effort against praising of talent is important. In another section, he describes the role of emotions, how a child develops them, and why it's important for parents to help a child label them. This section gave me insights as to how my parents brought me up and why I react to emotions the way I do. Again, very much worth reading, no matter who you are. One very impressive bit expressed in the book is the short discussion on what happiness is. In effect, Medina points out that all research has ever shown is that lasting happiness only comes from having good relationships with other humans, be it friends and/or family. People who make $5M/year, for instance, aren't appreciably happier than people who only make $100K/year. (The threshold seems to be $50K/year) This bears out with my life experience, but goes against the grain of what society values.

Finally, the book rounds out with a section on Punishment. This is a very cogent section and is relevant whether you're at work managing a team of engineers or whether you're at home dealing with a child. In particular, the section on praising correct behavior and noticing it is key to molding behavior, and I've never seen it expressed so well in any other written source. A small section on practical tips follow, though from reading it, I can only imagine that Medina's home is 5000 square feet large filled with specialized rooms and laboratories for every activity imaginable. I'd love to see how he cramps that all into a typical middle-class family's home.

All in all, this book comes highly recommended. There is absolutely no fluff in it, and much of it would be new even if you've already read Brain Rules. I'll probably end up buying a copy when I have to return this one to the library.

Review: Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V

For as long as the Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V was at $149.95, it had been sold out. One lucky evening when I saw it available on the web-site, I bought it for XiaoQin to replace the T-mobile Blackberry she'd been using (with only a voice plan) when her primary phone broke. Target was even running a special for a while when the phone was at $129.95 with a $20 credit.

The phone arrived and it activated smoothly and quickly. I immediately used Square to sell a book at an event, which demonstrated that the dataplan was working. XiaoQin got the number ported within 3 hours, but it took a phone call to figure out how to reconfigure the phone for service. After this, I realized that porting her old T-mobile number to Virgin was a mistake: we should have shelled out $25 to port her T-mobile number to Google voice instead!

The phone is a 600MHz phone, or about as slow as the original Droid. It runs Android 2.2, which meant that voice actions, navigation, and all the other goodies that Apple fanboys are missing come standard and works well. It's a bit too slow to run Angry Birds, but the more optimized Angry Birds Rio runs well. Like the original Droid, it's battery would last a day, so you have to charge it every night. The UI outside of Angry Birds is extremely responsive, more responsive than the original droid, without the occasional pause that cause me to have to reboot my 2.3 Nexus One.

The big feature of the Optimus V is Virgin's Beyond Talk plan: $25/month prepaid for unlimited data and 300 voice minutes. At this rate, the phone pays for itself over a T-mobile voice plan in 10 months. For a geek who hardly ever uses the phone, this is a huge feature. While others report that the Sprint network the phone uses is no good, we haven't found this to be the case. It's had voice and data whenever T-mobile has had it, and unlike an iPhone, does not drop any calls while in use as a phone.

The only thing that might give you pause is that the phone is a CDMA phone, which means it won't run anywhere in Europe, for instance. In any case, this is a phone I will seriously consider paying for when my T-mobile prepaid card runs out. Virgin Mobile has finally raised the price on the phone to $199.95 in order to keep the phone in stock and to build inventory, but if the price were to drop back down to $149.95 or even below, this phone would be highly recommended.

Startup Recruiting

Early on in Quora's life, there were lots of questions on Quora like Who are the best engineers at Google?, and Who are the rising stars in Engineering at Google? I don't know who asked those questions, but if you're a startup recruiting engineers, those are the wrong questions to ask.

To begin with, if someone is widely recognized inside a large company, they are unlikely to leave for a startup. Lars Rasmussen, for instance, did not leave for Facebook until after Google Wave was canceled and Facebook wasn't a startup anymore. Secondly, in large organizations that are well past the startup stage, climbing the corporate ladder is as much a measure of political skill as it is a measure of engineering skill. While bringing in someone with political skill might be very useful when you're past the startup stage, at the startup stage it can be a cause of pain by adding very political people into what would otherwise be a unified team. As Sanjeev Singh once said, internalizing Tips for Noogler Engineers might make you a great corporate ladder climber but would also make you useless at a startup.

So what's the right question to ask? The right question to ask would be, Who is the most undervalued engineer at Company X? This brings up two highly desirable traits: one, the engineer probably realizes that he's undervalued (or if he doesn't realize that he would as soon as you showed him your offer), and two, the engineer's probably undervalued because he's precisely the kind of person who can't or won't play the political game highly prized in big companies. I'll lead off with two examples, both from Google.

The most undervalued engineer I know at Google was a tech lead for one of the front-ends responsible for producing most of the company's revenue when I joined. He never shirked from the grungy work of fixing up code and making things work well. He never grabbed the sexy work for himself. Whenever I saw a code review from him, I would be awed by the kind of code he produced: this was not code, this was poetry. I learned something about programming well from every code review he sent me, no matter the language or the system. People knew he was a hot-shot: he was tapped to build another critical system just prior to the IPO. After a few years at this, he moved on to several other projects. But when he came up for promotion (and his manager had to put him up for promotion (after far too long at Google), since he wasn't a self-promoter), the promotion committee sent back the feedback: "Lack of demonstrated leadership ability, and insufficient technical depth."

The second most undervalued engineer I know at Google had both his 20% projects turned into full time Google projects which launched externally to high visibility. You would recognize at least one of these products as something that lots of people used. He too, was denied for promotion once, and after he worked the system and got his promotion, said to me, "After this experience, I want nothing to do with the system." Again, he's not a self-promoter, but his track record should have spoken for itself. Given his track record, it wouldn't surprise me to see him at a startup some time in the future.

Both these men are financially independent, and are effectively economic volunteers. But I can assure you that there exist others like them, and many of them are not economic volunteers. It's actually not that hard to hunt them down, but the trick isn't to ask managers about such under-valued engineers. It's to ask the "leaf-node" engineers who do the work. Ask the right questions, and your recruiting problems for your startup will be half over.

Review: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Before picking up The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, it is important to realize the Pullman is an atheist and not shy about it. So I expected to read an insightful and deep, if not funny novel about Christianity.

The book's premise was that Jesus had a twin brother, Christ, who stayed in the background recording Christ's deeds while eventually having an important role to play in the final days of that well known tale. Rather than use the Bible's original words, Pullman does a good job of bringing the stories into the vernacular, and keeping things as I remembered from my (now ancient) reading of the bible.

Nevertheless, I found the plot a little too predictable. Once the premise was provided, it was clear where things were going to go, and Pullman pulls no clever surprises, or ever twists on the Sermons/Parables. He does point out the obvious moral conflicts in what Jesus says, but never does resolve them.

To its credit, the book is short and easily read in a couple of hours, but I wouldn't say it was a good use of my time. Go read His Dark Materials instead.

Financial Planning Talk

A random group of people invited me to give a talk about financial matters. It was deemed better to have the talk off-site, so that's what I did. While I could not put all the slides up, I've put up a mostly sanitized version of the slides below in a Google presentation.

The talk went for about 50 minutes, and then I took about an hour or so of questions. Not all the questions were directed at me, as there were other financial experts at the talk. A pleasant surprise was Jeff Rothschild. I did not expect to see him there, since Jeff has probably forgotten more about financial planning than I've learned, but it was great to see him.



Someone did ask me a question about real estate, and XiaoQin pointed out that I should have answered it like this: it's one thing to hold REITs passively, it's another to buy real estate to make money as a business. The people who successfully run real estate as a business (like John T Reed) did it full time. Reed, in particular, no longer advocates buy-and-hold as a viable strategy for making money in real estate. (He said this even before the housing bubble!) He believes that you make money by buying below market value, or for cash flow with a cap rate of 10% or better. For everyone else, treat housing like a consumption decision, not an investment decision.

Review: The World Without Us

People have the tendency to describe books like The World Without Us as eco-porn. Alan Weisman asks (and then answers) the question: how would the planet fare if humans were to disappear overnight?

The depressing answer is that most of the planet would do very very well indeed. In fact, much better than with humans around. The exceptions are places like nuclear power plants, where the disappearance of humans would lead to break down in equipment eventually leading to melt down and release of radioactive material. Even that doesn't seem so bad compared to all the benefits the rest of the planet would see: depletion of the ozone layer would stop, as would rampant release of greenhouse gases.

The author explores nearly every piece of the world. From big cities such as Manhattan to the underground caves in Turkey, you get a nice overview of nearly every environment. The ocean, for instance, gets a large section to itself, and I felt like I learned a lot --- this is not mere eco-porn, since you learn not only about Coral Reefs, but also about how the oil refineries in Texas work. It took me quite a while to read this book, but when I got to the end I wished for more.

At the end of the book Weisman recommends a few (incredibly politically unrealistic) measures for the human race if it wanted to keep planet Earth as a home. I don't think there's a chance humans will take such intelligent steps, but at least the book does show that if we wiped ourselves off the planet life will make a comeback from the mass extinctions we've introduced.

Recommended.

Review: Mad Men Seasons 1-3

I am terrible at marketing, so when I saw that Mad Men was a show about advertising executives, I checked out Mad Men: Season One from the library. The result was I ended up watching not a TV show about advertising and how to do it properly, but about rich powerful men in the 1960s and how different the 1960s were from now. There was the division of labor (in both physical location and focus) between women and men, the political events and major events of the day (the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of major political figures such as John Kennedy and Martin Luther King), and the start of the recognition of African Americans as a viable economic market.

In Mad Men: Season Three, there's even a depiction of child-birth as it was in the 1960s. No ultrasounds, no knowledge of what was to come, and the men confined to a waiting room. More importantly, there's a sense of what's never changed amongst humans: infidelity, abuse of power, office politics are all depicted, including some great examples of good management. We ended up watching 3 seasons in fairly short order (granted, each season is only about 12 or 13 episodes). The cinematography is very pretty, and well deserving of the Blu-Ray versions of the show if you can get it --- none of the fake gritty /grainy look that made me feel like Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series [Blu-ray] would have been a waste of money, much as I enjoyed the first two seasons of that show.

All in all, an enjoyable series, if slow. And if you're young enough not to have lived through the 1960s, a good history lesson. As Charles Stross in Glasshouse reminds us, the 1960s were as alien as any science fiction future that you could think of. In terms of bringing that to life, Mad Men does a better job than even that excellent book did.

Review: Tampopo

Someone once told me that Tampopo is a great movie for foodies. It definitely has a lot about food, especially Ramen.

The plot revolves around Tampopo, a widow struggling to learn the true art of making good ramen, so she support her child. The camera does pick up and follow random side-plots, however, some of which are good, and some of which are distracting and take away from the movie's theme. Most of them are never fully exposited, which makes you have to fill in the blanks yourself, though one of them is ridiculously far fetched.

There are fabulous food scenes in the movie, one of which involves food as foreplay. However, these scenes aren't as common as I was led to believe. I think the movie could have been far more tightly edited and plotted, which would have kept it from dragging in places. Mildly recommended.

It's Real!

 

It took 2 months, but finally, the US Copyright Office has acknowledged me as the author of Independent Cycle Touring.