Review: The Temple of Gold

William Goldman, who wrote The Princess Bride, wrote The Temple of Gold as his debut novel. I'm a big fan of The Princess Bride, so when I saw they shared the same author and Amazon offered it for a low low price of $1.99, I jumped on the novel and bought it.

I shouldn't have. This is an awful, awful novel. The lead character is unlike-able, and does so many stupid things that at one point I just stopped reading because I just couldn't stand reading a novel about someone this stupid. This isn't even about him being an anti-hero, this is just stupidity. For instance, he recognizes when someone's really good for him in a relationship, but abandons the relationship anyway.

I eventually kept reading because I was stuck in a situation where I had nothing else to do, and kept hoping for a note of redemption in this novel. Unfortunately, there was none. Stay far far away from this book. I can hardly believe that the same person wrote The Princess Bride. Now I will hesitate to ever pick up another William Goldman novel again.

Review: The Ages of the Investor

The Ages of the Investor is the first book in William Bernstein's "investing for adults" series. It's unusual in that it provides an unconventional series of recommendations that I don't necessarily agree with, but makes good fodder for thought.

Bernstein looks at lifetime retiring savings as a human capital/financial capital trade-off model. In other words, when you're young, you have plenty of human capital in terms of future earnings growth, but very little in savings. When you're old, the reverse is true. He acknowledges that this view of things is simplistic, in that a young person can nevertheless fall ill, decide to have 12 kids, or do lots of other things to impair their future earnings growth, while his model of financial wealth includes all the risks involved in holding financial securities.

One of the earliest points of the book is that series risk is important. In other words, during your investing career, if you get to take advantage of low stock prices early on, it's a really big advantage, whereas if you get the penalty of a booming stock market in your early years, you don't get to buy stock at low prices, at which point any market crash can really nuke your savings. He points out, however, that if you get a lump sum and invest it all at once, you get to neutralize all series risk, and you avoid extreme outcomes and get to use the market average. This insight doesn't help much, Bernstein admits, because unless you get a big inheritance (or got rich from an IPO), there's no way to find this large lump sum.

Bernstein then examines folks at the beginning of their investing career. This part is not controversial. It's well known that young investors are unnecessarily conservative in their investments (mainly because it takes time to understand financial markets as well as how they react during a downturn), and should actually leverage themselves, as opposed to putting their money in a stock/bond mix. The problem is that most people don't want to use leverage, and even if they did, could quickly panic during a downturn. Bernstein recommends using a DFA-type portfolio instead to increase the risk that they take in their early years.

Then end game is where Bernstein's recommendations are controversial. His thought here is that once you've reached your "magic number", you should avoid taking further market risk. Well, the problem here is that there really is no avoiding market risk except by taking on inflation risk, and for any 30 year period, inflation risk is really high. He suggests a ladder of TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities), but doesn't point out that TIPS have really poor tax characteristics, and are also paying record low interest rates at this point. He also recommends purchasing an inflation adjusted annuity, but also points out that those have historically been very poor deals. He suggests value stocks, but again, those don't eliminate market risk.

Here's the thing, buying a ladder of government bonds during a period of unusually low interest rates is very likely to send you to the poor-house. Furthermore, once inflation returns, the interest generated from your portfolio would be insufficient to live on. This advice worked well for Robin & Dominguez, but they retired in the 1980s during record high interest rates. I'm not sure Bernstein is doing his readers a favor in 2013 by suggesting a similar route.

The only uncontroversial recommendation he makes here is to delay taking security as late as possible if you're in good health so as to get a great "annuity" from your social security income stream. Of course, if you're a die-hard libertarian I don't expect you to take that advice. Even worse, his examples don't note that those who have their assets in mostly taxable accounts actually have an advantage over those who have most of their assets in tax-sheltered accounts, which is the ability to control taxation through judicious use of when to take capital gains as well as substantial advantages to be found in using tax-loss harvesting. I'm not quite sure what to make of this omission.

All in all, the book makes a bunch of good points and gives you lots to think about, but I find Bernstein's recommendations here thin and not really very strong compared to the resources say, at The Retire Early Home Page. He doesn't even address those issues, or the very important question of how you would arrive at your magic number. While I think the book was worth the very quick read, I cannot give many of its recommendations my endorsement. Read and apply the advice at your own risk.

Review: Wheat Belly

My doctor actually recommended Wheat Belly, or I wouldn't have picked it up. Cure Your Child With Food, for instance, already mentions that gluten, the protein in wheat, is the source of many digestion problems. That book reported loads of success curing kids by eliminating wheat and anything white from their diets.

The Wheat Belly proceeds to blame almost all modern ills on wheat and wheat products. As in Cure Your Child With Food, he claims that wheat has been so genetically engineered or otherwise manipulated that the nutrition in it is not something that your body can absorb or deal with, leading to a bunch of diseases ranging from diabetes to acne (!!) to early balding in men. The book is replete with anecdotes from his practice where the patient is miraculously cured after eliminating wheat from his or her diet.

Unfortunately, things are not that simple. You see, Doctor Davis doesn't just recommend getting rid of wheat. He recommends eliminating all forms of whole grain and potatoes as well as the sugary fruits. Adopt his program wholesale and what do you get? The Atkins diet. If wheat was the all encompassing evil he claims it to be, then there shouldn't be any need to eliminate all the other foods, so this prescription basically undermines the entire first 2/3rds of the book!

Now, it could very well be that gluten sensitivity (not necessarily celiac disease) is far more prevalent than you might think, and that many people with irritable bowel syndrome could benefit by eliminating wheat. But if you're looking for proof that wheat is the culprit, then this book definitely does not provide it. That said, he does reference lots of interesting data, including Denise Minger's excellent debunking of the China Study. There's a lot of interesting information, though again, since he undermined himself in the last 2 chapters of the book I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to believe anything he says.

Not recommended.

Review: Pyle Waterproof MP3 Player with embedded headphones

I've been forced to swim a lot recently, and have come to the conclusion that lap swimming is the most boring sport in the universe. There's nothing to see, the scenery doesn't change, and you can't even hold a conversation while swimming like you can while you're cycling, running, or doing almost any land sport. I can't imagine doing it for any length of time long term.

After a while, I decided that it would be a good idea to find someway of listening to something while I'm doing my boring laps. If you're an iSheep, then the natural thing would be to pick up the Underwater iPod. These are basically iPod shuffles have been rebuilt with a waterproof resin internally and a waterproof coating externally, and then you can fit a pair of waterproof headphones to them, attach the whole shebang to your googles, and now you have an iPod that can play music underwater.

But I'm not an Apple fan, and $150 for a 2GB iPod shuffle is incredibly offensive to my senses. So I went looking and came up with the Pyle Waterproof MP3 player. At $40, it's more expensive than some other products, but it also had far better Amazon reviews. At 4GB of storage, it's got twice the storage of the Apple equivalents at one third the price, something very familiar to anyone who's familiar with how tech pricing works.

My first couple of swims were disappointing. The sound was muddy and unclear, and the headphone kept coming off. But I finally figured it out: the headphones come with 3 sets of ear pieces for underwater use, and what you need to do is to use the biggest ear piece that will fit in your ear canal. Once I got the right set (which surprisingly was the largest set), the sound was clear and lovely, and the ear pieces don't try to come off your ear. Now, if you do a particularly violent motion or if you knock your headphones with your strokes you still might get some leakage, but by and large the whole thing works and seriously, once I stop needing to nurse my back along I'm not going to swim more than a couple of times a week anyway.

In any case, my swims have gotten a lot less boring, and more than once I've found myself swimming an extra couple of laps to finish the song I've been listening to, so it's definitely changed lap swimming from "boring" to bearable. Recommended.

Review: The Story of The Human Body

The Story Of The Human Body is written by evolutionary biologist and Harvard Professor Daniel Lieberman. It's not just a boring history of how your various body parts evolved, but it's also an exploration about how mismatch diseases come about: diseases caused by the mismatch between your relatively old genes and the relatively unusual state of civilization today.

Midway through the book (page 173), there's a list of mismatch diseases that hold a few surprises even for me. For instance, apnea, ADHD, OCD, and chronic constipation are all considered to be mismatch diseases. I'm very familiar with Apnea, and I was surprised to find it on this list. The explanation is surprising: if you grew up on relatively soft processed or cooked food, you didn't have to chew very much or very hard, so your jaw ends up being a bit too small, which is one of the conditions that causes apnea. Lieberman suggests allowing kids to chew gum a lot as a way to help correct this deficiency, and I wonder if Singapore's ban on chewing gum could contribute to a rise in the number of children who end up with sleep apnea in the future as a result.

Which brings me to another interesting point about this book. Because mismatch diseases have long lead times and are caused by conditions in which the child grows up in, but the disease itself doesn't show up until in late adulthood, this book also doubles as a parenting manual of things that you as a parent should do, but might not have realized are important. For instance, he suggests letting kids run around in bare feet as much as possible to prevent future incidences of flat feet. This goes against the norms of civilized society, and parents should take note. Other little tit-bits from this book:

• Growing up in a hot environment will cause your child to develop more sweat glands. This may or may not be a good thing, depending on your point of view.
• Baby fat is not necessarily benign: even if the kid grows out of it, being fat at a young age causes your body to have more visceral fat cells, which can lead to being more easily fat as an adult.
• Myopia could be caused by spending too much time indoors, and insufficient variety of visual stimuli. Having a wide variety of visual stimulus is important for normal vision.
• If your kids get antibiotics, it might be necessary to follow up with a dose of probiotics to help the stomach flora return to normal.

If you don't have kids, there are lots of other fascinating topics that are relevant to you:

• Sitting is very bad for you.
• Human beings are basically the fattest primates around, but there are good reasons why.
• Why do men get prostate cancer?
• Why do you tend to get back pain as you age?

These questions all have lots of fun answers in Lieberman's book, plus a huge dose of evolutionary history which explains why if agriculture was such a hard life compared to being a hunter-gatherer, humans adopted it anyway.

Lieberman ties off the book with a bunch of policy suggestions as to how to prevent many of the mismatch diseases he describes. I have a very pessimistic outlook on those suggestions, as the long feedback cycle (40 years or so before diabetes begins to show up) ensures that much like global climate change, there's no real incentive for government to do anything about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it incredibly informative. It's very likely to be the best book I've read all year. Highly recommended.

Review: Skating to where the puck was

Skating to Where the Puck Was is part of William Bernstein's series called "Investing for Adults". I did not consider the previous book I read in the series, Deep Risk, to be worth the trouble, but I have a different opinion of this book.

Bernstein points out that in many cases, by the time an asset class is widely accessible to the masses for investing, it has lost most of the attractive properties it used to have, therefore rendering the asset class much less interesting. The first example he uses is from David Swensen's Pioneering Portfolio Management: the Yale Model, with its reliance of alternative assets, including hedge funds and other such, returned outsized success until it became widely known and copies, at which point it stopped yielding those outsized returns.

Similarly, he points out that recently, an individual investor could make outsized gains in the housing market by buying up houses and renting them for profit, but doing so would have required that you make a full time job (or serious side job) out of it, not by merely investing in an REIT. Similarly, the Japanese stock market returned incredibly high yields when John Templeton bought into it very early. So early, in fact, that when he first bought shares in the market, they could not even be taken out of the country! By the time generalized Japanese stock funds became available, the return on those funds going forward was dismal. The result, Bernstein says, is that:

if your portfolio looks like the Yale Endowment's, then you're likely to find yourself chairless when the music stops. Diversifying is easy; doing so early is difficult.

The solution? Boring old asset allocation and staying in the market for the long haul. There a really is no Santa Claus, and no tooth fairy, unless you're the next John Templeton and have the courage to get in ahead of the crowd. (And even then, there's no guarantee that you're not the next Bill Miller instead)

The book repeats stuff you probably already know as an investing adult, but the stories inside are worth a quick read and the book is cheap. Recommended.

Review: 3M Command Strips

I never really was into hanging photos or artwork on the walls, even photos I took myself. It wasn't until recently that I figured out what. It turns out that nailing holes in the wall is a somewhat permanent act, and I didn't like the irrevocability of putting a photo up.

One of the helpful folks at Orchard Supply inadvertently pointed that out to me when I asked about buying hanging fixtures. Thinking that I rented an apartment, he told me about 3M Command Strips, which are essentially matching sets of Velcro backed by sticky tape. The clever thing about the Command Strips is that there's a tab on the back of the sticky tape which stretches the glue in the sticky tape so that the entire strip comes cleanly off the wall when done.

A few things are necessary to get these to work right. First, you should use them only as recommended for their weight ratings. Secondly, you need the surfaces to be clean. Lastly, you actually have to follow the directions. We've hung a mirror and 2 pictures with these trips, and I'm very happy with them. I haven't actually tested the removal, but judging from the Amazon reviews, that's not actually a problem.

Recommended.

Review: Cure Your Child With Food

Cure Your Child With Food is a book about nutrition and the impact nutrition has on children's health and growth. It's an interesting book in that it's organized with each chapter meant to be read independently, which leads to a lot of repetition.

For instance, my impression of the first half of the book is that she's a one-trick pony. She seemed to have only two solutions for the patients who come to her: get rid of the diary in the diet, and ditch the gluten. Get rid of the American "white diet". That's it.

The second half of the book, however, does demonstrate that she doesn't just prescribe one thing for all patients. For instance, one patient came to her with sleep problems and an otherwise healthy diet. Getting her onto 0.5mg of melatonin supplement an hour before bedtime meant she could sleep through the night. She explains why melatonin is a good solution and why it is not addictive. Another patient came to her from a vegetarian background with muscular development issues. Adding choline and fish oil to his diet resolved his issues. She does caution that sometime fish oil by itself isn't enough and that other forms of intervention are required. She diagnosed one case of a patient ingesting pesticide from fruit.

She presents interesting theories about why there's been a recent rise in gluten sensitivity (not the same as celiac disease): the amount of gluten in wheat that has been harvested has gone up, due to "improved breeding" and other interventions. She also explains why she recommends fish oil supplements over just adding more fish to the diet: the risk of mercury poisoning.

While the book is wordy and repetitive, I found it useful in thinking about children's nutrition. For instance, once you take your kid off infant formula, you should think about where his Omega-3 is going to come from. In our case, it was more palliative than anything else, but it's not quite a "one trick pony" book that the first half of the book presents itself to be. Recommended.

Advanced Reader Copies of my next book now available

It's called How to Interview A Financial Advisor. It's a short book, about 50 pages, and the first round of beta only has 20 copies available. Since it's currently in beta, it doesn't have a cover yet (I'm waiting for the cover to come in), and the PDF copy doesn't have an index. If you make comments about the book that lead to changes in the book, you'll get to be on the acknowledgements page.

The book is priced low $4.95, and I'm still trying to decide on the final pricing. As a perk, beta customers will also get cheap access to the printed copy when it is finally available.

Review: Aqua Sphere Kayenne Goggle

I've been suffering from some lower back pain due to lifting my toddler at a time when he was struggling. The pain's been bad enough that I've been banned from cycling or heavy lifting, and about the only sport I can indulge in is swimming.

I've been stealing my wife's cheap goggles for those swims, but they're a bit small for me (yes, I know, you're not surprised), and I felt the pressure in my eyes. They also weren't optically very clear, so I splurged and bought the Aqua Sphere Kayenne Googles.

I picked these because (1) they're cheap, and (2) the goggles themselves are wide enough that it looked like the cup around the goggles would be wide enough so that they would spread themselves out over a wide area around my eyes, relieving some of the pressure around my eyes while swimming. At $16 for the cheapest versions they're not super cheap, but they were indeed less pressure than the previous goggles.

They're also optically very clear! I swapped them with my wife one day in the pool and she liked it so much I bought her another pair that were identical to mine. Needless to say, for me to buy 2 of anything means I really like it alot. Recommended.

Review: Invisiblity

Invisibility is a young-adult novel by Andrea Creme and David Levithan. Levithan, you'll recall, is the author of Every Day, and the voice in this novel is very similar to that novel, despite being told alternatively from two perspectives, Stephen and Elizabeth.

The hook in the novel is that Stephen was cursed to be invisible from the day he was born. The novel details all the issues this brings. Stephen seems to have done a good job coping with life as it is, until one day, neighbors move in and Elizabeth is able to see him. We start with a quiet love story, set in New York and its environs, while Elizabeth and Stephen work through their budding romance.

Once Elizabeth discovers that she's the only person who can see Stephen, however, the action revs up and the novel goes into high gear. She quickly discovers why, and starts trying to figure out ways to solve Stephen's problem. At this point, Stephen quickly shifts from being the center of the story to becoming almost a by-stander.

What I like about the novel is that the characters are faced with no easy answers, and have to sacrifice in order to stay together. The authors also do not try to resolve the situation arbitrarily and let the rules they have in place run the climax and conclusion.

While this novel started slowly, towards the end I found myself captivated, flipping pages relentlessly to find out what happens next. That the novel doesn't cheat itself by trying to set up for a sequel (unlike Every Day) is another point in its favor.

Recommended.

Review: Six Earlier Days

Six Earlier Days is a short prequel to David Leviathan's novel, Every Day. It's a light fast read, but doesn't have the heft or development of the novel. It brings together 6 different days of A's life, some of which reveals a facet of his character, and two of which foreshadowing the events to come in the novel. I can only recommend this book if you read Every Day and wanted more.

Review: Deep Risk

William Bernstein has written a new series of short books titled "investing for adults". Deep Risk is one of the series. The book is short, and I wish Bernstein had simply cobbled all the books in the series together as one book rather than trying to sell each monograph separately.

The idea behind Deep Risk is that there are 4 major potential disasters (Bernstein refers to them as the Four Horsemen) that can derail your financial plan. These are: inflation, deflation, confiscation (taxes), and devastation (war). He then analyzes them in terms of how frequently they occur and how difficult it would be to insure against them.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that inflation is by far the most common potential problem for any portfolio. What's interesting about Bernstein's analysis is that he discovers that the traditional inflation protection, Gold bullion, isn't actually very good as an inflation hedge! Rather, stock portfolios tend to do far better as inflation protection even though in the aftermath of an inflation, the stocks could do badly. Bernstein dismisses the potential short term underperformance of stocks as shallow risk: in other words, if you had the fortitude to hang on, you'd recover your portfolio with no permanent loss of capital.

Deflation is much less likely, and Bernstein claims that it has only happened once in Japan since developed countries went off the gold standard. He dismisses Japan as a one off. I disagree, as the U.S. came close to adopting the very same policies that Europe did and could have gotten 10 years of deflation as well. It's also not clear to me that Europe hasn't been subject to the same deflationary problems. Bernstein claims that gold is actually a great deflation hedge, since a big depression triggers a flight to safety, which is what gold traditionally is.

Bernstein defines confiscation relatively loosely. For instance, an increase in tax rates could be defined as confiscation. It seems to me that you could solve the confiscation relatively easily, by moving to a very high tax state with already confiscatory taxes, at which point your risk of further confiscation is relatively low. To be fair, Bernstein does point out the exiting U.S. citizenship would cost you an exit tax, and even holding foreign assets is no protection from the tax man, should we ever get an administration that chooses to enforce such laws. The reality is, if you're a U.S. citizen intending to stay in the U.S., there's relatively little that you can do beyond the existing well-known tax-sheltered accounts and tax-managed funds.

Finally, the threat of war is real, but again, there's relatively little you can do unless you decide to become a survivalist and start building bunkers. In serious threats, what you'd have to do is to stockpile food, guns, and ammunition and build a private army. Historically, people who've done that don't tend to do all that well financially, and the existence of events such as the Waco Seige indicates that even building your own private army doesn't do very good if someone with a real army chose to take you out.

Ultimately, I found the entire book disappointing and lacking in useful action items. The truth is, as a financial observer I've found that far more people have devastated their portfolio by panicking during a crisis than by having their wealth confiscated by a government, war, or even inflation. So rather than writing a series of books called "investing for adults", Bernstein probably should have written a book about how to become an adult, as far as investing is concerned. Not recommended.

Review: The Sports Gene

The Sports Gene is not just a book about athletes. It's also a thorough debunking of books such as Talent is Overrated. If you were to want to debunk that book, you'd want to do this starting with athletes. Pretty much everyone knows intuitively that no on 5' 2" and shorter is going to play in the NBA. The disadvantages that accrue from being shorter than all the freaks of nature playing in the NBA would just be too much for any amount of practice to overcome.

The book starts with Tiger Woods, whose dedication to golf is pretty famous and well-documented. What Epstein points out, however, is that few accounts of Woods' success points out that even at 6 months, Woods was capable of standing on his father's palm while his dad walked around the house! That's innate talent that wasn't taught and can't be taught.

The book then goes on to cover short distance athletes, marathoners, skiers, sled dogs, and ties it all together. What's great is that in the course of covering the genetics of performance, he also discusses certain questions that have always bothered me. For instance, if living at altitude is so beneficial, why aren't the gold medalist sprinters and marathoners from Tibet and the Nepal Himalaya instead of being from Africa? It turns out that there's an optimum altitude for hemoglobin creation (5000-7000'), beyond which it's difficult to train hard. Furthermore, the sherpas and other high mountain people developed a different genetic pathway towards altitude acclimation rather than the metabolically expensive hemoglobin creation.

There's also a great discussion of Superbaby, how the success of a breed of alaskan Huskies proved that even motivation has a genetic component (they bred a breed of dogs that just wants to run when harnessed!).

The author also studied the Australian Olympic program, which specializes in identifying which sports an athlete is uniquely suited for, and then grooms that athlete for those sports. In those cases, it's quite clear that gold medalists with talent can achieve in 4,000 hours what others without talent cannot do with 10,000 hours.

Epstein succeeds in making his points, though obviously doesn't answer any questions about the intellectual analogues to the skills/abilities he discusses. Along the way, you'll learn a few things about genetics and what types of bodies it takes to succeed in the various sports. The average reader might be disappointed that he doesn't discuss what ethical implications they may be, and how quickly genetic engineering is likely going to take over the sporting events. The days of unaugmented athletes being able to perform at the world level might very well be numbered.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and can highly recommend it.

Review: Naked Statistics

Naked Statistics is a non-technical introduction to statistics. In terms of explaining the science of statistics to laymen, it does a passable but not stellar job. The basics are straightforward: nearly everyone should know the difference between mean and median (the book doesn't cover "mode"), and Wheelan does a fine job of explaining the difference.

Where the book starts to fall apart is on items such as the Central Limit Theorem and Regression analysis. Both topics are technical enough that you really should just get out a statistics or math textbook and work through examples yourself. The book separates out the technical details in an appendix to each chapter, but I found that treatment unsatisfactory. On the other hand, I'm also the kind of person who'd read a textbook if  I really wanted to review this material as preparation.

The book is sprinkled with lots of examples, some of which are fun, but doesn't into enough depth about the anecdotes to really get at the gist of the matter. The author says he was inspired by How to Lie With Statistics, but in my opinion anyone who wants to read this book should read the original instead.

Not recommended. Go read a textbook instead, or the original source of inspiration instead.

Review: Cold Days

Cold Days is the latest available novel in the Dresden Files series. Like the previous couple of books in the series, you are well advised not to read this novel until you've read at least the previous 3 books in the series.

The books at this point suffer from the travails of a D&D campaign that's gone past the sweet spot of the game system. The characters are now extremely powerful and the only way for the DM/author to challenge the players is to keep throwing bigger and bigger challenges and bigger and bigger bad-asses at them.

This is not a bad thing. But as an action series, there's precious little time for reflection on the part of Harry Dresden, and there's even less motivation for him to introspect. We do get a few notices here and there on the part of the temptations he's subject to as the new Winter Knight, but by and large he brushes them off as he spends much of his time going for survival, rather than flexing his powers.

I did enjoy a number of plot twists in the book, and the expanded awareness of his urban fantasy world is a lot of fun for long time readers of the series. If you're already a follower of the series, this is a great book, and worth your time. While it's not necessary to read the entire series, it'd be worth while to at least start from Changes. Recommended.

Review: Ghost Story

Ghost Story is book 13 of the Dresden Files. It is a direct sequel from Changes, and if you haven't read that book you'll not get very much out of this book, because it picks up directly where Changes start. Given that that's the case, I'm going to spoil this book if you insist on reading further on this review.

Dresden was murdered at the end of the last novel, and he wakes up as a ghost, 6 months later, at the start of this one and is charged with investigating his own murder. Unfortunately, there's a complete shortage of clues, and Dresden wanders from situation to situation, trying to resolve more urgent problems than that of his murder, which in fact, he deduced correctly fairly early on in the novel.

In many ways, fantasy is about wish-fulfillment. In some ways, this is Dresden's wish-fulfillment. He gets to see how crucial he was to the community, and how much things went wrong without him for 6 months. The mystery as such isn't much of one, but again, is more like an action movie. It does end up with a setup for the next book, so it's clear at this point that Jim Butcher has given up on standalone novels and is only writing for folks who'll read the entire series.

Only recommended if you're willing to slog through the entire series.

Re-Read: Ender's Game

This is my third time reading Ender's Game, and I've read the previous incarnation of the novel (which began as a short story in 1977) several times over the years. I started reading it because of the upcoming movie based on the novel.

There are several things that date the novel at this point: the first of which is the superpowers of the world back in 1977 were the Russians and the Americans. Obviously, that has changed recently, and but the book doesn't reflect that. Fortunately, this background has little to do with the main focus of the novel.

The novel is compellingly readable, but it lost a bit of impact between the short story of the same name and the conversion into a novel. The short story was focused at it's core: if the horror of war could be distilled away into a child's game, then we could perhaps train children to become amoral warriors. The novel is quite a bit more nuanced, meandering into issues of xenocide, the rightness of abusing a child, no matter how brilliant and no matter how important the purpose. What's worse, the ending of the novel makes it clear that Ender's sacrifice was unnecessary.

Nevertheless, the book, when it does focus on Ender and his travails, is excellent, providing many examples of leadership that real world managers and executives would be well-advised to emulate. Highly recommended.

Review: Changes

Changes is book #12 in the Dresden files. In many ways, the series reminds me of a RPG game. As the characters get more and more powerful, the ante has to ramp up, otherwise, the characters are left with no challenge in their lives.

At least Butcher is willing to make drastic changes in his milieu, resolving a major plotline that's been long-running in the series, which is the war between the White Council and the Vampiric Red Court, while Dresden, the main character, undergoes a major life change as well, picking up yet another family member, a new job, as well as a new life state.

The bad things about the book is that the plot feels like it's been reused. The "little girl in trouble" scenario feels a bit old, because it was just used a couple of books ago. Finally, the end of the book feels very much like a cliffhanger to get you to read the next book in the series. Regardless, there's thrills galore, lots of explosions, and many set pieces. There's not much boring investigation work, but at least Butcher seems to have given up on the "I got bonked on the head, fell unconscious, and woke up someplace different" mode of investigation.

It's good summer reading, a lot like any of the summer blockbusters. I'll pick up the next book in the series soon.

Review: Turn Coat

Turn Coat is book 11 of the Dresden Files. The series finally comes full circle, as Dresden now has to bail out the very person who was his "parole officer" at the start of the series. We finally get a good view of the White Council HQ, as well as the politics involved in the wizards. I still found myself wondering why the wizards seem to be so ineffectual in the world if  there were so many high powered individuals wandering the globe. There's a grand climax with big battles. It seems nothing ever gets resolved with a big bang in Butcher's milieu when it could be resolved by multiple nuclear options.

It's still an enjoyable read, though the series is starting to get to the point where Butcher is introducing as many new mysteries in each novel as he's resolving them.

Review: Small Favor

Small Favor is book 10 of the Dresden files. It is so far the best book yet. It's action packed, exciting, and is the equivalent of a summer blockbuster movie.

Harry Dresden is finally behaving like a good hero of the traditional sort: rather than being an investigator who "investigates" by getting thumped on the head, he's now actually driving the action in the novel. For me, anyway, this reads much better than the older novels.

This is the first novel from Jim Butcher where I didn't see gaping plot holes. Everything does come together neatly, and the ending is quite satisfying. The only problem with the series is that jumping into the series at this point is that you'd lose some of the context, but unlike other fantasy novels, Jim Butcher does tie everything in the story off at the end of the novel, so even if you only read one novel it works by itself.

Recommended.

Review: Neptune's Brood

Neptune's Brood is set in the same world as Saturn's Children, but is not a direct sequel in style, tone, or humor. This is a feature, since Saturn's Children, as much as I enjoyed it, was a Heinlein Pastische, and you don't need too many of those.

Science Fiction is often called the literature of ideas because it's frequently lacking in other areas like character, plot, and pacing. As a hard science fiction writer, Stross demonstrates this in this book, which frequently reads more like a treatise in interstellar commerce than a novel. There are long expositions abound in which the reader is lectured to (shades of Asimov) about Fast Money (cash), Medium Money (investments), and Slow Money (interstellar bitcoinage), and how Spanish Prisoner and other fraud schemes would occur in the absence of FTL travel and only lightspeed communications.

Now, all this works only because the characters are all post-human, including the narrator/protagonist (Krina), a historian/accountant who specializes in audits and has a sideline/interest in investigating slow money fraud. As a result, she can "beam" to various locations and travel via starship to places without a beacon. The plot revolves around Krina's visit to her sister Ana. When Ana disappears before she gets there, Krina investigates and gets dropped into a web of intrigue when everyone she talks to, works for, or is arrested by wants a piece of whatever Ana seems to have found before she disappeared.

Like you would expect in a science fiction novel where all the fun happens in the exposition, Krina isn't much of an active entity in the story. She gets dragged and dropped by other forces outside her control pretty much throughout the novel, and never really initiates anything herself. This allows her to exposit on topics that Stross considers important for the reader to know.

The ending, much like with Saturn's Children, comes together in a hurry after the great reveal (which isn't terribly exciting), and leaves the reader with most of the loose ends tied up and a deeper understanding of how Charles Stross feels the entire financial system is. There are lots of snide remarks about investment banking, bankers, accountants, and bank branches (one of them is a pirate outfit), but in the end, the reader isn't likely to gain any more expertise in economics as a result of reading this book than he already had. (On the other hand, Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman liked the book, but of course he would)

Now it sounds like I didn't enjoy this book, but I did. It's just that the audience for this book is likely to be incredibly narrow (geeks who enjoy Economics). To that audience, I'd highly recommend this novel. It explores many ideas that few other science fiction novels do. For anyone else, I'm afraid you're going to have to enjoy lectures or the novel just won't work.

Review: White Knight

White Knight is book 9 of the Dresden files. What impresses me about this book is that Jim Butcher seems to actually be tying up loose ends faster than before. We get a recurring villain, a hint of the overall plot arc, as well as lots of action. I thought the finale was very suitable for a big-bang hollywood movie, and given the popularity of urban fantasy, I'm surprised that there hasn't been a movie series optioned for it. (There was a tv series, but it definitely doesn't have the bang or the sizzle of the books) It's quite possible that having the lead character be male is the problem.

Dresden tracks down a serial killer of women magic practitioners, only to discover that the person responsible dressed up like him. It turns out that there's an organization involved in the killings, and the plot deepens as Dresden struggles to outwit everyone as well as taking responsibility in his new position as a warden of the White Council.

Mildly recommended. Good summer reading.

Review: Proven Guilty

Proven Guilty is book #8 in the Dresden files, and we see Jim Butcher finally starting to tie all the previous books together.  This is a good thing, because the disparate plots were all feeling like the "monster of the day".

What I do like about the book is that the character, Harry Dresden, finally seems to be more than competent and doesn't just drop his magical implements in the middle of a fight all the time. Even better, he seems capable of plotting more complex solutions than in previous novels, and no longer seems to just try to fry everything in his path.

The novel does tie up many loose ends from previous novels and bring some of them to a partial resolution, so in that sense it works on many levels. On the other hand, at an emotional level, things still seem to be fairly simplistic. That doesn't detract from the novel though: it's summer reading, and one that I can recommend.

Review: Modernist Cuisine at Home

Modernist Cuisine at Home is a cookbook. As such, it shouldn't be read end-to-end, but should be reviewed for the recipes it contains. However, it's more than a cookbook, since it's also an advocate for a different approach towards cooking, which is ideally suited for engineers and other folks (mostly men) who have little patience for acquiring skills associated with traditional cooking. I am just such a person, so the Modernist approach does have great appeal to me.

As far as I can see, modernist cooking has a few principles:

• Use of modern technology. This includes pressure cookers, sous vide machines, and blow torches
• Accurate temperature control. This could mean water baths, or simply an oven safe probe stuck into the thickest part of the meat.
• An emphasis on time efficiency. Minimum prep time, and "fire and forget" formulas.

I, on the other hand, was looking for the following:

• Minimum skill required, as well as prep effort. I can barely flip an egg over to make eggs over-easy. Anything more is just too much.
• Precise prescriptions. "A dash of baking soda" means nothing to me. I'd rather hear, "10g of baking soda."

To my mind, Modernist Cuisine at Home meets a lot of this criteria. Much has been made about sous vide, but I didn't have a sous vide set up, so I first tried the other recipes that were easy:

• Slow Baked Chicken with Onions (page 242). The first time I did this the results were amazing. The prep work is weird, using brine injectors and slicing onions thinly, but my wife (who usually hates chicken) liked it a lot so I tried again. The second time was a disaster. I had to throw it away. The inconsistency of the oven made me willing to buy a Sous Vide setup.
• Pressure Cooked Lamb Shank (page 234). The first time I did it the results were good, but marred by my pressure cooker being not up to spec. I splurged, upgrading to a $30 Presto pressure cooker, and the second time I made it it was nothing short of incredible. The meat just peeled off the bone when I lifted the bone up, and the resulting lamb curry tasted great. In fact, the store-bought sauce did not do the meat justice.
• Carrot Soup (page 178). Since my visits to Rosenlaui began, I've admired their soups. Since I had a pressure cooker now, I could use their recipe to see if I could emulate the creamy soups that Rosenlaui did. The resulting texture is nothing short of amazing. It's quite a bit of work, since you have to pressure cook the carrots, then blend them, and then add carrot juice. This is eliminating the final step. But the soup is incredibly smooth and generally good stuff. I liked it a lot, but Xiaoqin is in general not a fan of Western style soups, so I guess I won't be making this again.

All this convinced me that I should experiment with sous vide for a more consistent experience. It took a bit to figure out what to buy, so I'll list it here, in case you want to try it yourself:

• Sous Vide Supreme Demi. You don't need anything bigger, so don't waste your time with the other stuff. I didn't opt for a circulating bath heater, because the resulting decor would not please my wife. If you're single and cheap, try a manual rice cooker or crockpot and the DorkFood temperature controller.
• Iwatani Torch Burner. It burns butane cartridges you can easily get at Ranch 99. Easy on, easy off, and it doesn't look like industrial equipment.
• Seal-a-Meal Vacuum Sealer. If all you do is short recipes you can use zip-loc bags. You can also buy a package including the Sous Vide Supreme sealer, but the difference between reviews of this unit and reviews of the Sous Vide Supreme unit is huge, so I recommend buying this one.

With this, I experimented with the following receipes:

• Sous Vide Salmon (page 276). OMG. This is melt-in-your-mouth type salmon. I couldn't believe how good this was. Xiaoqin doesn't like cooked Salmon, but she found this acceptable. I'm going to have to try cod one of these days.
• Sous Vide Chicken (page 244). You know how baked chicken always tastes dry? The reason the Slow Baked chicken receipe works is because you inject the chicken with enough brine so it doesn't dry out. Well, by cooking sous vide, you don't have to do that and the results are amazing. Xiaoqin doesn't usually like chicken, but she liked this one so much she complained I didn't eat enough. Bowen doesn't usually eat meat, and he ate a third of a piece of chicken thigh by himself. This blew my mind.
• Sous Vide Prime Rib (page 194). This was relatively disappointing. Not because the result was bad, but because we'd had high hopes after the last two sous vide dishes. I didn't follow the instructions enough, and left the meat in the machine for 3+ hours instead of the recommended 50 minutes, because I read some other instructions on the internet. On the one hand, it was my loss, but on the other hand, it demonstrates the value of the book: the book's recipes so far out perform the internet, which is unusual.
• Sous Vide Duck Confit (pages 245-246). This was the most ambitious recipe that I tried from the book. It took about 18 hours of brining the duck legs in the refrigerator, and then about 27 hours in the Sous Vide machine. But it was excellent and better than some duck confit I've had in France! If you'd told me a year ago that I'd be able to make duck confit this good, I wouldn't have believed you.

I'm not much of a foodie, and have eaten at Michelin 2-star restaurants that I considered terrible compared to say, Kabab & Curry's. I've also eaten at Google's cafetaria during the good years (2005-2007), and could taste the difference when I returned to Mountain View in 2008 after a stint in Europe. I would say that this book has revolutionized my approach and expectations for home cooking, and I cannot imagine not using the sous vide approach for meats cooked home if I can help it. I justified my purchase of my above set up based on the idea that I could easily return it to Amazon if I didn't like it. Well, I'm not going to return those machines. Furthermore, when I first heard about the 72 hour short-rib sous vide recipes, I thought, "3 days to cook dinner? That's ridiculous." I will now admit that my thoughts about the matter now are: "how could I do without my sous vide machine for 3 days?!!"

I will now pay this book the greatest compliment I can: before I return this book to the library, I will either buy my own copy of Modernist Cuisine at Home, or the entire $530 6-volume set of Modernist Cuisine. Highly recommended. If you haven't tried it out, try it. If you're local and want to try it, talk to me and we'll work something out. And if you're an engineer who hates cooking and can't do anything right in the kitchen, you need this book.

Update: My 4-month retrospective.

Review: Dead Beat

Dead Beat is book 7 of the Dresden files. The theme villains for this novel are the necromancers, so we finally get to see zombies in action. Harry Dresden no longer seems as incompetent at the start of the novel as in other novels, as he faces off several villains who outclass him by a lot. But then he pulls off a bone stupid move in the last third of the novel.

Fortunately, not all is broken with the novel. We finally start to see him get some recognition from the other Wizards, and he even gets a regular paycheck, which eliminates some of the silliness inherent in the series: if you're any good at magic, how can you stay so darn broke all the time?

The novel does seem set up to be a blockbuster movie at some point, with undead dinosaurs, gobs of explosions, and even a spot for a pretty guest star. Butcher gets his pacing right, and while there is a spot of idiocy in Dresden's actions, the rest of it is reasonable.

As lightweight summer reading this novel works. Mildly recommended.

Review: Strikefleet Omega

The first time I saw Air Traffic Control, I immediately got addicted. This is one of those genre of games which are ideal for a tablet or phone: you draw lines on the screen to direct planes to their destinations. However, other line drawing games haven't been as good. Air Patriots, for instance, was just too hard and tedious.

Strikefleet Omega, however,gets the difficulty right, and is not at all tedious. The science fiction theme is that you're the commander of a fleet of battleships fighting for humanity's survival. You fly from star system to star system, warping in and then defending yourself from incursions from the enemy. Enemies come in 3 types: fighters (small planes), cruisers (larger flying saucers), and battlecruisers (giant ass ships or constructs). Correspondingly, you have 5 types of ships you can warp in to defend your flagship, 3 of which deal specifically with the different types of enemy. The 4th type is a mining ship that generates resources so you can pay for the warp ins. The last is a generic artillery unit which can be used to target small and large ships alike.

Most of the missions are fair. You'll win on the first try, just barely, and then be able to improve your performance. The game has two types of currency: alloys, and mega creds. The former are gathered by destroying large ships and scoring points, and the latter can only be attained by a flying saucer that can be shot with an artillery unit. The last 3 missions are exceedingly hard, and I found myself using mega-bombs twice. I had more than enough mega creds to do so, however, without having to spend real money on the game. I didn't do much grinding: I'd play each mission twice, and the last few missions just once each because I didn't want to blow mega creds..

I rarely get around to finishing games, on tablets or otherwise. That Strikefleet Omega got me interested enough to play it to completion speaks volumes about how well-designed and addictive it is. Recommended.

Review: Weeride Kangaroo Childseat

It is clearly not a hidden agenda with me that I want my child to enjoy cycling, preferably from as early an age as possible. One of my fellow bike club members once confided in me that her biggest disappointment was that both her sons did not like cycling at all, so she has to ride "on the sly" as far as her family is concerned.

We did buy a trailer fairly early on, but he didn't like it. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised. The trailer is much more like a car than like a bike: he's low to the ground, with limited visibility, and has to stare at daddy's rear wheels and legs. So we started shopping for a child seat. We ruled the rear carriers out of hand, because that was only a mild improvement over a trailer. I also wanted to be able to monitor Bowen, and a rear mounted seat doesn't work that well for that.

As far as front carriers are concerned, there are only 2 choices, the WeeRide, and the iBert.

We picked the WeeRide because it was cheaper, and looked easier to install, and didn't have his legs sticking out under the bars, where it might interfere with cables, etc. We tried the iBert at a Co-Motion event in the middle seat of a triplet, and in that situation, the iBert is actually better, so whether you plan to use the seat on a single or a triplet makes a difference. In any case, both are so cheap that you could reasonably buy both and not break the bank.

Since both types of seats are suitable only for flat bar bikes, I decided to just buy a cheap bike for riding with Bowen. While I paid only $250 on BikesDirect, I'm not sure I would go quite so cheap next time. The big chainring on that bike bent on the first ride, and the wheels definitely needed additional tensioning. I'm equipped to fix the latter problem, but the former is just an indication of poor quality.

The problem with the Weeride is that unless you have an unusually long top tube on the bike, your knees will interfere with the seat. I ended up setting my saddle height low as a result so I could actually mount and ride the thing with Bowen on it. This is not a big deal for very short rides, but it does mean that any ambitious I have of towing a trailer as well are gone.

The mounting scheme doesn't let you adjust the seat height after you've set up the seat without a hassle, so no, you can't just set it up and then set up your saddle.

I might sound like I'm complaining a lot, but actually, we've been using the Weeride quite a bit! Bowen loves it and has started demanding bike rides, and has taken to imitating the Weeride on his strider. He now asks to listen to Queen's Bicycle race over and over again. So in terms of getting Bowen into cycling, it's working. We'll see how it goes when he masters the Strider.

My Books Are Discounted on Amazon

Those of you who visit my books' website know that I don't believe in discounting. But Amazon believes otherwise, and for now, print copies of my book are being sold at a discount:

• An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups ($39.56)
• Startup Engineering Management ($35.96)
• Independent Cycle Touring ($26.01)

Independent Cycle Touring in particular is discounted by a huge amount (35%), and it works particularly well in print format, so if you've been holding off on buying it, this is the cheapest it's ever been and probably the cheapest it will ever be. If you have any interest in the topic at all, this is the best book on the topic, and of all of my books is the least likely to be outdated.

Review: Contagious

Contagious is a viral marketing handbook. Written by a professor of marketing at the Wharton business school, it promises to tell you how to make a sticky and effective marketing campaign by breaking down why and how certain videos/articles go viral while others languish in obscurity.

The author breaks down the five common denominators (plus an enabler) into 6 principles, providing a mnemonic STEPPS to hep you remember:

1. Social Currency: the idea is that people share things that make themselves look good. This can be achieved through gamification, making a product rare, or some other means that ensures that people will rush to acquire your product or join your service.
2. Triggers: the idea here is to attach your product to something that's encountered frequently, or failing that, to attach your product to an action or activity where buying your product is convenient. For instance, Rebecca Black's awful song, "Friday" gets triggered every time someone searches for Friday, whether or not they're looking for that song.
3. Emotion. try to active high arousal emotions in viewers or the audience. Awe, Excitement, Amusement (seeing something funny), Anger and Anxiety are all far more effective than Contentment or Sadness.
4. Public: make your product advertise its presence in as conspicuous a fashion as possible. Examples include Apple's white headphones, Macbook's Apple logos which glow every time a user opens it up, and of course, the bright-yellow Livestrong wrist-band.
5. Practical: people love sharing practical tips, either big discounts or useful advice.
6. Stories: this is the wrapper. What successful marketing campaigns achieve is to tie some (or all) of the above components together into a story in such a way that the product or brand is integral to the story.Without this last step your story/ad campaign might go viral, but your product will not benefit.

The biggest problem with books written by marketing people is that they're great at marketing themselves. For instance, Berger doesn't tell you which combination of the 6 principles work best together. They also use examples are have faded. For instance, FourSquare never did reach the kind of mainstream adoption that it's founders looked for. There's also nothing that tells you whether any of the successful campaigns used as part of the case studies are deliberately constructed that way, or just happen to be viral by accident. If it's the latter, you might actually not be able to replicated someone else's success.

What's most disappointing, then, is that there's no process detailed on how to achieve the results you want, and nor are effective ways for you to measure the success of a viral marketing campaign described and mentioned.

While this book was worth reading (it's very short and a quick read), I wonder how many people can actually effectively use this book.

Mildly recommended.

Review: Nickel Plated

Nickel Plated comes from the Amazon Encore Imprint of books. Judging by the quality (and price) of the book, traditional dead tree publishers have a lot to fear from Amazon Encore, if this is the type of author they've been passing on and this is the type of book that's the future of independent publishing.

Nickel is an all-round fixer. He charges people who can afford it $100/day to fix their problems. People can't afford it get the job done for free. Obviously, this can't possibly pay the bills, so he runs a business on the side selling weed that he grows in his backyard. Sounds like a typical action-hero thriller? Oh yeah, Nickel is 12 years old.

Not only is he a 12 year old, he's the one that you wished you were when you were 12. He lives alone, pays his own bills, run his own life, never has to go to school, and beats up bullies who tries to bully him. He's almost too perfect. The main plot around the novel starts when Nickel is approached by Arrow, whose sister has gone missing and whose dad becomes the prime suspect for the disappearance. Nickel investigates, while his life is complicated by a mom who is worried about her son's night life, his drug business, and the general problem of being 12 years old trying to get by.

The plot and story sounds outrageous, and it is, but Davis makes it all work, and work well. Nickel pretty much has to either take a cab or ride his bike everywhere, and he does. He talks about how he has to go grocery shopping and treat every trip as though he's running errands for his parents, and how to construct fake Facebook identities. He points out that in the modern suburban environment, most people don't even notice their neighbors, so never see that there's no one home next door but there's a 12 year old living there.

I hate to say it, but this is a novel that definitely demands a sequel, simply because the character is so compelling and has a great backstory that I would love to learn more about, and I will look for more books by Aric Davis in the future. Highly recommended.

Review: The First 20 Minutes

The First 20 Minutes is a book about exercise physiology. It's been a number of very good years for exercise physiology since more and more research has been published about mind-body connection, and there's any number of fads and myths, which this book does a great job of debunking.

For instance, take barefoot running. It's been touted as the solution for everything related to running injuries, but it turns out that for instance, the natural walking position even when barefoot is heel striking first, not stepping on the balls of your feet. Interestingly enough, there's research showing that barefoot running doesn't solve all running injuries, and in fact may create different injuries, so choice of running footwear or lack thereof is largely a matter of personal taste.

The section on stretching is well known --- hopefully by now everyone knows that stretching before exercising is actually bad for you. What's oddly interesting is that she found research showing that most athletes overdo the warm up, wearing themselves out before the actual event.

Reynolds does a good job describing the difference between fitness and health, and points out that 20 minutes of exercise a day is all you really need to maintain health. But if you want to change your body shape, then you have to do quite a bit more (an hour a day). Worse, exercise isn't a great way to lose weight, unless you do a lot of it. She notes that vigorous intense workouts exceeding 800 calories burned do indeed give you an "afterburn", where your appetite gets depressed and your metabolic rate increases even post workout. Unfortunately, life's not fair. Apparently, this does not happen to women.

Ever wondered why women sweat less than men? This book has the answer. There's also sections on why more repetition at a lower weight is the preferred method for strength training now, and how exercise affects your brain (old hat to folks who've read Brain Rules), and how exercise affects your DNA at a deep level, provided you start early enough (in your 20s). There's also how exercise affects kids as well as older people (hint: it's good to start early, while the baby is in mom's womb!). All in all, the book is comprehensive, even more so than Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights.

I do have a few complaints about the book. First, Reynolds doesn't like cycling, so she gives cycling short shrift --- there's very little tips for cyclists that are useful, and she quotes an old study showing that 60rpm is more efficient metabolically than 90rpm. Anyone who does any amount of cycling knows that metabolic efficiency is unimportant in cycling --- cyclists are already the most efficient land animal on the planet. It's about endurance, and it's far easier to push a light weight for a long time than to push a heavier weight for the same amount of time.

With those criticisms aside, though, this is a great book and worth reading. Recommended!

Review: Ghost Spin

I was all set to buy Ghost Spin, after enjoying Moriarty's previous books Spin State and Spin Control, but the Amazon reviews put me off, so I waited for the library copy. I shouldn't have waited, because the reviews are wrong and Ghost Spin is one of the best novels I've read all year.

It picks up after Spin State and Spin Control, but is a far more ambitious novel. The themes in this novel include the nature of identity (Are you your memories? Are you still you, if you can be replicated multiple times but the different versions of you have different experiences?), the nature of love and consciousness, as well as how we would treat AIs if emergent AIs truly did exist.

The novel starts with Catherine Li's AI husband, Cohen, committing suicide deliberately. His remains are (in accordance with AI traditions) are immediately auctioned off. As his widow, Catherine sets off immediately to try to recover and reconstruct her husband, but the path to doing so is filled with obstacles and she ends up scatter-casting herself through human space as well.

What makes the novel work for a computer scientist is the references scattered throughout the novel that are accurate and interesting. Moriarty clearly does her homework: references to Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, and Lewis Carroll are all well made and taken within context. Her extrapolation on how an emergent AI would work, and how an AI could die or evolve is fascinating and interesting. For instance, something that no other AI-oriented novels ever cover is the fact that if your memory is perfect, and you were unable to truly forget, wouldn't that drive you crazy? Her characters are also worthy of being cared about, even though some of them do do despicable things. One of the main characters in the book (Captain Llewellyn) ends up having to share his brain/body with an AI, and the exploration of the themes emerge most thoroughly with the conversations he has with himself.

Where the novel fails is in plotting. I really liked the book for the first 20 minutes after putting it down, but then realized that the plot didn't make a lot of sense in retrospect. For Cohen to commit suicide doesn't make sense to me, even at the end of the novel. The big reveals in the novel, however, are very fair --- you get plenty of foreshadowing and all the clues needed to put together the reveal yourself.

This novel is not an action-packed one, especially in comparison with Spin State. A lot of the book just composes of conversations characters have between themselves or even with themselves. And the novel does have the one obvious failure. But the writing, the milieu, and the thorough exploration of fascinating AI themes are more than enough to let me overlook the failure. If you're a computer scientist who enjoys fiction this could very much be the perfect novel for you. If not, then be prepared to get a massive info dump and not quite enough context to understand fully what's going on.

Highly recommended.

Review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Garrett was kind enough to get me an autographed copy of The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, so I could skip the queue at the library and get to reading Gaiman's latest.

The novel starts out autobiographically, and one could be almost forgiven for thinking that Gaiman has decided to move away from his usual genre. (In his blog, Gaiman states that he started the novel slow so that younger readers wouldn't persist and read a book meant for adults) We get some insight about how someone who's going to be an author grows up, and there's a good description of the house Gaiman grew up in, as well as his room.

Then one day, a paying houseguest commits suicide at a neighbor's, leading the protagonist (who's unnamed through the entire novel) to meet the Hempstocks, who live on a farm at the end of the road. The Hempstocks, however, are not just farmers, and we are quickly introduced to Lettie, her mom Ginnie, and grandmother Old Mrs Hempstock. In a bit of a head fake here, I thought Gaiman was going to reuse the tropes of the three Fates, but instead, the Hempstocks are quite a bit different.

Our protagonist gets taken away on an adventure, but in the tradition of such stories, he fails to obey all the rules exactly, and brings home a hitch-hiker, which proceeds to wreck havoc with his life and his family. The correspondence with Coraline is clear here. The Hempstocks come to the rescue, but the results teaches our young narrator the meaning of sacrifice, as well as the nature of story and the purpose of life.

In many ways, I feel like Gaiman is reusing the same themes from his previous books. Each part of the story draws from so many traditions that the entire novel feels inevitable. The prologue and epilogue, however, nicely frames the story and gives us more than the usual fairy tale. I recommend this book, though not as highly as say, Stardust.

Review: Lance Armstrong's War

I picked up Lance Armstrong's War from the library on a whim, since it's Tour de France season, and I figured it would be amusing to see how things looked a few years ago.

Written by Daniel Coyle, who was a writer/editor for Outside magazine, this book tries very hard to introduce non-cyclists to the world of the pro peloton. What's interesting in the aftermath of history, of course, is how much this book reads like a fan-boy account of Armstrong. The author moved to Girona, works in his rivals, team-mates, mechanics, and others into the story, and then largely takes Armstrong's side against the accusations of doping. This is American journalism at its worse --- the author even gives up all pretense of independence by submitting drafts of the book to Armstrong and his publicity team

 In retrospect, David Walsh's criticism of Armstrong's connections to doping has been largely vindicated by history. However, as an unintentionally funny read (as well as an indictment of American-style OMG/Engadget journalism), this is a book worth picking up at the library. (The book has also now been bargain-binned by Amazon, for good reason) It's not recommended if you're going to read the book unironically, though!

Negotiation Consultancy Back In Operation

While I was working for Quark Games, I stopped accepting clients for my private services. (There would have been something wrong with working somewhere while negotiating on behalf of engineers) As of last week, however, I am no longer associated with Quark Games, so I am now reopening my service. It's good to be back!

Review: Funky Gourmet, Athens

I neglected to review Funky Gourmet during my Athens Trip Report. It was a bright spot in an otherwise not very stellar trip.

To begin with, the restaurant is in a house set in a neighborhood which not even taxi drivers can necessarily find. What you do is call the restaurant with your cell phone and have them talk to your taxi driver. Secondly, the house has no signage proclaiming the presence of a restaurant. What it does have is a little tag next to the door bell proclaiming the name of the restaurant.

Inside, the restaurant is beautifully decorated and the wait staff is attentive. This was my first Michelin-star-rated restaurant experience, though I've since been to higher-rated Michelin restaurants and have been unimpressed by them in comparison to Funky Gourmet. I've since decided that TripAdvisor ratings are a much better gauge of restaurant quality than Michelin ratings. Most Michelin-star rated restaurants are not very welcoming for families, but this one very tolerant of Bowen. They brought him his own plastic cups, and gave him as many straws as he threw on the floor. When the time came that he couldn't stay in his seat any more, they were happy to let him run around.

I have high standards for food, though I'm unimpressed by price and service. Funky Gourmet exceeded my expectations. The self-made pesto pasta was the best I've had anywhere, and the scallop impressed even my wife. The presentation of every dish was great, and the desserts (the 13 course menu had 3 of them) were nothing short of excellent. The early dishes had quite a bit of greek influence, while the later dishes (except for the desserts) were more conventional. The only miss was the mini-burger. All in all, a great restaurant/experience, and highly recommended if you're in Athens.

Review: Blood Rites

Blood Rites is book 6 of the Dresden files series. In this book, Dresden foils a plot involving murder of various women who are working at a porn studio. Unlike previous books, one of the mystery puzzles in the novel is actually fair: in other words, you have all the clues needed in order to actually solve the puzzle.

Tangled up with this main plot is one of the recurring villains from a prior book returning to make Dresden's life and revealing more details about the White Council as a result. This also includes Dresden's relationship with his mentor, as well as his long lost brother.

Butcher is a decent novelist, but unfortunately I have a hard time feeling for his characters, who act pretty much like puppets in the plot. All in all, it's a good book in the series, but it would lost most of its impact if you hadn't read the previous books, which I'm not sure I would consider. I'm going to take a break from the Dresden files for a while. Nevertheless, I'd recommend this book if you've read the other books in the series as it does add a lot to the mysteries previously detailed.

Review: Death Masks

Death Masks is the fifth book in the Dresden files. It continues the series' trend away from the private investigator schtick towards the super-powered magical hero set in an urban environment. In this novel, everything that's happened in the previous four come together in a climax that's worthy of Joss Whedon's Buffy.

We have the war between the wizards and the vampires, we have his former reporter girlfriend (now a proto-vampire), we have a stolen magical artifact (the Shroud of Turin), and we have the Knights of the Cross, as well as Chicago's crime boss. To me, this is the first novel where Dresden doesn't seem like a barely competent wizard, but actually seems to be effective at doing stuff other than dropping his implements and tools, and is able to achieve effects other than dropping unconscious any time anything contacts his noggin.

The novel seems built for the movies: lots of set-piece action sequences, fancy sword play, demons, and no less than 3 showdowns and a Mexican standoff. While it's all a lot of fun, it also feels like Jim Butcher's deliberately holding out on us: there's lots of hints about how Dresden is special, and lots of big actors are afraid of him, but no actual exposition on his past or his parents.

A fun summer read. Mildly recommended.

Review: Summer Knight

Summer Knight is the fourth book in the Dresden files. This time, Jim Butcher focuses on the Faerie, while providing more background for Harry Dresden's past. We finally get to see the White Council in action, as well as some the werewolves from Fool Moon.

There are several problems with Butcher's milleu, however. For instance, given an apparently large number of Wizards, they seem ridiculously ineffectual. While you might dismiss most of them as being perhaps researchy/ivory-tower types, it does seem like Dresden is the only Wizard who's actually actively involved in the world, leading to what I call the "player-character-problem". In other words, it's a world where that does seem like it exists only give give Dresden meaning. While this is common in fantasy, by setting Dresden in Chicago, the milleu means that Chicago is at the center of the universe.

That might be ok if Butcher has Dresden doing his best to reset everything into status quo after each book, but given the huge world-changing events that tend to happen, it's a wonder that not everyone in this universe knows all there is to know about the monsters in the night.

Nevertheless, if you can put all this behind you, it's a fun summer read that doesn't require a lot of thinking. Mildly recommended.

Review: Before Midnight

I saw Before Sunrise/Before Sunset as a set of movies years ago. Those were great films, so when XiaoQin mentioned that Before Midnight was in the theaters, I was happy to see it with her.

Before Midnight is set in Greece, 9 years after Before Sunset. Like the other films, the film is shot in almost real time. Like many couples in their 40s, they have three children, one divorce, and a family life under pressure, though given that Jesse is a successful writer, they do not seem to be under financial stress.

As with the prior two films, the dialogue is beautiful and real, and even the depiction of the people involved seem real. Whatever make-up is on Julie Delpy, for instance, isn't there to make her look like an ultra-beautiful mother, but serves the story and role she plays. Even the fights between the couples and the extremes they go through seems real. I like it quite a bit better than Before Sunset, where I felt that the plot leaned too hard against what the character might do.

Obviously, this isn't a movie that needs to be seen in the theaters, but it does deserve your viewing. Highly recommended.

Review: Don't Turn Around

Don't Turn Around is Michelle Gagnon's YA thriller. It does seem custom-written for Hollywood as far as facing the latest trends. The teen heroine protagonist, Noa, wakes up on an operating room table and immediately manages to run from her captors despite having what looked like pretty major surgery. She soon teams up with rich boy Peter, who while hacking into a corporate site gets his house broken into and his laptop taken away. They then work to figure out why this corporate site is so important, why Noa was operated on, and the latest nefarious scheme to kidnap runaways.

The treatment of computers is very much like a Hollywood movie: being good at computers means you're good at breaking and entering corporate sites and running your e-mail through multiple proxies to hide where you're from. The evil people are cartoon villains who have enormous resources behind them. The ending has light bulbs exploding,  etc.

The heroine, Noa, draws immediate comparison with Lisbeth Salander in Girl with  the Dragon Tattoo. Unfortunately, with an even more unbelievable plot, I cannot recommend this novel. Go elsewhere for your summer reading.

Review: Grave Perils

Grave Perils is the first Dresden book that feels like it's a good novel. It starts out with Dresden and his friend Michael trying to figure out what's causing the ghosts in Chicago to go crazy, and rather than trying to follow the private investigator genre that's not working for the a Wizard who's none too good a putting clues together, the Butcher goes the route of the thriller.

We get large set pieces involving ghosts, faerie, and of course, a vampire masquerade party. We get grudge matches, and Dresden at last seems to show that he's actually a somewhat competent Wizard, even though he does seem to spend a lot of the novels almost completely bereft of power.

The lows: the novels don't seem to provide a coherent view of magic and what it can or  cannot do, and so what Dresden does doesn't always feel like something the reader could anticipate in the first place. Lois Bujold does a much better job in her Chalion novels.

Nevertheless, if you're interested in a fantasy thriller, this was a fun read. Recommended.

Quantifying the Apple Tax

The last time I was a Mac user was in 2009 when I upgraded to the Canon 5D Mk 2 and got rid of my Mac Mini as being too slow to run Lightroom. Before 2006, I was a PC user and never bothered paying the Apple tax. It wasn't until I joined Quark Games, which was a mostly Mac shop that I ran into the Apple tax again.

The Apple tax impacts small development shops. Large corporations  like Adobe or Google aren't cash constrained. In fact,  at Google, most developers wouldn't even be aware of the Apple tax because most of their computation is done in the cloud. At a small shop like Quark, however, we are cash constrained and most of our computation is done locally, at the developer's desk.

Most of Apple's desktops are incredibly under-powered. For instance, the iMacs don't even let you replace a hard drive, which means that you have to pay Apple's incredible markup for SSDs, and in the case of the smaller iMacs, you can't even upgrade the memory yourself. For a developer workstation that potentially needs more than one SSDs, this is unacceptable. Yes, you can upgrade to a 3.4 GHz Core i7, but that's even more expensive than a Mac Pro and you end up with a machine you cannot upgrade.

Then there's the Mac Pro. It's mid-2013, and they cost $2500. What's worse, is that they use a 2009 Xeon CPU which under-performs my 2008 home desktop! And that machine cost me $1200 back in 2008! You can compare it with a current Dell with the latest Haswell i7-4770 processor. That machine would cost $750, with twice the processing power of the Mac Pro! Sure, the Mac Pro has a nicer case which makes it easier to upgrade. And it has ECC RAM (for all the good that'll do you --- I can't remember a single instance where I wanted ECC RAM for any of my development needs). The fact is, Apple has no mid-range towers, but if you need to deliver iOS applications to your customers you have no choice: you have to buy an Apple product. Yes, I'm aware Apple has a new Mac Pro at the end of the year. However, the new machine has no room for hard drive expansion at all, so I might as well buy an iMac!

At Quark, our solution has been to buy the 13 inch non-Retina Macbook Pros. With a couple of screwdrivers you can take those apart and upgrade the memory and hard drive. Unfortunately, when you need to process a lot of art and music assets, the CPUs on those machines bog down. Even then, using Macbook Pros save you because when we bought our Mac Pros, we could take the hard drives out of the laptops and stuff them into the desktops and get immediate productivity gains, without the pain of reinstalling all our software and losing a day in the process.

What's amusing to me is that the art team tells me that the rest of the industry has gone to Windows PCs for 3D-modeling and other art needs precisely to escape the Apple tax (and these despite Apple's reputation as the go-to computer for artists!). So it's only engineering that's stuck paying the Apple tax. Certainly, if Android were too crush iOS devices, small development shops will be the first to switch sides completely just to avoid paying the Apple tax, which stands at $1700/developer. I know I'll be switching our art team over at the next available opportunity. In the mid-1990s, I dreamed of the days when we'd escape the Microsoft hegemony. But now that we've largely escaped it's clear the Apple overlords are much worse than the Microsoft ones ever were.

Review: Fool Moon

Fool Moon is the second book in Jim Butcher's Dresden files series. It's clear how Butcher's approaching the series. Each book is going to be the paranormal monster of the moment, and we get to see Dresden repeatedly beat up and tortured until he limps across the finish line.

The theme in this novel is the werewolf. Again, Dresden solves problems mostly by getting beaten up, spat out, and getting screwed over. He also demonstrates that he's not much of a wizard by running out of power repeatedly, dropping his tools at crucial moments and in general failing to do wizardly things.

I've been told that the novels get better. The voice is good enough that I'll give a 3rd novel a try in the hopes that it does get better. In any case, skip this one.