Trips Index

The trips index that used to be on the navigation bar on the left of the blog has finally gotten too unwieldy. I'm replacing it with this page (which will be permalinked from the navigation bar) instead.

• Conslidated Cycle Touring Index
• 2003 Tour of the Alps
• 2005 Tour of the Alps
• 2006 Coast to Coast
• 2007 Tour of the Alps
• 2007 Virgin Islands
• 2008 Tour Across France
• 2008 Sailing in Turkey
• 2009 Australia
• 2009 Tour of Hokkaido
• 2009 Sailing and Diving in St. Vincent and the Grenadines
• 2010 Tour of the Alps
• 2010 Canadian Rockies
• 2011 Tour of the Alps
• 2012 British Virgin Islands
• 2012 Europe
• 2013 Greece
• 2014 Tour of the Alps
• 2014 Virgin Islands
• 2015 Grand Tetons and Yellowstone
• 2015 British Columbia
• 2016 Japan
• 2016 Iceland
• 2016 Tour of the Alps
• 2016 Florida Keys
• 2017 Magic Kingdom & Universal Orlando Islands of Adventure
• 2017 British Virgin Islands
• 2017 England Lakes District and the Yorkshire Moors
• 2017 Bowen's First Tour in England
• 2017 Carson Iceberg Wilderness
• 2017 Puerto Vallarta
• 2018 Bowen Winter Bike Tour
• 2018 Bowen's First Tour of the Alps
• 2018 Lassen Volcano National Park Trip
• 2018 British Virgin Islands
• 2019 Boen's First Bicycle Tour
• 2019 Mallorca, Barcelona, and Girona
• 2019 Shasta Kayaking and Cycling
• 2019 Tour Across Bavaria
• 2019 Cabo San Lucas
• 2020 Yosemite Hetch Hetchy
• 2020 Covid19 Excursion List
• 2021 Chiluana Falls Backpack
• 2021 Montana and Glacier National Park
• 2021 Antigua and Barbuda
• 2022 Barcelona, Cadaques and Girona
• 2022 Tour of the Alps
• 2022 Spanish Virgin Islands
• 2023 Canada
• 2023 Bahamas
• 2024 Tour of the Alps
• 2024 Whistler
• 2024 Yosemite
• 2024-2025 New Zealand & Fiji
• 2025 Yosemite's Half Dome
• 2025 Tour of Dolomites, Slovenia and the Alps

Japan 2016: Kyoto

The Shinkansen was a great experience, but to my surprise despite it being a mid-day trip we had a hard time getting seats in the non-reserved section. I made a note to make sure we got reserved seats on the trip back to Tokyo. Arriving in Kyoto at 2:45pm, we opted for a taxi to take us to our AirBnB home for the next 3 nights instead of the bus. The place turned out to be hard to find even for the taxi driver to find, but Yumiko, our AirBnB host was kind enough to get on a Skype call with the driver and even meet us outside the bridge in front of her house to guide the driver in the last 50 meters. Given how tricky it was I wasn't unhappy about spending the money.

By the time we were all settled in, it was 4pm, and we opted for a neighborhood stroll:

From Japan 2016

Kyoto is a gorgeous city, with lots of beautiful streets and neighborhoods. In fact, i"d say that my biggest regret about Tokyo was not walking enough. Note that according to my Garmin Vivoactive, during our 2 full days in Kyoto, we walked 9.5 miles and 9 miles respectively, most of that with Boen in the backpack on my shoulders, but I wanted to walk even more and just simply ran out of time (and also didn't want to push Bowen that hard, since the poor kid had to keep up with adults!).
That first night we walked around, explored the neighborhood, and ate dinner out, then bought breakfast for the next day. I had some ambitions about being able to eat out, but as the days progressed realized that with 2 kids, eating out was way more stressful than buying ready-to-eat packages at the supermarket that was literally 150m from the house, and much cheaper to boot!
Our first official visit the next day was at the Kiyomizu Dera, which many many people had recommended to us. The grounds were pretty, but it was crowded despite our early arrival.

From Japan 2016

From Japan 2016

From Japan 2016

There was also a Studio Ghibli museum nearby, so Bowen got to hug a large number of Totoros. After lunch, I looked in the guidebook and discovered that nearby was a street that was said to be the prettiest street in all of Asia. Going there took us through the Gion district and another temple, but it was indeed pretty.

From Japan 2016

After that, we took a bus to a Ramen shop, and then made it home for dinner after visiting the Imperial Palace and discovering that it required reservations. Our last full day in Kyoto started at Fushima Inari, which would have been a nice climb but with kids, would have taken quite a bit longer than the projected 50 minutes. We got as high as the first place with which to get a nice view of Kyoto and turned around.

From Japan 2016

From Japan 2016

It was indeed pretty, but once again had people, people, and more people everywhere. I think after too many decades of living in North America, I'm just no longer used to such crowded areas. After the shrine, we headed to the Nishiki food market for snacking, and then headed over to Ginkakuji, which was yet another nice looking temple. But that wasn't what was exciting about Ginkakuji: it was the Philosopher's Path that started near that temple and led through the back alleys. That's a nice city walk that surpassed all our expectations, and if I'd known it was that nice I would probably have started the day with it instead of ending our visit to Kyoto with that walk. I would prioritize it over all the temples in the city.

From Japan 2016

From Japan 2016

From Japan 2016

The walk took us right to the supermarket near our AirBnB, so there we left the path unfinished, to grab dinner and breakfast, and prepare for our trip to Nara the next day.

Japan 2016: Matsumoto

After our customary early breakfast, we checked out and proceeded to walk to the bus stop, which would take us to a relatively small JR train station. When you're traveling with luggage, buses are actually easier than subways as you don't have to lift the luggage up and down stairs. The bus stop was also much closer than the subway station, and provided a direct connection to a JR station. Once there, I bought the train tickets for Matsumoto from a person at the single counter available there (it was a small station), and we got onto the next train for the Shinjuku station. We changed there to catch a local express train, but Xiaoqin missed the train! Fortunately, the Tokyo express train came every 5 minutes, so she simply boarded the next one and then we got onto the long distance train together with almost an hour to spare, thanks to our being super early to begin with.

Once in Matsumoto, I walked over to the rental car company with my international driver's license to pick up a rental van (with car seats), and then picked up everyone else at the train station and then drove to Matsumoto castle.

From Japan 2016

Matsumoto wasn't at peak display either, but it was much closer to the peak than Tokyo was. Matsumoto castle itself provided a beautiful backdrop for the viewing, and we got a chance to enter the castle and examine both historical artifacts, and see what it was like in an ancient Japanese castle first hand.

From Japan 2016

From Japan 2016

The ticket for the castle also included a tour of the city museum, which wasn't nearly as impressive, but still worth a visit, given how close it was. Our stay that night was at Sugimoto Ryokan, a high end traditional luxury (read expensive) Ryokan whose service and hospitality was unmatched by any Western hotel I'd ever stayed at. For instance, the minute we parked our car in the parking lot, they'd jumped out and took our bags from us and delivered the bags into the room, even before we'd even checked in. When Bowen saw that we had gi and he didn't, the Ryokan provided him with a gi:

From Japan 2016

The room was huge, the hot springs (real hot springs!) had both indoor and outdoor rooms, and the food was nothing short of fabulous.

From Japan 2016

My Japanese instructor back in college had raved about Basashi (horse sashimi, and yes, that means it's raw!), but this was my first time trying it and wow, it was yummy! I ate everything the rest of my family couldn't finish, which unfortunately still left me quite hungry. The reason for this was obvious in hindsight: all the days in Japan, I was carrying Boen (23 pounds) on a Deuter Kid Comfort backpack (8 pounds) that was also loaded with baby food and diapers. That was at least a 35 pound load, and on some days closer to 40 pounds. Walking about 8-12 miles a day with a 35 pound load would leave me in a constant state of hunger not unlike my condition during the 2009 bike tour.
We reluctantly left Sugimoto the next day to drive towards the Shinhotaka Ropeway. On the way there, we took a detour to visit Shirahone-Onsen. The milky white character of these hot springs are apparently famous, but the place was exceedingly expensive so we didn't stay.

From Japan 2016

Not realizing that Shirahone-Onsen was on a detour, we found a tourist information center and booked a Ryokan for the night. We ended up back on the road to Shinhotaka Ropeway and being surprised that we'd seen it before! Well, we'd already paid a deposit, so we gritted our teeth, drove the rest of the way, and went up the ropeway, which did grant us nice views of the Japanese Alps.

From Japan 2016

We hiked around near the top of the ropeway, but it was mid-Spring, and there really wasn't that much hiking you could do without making an overnight trip out of it. The Ryokan we stayed that night was half the price of Sugimoto, and so not nearly as nice. But they nevertheless gave us decent food. The next day, it was cool and windy, and the hiking wasn't going to be good anyway, so we aimed to visit Obuse. On the way, however, we found a little village with cherry blossoms in full bloom!

From Japan 2016

From Japan 2016

From Japan 2016

That alone made the cost of the rental car worthwhile. Japanese mountain roads suck compared to European or North American ones. They're full of tunnels so you can't see any scenery, they're narrow, with no interesting views whatsoever. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover nice views from the Japanese freeways (well, toll-ways).
At Obuse, we visited the Hokusai museum as well as the Kozan Takai musuem. Both museums are small (under 90 minutes each if you don't rush), and well worth the visit. We tried some chest nut specialty food which Obuse was famous for, and then I set about looking for lodging on my smartphone. Due to a Tripadvisor app screw up, I ended up searching on booking.com and found a place in the Yudanaka Onsen area. Once I read in the guidebook that this was where the opening sequence of one of my favorite movies Baraka was filmed, I was sold!
Finding Yudanaka Onsen was easy. Finding the hotel we'd booked online wasn't. But we did eventually find it after some help, and then settled in. Yudanaka still had plenty of cherry blossoms in bloom, so in the evening before dinner we did a cherry blossom walk.

From Japan 2016

From Japan 2016

I also did laundry in the most sophisticated coin operated laundromat I'd ever seen: each single machine could wash, rinse, spin, and dry your clothes in fully automated fashion, without you having to pour in detergent, etc. It was super expensive ($10 per load), but you could walk away and then come back in an hour without having to do anything.

From Japan 2016

The next morning, we drove the precarious single-lane road up to the Monkey Park. In Chinese, the park's name was: "Hell Valley" park. We had a limited time to visit the park as I had to drive back to Matsumoto that day, return the car, and then we all had to pile into a bus that would take us to the night's stay, but the trip was worth it, as we got to see the snow monkeys bathing in the pool, the scene which Baraka had made famous.

From Japan 2016

From Japan 2016

We then made the drive back to Matsumoto, where I returned the car with a minimum of fuss and we found ourselves boarding the bus for ougatou. Set high in the mountains at 6000' feet, Ougatou was billed by the guidebook as a hotel above the clouds. Unfortunately, the weather didn't cooperate and it was either clear or raining, so we didn't get the experience. Still, for the price, the service was excellent, even if the views were disappointing.

From Japan 2016

From Japan 2016

We did a bit of hiking, but it was cleary not the best season for it. Summer, Fall, or Winter would be preferable to Spring for this. We left the next day in the rain, heading back to Matsumoto for the train to Kyoto.

Japan 2016: Tokyo

Traveling with family is much different and tougher than traveling alone (or with a partner) as an adult. For instance, if you're jet-lagged as an adult, you can take sleeping pills, or worse comes to worse, wake up at 3am and go walk around a foreign city, which can be fun all by itself. You're not going to be able to do that with a toddler and infant in tow.

With that in mind, I booked a 3 night stay at Homeikan in Tokyo, hoping that it 3 days would be sufficient to get over baby jet-lag. (Bowen's baby jet-lag during the 2012 trip was a horrifying experience that I still remember today) In a similar vein, I paid one of our AirBnB hosts, Ryu, to pick us up from the airport in a mini-van. After a 9 hour flight, I expected everyone to be stressed and I did not want to deal with navigating the train system and busy streets immediately after the flight. The flight was indeed stressful for Boen, so it was a relief to see Ryu holding up a sign for our party when we exited the customs and immigration terminal.

From Japan 2016

The trip to Homeikan took a good 2 hours by car which was much longer than it would have by train (which would have been an hour or so), mostly because of unusually poor traffic conditions. On the other hand, we could see Tokyo first hand, including cyclists without helmets, the Skytree, and ask questions of Ryu. Bowen whined a lot about having no water to drink, but that would have been true on the train as well. Once settled in the hotel, we went out for a quick dinner, got a quick bath, and then went to sleep as late as we could.

Going from California to Japan was the easy direction, but we still all woke up around 5:00am, and by the time breakfast came, we were hungry. 

From Japan 2016

We then went to Ueno park, mostly because it was close. We knew from reports that the Cherry Blossom season was over. But what was left was remarkably good, and still quite pretty:

From Japan 2016

What was remarkable was that whenever the wind blew, we'd get cherry blossoms coming down on us from the trees. We would later be told that this was 花吹雪, Hana Fubuki.

After that we went to the Nishiki market for lunch. The wait was over an hour, and we later found out that this was normal! The only time to go when it wouldn't be crowded would be in the morning, right after breakfast. Well, I wasn't about to do that since the Ryokan did feed us quite well.

From Japan 2016

Over-ambitious by this point, we went to Akhibahara, but discovered that all the big shops that would do tax-free discounting required you to bring your passport, and we'd left ours safely at the hotel. Everyone was tired by now, so we headed back to Homeikan. Poor Bowen fell asleep waiting for his ramen dinner!

From Japan 2016

The little guy had walked all over Tokyo with us (I was carrying his little brother in the backpack, so I couldn't carry him), and according to my watch, we'd walked 10 miles in total. No wonder he was tired.

Ask anyone what the best antidote for jet-lag was, and you'll hear that sunlight and exercise are the best. We didn't get a huge amount of sunlight, but judging by my hips and shoulders, we did get quite a bit of exercise. So rather than a long walk through a park, we took the subway to the Tokyo Skytree.

From Japan 2016

From there, you got nice panoramic views of Tokyo, but unfortunately, it wasn't the clearest of days so we couldn't see Mt. Fuji.

From Japan 2016

We had lunch in the area at a famous beef tongue shop, visited the Studio Ghibli store, and then went to Shinjuku, where the intention was to look at the street scene. Instead, we got side-tracked into buying baby food. We got help from a very nice lady, and ended up at a department store. Having brought my passport, I paid a visit to Yodabashi Camera, and purchased an EF-M 11-22/4-5.6 STM IS for the EOS M3, as well as a spare battery. As a foreigner on a short visit, camera equipment is one of the few things that are cheaper in Tokyo than they would be in the USA, though even in those cases you should still do some comparison shopping in advance.

Exhausted, we went back to the hotel early and went to bed early, as we had a train to catch the next morning to Matsumoto.

Japan 2016 Index

For this year's Spring Break, we opted to visit Japan. Since we had to orient around Bowen's school schedule, we weren't able to pick the optimal dates to visit Kyoto/Tokyo during peak cherry blossom season. Because of that, in addition to those two cities, we picked Matsumoto, where we could rent a car and use that to explore and find cherry blossoms to look at. This is the index page for the trip. Unlike my cycling trips, I won't do a day-by-day breakdown but simply discuss each city/region:

• Tokyo
• Matsumoto
• Kyoto
• Nara
• Final Day in Tokyo
• Thoughts and Conclusions

Equipment reviews will also be provided, as well as recommendations for future trips.

Review: Hitman GO (Android)

I don't usually play Android games, but Hitman GO was an exception and well worth it. I never played any of the Hitman series, but that didn't matter. The game's laid out like a board game, where for each move you make the other characters on the board move. Those other characters are controlled by an algorithm, so each level is essentially a puzzle where you figure out the sequence of moves that will achieve your objective.

Most of the time your objective will involve either getting a briefcase, killing everyone on the board, or not killing anyone on the board, as well as getting to the exit. The game comes with 6 different sets of puzzles, and to move from one set to the next requires that you score points by achieve those objectives. What's great about the game is that Square Enix did not require micropayments to move forward: if you achieve 2 out of 3 objectives for each puzzle, you will be able to unlock the entire game. What I did not realize was that to achieve all 3 objectives for each puzzle is not possible without playing through the puzzle twice.

The game also comes with a hint system should you get stuck. The puzzles, however, are fairly straightforward and I wouldn't have used it except that I was playing with the UI and found it by accident on the last mission.

The game does drain the battery on my smartphone, and on my Moto G had a significant startup time. Once started, each puzzle takes you about 2-5 minutes, which is perfect for a game you play at a bus stop. For $1-2, the game is recommended and worth your while. Because there are no micro-transactions even for hints (not true of the follow-up Lara Croft GO), it is safe to give it to your children to play.

Review: WingZ

I was a big fan of WingZ for a couple of rides. The service lets you book a trip to the airport, minus the hassle of ride shares like Super Shuttles, which are either expensive, or Uber, which doesn't let you pre-book a trip at all. (Not to mention I could never get Uber to work for me on the smartphone)

Then I got a driver who not only didn't show, but only told me that he wasn't going to show 10 minutes before my flight departed. I'd ended up driving the family to the airport at the last minute and paying a daily rate for a multi-week trip.

Now, since the drivers aren't employees, I don't really blame WingZ, but surprised me was the completely unsympathetic response of the organization, given that I'd documented all the interchange between us and our driver, and the driver's pathetic excuse "Not comfortable driving in the rain."

Contrast this with AirBnB's response to our issue in 2012 of getting charged a cleaning fee that wasn't appropriate. With this kind of attitude, I strongly urge friends and family not to use WingZ, and I don't expect them to be around for the long haul regardless.

NOT RECOMMENDED.

Review: Matterhorn

My standard for Vietnam War books is The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien. But Matterhorn might very well replace that. Matterhorn is the name of a firebase during the Vietnam war, and the novel follows the travails of Bravo company, amongst which is one Lieutenant Mellas, a college educated Marine Corps officer who for idealistic reasons, opted not to go for deferment and ended up in the infantry instead.

One by one, you get to know other members of the company, officers, NCOs, machine-gunners and yes, the guy who's only got a few weeks left to go on his tour and is dreaming of going back to the girlfriend he left behind in Thailand. The story is good, with Bravo company getting screwed over by senior military officers who're trying to make themselves look good at the expense of the men they command.

If you're wondering why a Vietnam War novel might be relevant to a software engineer, I think this short passage might change your mind:

“You know why we’re really strung out in this fucking death canyon?” Mellas didn’t know, so he just grunted. “Because Fitch doesn’t know how to play the fucking game. That’s why. He’s a good combat leader. I’d literally follow him to my death. But he’s not a good company commander in this kind of war. He got on Simpson’s bad side because he got his picture in the paper too often and never gave Simpson credit, which by the way he doesn’t deserve, but that’s the point. The smart guy gives the guy with the power the credit, whether he deserves it or not. That way the smart guy is dangling something the boss wants. So the smart guy now has power over the boss.” (Loc. 3841-47)

Over and over again, the novel doesn't flinch from the power politics that are played at high levels in a corporation (and in this case, the Marine Corps is just as functional or dysfunctional as any large corporation). At one point, Bravo company is tasked with digging trenches and building bunkers to defend a hill --- only to be told to abandon it to prepare for another assault elsewhere in Vietnam. Whereupon the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) promptly take over those defenses and Bravo company is then tasked with assaulting the very defenses they had built from a disadvantageous position. The poor Google engineers who built the very first version of Google Drive were similarly told to abandon it, only to have to launch again after Dropbox proved that the market existed and is pretty lucrative must have felt very similar to the marines in Bravo company. In fact, just as some of the high performing officers were unfairly blamed by their commanding officers for incompetence, I myself heard a Senior Staff Engineer at Google blame the former tech lead for Google Drive for failure to push against the killing of the project.

There's a passage where Mellas thinks about the Colonel in charge of the operation:

Mellas would probably have said that Blakely didn’t have what it takes, but Mellas would have been wrong. Blakely would have performed a lower-level job just as well as he performed his current job—competently, not perfectly, but well enough to get the work done and stay out of trouble. He’d make the same sorts of small mistakes, but they’d have a smaller effect. Instead of sending a company out without food, he might place a machine gun at a disadvantage. But the Marines under him would make up for mistakes like that. They’d fight well with the imperfect machine-gun layout. The casualties would be slightly higher, with slightly fewer enemy dead, but the statistics of perfection never show up in any reporting system. A victory is reported with the casualties it takes to secure that victory, not the casualties it would have taken if the machine gun had been better placed. There was nothing sinister in this. Blakely himself would not be aware that he’d positioned the machine gun poorly. He’d feel bad about his casualties for a while. But reflecting on why or for what wasn’t something Blakely did. Right now the problem before him was to engage the enemy and get the body count as high as possible. He wanted to do a good job, as any decent person would, and now he’d finally figured out a way to do so. He might actually get to use the entire battalion in a battle all at one time, an invaluable experience for a career officer.  (Loc. 6174-84)

That's the reality of management in a big organization, and an inherent limitation in the data-driven management techniques used today. Suboptimal code (or machine gun placement) sure as heck matters to the marines who get killed because of it (and to the engineers who have to maintain or work-around the problems), but it's not visible at all in the aggregate level to senior management. As a result, incompetent managers with serious political skills get promoted far more frequently than competent managers who lack such skills. In a high quality organization (like the Marine Corps or Google), the rank-and-file who get hired (or enlisted) are so good that they can make even incompetent managers look great. In fact, in certain circumstances, high casualties, constant war-rooms, and constant enemy engagement can make such managers look like stars, even though a better manager could have avoided all of the above. (And no, I have no idea whether the Marine Corps or Google's rank and file are really that far above average nowadays, but back when I was at Google, the average engineer was really really good, and in many cases much better than the average manager)

I'm at risk at this point of making this novel sound like a treatise in office politics, self-promotion, and lessons in how to make yourself (and your boss) look good rather than a great novel.  Let me try to disabuse you of that. It's a great novel. It's got great characters, a transparent prose style, an interesting plot and setting. It explains why the North Vietnamese beat the Americans despite the latter's overwhelming technology advantage: the terrain and weather negated most of the advantages the Marines had over their enemies, and organizational dysfunction took care of the rest.

But at this point, the novel has won so many awards and accolades (it took 30 years to write and publish!) that anything I can say about the conventional aspects of the novel can be (and probably has been) better said elsewhere by professional reviewers. The novel delivers everything a novel should deliver, and provides lessons and entertainment in spades. I paid $2 during a Kindle sale for it, but knowing what I know now would not hesitate to pay full freight. Buy it, read it, and enjoy the heck out of it. And as you do read it, the management/political lessons it provides might turn out be really useful in your career. That makes this book highly recommended.

Review: Beyond the Tiger Mom

Most parenting books are a joke, especially ones like Beyond the Tiger Mom. They ignore statistics, don't examine best practices from research, and are written pretty badly, never taking a paragraph to say something when 10 pages from a chapter would do.

I picked up Beyond the Tiger Mom because it was written by a woman (Maya Thiagarajan) who'd moved with her family from the USA to Singapore. She was an English major, of Indian descent, and also a school teacher, which gave her an insider's perspective on both educational systems. Singapore's an interesting case, since I have personal knowledge of the system from having been educated within it. From a global perspective, Singapore's educational system competes successfully with the best schools anywhere. One of the board members of an elite private school was telling me that the school he sat on the board on had the largest number of perfect scores on an economics test in the US, and was globally only second to "some school in Singapore." I immediately guessed it was Raffles Junior College my alma mater), and he confirmed it.

The issue with the Singaporean system for teaching math (or almost any other subject, for that matter), is that it's extremely exam and test focused. This is great for producing awesome scores, and you really can't argue with the results. What it's not so good at is producing motivated students who can reason their way to a novel solution. Thiagarajan acknowledges this in the book, but also points out that in aggregate, the Singaporean approach produces more students who are more capable than US:

East Asian countries with standardized exam systems tend to benefit students at the bottom of the economic ladder. In his provocative book Re-Evaluating Education in Japan and Korea: Demystifying Stereotypes, Professor Hyunjoon Park of the University of Pennsylvania uses PISA and TIMSS results to show that the bottom students in Japan and Korea 31 perform very well on these tests compared to low performers in other nations. While the top students in America are on par with the top students in Korea and Japan, the bottom students in America are far behind the bottom students in Korea and Japan. Similarly, I am repeatedly amazed that every child on the island of Singapore, whether rich or poor, is required to take the extremely rigorous and conceptual PSLE math exam. (Kindle Loc. 1503-10)

 To some extent, math at the primary school level is fairly straightforward: you can pretty much memorize the multiplication table, learn the algorithms, and then do well on the exams. At the higher levels where there's a need to understand the concepts is where the exam-focused approach falls apart, though in recent years Singapore has improved dramatically with the introduction of word based math problems, where the student is expected to translate a real-world problem into math and then solve the problem that way.

The real issue with Singaporean-style education comes from reading. Thiagarajan observes that Singaporean-style English education pretty much ignores reading for pleasure:

“The problem with Chinese kids is that they don’t think about reading books at all. Books are to be studied for exams, but the concept of reading for pleasure hasn’t really taken off in Asia.” (Loc. 1053-54)

To some extent this is endemic in American culture as well, since the statistics are that the average American reads about 1 book a year after leaving college. But the tradition of Dad reading to kids before bed-time is embedded deeply into American culture, while there's no such tradition in Asian culture. (And it was very rare to see a Singaporean adult reading while waiting for the bus at bus stops --- while if you board an American domestic flight you'll see Kindles pretty much everywhere)

 Thiagarajan also points out that pretty much no Singaporean students ever get unstructured outdoor play time, leading to the highest myopia rates in the world:

When I first arrived in Singapore, I was simultaneously impressed and perplexed by the number of sparkling swimming pools and well-manicured public parks and playgrounds in the city. These spaces are beautiful, making this little island feel like a resort, a paradise for children. Nonetheless, these spaces are often empty, particularly during the week; if there are children splashing or running about, they tend to be children who attend international schools— “expat kids.” Where are all the local Singaporean children? There’s an easy answer to this question: they are at tuition. Or they are at home studying. Or they are in special classes, learning to develop additional talents and skills. (Loc. 1664-70)

Of course, the tropics are notoriously un-fun for outdoor activities. I definitely didn't ever see the point in hiking or camping until I arrived in the US.

All this portrays a relentlessly competitive society, with an eye on practical achievements.

Chinese teacher I interviewed told me, “every Chinese mom’s worst nightmare is that her child will decide to be an artist.” (Loc. 2651-52)

In other words, a lot like the San Francisco Bay Area, where competitive parenting is the primary sport most parents engage in. The book's an entertaining read, and it has lots of pages where Thiagarajan gives you tips on parenting (not that she has any research or special expertise to provide). It's recommended but for entertainment value, rather than for her recommendations on how your child can be better cultivated. And boy am I glad I left Singapore, and I'm not unhappy that my 2 sons have a chance to enjoy a little bit more childhood than I did.

Review: The Grace of Kings

I'm a huge fan of Ken Liu's short stories. The guy's pretty much managed to win an award with every story he published, and deservedly so. I was nervous, however, about him writing a novel, and a fantasy novel at that. So I checked The Grace of Kings out of the library instead of rushing to buy it.

The prose style of The Grace of Kings is that of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The characters are larger than life in much the same fashion, but with more fantastical/mechanical devices, including airships, submarines, and battle-kites. It's fun reading, evocative of that ancient Chinese novel but telling its own story. The characters don't really develop as such, but rather, do what the plot demands of them. As a result, brothers betray each other, wives play political games that they later regret, and generals commit egregious tactical blunders for no particular reason.

While it's not a waste of time to read it, I suspect I'll be checking out the next volume (yes, it's book 1 of a trilogy) out of the library rather than rushing to buy and read it.

Review: Sapiens - A Brief History

Knowing that I was heading off for Japan, I picked up a couple of books during an Amazon digital sale. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was one of them. It's an extremely readable book and covers human pre-history, the development of agriculture, and the rise of technological society.

The grand themes of the book are a lot of fun, and the book is written in a compellingly readable manner, such that even when it was covering material I'd already read elsewhere, I didn't feel put upon going over it again. For instance, on the idea of memes:

People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take for example the world of business corporations. Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales. (Kindle Loc. 473-77)

 Along the way, Harari manages to dispel such myths about the agricultural revolution:

The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.  (Kindle Loc. 1289-94)

The agricultural revolution was basically a trap: by making wheat, rice, or other staples more productive, the descendants of foragers were fooled into settling next to the fields, producing more children (a success for their genes) but dooming them into a life of toil and ill-health compared to the easy lives the foragers had.

Harari points out that mass extinctions are also not something recent:

Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. (Kindle Loc. 1213)

Once Harari gets to civilization, the history is more serious but no less interesting. He points out that monotheism isn't necessarily more sophisticated than polytheism or dualism:

So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief. (Loc.3417-19)

He points out that the rise of science and enlightenment in recent centuries has been a break from the past in terms of the acknowledgement of ignorance. Prior to modern science, human cultures have always thought that all that was knowable or worth knowing was already known. You didn't ask how old the earth was by consulting empirical sources --- you read the bible carefully to try to figure it out. In traditional human cultures (much as is described in the Lord of the Rings), the past was always better, ancient traditions had all the answers, and questions that were not answered by tradition weren't worth asking. It is the breaking of this tradition that held the secret to scientific progress.

All in all, the book's very much worth reading and very entertaining. Recommended.

Review: Amplitude (PS4)

I backed Amplitude (PS4) as a kickstarter project despite having no prior experience with the PS2 game. I guess the Harmonix name on the sticker sucked me in. Like all music/rhythm game, this is a game where the story doesn't matter, even in campaign mode.

You essentially fly a space ship with notes flying towards you. Each song is represented by a series of tracks, and you get to pick which track's rhythm you'd like to work on. Each track only has 3 notes (left, middle, right), and those are played using the face buttons on the controller (square, triangle, circle). Pushing those buttons at the right time, fires the space ship's blaster at the note and it finishes. Complete a measure successfully and the track goes away, and you can use the directional buttons or joystick to move to another track. The last face button (cross) activates various special abilities which you unlock as you successfully play a measure.

As far as music games go it's very abstract. It's an entertaining diversion, but by far my biggest problem is that the songs aren't very memorable. Or at least, I didn't feel that any of them were interesting: it all sounded like random techno pop to me, which made it less than motivational for me to consider playing it through on a harder difficulty.

I can see how this game could have been considered ground-breaking back before Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and it's nice to be able to just use the controller instead of a special device. I'm afraid I got way more out of Resogun than this. Not recommended.

Review: The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

There's something extraordinary about the British Empire. If you look at a world map, and visit England, you can't help but wonder how such a tiny nation with such seemingly gentle people built an empire where the sun never set. Even now, there's an argument to be made that the sun still has not set on all British territories.

The Rise and Fall of the British Empire is a great courses audio book about this history, and it covers roughly the events from the 1600s to the post world war 2 era. It is an astounding 18 hours long, and is extremely detailed. Let's see if I can summarize the salient points:

• The British Empire was more or less accidentally created, not by intention, but by the founding of various companies which were given charter to exploit trade with various territories. These companies ended up dominating India, Africa, and various other territories, but had no desire to actually rule people, and so eventually the job of ruling was given over to the country itself.
• That meant that the Empire was actually built very cheaply, and the early conquests were made primarily through technological superiority, not through hard-fought battles.
• The corollary to this is that England could never rule any part of continental Europe, and never had any pretensions about doing so. Ironically, this meant that a single-minded focus on the Royal Navy served both as defense and as an extension of the empire's reach.
• Early on in the history of the Royal Navy, an execution of a British sea captain for not engaging with the enemy when the opportunity arose, led to a culture within the Royal Navy of being aggressive in its actions. This led to a positive feedback loop culminating in the Royal Navy's dominance of the waters.
• Unlike many other empires, the British Empire learned its lessons from the American Revolution, which led to a self-rule amongst its white colonies and eventual independence of countries like Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
• The African, Indian, and Asian colonies, however, agitated for independence after World War 2, and the British were in a hurry to get rid of them as well. Not only was the public sentiment against retaining the empire, they were also costing the empire money which the public wanted to put into Britain's welfare state. These hurried exits rarely turned out well in Africa, where Botswana's the only one that has had a continuous democracy. South Africa itself had a terrible history with apartheid, while the rest of the former British colonies became ruled by dictatorships.
• The British empire was the first (and only) country to abolish slavery without a (civil war) like in the US. It abandoned slavery even though it had a strong monetary incentive to continue with the institution, and used its navy to blockade slave shipments across the Atlantic. The British continue to be very proud of this, justifiably so.
• The British was over-stretched by World War 2, and quickly had to be second place to the Americans by the end of the war, taking orders from the American government rather than dictating the terms of engagement. In particular, Roosevelt determined that Americans should not fight to help Britain maintain its empire.

As you can see, a study of the British Empire quickly turns into a history of the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Malaysia, Singapore and even parts of China. It's a monumental undertaking and I think Prof. Alitt did a great job. The only weakness I can find is that I wish he'd organized the themes better, rather than the whole audio book being a chronological narration of events.

Regardless, however, this is a massive info dump, and contains many titbits that I wasn't aware of before, including details of Mahatma Ghandi's life and the Indian independence movement. I recommend it, but after coming from the science-oriented courses, it does feel a bit of a slog and I'm glad I chose to be a computer scientist instead of a historian.

Review: The Sculptor

The Sculptor is Scott McCloud's graphic novel about art, young love, and a deal with death. The protagonist is David Smith, who has a meeting with Death at a depressed time of his life: he's lost his family, his girlfriend, his supporting patron, and the money required to acquire more raw material to sculpt. Death grants him a gift which could potentially make him the greatest sculptor of all time, in exchange for giving him only 200 days to live.

The story can't possibly be that simple, of course, and the course of his life soon takes a turn and he meets someone truly special. Along the way we discover the true nature of David Smith's successes and failures: he's not a people person, speaks his mind too quickly and too loudly, makes assumptions about people that are unwarranted out of ignorance, and is a very flawed human being. What I liked abou McCloud's depiction of Smith is that he gets you this nuanced view of Smith indirectly, slowly unveiling it. You understand his strengths, his will, and his devotion to his art as well.

As a story, McCloud steadfastly ignores all the possibilities for a typical Hollywood ending, and the logic of the tale remains consistent all the way to the end. It's very well done, and every time I think I have McCloud's story worked out, he surprises me with a "twist" that nevertheless makes sense in the context of the story.

The artwork of the novel is simplistic in style, though not simple. McCloud clearly understands the medium he works in and makes great use of it.

Unfortunately, the limitations of the graphic novel also has me thinking that in many ways, this story could have been told better as a movie. In the pre-CGI days, I think it would have been true that The Sculptor would be too expensive to be told as a comic book, but that's no longer true. It is true, however, that telling it as a graphic novel ensures that McCloud controls every aspect of the story, including the visual presentation, but all through reading the novel I thought it could be done just as well (with appropriate actors and directors, of course) as a film.

In any case, I can recommend the novel. It's short (2 hours reading time), explores interesting themes, and is executed competently. I'm glad I picked it up.

Review: Call of Juarez Gunslinger (PC)

The best thing about the PC platform is that games are cheap. I picked up Call of Juarez Gunslinger as part of an Origin sale. I'd picked it up for a different game, but ended up playing Gunslinger instead and finding it surprisingly fun. It's a pretty old game, so I could turn up all the settings on my old PC and still get excellent frame rates. As a budget game there's no full motion video so it's really light on resources.

The game is a first person shooter with a few gimmicks: you have the "bullet time" equivalent, where time stand still while you shoot. The "bullet time" bars are earned by chaining combos or performing head shots. There's a skill tree where you can unlock abilities. There are varying weapon types and upgrades though you're encouraged to specialized by the skill tree. There's also a "dice with death" mechanic where a shot that would otherwise kill you could be dodged, and then you'll get your health restored so you can keep playing instead of dying. Finally, nearly every boss in the game is dispatched with a shoot out, with its own mini game and mechanics. You can even be dishonorable and draw early.

Ignoring the mechanics, however, the main reason to play the game is that it's narrative is very well constructed. That seems like an odd reason to play an FPS so let me elaborate. The framing story is a grizzled gunslinger telling tall tales in a bar to admirers. The admirers, however, are true geeky fanboys of the cowboy world, and they continually probe and question the narrator of the story, forcing him to back-track and retract pieces of his story. While this happens during game play, the set you're playing on shifts and even sometimes resets as the narrator re-tells the story. This is hilarious but very well done and a lot of fun.

As a shooter, the game's relatively straightforward. It's not something that you'd want to play for more than an hour at a time, or it'd get repetitive, but spread out over multiple sessions over multiple days, it's entertaining enough that the narrative is all that's needed to keep you coming back.

At the end, we return to the framing story and all the names of the admirers are revealed and we get to resolve the story. I disliked the resolution, as if you pick one option over the other you get more game play vs less, which I thought was sucky and questionable.

But other than that, it's a surprisingly fun game and playable on even creaky old PCs. It doesn't have any insane difficulty spikes and the pacing was just right. Recommended.

Review: The Hunt for Vulcan

The Hunt for Vulcan is a short book about the supplantation of Newtonian Mechanics by the general theory of relativity. Unlike books that are focused on teaching you the details of relativity, it focuses mainly on the people involved, with Newton, Laplace, Le Verrier, and Einstein playing major roles. Along the way, the discovery of Neptune (used by Le Verrier to account for irregularities discovered in the orbit of Saturn and Uranus) and the failure of Newtonian mechanics to properly predict Mercury's orbit are used to discuss how science works.

The thesis of the book is that under the standard model of science, when a theory fails or does not match with observation or experimental evidence, it gets tossed out and a replacement is searched for. In practice, the book demonstrates that while the Newtonian mechanics failed to model accurately the orbit of Venus, the initial response is to try to find an object (in this case, the phantom planet Vulcan), and when that fails (despite numeral false observations that could not be replicated), the problem is ignored until a new paradigm emerges from a completely unrelated area of research. This is an interesting observation, but hardly earth shaking.

Nevertheless, because the book is short, well-written, and does a great job of describing what Einstein went through to go from special relativity to general relativity, it's still worth reading. I also love the package of the book: it's the first physical book I've handled that comes close to matching the convenience and handling of a kindle (though obviously if you need more than a couple of books the Kindle is much better).

Recommended.

Review: The Idea Factory

The Idea Factory is Jon Gertner's abbreviated history of Bell Labs. I use the term abbreviated, because Bell Labs was so huge that there's no way a single book could cover all of its contributions to research. Gerner focuses on semiconductors (the invention of the transistor), information theory, lasers, cell phones, video phones, and communications satellites, but barely mentions UNIX, the C programming language, or any of the contributions to computer science.

That's good for me, since I'm already familiar with most of the software contributions, but not being a physics geek, ignored the history of basic inventions such as the transistor. The book fills in the gaps I had, for instance, as to why William Shockley was such a great recruiter (the people he recruited for his startup went on to become co-founders at Intel), but later pissed them off so much that they quit. It turned out that he was much more of an ass that I could have imagined, which is pretty remarkable because I've know quite a number of those.

Rather than just focusing on the scientists involved, Gertner also spends quite some time on the administrators. This distinction's diluted in Bell Labs' case, since so many of their administrators were scientists to begin with. What's sad for me is that he doesn't dive deep into the managerial structure and the methods of the star Bell Labs administrators, so while we could see the amazing results coming out of Bell Labs were attributable at least in part to the administrators, there was no way to see how one could replicate that in a modern research environment.

One particularly important point that came across for me was how dependent the big research results such as the transistor was on materials science. Stan Lanning once told me that effectively all the huge innovations in the state of the art depends on discovering new materials that have properties superior to older materials for some applications, but I never realized how much also depended on our ability to refine or eliminate impurities in materials (as well as in the case of semi-conductors, introduce precisely the right amount of impurities).

Ultimately, Gertner writes a lament for the fall of Bell Labs, which occurred as a result of the break up of AT&T. Effectively, by being funded by a publicly supported monopoly, AT&T could run Bell Labs as a national laboratory. In fact, many inventions that were licensed freely (such as the transistor) were done so because Bell Labs was prohibited from entering the computer market for instance (after the breakup those strictures were lifted but by then AT&T had forgotten how to compete in a market dominated by Silicon Valley startups), or to curry favor with the regulators to show that all those monopoly profits were being put to good use.

While I do think that the type of long term basic research that Bell Labs did can and should be publicly funded, I'm not sure I sympathize with the idea that a government regulated monopoly is the way to do that funding. In fact, I'm pretty sure ARPA has had a track record as good as Bell Labs, but doesn't have a line of writers waiting to write about how great they are, mostly because their successes have been diffused over multiple industries and more scientists.

That being as it is, I still recommend this book. It gave me details on some of those inventions that I didn't know before, and it's quaint to think about how once upon a time, the landline telephone system was considered "The most complicated machine ever built."

Review: Airborne Seeker Mountain Bike

Now that I've ridden my Airborne Seeker enough to approach one maintenance cycle, I feel like I can write a review of the bike and do it some justice.

The bike press and some cyclists talk about "catching air". Until I rode this bike, I never actually went fast enough up a ramp to experience it. It's a sublime experience: for one moment, you're completely weightless: a nudge from your body in any direction can move the entire bike. To be able to experience it, you need to trust your bike enough to go fast down an incline that ends in a ramp. It's a great feeling, and I never felt it on my 1993 Bridgestone MB-3.

It took me a while to get there. On my first few rides on the bike, I took every corner gingerly and with concern. The wheels felt big, but having experienced a good 29er, I had faith that as I got used to the bike that feeling would go away. Indeed it did: I'm now taking corners better than I did on my 26" MTB, and tackling pretty much the same obstacles I rode before. I still get a little freaked out on technical climbs, but when I remember that the big wheels roll very well over obstacles and relax, I pretty much roll over anything I can find on the bike.

Dialing in the suspension also made a huge difference: since I'm very light, I had to use the lowest number printed on the fork, and release air from the shocks. Even with the shock locked out the suspension still bobs a little as a result, but not in an annoying way. The 2x10 drive train has made me a convert: I think the 2x10/11 drive trains should be a standard on all future bikes, road or mountain. It's the way to go.

The brakes are said to be the weakest part of the Airborne Seeker. But I'm so light that I hardly put any stress on them. They do warp and occasionally make a zing-zing sound, especially when I hammer through muddy sections or otherwise tax them. But they've been surprisingly silent most of the time: the annoying sounds go away as soon as I ease up and they have not persisted. I will never put disc brakes on any road bikes, but on the mountain bike, I can see them as being potentially more reliable than V-brakes or cantilevers, as well as being easier to maintain.

Pardo once said, "Mountain Biking is the process of throwing your bike off a cliff very slowly --- with you on it, so there's no point anything that's too good." When I went bike shopping, I settled on the Airborne Seeker because its component selection (2x10 drive train, air shocks, gearing, and 29er wheels) could not be found from any other manufacturer under $1500. I was ready to buy it new from the factory, but they were out of stock so I bought mine for $730 shipped on eBay. I now realize that buying an Airborne Seeker is not "settling" by any means. I'd have a tough time finding a better bargain, and it's way more fun to ride than I expected. Even better, when I called up Airborne asking to buy a spare derailleur hanger, they immediately asked for my address and sent me one for free! For someone who bought a bike from eBay used, I did not expect that kind of treatment. I'll give them the thumbs up for customer service any day of the week.

If you can fit one (and find one in stock --- the factory said that they'll have them in stock sometime in spring), I cannot recommend them enough. This is one heck of a great bike. I'm sure other bikes are lighter, etc., but there's nothing else in this price range that comes even close.

Review: Producing Excellence

If you're a parent in the middle class, you've probably read countless parenting books. Most of them are prescriptive, telling you what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and why the advice works. Whether the advice is any good is up for grabs. Producing Excellence is the ultimate parenting book in reverse, beating even Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother for a great list of things not to do to your kids.

The book explores the world of the violin virtuoso who's training for a career as an international soloist. Imagine a world in which:

• Parents regularly pick the careers for their children at an early age (5 or 6 is not uncommon)
• Subject kids to 8 hours of practice a day, eliminating their social life outside of music
• Engage in extreme helicopter parenting, including participation in rigged competitions (every musical competition is pretty much rigged, if you believe this book), selecting music teachers, finding prestigious violins to play (getting such violins on loan takes up an intriguing 10 pages of the book), punishing international travel to get to competitions, garnering sponsorship, and eliminating general education to the point where soloists-in-training cannot conceive of (and in any case aren't prepared for) a career outside music, even in the (common) event that they cannot achieve their goals

As I read this book, I found myself highlighting passage after passage, not just because of how interesting they were, but because of how appalling the process is:

     “I do not need prodigy pupils, only gifted mothers.” —Violin teacher  (kindle loc 1113-16)

Teachers advocate minimum practice periods of an hour to an hour and a half for three- to five-year-old students; two to three hours for six year olds, four or more hours daily by the age of eight. The famous twentieth-century teacher Stolyarsky Piotr Solomonovitch “demanded that his student take the violin out of its case immediately after breakfast and put it away just before going to sleep at night. All other activities, including general education, were expected to be cut to a minimum”  (Kindle Loc. 1240-47)

 I first heard while observing an eight-year-old student taught by a renowned teacher from the Moscow Gnesina School: You know who Niccolò Paganini was? The most important virtuoso of the nineteenth century. You know why he was so famous, so great, and the best violinist of his time? People say that he offered his soul to the devil in exchange for such magical skill that [his instrument] was a magic wand! Niccolò, at your age, had already worked very hard. From the beginning of each day, his father confined his little son to a small empty room and ordered him to play violin. After one hour of work, Niccolò earned the right to breakfast. Then again, he worked until lunchtime. When the father had estimated that Niccolò played badly, he wouldn’t let him eat anything. In that manner the boy worked all day. (Kindle  Loc. 1276-80)

 In another case, the parents of a child were said to have given him slaps on the head, or pulled his ears or hair. Public revelations concerning such practices are rare, yet Ruggiero Ricci, the American violinist, is convinced that numerous child virtuosos are victims of parental pressure or abuse. According to Schwartz, “Ricci was speaking from experience. He describes his father as ‘some kind of musical maniac.’ He had all seven children playing an instrument. ‘I wanted to be pianist, but my parents got me off that jig. They bribed me with fiddles.’ On the whole, Ricci had an unhappy childhood. His father did not hesitate to put pressure on the boy”  (Kindle Loc. 1328-30)

 With testimonials like this, it is no wonder that Amy Chua abused her daughters to get them into Carnegie Hall: she was competing with other parents who were more extreme, more willing to work their kids, threaten them or even physically abuse them. With more intellectual activities like Math, Computer Science, or Physics, once you've mastered the material, all new work is fresh problem solving. Not so with motor skills like violin, piano, or practically any other musical instrument. Even after reaching the pinnacle of their professions, the violin player still needs constant daily practice to maintain excellence:

Kubelik’s biographers reported that he worked twelve hours each day before concerts; on the evening when he performed, his fingers would bleed. Heifetz described his practice as two hours each day, exercises and scales, and several hours of repertoire. (Kindle Loc. 1392-1400)

With STEM fields, achievement in the field is based on publication and citations. If you managed to prove P=NP and published a paper to that effect, no amount of bias or attempts at suppression of your work would succeed. But musical competitions are extremely subjective, with loaded juries. In fact, according to Wagner's book, most of the competitions have a "pay to win" component:

Competitors try to have a master class with at least one jury member. In the case of the observed competition, its organizer created a master class with a jury member just before the event, to allow competitors to “better prepare their performance,” as a jurist explained in his opening speech. For this master class, lessons and accommodation cost over 300 euros. Not all competitors were able to pay this, but all competition finalists had participated in this master class.  (Kindle Loc. 1822-26)

Negotiations of the jury are secret; according to testimonies, discussions are sometimes stormy. According to a teacher who participates in juries, it is always possible to “sway the vote.” Three jurists working together, he says, can control and influence competition results. “I don’t know of any competitions which aren’t backhanded. It is always possible to support or throw out someone before the finale.” An accompanist, speaking with a competitor’s parent on the first day of selections, expressed discontent: “Here, the prizes have already been distributed. It’s a pity, because I have accompanied children who have played very well.  (Kindle Loc. 1873-76)

After the competition, the parent of a losing candidate asked two jurists separately for reasons they did not select his child. Both men responded that the young violinist was very talented and a soloist career was at his fingertips, but that he should change his teacher. Both suggested the young musician would be welcome in their classes.  (Kindle 1905-9)

If you're wondering what sort of parent would put their child through this huge amount of hard work just so as to support a corrupt system where success has very little to do with actual excellence but everything to do with who you know, and the kind of backroom dealing that you would expect from 3rd world banana republic elections, you're not alone. The answer appears to be that the truth behind the classical music industry is carefully hidden from parents, students, and the general public:

Teachers carefully hide the fact that success is rare, even nearly impossible. Professors believe that the parents and their children do not need this information. Without faith in a glorious future as a globetrotting soloist playing packed halls such as the Albert, Carnegie, and Pleyel, how can the teacher motivate young students and their parents? The shadow of failure could dull the enthusiasm and provoke the demobilization of the teacher’s entourage. It is absolutely contrary to the teachers’ interest to speak about the relative proportion of successful students. And so, the teachers continue to support the notion that students’ aspirations are realistic.  (Kindle Loc. 4957-60)

 “The problem with Ivan, and with others who work with children as he does [in the soloist class], is that for every ten students, one will attempt suicide, one will become mentally ill, two will become alcoholics, two will slam doors and jettison the violin out the window, three will work as violinists, and perhaps one will become a soloist.” Although this may be exaggerated, the ratio of success is certainly accurate, and the risks of failure are not unrealistic.  (Kindle Loc. 4962-64)

When students are asked, “Why have you chosen to became a musician?” the response is generally, “I don’t know,” or “It was always that way,” or “I only know how to play.” The lack of knowledge in any other field seems to pose an impassable obstacle. At the end of their education, after abandoning hope of becoming a soloist, the easiest solution is to find a job in the larger world of music. (Kindle Loc. 5329-36)

 The author then discloses that she herself is the mother of a son who was put into this career track before she started her research project (the book was the result of her PhD thesis on ethnology). Her poignant passage upon the realization that she had stuck her son into this low-success-rate career:

 When my position as a research worker opened the possibility for me of seeing my world from a different point of view, I developed profoundly mixed emotions. It was frightening to be more fully aware of a world where competition is strong and the market is saturated. I came to realize the stakes that participants of that world—including my son—were up against. I hadn’t seen how high those stakes were before, because I had embraced the ideology of the world. The sociologist in me was overjoyed—the mother in me panic-stricken. I tried to retreat and find ways for my son to leave this milieu and find another field of study and work. But I failed, for the bonds between him and the soloist elite were too tightly wound for his escape. (Kindle Loc. 5884-89)

 There were many times during my reading of this book where I had to stop because I was so stricken with incredulity and pain. By the time I was done with this book, I became disgusted with myself for having spent any money at all on classical music and thus indirectly contributing to the unhappiness of so many children worldwide. I'm not sure I could in good conscience ever go to a classical music performance, listen to a  classical soloist, or look on the (frequently shared) YouTube videos of "child prodigies" again with the innocence I once had. It's a shame that something as beautiful as music has been turned into a corrupt industry by greed, hunger for fame, and desire for money. What's worse is that the kids who were started on this career path were driven to it by their parents, not because they personally would have chosen the career path on their own. Furthermore, the media glorifies the exceptions who make it (we all know that Lang Lang's father was an SOB who was abusive to his son), while hiding the very human costs for the ones who don't make it.

I also can't help but wonder how rigged the science competitions are: since each submission is effectively a unique research project and it's run by a jury similar to those on music competitions, I wonder how much backroom dealing is involved. At least with the math Olympiads, everyone's given the same problem and has to solve them within the time limits.

All in all, I came away from reading this book sadder but quite a bit wiser. A few principles:

• Any situation where there's a jury determining winners and losers is bound to be unfair. Hence running (no judges) is better than figure skating, and math is better than music. Even though many athletic events are plagued by cheating and drug using, the people involved in those are adults and chose to cheat or not cheat.
• Where possible, choose fields where your results are sold directly to the public, rather than being sold to a narrow band of curators or taste makers. That means pop music is probably (but not much) better than classical music, and self-publishing books is probably better than the crazy system which is book publishing.
• Any kind of democratization of taste that works by disinter-mediating the elite taste makers is a good thing. It's a good thing that people now pay more attention to Amazon's reviews than to "official" book critics like the New York Times review of books.
• The media loves child prodigies. They will show the glories of a kid producing music, but not show the hidden costs behind that performance. And when that kid ages out of being cute, he will be dropped like a hot potato and never be mentioned again. Bear the in mind the next time you see a Youtube video of a child prodigy. Resist the temptation to turn your child into one of those. If you are still tempted, buy and read a copy of this book.

In any case, I enjoyed this book and can recommend it. It's a lot like watching a train wreck: you cringe for the people involved, but there's a perverse fascination in watching nevertheless. And if the book inoculates you against trying to turn your kids into one of those prodigies, that's well worth the (hefty) price.