July 7th: Bridgnorth to Worcester

Under partly cloudy skies we departed from Brignorth, following the signs along National Bike Route 45. At the first intersection where the bike route signs differed from the GPS directions, I decided to take a chance and ride the bike route, as the road looked smaller and quieter. To my surprise this was a mistake:

The bike route quickly devolved into single track, and I hoped for relief when the bike route finally re-intersected with our GPS route, only to discover that the GPS route at this point also took up the bike route single-track around the Chelmarsh reservoir. The single track was mostly rideable, but the stinging nettles by the side of the path would occasionally brush against my bare legs and hurt! Fortunately, Bowen was wearing pants over his bike shorts and was spared some of the agony.

After the single track was over, the route descended and brought us onto Hampton Lodge, where the Severn Valley Railway had brought us to the evening before! The path was guarded by leaning gates that were narrow at the top and wide at the bottom so our panniers would clear, but still necessitate a stop and wriggle to get through. Once on the railroad grade, however, the path was very pleasant, shaded and woody with no cars in sight.

In the town of Highley, the bike route went on the Highley Trail, which dumped us out into a parking lot with a sandy playground. Bowen took some time to spend on the playground, which would warm and cool depending on whether we had cloud cover.

To my surprise, after the playground the bike route did some gentle climbing and then quickly descended back down to the river. At the river, the road dead-ended, but it turned out that we had missed a bike route sign directing us to get off the bike and get onto a pedestrian bridge over the Severn river.

The bridge was pretty, but a group of passing cyclists warned us of the steep grade ahead. We climbed the grade, which while steep was nowhere near as hard as the single-track hiking trails we'd already traversed that day. In fact, we caught up with the group when they rested at an inn after the steepest section, whereupon they said, "We did not expect you to catch us!" I took the opportunity to get them to shoot pictures of Bowen and I while we were riding, something that happened only rarely.

In the town of Bewdley, the route looked like it was going to cross the river again, but it was near lunch time, so I stopped a pedestrian and asked about a local bakery, whereupon he walked us to the nearest one! There, we bought a selection of savoury and sweet pastries, and asked about a picnic area. "Just walk across the street, through the visitor center/museum, and there's a nice park there!" Before doing so, I stopped at the local pharmacy to buy a replacement toothbrush for the one left behind at Market Drayton.

Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Gardens turned out to be a wonderful place to have a picnic. With shaded benches, a garden pool, gorgeously tendered flower gardens, and even statues of bunnies, it was very pretty. There's a frequent statement that children don't appreciate scenery, but Bowen has always liked flowers, and was happy to look at them after finishing both his sweet and savoury pastries. Passerbys would stop and ask us about the bike and where we were going, and never failed to be impressed that we were on a long trek from Manchester to London. One even made sure that I understood that Hindhead was past London and we'd have to double-back to catch our train, he was so concerned that we didn't know what we were doing.

After lunch, the ride took us into Burlish Top Nature Reserve, where more single-track riding awaited us. Fortunately, this wasn't lined with stinging nettles this time, and we made reasonably good time. Past Hartlebury, the route took us on the side of a busy A road once more, which meant that the riverside bike path alongside thee Drotwich Canal provided us with relief when we found it.

 To our chagrin, the bike path soon left the river, through a series of increasingly rough hiking trails, and finally terminated in a steep inclined which forced Bowen to dismount and me to get off the bike and push with all my effort (I was straining so hard that Bowen felt compelled to help push) to get off the bike path, where at the top we saw signs confirming that yes, we were indeed still on National Bike Route #45, and tourists following the route were indeed expected to get off and push! I don't know who the people are who designate the National Bike Routes in England, but they clearly have no expectations that anyone's going to ride tandems on these trails. They might be well-signed, but reasonable they are not!

Fortunately, that was the last of the crazy bike routes for the day, and the approach into Worcester on the bike route had us on quiet side streets without many grade changes until we got to our AirBnB. Our hostess, Jain, was clearly in the middle of either a remodel or a move, and was busy clearing the house. She was happy to do laundry for us, which is a sign that the major hotel chains are missing the boat when it comes to servicing customers: for the rest of the trip, we would abandon hotels and stay with AirBnBs whenver possible because when you stay in somebody's home, you almost always got access to a laundry machine, which is a big deal when you're touring with a 5-year old. While adults might not get their clothing so dirty that hand-washing was straight-forward, a 5-year old manages to get stains on their clothing that a hand-washer would be hard put to fix. I asked Jain when the shops downtown closed, and she asked me what I was looking for. When I mentioned that I needed a USB charger (so our devices could charge even when I was using the CPAP machine), she didn't even think twice and pulled out an old Apple charger for us. Wow.

We walked to the local supermarket but on the way there, saw a newly opened bike shop. I asked if they would take a look at our shifting since I'd failed for 3 days in a row now to fix the indexing on the tandem. They said they'd do it while we waited, and so we brought the tandem to them, bought ice cream, and visited the local playground which was full of kids since it was a Friday afternoon and it was late enough that school was now out. Bowen's been spoiled since he'd gotten all the playgrounds to himself thus far, and said: "This playground is too crowded!" I learned that school lets out in England somewhere around mid July to late July, and only starts in September, so American school districts usually let out earlier and start school earlier than English school districts by 6 weeks. This is nice, because Americans vacationing in Europe during the summer don't have to compete with locals for lodging, etc.

When the bike was returned to us the shifting now felt better than when we'd left the USA, so I was happy to pay the fee. We then took the bus downtown, where we bought some Hydrocortisone cream for the stinging nettles, and sat in a cafe drinking drinks while searching for our next destination on AirBnB. Booking.com wanted $500 for some hotels that were in pretty poor places for touring, so I compromised on an AirBnB in Winchcombe, which was some 27 miles away. I figured we could make up the deficit on another day, and risking no lodging on a Saturday night wasn't acceptable, especially since we knew that the Costwold was heavily touristed.

Bowen had a hankering for duck, so we went to the Singapore Restaurant in Worcester, which actually had pretty good reviews and delivered duck in plum sauce that Bowen devoured with unusual enthusiasm.

Next

July 6th: Market Drayton to Bridgnorth

Our second day started with a great breakfast served by the Four Alls Inn, and we got going by 9:00am. South of Market Drayton, we rode through tiny towns, avoiding main roads. We had been told to avoid Telfords, but the tourist information center the day before had told us that Ironbridge is a good destination, since it was the home of the industrial revolution, and would have lots to do. That sounded intriguing, so we planned to visit.

Near Ironbridge, however, I chose to ignore the GPS and follow the street signs, which turned out to be a mistake. To direct car drivers to big parking lots, the road signs would lead you into Madley, which wasn't at all what you wanted. We recovered by asking a couple of pedestrians, and made it to visit Iron Bridge.

There, we visited the museum of the gorge, which included model displays and a film outlining the area. There was a coop supermarket near the museum, and we bought lunch to eat at the nearby park, which was beautiful and featured a playground.

After lunch and a playground stop, we rode onto the bridge, and visited the tollhouse at the other side.

 From there, the bike route signs pointed us along the old railroad track which then abruptly terminated just a couple of miles down the road, with the bike route sign pointing up the hill, signed for Bridgnorth. We would discover later on that there was a disused rail road path that was mapped, but not signed!

The resultant climb, coming late in the afternoon heat wore us out, and by the time we rode into Bridgnorth we were ready to stop. At the tourist information center, we again found no one to help us, except a couple of staff members who told us that it wasn't in their job description but pointed us at a list of B&Bs in the window. I called a few that all turned out to be closed, and eventually just booked The Croft on booking.com.

Upon checking in, I discovered that I'd left my MoKo travel charger in the Four Alls Inn! I fortunately still had the rapid charger for my Moto G5, but I still needed a plug adapter. Fortunatlely, the inn keeper had a stash of plug adapters (some of which no doubt were left behind by other customers) and simply gave us one. "It's a small town, so I wouldn't even know where you could buy one of these!" he said.

After asking where the nearest ice cream shop was, we walked to it and bought ice cream. Then we walked over to the "cliff railway" in town, which turned out to be a funicular taking us down to the river side, where a 15 minute walk took us to a bike shop next to the Severn Valley Railway. The bike shop told us that the next day's trip to Worcester was going to be hilly, and surprisingly enough couldn't help us with a good route. They claimed that the bike route was no good, and suggested staying on the roads, but all of the roads looked like they would be busy ones not suited for cycling.

I was reminded that the next day was a Friday, so I'd have to start searching for lodging early, preferably today. In fact, Saturday was going to be an issue as well! As a result, I started putting in queries on AirBnB, since Worcester was a big city and I could expect to find reasonable lodging there. I sent a few queries and hoped for a reply.

The Severn Valley railway turned out to be a steam train, though we arrived only in time to catch the last train of the day, with a round trip to Hampton Lodge (the first stop) being the only possible round trip we could do. So we paid for the ticket and hopped on the heritage railway. Bowen wasn't about to pass up a train ride no matter how short it was.

Upon returning from the train ride, the sky started becoming overcast with the thunderstorm in the forecast becoming more believable after the heat of the afternoon. We discovered there was a bridge from the railway station that took us halfway up the hill to where the town castle grounds were, which we took advantage of rather than walking back to the funicular.

The castle grounds/city walls garden turned out to be beautiful, with a mini bridge, wishing well, flowers, and a monument. We walked along side it, and Bowen threw in a coin to make a wish. He started getting tired, so I carried him into town where we looked for a restaurant to have dinner. We settled on Casa Ruiz, a Spanish tapa place that served excellent food in small dishes that suited Bowen. He was very excited about an impending thunderstorm, and quite disappointed that it didn't materialize.

At bedtime, I discovered that I'd forgotten another thing at the Four Alls Inn, which was Bowen's toothbrush. Luckily, I'd brought along the teeth-cleaning gum, so that's what I gave him, but I was determined to buy a replacement toothbrush the next day. I was not having a good tour in terms of leaving stuff behind that I didn't want to leave behind!

Next

July 5th: Manchester Airport to Market Drayton

Bowen's naturally an early bird, so we ate breakfast in our room and left around 9:20am, after leaving the rest of our luggage in storage at the hotel. Manchester Airport is actually surrounded by fairly rural-feeling suburbs, and with the fairly flat country, it didn't take us long before we found ourselves heading down beautiful single-track roads.

In Knutsford, we found a playground with a Zipline. My promise to Bowen at the start of the trip was that we would always stop at a playground with a Zipline, and I kept my word.

We discovered that English playgrounds, like their European counterparts, usually had Ziplines and other "dangerous" toys that have long disappeared from American playgrounds. As a result, the playgrounds are a treat for Bowen. Not only that, the English school year runs until at least mid-July or early August, so while we were touring Bowen would get spoiled by having Ziplines are other such high-demand play structures all to himself. At Middlewich, we saw a supermarket and stopped to buy a supermarket lunch. I asked if there was a park nearby, but ended up with such confusing directions that after a while I saw a large piece of sloped green next to the main road and just stopped there for lunch.

Looking at the map after lunch, I saw that we had to ride on the road a bit more and then we'd be back on the route I plotted the night before. It was a busy A road, but the distance was short and soon we were on a much smaller road and eventually a bike path that led into Nantwich, where we had another playground stop, though this time, without a Zipline. Bowen needed to go to the bathroom, and the bike path led neatly to the sports complex, which was happy to let Bowen use the bathroom.

Near Swanbach, however, we were back on a busy road, which would lead us all the way to Market Drayton, where at 49 miles of riding I was determined to stop. My memory of my first tour in Scotland was that the tourist information centers were very helpful, frequently providing us with B&Bs that would be far cheaper than hotels. The one in Market Drayton, however, handed us a B&B list but didn't offer to call them for us. I called the first one on the cell phone, but another pair of cyclists had just filled their room, and they informed us that all the other B&Bs in town were closed, as was the lone hotel that was on the tourist information center's list. They suggested the one out of town, the Four Alls Inn, which was available on booking.com, so I booked it on my smartphone app and then bought ice cream for Bowen before heading out.

That hotel was out of town, but we didn't have much choice, so we headed over to it to discover it was actually a pretty reasonable place, serving dinner in a bar-like setting, and the owner was happy to do laundry for us at a very reasonable price. We took an after dinner walk among corn fields, but there wasn't much else to do, so we turned in early.

Next

Prolog: Manchester Airport Etrop Grange Hotel

In the middle of March, my wife and I planned a visit to England. I realized that if I tacked on a couple of weeks at the end, this would be a chance to do a bicycle tour with Bowen in England, a country where I’ve never toured by bicycle before. I asked Bowen if he’d like to do this, and he said yes. 

I started the trip planning process thinking about a tour in the Peaks District or in Wales, but Bowen short-circuited the entire thing by asking if we could go to Gibbet’s Hill, which is a level in one of Bowen’s favorite game, Tearaway. I wrote to the developers and asked if Gibbet’s Hill was a real feature, and was sent to a Wikipedia link noting that Gibbet’s Hill was in Hindhead, near Guildford. 

I looked at the area and decided that between Manchester and Hindhead were the Cotswolds, Stratford Upon Avon, and Oxford, all worthy of visits. If time permitted, the rest of South Downs National Park looked pretty as well, so I did some  back of the envelope calculations which indicated that the entire trip would run about 300 miles, which was easily doable in 10 days if there was a train transfer back from Hindhead. 

Unfortunately, English trains do not typically take tandems, and in fact, the only tandem transfer service I could find back to Manchester ran from the London Euston station on Virgin Trains. This would add another 50 miles or so to the trip, but I figured in the worst case I could arrange a one way rental by car, take apart the S&S coupled tandem and stuff it in the car. It took several international calls via Skype to reserve a train ticket with a bicycle space, but that was accomplished by the end of May. 

The biggest challenge was coping with the bike. While Virgin Airlines’ website had led me to believe that a plastic bag was all that was necessary to bring the bike on the plane, at the airline checkin counter they insisted on a box. This completely messed up my plan to just ride the tandem to the hotel from the airport, and I ended up having to get a ride from the car rental company to accomplish this. 

After our 2 week family tour in England, Bowen and I put Xiaoqin and Boen on the plane, got back into the rental car, and immediately found a laundromat to do laundry. We then checked into the hotel with all our luggage, returned the rental car, and got a ride back to the Etrop Grange Hotel so we could assemble the bike. Bowen's bunny arrived safely, and he was happy to play with it while I worked on the bike.

Upon assembling the bike, I discovered that I had forgotten to pack chain oil, and so we had to ride to find a shop to sell us one. We also tried to get clear eye protection for Bowen, but could not find any, so he was stuck wearing his sunglasses for the entire trip, rain or shine. 

Our final goal was to get a hair cut, as the short ride to the bike shop had made both of us itchy under the helmet, since neither of us were used to having longish hair and helmets as a combination. I asked the hotel receptionist if we’d have to go to downtown Manchester for that, but she told us to just walk to the civic center, which turned out to have a barber shop, several supermarkets, bakeries, and a shop which sold me a SIM card for UK services. Last year, T-mobile ran a promotion during the summer which gave us LTE speeds in Europe but this year the promotion was over and I could definitely tell that performance was less than acceptable. 

In the Alps, I wouldn’t have minded, but in England with its dense road networks and multitudes of ways to get lost, I was dependent on the phone for navigation. So I paid up for a SIM card: 20 pounds for 12GB of data, 300 minutes of calls, and 3000 text messages, which would be very generous if not for the 30 day expiration date. 

After the haircut, we spent some time in the playground before returning to the hotel to pack. Painswick Park included a snake and ladders game, and this being Bowen's first exposure to that game, he insisted on playing it 4-5 times before returning to the hotel. On most tours, I’m a minimalist, trying to bring as little as possible. On this tour, however, I knew that there would be playground stops, and we wouldn’t spend all day riding, so brought a long more than the usual electronic luxuries, including the Playstation Vita and the Kindle. 

When in California, I’d plotted out a couple of potential first day routes , but looking at the weather forecast, I knew that any of the hillier options were off the table. Furthermore, it looked like the further south we went, the better the weather got, so our major priority was to head south as much as possible. 

One of the receptionists at the Hotel was a local, so I asked her advice on potential routes. I’m glad I did, since she immediately pointed out to me that the western towns (Wilmslow, Knutsford, Northwich and Nantwich) were prettier and quieter than the eastern towns near Birmingham, Telfords, and Stoke on Trent. That essentially caused me to replot the entire trip towards Market Drayton rather than through the Peak District.

Looking at the map, Market Drayton at 50 miles looked like a manageable first day, but of course, the riding would be full of unknowns: I'd never been in this country before, and I had no idea how much Bowen would want to do. It looked like there were plenty of towns to stop at should the need arose, however, so we went to bed full of optimism about the next day.

Next

Review: Muse of Fire

Muse of Fire is Dan Simmon's novella about Shakespeare's plays, set in a far future setting. In this setting, human beings have been conquered by a hierarchy of aliens, and the narrator are a troupe of Shakespearean actors who travel human occupied space performing Shakespeare's plays. The plot starts when the alien overmasters demand that the troupe perform for them instead of just for the human audiences.

The inside-baseball account of being an actor in a troupe is well done, as is the commentary on Shakespeare's relevant now and far in the future, as well as Simmon's attitude towards various plays in the opus. The plot twist involving the alien overlords was also surprising, though perhaps overblown in its Shakespeare worship. It was a particularly relevant read for me as I was visiting Stratford Upon Avon at the time.

Recommended.

Review: Jessica Jones Alias

I picked up Jessica Jones Alias: Volume 1 during the recent marvel sale. It's a reasonably good title, depicting a superhero (who still has her powers). She becomes a private investigator, and then deals with various issues in the Marvel universe from her perspective as a non-costumed ex-superhero with various connections to the higher powers.

The conceit of the series is upheld, but we never really get much of a view inside her character: what her motivation is, why she took up a costume in the first place, etc. The art's also not the best. I'm not going to bother picking up the rest of the series.

Bowen's First Bicycle Tour

From July 5th to July 15th, Bowen and I conducted a bicycle tour of the English Midlands from Manchester to London via Hindhead. The ride was 354 miles with 13,610 feet of elevation gain. We had 10 riding days with 1 rest day, 2 flat tires, and 1 train transfer. This is the index page for the daily trip reports.

• Photos

Daily Trip Report

• July 4th: Prolog
• July 5th: Manchester Airport to Market Drayton
• July 6th: Market Drayton to Bridgnorth
• July 7th: Bridgnorth to Worcester
• July 8th: Worcester to Winchcombe
• July 9th: Winchcombe to Oxford
• July 10th: Oxford to Reading
• July 11th: Reading Rest Day
• July 12th: Reading to Hindhead
• July 13th: Hindhead to Staines-Upon-Thames
• July 14th: Staines-Upon-Thames to London
• July 15th: London to Manchester Picadilly via Train and Manchester Downtown to Manchester Airport
• July 16th: Epilogue: Cycling is the easy part

Appendices

• Tips for Touring in England
• Long Term Review: Wahoo Element
• Notes on Equipment

Review: Hidden Figures

Reading Hidden Figures after reading The Rise of the Rocket Girls feels like reading a prequel. While Rise of the Rocket Girls focused on the West Coast and JPL, Hidden Figures focuses on Langley, and starts out during the world war 2 era, where due to the shortage of man (and woman) power, various administrations were forced to hire women (and Blacks) to work as computers during the war effort.

The issues covered are very different from The Rise of the Rocket Girls. For instance, segregation played a big role in the story, and the author covers the entire civil rights era, where the state of Virginia (where Langley was located) at one point shut down its entire public school system rather than permit Blacks and Whites to be at the same school. One of the protagonists later would attend adult school in one of those high school campuses and remark that the place was so dinghy that it was a wonder that this was what they were trying to keep Black people away from.

The story is well written, and also covers the creation of NASA from NACA, which was meant to help with aviation rather than rocketry. The politics behind the formation of NASA was interesting as well. All in all, I recommend reading this book.

Review: Pachinko

Pachinko is Min Jin Lee’s novel covering the Japanese occupation of Korea, and depicting the lives and various fates of Korean Japanese during the world war 2 period. As someone who’s always heard about how badly Koreans were treated in Japan for many years, I’ve always been curious about how it’s happened, and this book was a great way to find out about it.

The novel depicts Sunja’s family, starting from her parents’ lives, and including her children during the pre-World War 2 and post-WW2 period in Japan. Having been made pregnant by a Korean businessman living in Japan, Sunja refuses to become his mistress but then a Christian pastor on his way to his church in Japan feels sorry for her, marries her, and then they move to Japan proper.
Basically, Korean people in Japan have limited job opportunities. You can run a restaurant (or sell street food), or be hired into the Pachinko industry, which apparently has some ties to organized crime as well. As the war proceeds, we get views as to how the family survives (and in some case even thrive) and what the effects of the war is.

I enjoyed the book’s depiction of Japan and Korean people living in Japan. The book is a long read but at no point did I think it had filler. Definitely worth your time.

Review: Howl's Moving Castle

Howl’s Moving Castle is Dianne Jones’ fantasy novel upon which Hayao Miyazaki’s movie of the same name was loosely based. Fans of the book often say that the book's much better than the movie. I haven't seen the movie, but if this is true then I probably won't bother with the movie at all.

The story revolves around Sophie, who as the eldest daughter  of the house is predestined not to find her fortune, and is so reconciled to being a hat maker. Then she runs afoul of the Wicked Witch and is cursed, whereupon for random reasons she ends up in the castle of evil wizard Howl.

Howl ends up not being so evil, and Sophie ends up being able to release herself from her curse. I didn’t realize that the book was the start of a series of (apparently well loved) YA novels, but in any case, the book while well written didn’t feel compelling. None of the characters felt anything more than 2-dimensional, while there aren’t any interesting reveals: magic in the novel doesn’t really follow any systematic approach, and it feels like a random series of events rather than the characters actually driving the plot.

I bought the book when it was on sale on Amazon, but I won’t be pursuing further books in the series.

Review: My Sister Rosa

My Sister Rosa is Justine Larbalestier’s hybrid novel  both about a coming of age and of psychopaths in families. It’s an excellent book and you should just run out and borrow (or buy) it. 

Che is a typical teenager, except that he’s been moved between various countries in the last few years  by his do-gooder parents. As a teenager moving to New York City for the first time, he has 3 goals: 

1. Keep his sister Rosa under control 
2. Get to the  boxing ring and Spar 
3. Get a girlfriend 

Except for the last goal, these are actually pretty unusual goals for a teenager. But Che’s sister Rosa isn’t just a baby sister, she’s a psychopath, which Che has actually looked up in the DSM. What’s more, Che seems to be the only person aware of it. Both his parental units seem blissfully unaware, and Rosa when she wants to can charm other people easily, to the point where they do whatever she wants them to. 

Che then goes through the process of settling into New York City, going to a new boxing gym where he does meet a pretty cool girl. Then Rosa decides to start messing with his life and everything quick goes into pieces. 

The novel’s well written, with most characters being fully realized. The twist in the second third of the book was profound, and the set up for that was fair. Unlike most other books which nowadays seem determined to shove a happy ending down your throat no matter what, My Sister Rosa doesn’t end on an undoubtedly happy note, and Che doesn’t achieve all of his goals. 

Pick up a copy of this book and read it. You won’t regret the time you spend in Che’s world. I certainly don’t. 

Review: Norse Mythology

Norse Mythology is Neil Gaiman’s retelling of (what else) Norse Mythology. It’s written in modern language, but with the tell-tale Neil Gaiman style --- easy to read and straight forward, by lyrical as well. If you’re not familiar with Norse Mythology except (for example) through the Thor comic books, Norse Mythology isn’t just a good introduction, it’s a well-written one. Gaiman writes that many of the stories from the folklore have been lost in time, and it would be interesting to know which he picked to put in this book and what was left out because it was incomplete and he didn’t want to add to the mythology with his own fiction.  It would also have been interesting to see what he would have wanted to add to the mythos.

A light, short airplane read. Perfect for a vacation. Recommended.

Review: Revenger

Revenger is Aliastair Reynold's novel about space pirates in a far future setting. Told from the point of view of a highly educated young woman (Fura Ness) from a family down on its finances, it tells the story of her and her sister's attempt to go on an adventure by signing up on a sailing vessel as "bone readers." Bone readers are the VHF/telegraph operators in this millieu, and since it's a talent that you can age out of, new  bone readers are always in demand and the sisters sign up on a treasure-hunting expedition boat. During the expedition, the boat is attacked by space pirates and the rest of the story revolves around Fura's attempt to get revenge and rescue her sister.

The millieu is particularly interesting, obviously constructed to mirror the golden age of sail's particular constraints so as to make the kind of voyages described interesting. For instance, everything takes place within a single solar system, so solar sails can be used as a means of getting everywhere. The result is travel times described in weeks, rather than years required for interstellar distances without breaking the known laws of physics. Similarly, the worlds described aren't planets, but rather artificial habitat constructs ranging from 25 miles wide to about 100 miles wide, similar to island sizes in the Caribbean. Scattered amongst the worlds are baubles, apparently stasis-protected former habitats that may contain artifacts or quoins (treasure) so treasure hunters have something to do.

It's always interesting to me to see authors work around their weaknesses. Reynolds, for instance, cannot write a romance to save his life, and in this novel he works around it by eliminating any such possibilities: the lead characters are essentially asexual, and married people are introduced with their status as though it's a title. It works, but obviously one of the tropes of pirate fiction is completely eliminated.

As a story, the novel is fun: we watch as Fura Ness goes from naivete to becoming a classical pirate. The book is full of slang and sayings that evoke the golden age of sail while being more or less scientifically correct, and the setting is interesting if improbable.While not his best work, it has a certain appeal to those who like pirate fiction/science fiction mashups and can be recommended as such.

Review: The Populist Explosion

The Populist Explosion is a political overview of recent political movements that have swept both the USA and Europe as a result of the great recession. It ties populist movements in the past (such as Huey Long's) with recent movements like Occupy Wall Street as well as the Tea Party.

What's interesting is that it covers both left and right movements. For instance, while the left explicitly avoided scapegoating by race, the right has no compunction against doing so, and in fact, this probably did win Donald Trump the election. As a result, the author's attempt to conflate the two sides don't really make a lot of sense to me.

What is interesting is that the right wing in Europe does seem particularly focused on immigration, and the movements have been because the generous welfare states mean that the middle class is opposed to large scale immigration of any form. Those societies have historically been so homogeneous that even relatively small amounts of immigration constitutes a sizeable shift in the feel of the population to citizens.

What the author fails to do is to provide context: for instance, when discussing immigration in Denmark, he provides absolute numbers but neglects to provide the total size of the country, so you have no idea whether citizens are complaining as to whether new immigrants consist of 1%, 2%, or 10% of the population. When reading the book you want to have Google handy so you can give yourself context with regards to those numbers. Otherwise you start to see big numbers like millions or hundreds of thousands and have no idea whether it's a big shift that would take a while to get used to.

Regardless, the author points out that the center-left in Europe and in the US has been neglectful of the working class, to the point where they have no felt like they have any stake in the process and therefore might rationally choose to "burn down the house" rather than continue to accept a (to their point of view) worsening situation. This is an important dynamic that has led to the political situation we see today. He doesn't provide any suggestions but does allude to the fact that in the past, such political movements rarely turn into long lasting changes in the system, but instead get co-opted into actions like the New Deal which were driven by the existing political parties.

Here's hoping that something like that does happen. In any case, flawed as the book is, it gave me a lot to think about. Recommended.

Building a custom desktop

In recent years, performance on consumer desktop processors have pretty much stagnated, so I felt comfortable sticking with my 2009 HP m9600t. That machine's had several upgrades: to SSDs, additional RAM, and a new GPU. It's had hard drives added and expanded, and a blu ray drive when those became cheap. Over the past year, the ethernet port went out, so I added a PCI ethernet card to it. The machine's gotten flakey over the years: it no longer slept or hibernate, waking up whenever it put itself to sleep. While this was annoying, I lived with it by hard powering off the machine every time I turned it off. For a while, it wasn't a big deal as I used a laptop for non hard core tasks (any Adobe software).

Then I won a Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 7 motherboard during a web-site lottery. The motherboard was not the latest, but it's over-clocking enabled, and was forwards compatible with the latest intel desktop processor: the Core i7 7700K CPU. Since I had a friend at Intel who could supply me with the processor (and a PCIe m.2 SSD) at employee discount prices, I figured i could build a new machine. Note that in most cases you can usually purchase equivalent machines from Dell or some other white label device at a better price than putting it all together yourself. Those manufacturers, however, typically skimp on parts. For instance, the case of my HP m9600t was so tightly packed that I pinched my fingers every time I installed or replaced a part. Similarly, the PSU is usually not an energy efficient PSU. Back in the old days, you wouldn't keep a PC around long enough for a more efficient PSU to pay for itself, but now that you typically keep a PC around for 10 years or more (because of the failure of Moore's law) there's no reason not to pay for a better unit, especially if it's quieter.

As a first time PC builder, I went with the Fractal Design Define R5 case. I picked it because it was a fairly large case, which meant no more pinched fingers. It comes with 7 3.5/2.5" drive trays and 2 5.25" drive trays, which I figured would be sufficient capacity even for a storage-hungry photographer/video processor. The case was indeed huge but to my surprise was well balanced and easy to handle. It also came with an ample set of screws and nice features such as being able to change the direction in which the front door opens.

The instructions start with screwing in the power supply, which apparently is a fixed size in PCs. Mys elected power supply screwed in just fine, and then I plugged in the power cord and then grounded myself using an anti-static strap. Next came the motherboard. Plugging in the processor was easy, but then the cooler felt like you had to be much more careful. I'd acquired both a water cooler and an air cooler, but at the last minute went with the air cooler for simplicity, so I wouldn't be managing 2 pieces that are attached to the motherboard. The air cooler was interesting because it had multiple orientations, and you're supposed to point it up or out of the case for better airflow, so I played some 3D rotation games before I settled on "up." I then plugged in the memory and the SSD. The SSD is weird because the motherboard had a bizarre table which showed what configuration of SSD installation would preclude the use of which other SATA slots and/or reduce the speed of the PCIe SSD. I found myself thinking: "Really, Intel? Really?!" Apparently this has been fixed in the latest Z270X motherboards, but of course, I wasn't going to buy one when I had one for free. But the next step after selecting the right slot really puzzled me.

All motherboards come with a back plate. You're supposed to insert it into the case, and then insert standoff screws into the motherboard and then insert the motherboard and then screw it down. What I was surprised by after having such an easy time with the processor, cooler, memory and SSD was how much I had to wrestle the motherboard and backplate together into the case and make everything line up. You have to tighten down the screws because otherwise if you insert or remove display cables or USB cables from the computer you'd shift or move the motherboard, which would not be good. I did so without damage (I thought!).

Then I started plugging in cables into the motherboard. The manuals here just don't help much. For instance, some of the case fans have only 3 holes while the corresponding motherboard pins have 4! I had to do some googling around before figuring out which 3 pins should be used. Similarly, for many of the single jumper cables I practically needed magnifying and tweezers to get a 5mm cable plugged into a pin squeezed into a 8mm space. This was definitely a pain. This was also where spending lots of money on the case helped. The Fractal Design case had rubber grommet windows where many of the cables were already pre-wired to run correctly. Unlike my HP, where there were cables everywhere, you could place only the cables you needed and route even those cables under the motherboard, so you had nothing hanging on top. Working on this was a pleasure.

Then came the moment of truth: plugging a display cable in and seeing if the machine would POST. To my horror, when I powered it on, the fans spun up and then spun down. Something was horribly wrong. I googled around and finally figured out that I'd made the rookie mistake: I had forgotten to plug the CPU power cable in. For whatever reason I thought that giant 24pin cable plugged into the motherboard ought to be sufficient. It's not. I plugged in 2 4-pin cables into the motherboard socket, and the device posted!

After that, the rest of the process was easy, though I was disappointed that the "backside of the motherboard" 2.5" SSD trays didn't actually fit 2.5" SSHD drives. But I moved over the blu ray player, intalled 3 HDDs, and still have room and power left over for more.

After installing Windows 10 (which transferred the license over with no issues), the machine sleeps and hibernates with no issues and is also incredibly quiet. I tried over-clocking it a little with no issues, but probably won't do too much. Lightroom and Premiere Elements 12 now fly! A usual, the storage upgrade to a PCIe SSD was probably more responsible than the mere 3X increase in CPU performance.

I haven't installed a GPU yet so am relying on the built in Intel GPU which many enthusiasts love to complain about. I am still of 2 minds as to whether to decommission the old machine or to let my son use it, but if the latter I can take my time to shop for a GPU.

I must say that over-all, the process has been much easier than I expected, and some of it was (dare I say it) even fun! Just like with a bicycle you've built yourself, there's something special about a machine you've built yourself. I expect that this is probably the best approach if you're not in a hurry for a machine and have time to shop. My wife's Dell now sounds loud by comparison, while my old HP sounds like a jet-engine whenever it does anything compute intensive. Given the changes in the PC market over the past years, I fully expect this to be the correct approach going forward.

Review: Rise of the Rocket Girls

Once upon a time, computers didn't refer to machines running programs, but to people who did the computation work that were eventually relegated to those machines. Rise of the Rocket Girls is the story of the computer department at JPL. It's a great read and well worth your time.

That the computer department at JPL consisted entirely of women was not an accident but deliberate policy. The supervisor of the team, Marcie Roberts, had a policy that she only hired women. She would say to the women in her team:

"In this job you need to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, and work like a dog." (Kindle Loc. 3061)

As the department switched to electronic computers, the women involved trained and learned to write computer programs. What's document is interesting: the early IBMs were so unreliable that the engineers involved wouldn't trust the results unless it was a human who did the computation. It took several generations of improvements before the computers became good enough to be used. The first of such machines was even given a name by the department and became a valued part of the team. Subsequent generational iterations happened so quickly that the people no longer became attached to them:

The scientists reviewed the computer analysis and tried to make sense of it. Some of the students were surprised by how much of the operation required human interaction. They expected to see supercomputers instead of people doing all the work. Senior scientist Harold Masursky good-naturedly responded to one inquiry: “Computers are just like wearing shoes. You need them when you are walking on gravel, but they don’t get you across the gravel. (Kindle Loc. 2922)

Note that JPL as an eventual government agency focused on research instead of financial results, didn't hand out stock options. That didn't actually matter: the programmers were paid by the hour, which given the usual extreme overtime hours required of programmers actually meant that they were paid much better than if they were salaried:

The women worked late nights and weekends on Mariner, desperately checking their trajectories and programs. The hours were exhausting, especially for new mothers Barbara and Helen, but their paychecks were worth it. As hourly employees they were both earning impressive incomes, outstripping their husbands, thanks to the long hours Mariner required. (Kindle Loc. 2154)

Having an all-woman department at JPL meant that in the early days the lab could run beauty contests:

As odd as it seems by today’s standards, the beauty contest was a result of JPL’s progressive hiring practices. As the bouquets were handed out and an attractive woman crowned the winner, the competition was unintentionally highlighting the presence of educated young women working at JPL. After all, other laboratories would have found it impossible to hold such a contest in the 1950s; they simply didn’t hire enough women. (Kindle Loc. 949)

An interesting difference between  biographies of men and women is that while men's biographies rarely mention their personal lives (like raising kids, etc), in women's biographies that's covered in detail. Nevertheless, the book provides ample coverage of the various missions that JPL ran, including the practice of planning dual missions for redundancy.

It's also well-written and provides a compelling narrative. Highly recommended.

Review: Planet Hulk

Amazon was having a comic book sale, and Planet Hulk came up as an Amazon recommendation. I was about to be taken in, but fortunately, I've installed library extension on my web browser, which automatically told me that the library had a copy and the hold queue was 0.

You don't read a Hulk story for the subtlety or characterization. Hopefully the plot is interesting, and there are fun set pieces, but it didn't take 20% of the book to get tired of the "hulk smash, bigger problem shows up, hulk smash" loop. I finished the comic book but don't feel the need to read further.

Not recommended.

Review: How Great Science Fiction Works

How Great Science Fiction Works is a survey course for science fiction, easily my favorite fiction genre. I audited this course hoping to find themes or maybe even discover great books I haven't already read.

Not surprisingly, I've already read a ton of the books referred to in the lecture series. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, when he discusses a book, most likely I know what it's about, and can recall the primary themes of the book. On the other hand, there's only a handful of books he's mentioned that were new to me, and I would want to follow up on.

The worst part of the series is that he doesn't really explain what makes a particular work great. He covers the plot but doesn't explain, for instance, that Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun was interesting because it was one of the early examples of the unreliable narrator in science fiction. Further disappointing me was that the themes he chooses for the lectures are usually surface detail: Robots, Spaceships, etc. rather than the themes I would choose to organize a course on science fiction about: "Science Fiction as the literature of ideas", "Provoking the sense of wonder", etc.

The last lecture of the series redeems the series, as he captures one of the differences between the literary genre of fiction and science fiction. "Literature" usually provokes the "Ah yes!" reaction of recognition, while "Science fiction" tries to provoke the "Oh my!" reaction as the author extrapolates (usually to the extreme logical conclusion) the initial premise of the setting, plot, or idea. There's room for both types of fiction, but the best novels or stories would ideally involve those. As such, the lecturer points out that good science fiction is actually really hard to write as it needs to provoke both reactions in the author, while literary fiction as a genre doesn't have to provoke the sense of wonder in order to win awards in the traditional fields.

As a survey of the genre, I think the course has some merits. But for me, it just wasn't fun enough to recommend to anyone else.

Reread: House of Suns

I don't normally re-read novels, but my recent read of Beyond the Aquila Rift's Thousandth Night made me go back and start reading House of Suns again, and the book absolutely sucked me in. Not only had the 9 years between reads eroded my memory of the book so that it was completely fresh to me again, but I discovered new things upon re-reading the book, which is a true test of how good a book is.

For instance, I realized that the novel postulates answers to the question, "What is Dark Matter and why can't I see it?" And the ending, far from being unsatisfying, was actually quite good from my point of view. I certainly no longer feel like Reynolds wrote himself into a corner.

The secondary story, which tells the story of Abigail Gentian is less compelling as I don't think it gave us a good grip on what motivates the primary characters in the novel. Nevertheless, it references the Winchester Mystery House in an indirect fashion.

What I love about the book is how subtle all the references and postulations are. At no point does Reynolds point out "Hey, this is my great idea. Pay attention!" He respects the readers' intelligence and expects you to do the heavy lifting. Thinking about the lesser novels I read this year like The Three Body Problem or The Wall of Storms, I think that makes even the worse parts of House of Suns better than the best parts of other novels.

Highly Recommended, and well worth the re-read.

Review: Ortlieb Compact Handlebar Bag

My 15 year old REI nylon handlebar bag finally gave up the ghost. My first instinct was to just buy another one, but REI in its infinite wisdom had stopped making it. Try as I might, I couldn't even find a reasonable replica on the internet. Fortunately, fellow cycle-tourist Pamela Blalock came to my rescue: she had previously upgraded her handlebar bag, and was now willing to give me her old Ortlieb bar bag for the price of postage.

The bag arrived, and I immediately mounted it onto the handlebars of the single and the tandem. It comes with a mounting kit that requires a pretty permanent screw on mount on every bike you use. The benefit is that it's an "easy on/easy off" system, not that the velcro on the old REI bag ever gave me trouble.

It's pretty waterproof, and much bigger than my old bag, with the issue that it no longer has a map case. The older REI bar bag's map case was pretty useless anyway, so I didn't miss it. I can stuff a cycling jacket, a pair of leg warmers, a cheap cable lock, alternate blades for my Oakley M-frames, and it would still all fit. I anticipate no problems stuffing other valuables like smart phones (the bag's waterproof, so even if your phone's not this would make the phone reasonably accessible), wallet or passports while touring, provided I moved items like the lock away. The idea is you can lock up your bike, remove the bar bag with your most valuable items, and eat lunch at a restaurant without worrying about the rest of your gear.

In practice, on particularly rough roads or off-road, the mount shifts a bit. Fortunately, it bottoms out against the head tube, so there's only so much it can descend. Even in this position, I can still get at it while riding. The velcro is kinda loose, but so far, I haven't lost anything from the bag yet, even when the flap flew open while the bike was on the rack of my car while going 65mph.

It came with a shoulder strap that Pamela said was useless, and indeed, it was pretty freaking useless. It's not even worth the weight of carrying it!

It's definitely lighter and higher quality than the other bags that I've seen. I'm not sure it's $50 better than the $20 bag I bought from REI 15 years ago, but to be honest those aren't made any more, so I'm not sure you could do better today.

Recommended.