Review: Marvel's Spider-man (PS4 Pro)

So we now had a 4K HDR TV, but scarce content to drive it with. Well, since the TV was bought within the same time frame as the Limited Edition Spider-man PS4 Pro Bundle, I decided to place a pre-order for it. For $400, you got a bright-red PS4, a retail copy of the game with codes for the future downloadable content, which is about a $80 value. I figured if the game had horrible reviews,  I could still sell it unopened for a profit on eBay.

Nowadays, you can tell whether a game's going to be good by the press embargo. A game that the manufacturer expects to be good will lift the embargo days before the game is released, so that the press hype helps to sell the game. That was indeed what happened to Spider-man, so I ended up installing it (downloading the multi-gigabyte day-1 patch in the background) and playing it.

AAA-games, especially those backed by Sony as an exclusive game for the Playstation do several things very well:

1. Tell a cinematic, movie-like experience, complete with all the special effects you would expect from a blockbuster-movie experience.
2. Be relatively accessible (i.e., with a little experience you can play and be expected to "finish" the game)
3. Make full use of the platform's capabilities, showing off all the capabilities the device is capable of. In this case a 4K video output with plenty of HDR effects would be expected.

Spider-man delivers on all these fronts. The story is great, with an expectation that you already know who Peter Parker is, and conversations introducing and driving the characters supporting Spider-man. I especially liked the Mary Jane Watson as depicted in this game, who's a spunkier and braver character than in the movie Spider-man 2. And yes, Stan Lee makes a cameo, just like in the movies! Bowen didn't even play through the first act of the story and but became inspired to actually finish watching Spider-man 2, still the best Spider-man movie ever made. I didn't particularly like the character model that was used for Peter Parker, but I got over it eventually. You don't spend a ton of time being Peter Parker anyway.

The game does everything right: the swinging in New York City is a delight: Bowen would pick up the controller and swing around the city for fun, not trying to advance the story or even stop any street crimes. The combat liberally borrows from the Batman Arkham series, but with its own feel: Spider-man is a much more agile character and moves around the scene quickly and easily, and Spider-man loves bringing enemies up into the air and swinging down at them. I became comfortable with the combat in ways that I never did with any of the Batman series.

There are a few frustrations: there are times when you have to play Mary Jane Watson or Miles Morales. You can tell that the game has a certain direction/solution that it wants you to use, but the direction is sometime too subtle and you end up getting misled. But fortunately, those sections are short and don't overstay their welcome.

Insomniac studios shares the same office building as Naughty Dog, so you can see some cross pollination of ideas here and there, with a few scenes where you can take a breather and just explore an area without combat being thrown at you.

The game has no loot-boxes, no multiplayer, and no "insanely difficult get this timing correct or die" challenges. I successfully completed the game on "Amazing" (medium) difficulty. To be honest, Bowen tried it on "friendly", and I can't really tell the difference.

I don't get to play many video games these days, but Spider-man is definitely one that you shouldn't miss. It tells a great story, and I'm looking forward to playing the DLC as it comes out. It's the first game that I've actually gone to the trouble of getting a Platinum trophy for.

Highly recommended. This is a game worth buying a PS4 for!

Review: All the Birds in the Sky

All the Birds in the Sky was a free tor.com download. I was trying to read Small Fry, and got too depressed from reading the book and started reading All the Birds in the Sky instead and got thoroughly sucked in. I only found out after I'd finished that the book won the 2017 Nebula Award.

The book tells the story of 2 kids, Patricia and Laurence. Patricia learned to be a witch, and Laurence was destined to be a mad scientist, but as middle-schoolers both were outcasts and thrown together. Their coming of age happened jointly through a series of tests of loyalties, and then the plot dissipates and reunites them years later, when both have become adults.

The novel is strangely uneven, with lots of pieces that feel very unnecessary and stuck in there for no good reason. The novel could have used a really good editor to make the author whittle down the novel so that its major themes resonated better. On the other hand, Charlie Jane Anders managed to make me care about the characters and their relationship with each other enough that I didn't switch back to other books while reading this one.

The novel's only 300-odd pages, but read like it went on for longer. This is not a good thing. The author had maybe sufficient material for an excellent 200-page novel, but went for a decent 300 page novel instead. The ending, in particular, is literally a Deus Ex Machina. The novel doesn't provoke any deep thoughts though it tries to invoke the idea that there was some deep thinking behind the novel by positing a conflict between science and magic.

I recommend reading this on an airplane, or as a distraction from deeper, more depressing books.

Exped MegaMat Duo 10 Insulated Self-Inflating Sleeping Pad

With both kids in tow for a camping trip, it's insufficient to have just one parent around, especially when both are boys. So Xiaoqin had to go camping too. Since she didn't like our old air mattress, I had to look for something better. Something "glamping style". When it comes to luxury, I defer to Roberto, who knows far more about this sort of thing than I do. (All my camping gear is directed towards being carried on my bike or in my backpack --- everything has to be light and compact. Comfort is a secondary consideration: as Roberto will tell you, my solution to not being able to sleep enough is to add distance and elevation gain until you're tired enough to sleep --- or carry enough gear for your 6 year old so that when he sleeps you sleep too)

Roberto recommended the Exped MegaMat Duo. We went to a store and tried it. Xiaoqin thought it was OK. So I bought it.

The marketing literature claims the pad to be self-inflating. It's not. After a good 20 minutes of waiting it still looked half-inflated, so I attached the pump and pumped it. The pump sucks. You have to put your palm over the hole or air will leak out and your pumping effort is wasted. The inflation valve is such that you have to use the pump, so you can't attach say, the Coleman Quick Pump.

Once you've pumped it up, it's as comfortable as any mattress you can buy from Ikea. Of course, those don't roll up and deflate when done.

Well, this one doesn't quite deflate easily either. You have to undo the deflation valve, roll it up once, undo the roll, then fold it and roll it up again. And since I don't weigh as much as Roberto, I'd have to do that again! And even then the stuff sack won't quite fit it when done. Oh well. It's for car camping trips anyway.

The true test is whether my wife will voluntarily go camping again. But I guess even if she doesn't, it's still an upgrade over our old air mattress, so I guess it's recommended. But don't bother getting it out if you think you need to pack up in a hurry!

Review: ENO DoubleNest Hammock

There was a sale on the ENO DoubleNest Hammock for $30. After taxes, that turned out to be $32 or so, but I also had to buy Hammock Straps for $8, making the entire setup about $40.

When I got the packages I was impressed by how small the entire thing packed up and how light everything was. This was definitely something I could carry while backpacking, even if I wasn't planning to use it as a shelter. The resulting hammock was big enough for me and both kids, and even my entire family would fit in under the weight limit of 400 pounds.

When I set it up during a 2 night camping trip with the kids, neither Bowen nor Boen ever got tired of the darn thing. They would sit in it, ask me to swing it, and swing it around, or have one kid pushing on it while the other rode in it. Twist it inside out and upside down. The hammock wasn't torn or destroyed despite the abuse, though I was very glad I set up the hammock over soft dirt and set it up low, so that when the kids deliberately fell out, they didn't get hurt.

My wife was annoyed that the kids didn't want to leave the hammock. Then she got in it with Boen, and decided that yes, it was that comfortable. "No wonder they didn't want to leave it!"

I'm sure the next time they see it they won't be as enamored of it, but I'd say I've already gotten my $40 worth. Recommended.

Review: This is Your Brain on Parasites

I listened to This is Your Brain on Parasites as an audible audio book because it was on sale. The book obviously covers parasites and their impact on society, but somehow also meanders into gut microbes (which I'm not sure would fall into the category), and digresses into that strange parasite that turns rats into cat loving creatures so that the microbe can complete its life-cycle in the cat's digestive system.

There's a ton of talk (literal in the audio book version) about similar behavioral modification on human beings by microbes or parasites, but unfortunately, it's only statistical evidence, not indicative of major behavioral change. The kind of behavioral change seen by certain victims of decompression illness, for instance, would be much more distinctive and severe than most of the parasites she talks about.

The book is long, meandering, but ultimately didn't tell me anything I didn't already know about. Pass on it.

Review: It's Better Than It Looks

I'm a natural pessimist and contrarian at heart. It's Better Than It Looks is a very optimistic book, using the long arch of history to provide evidence for optimism about the world we're in today. Easterbrook points out that compared to 50 years ago, the world has become a much better place, with pollution cleaned up in many areas (including the restoration of the ozone layer), world-wide poverty reduction, and world-wide reduction in inequality.

All of the above come with a large number of caveats of course. For instance, poverty reduction was mostly accomplished by reduction of poverty in China and India. Small comfort if you're an American working class (or even middle-class) voter. Inequality reduction was accomplished by reducing the difference between the middle class in the first world and the middle class in the developing countries. I'm sure that's going to make the Trump voters happy.

So it turns out that if you want to be an optimist, you have to take the global view of things instead of the national view. Of course, that ignores the problem that by making that focus, the elites of our society have left the majority of voters out, and then spend their time wondering why they're so angry and want to bring down the system.

The coverage of the climate problem was definitely tinted with rose colored glasses. It is conceivable that a technological breakthrough to solve our problems, and ongoing efficiency improvements have been dramatic over the last 50 years, but even Easterbrook had to acknowledge that the internal combustion engine improvements have largely gone towards bigger cars and more horsepower per liter, rather than the dramatic improvements in fuel efficiency that would have been possible.

Nevertheless, it's a good book to read if you're in the mood for a pick-me-up after browsing the news. Mildly recommended.

Review: Pletscher Double Leg Kickstand

Our triplet/tandem/quad came from the shop with a Pletscher Double Leg Kickstand. It finally gave up the ghost after 3 and a half years of service. The biggest benefit of a kickstand is that you can park the bike anywhere, without looking for a prop. The disadvantages are the weight, and the failure mode.

This particular kickstand has a maximum weight limit of 25kg. That sounds like a lot, but the triplet empty is 65 pounds, and then we have the habit of putting Boen on the bike while it's on the stand, which loads another 15kg on it. So clearly we've abused the heck out of the kickstand.

The failure mode is nasty. The legs splay out and never quite come back together. As a result while you're riding one of the legs will touch the spokes making an annoying noise. I imagine that as the kickstand gets even more worn it'll eventually enter the spokes and cause a severe crash.

This summer on our tour, I ditched the kickstand when packing the bike. It wasn't just because of the weight, but it was also because of this annoying klick-click sound. I've decided since then that the kickstand, like all others I've ever encountered, simply isn't worth the trouble, and the risk of it destroying my precious wheels and causing a crash just isn't worth the minor convenience of not looking for a parking spot whenever I have to stop the bike.

Not recommended. Good bicycles shouldn't have kickstands, no matter what Grant Petersen says.

First Impressions: Garmin RTL-510

My brother gave me a RTL-510 for my birthday. It's a safety accessory that I've been seeing more and more on bikes around here, and while it may not be a sexy piece of equipment, I felt that it would be the one thing that would bring me back to Garmin.

The device comes with a single Quarter Turn mount. One would think that for a $200 device, including a few more rubber bands and pieces of plastic wouldn't kill Garmin, but I suppose shelling out $20 each is better than buying a whole new unit each.

The only head-unit that I have which was new enough to pair with the RTL-510 was Bowen's Garmin Edge 25. The unit paired easily with the 510, and automatically recognized it as a light so it would turn on the tail light every time the computer was turned on. After a few rides, my Vivoactive HR automatically paired with the RTL-510 as well (without me prompting it to do so or anything), so that was great! The Vivoactive HR will only pair with the RTL-510 as a radar unit, not as a light, so no automatically turning on the light when you start a ride, but for now that's enough to stave off any desire for me to buy a new head unit.

When mounting the unit on the tandem, I discovered that the wheel would block the radar, since Bowen's seat post was so low. Fortunately, the quarter turn mount also lets you flip the unit upside down, and that seemed to do the trick. Of course, what this means is that I can no longer use a trunk bag with this bike and still have the radar working, which sucks. As with all bicycle accessories, the most important part of the accessory is the mounting, and Garmin clearly has a ton more work to do. Cateye/PlanetBike have all done a great job there for their lights with a wide range of rack-mounts, etc., and I don't understand why Garmin which is vastly better funded can't do the same.

One of the problems I'm encountering is that the triplet is long enough that on a fast descent I can't hear the chirp when the Edge 25 (mounted at Bowen's position) signals that a car is coming up. Obviously, that means that I'll need to get a head unit or watch that's compatible with the RTL-510. On a busy road (say, Foothill Expressway), the chirping is almost constant, but on a country road without much traffic, the occasional chirp served as a good warning. Fortunately, with the Vivoactive HR, the unit would send a vibration to my wrist whenever it detected a new car. This wouldn't do much good if you're on a bumpy descent, but on a smooth road at high speed it's a great warning and a glance at the unit would tell me how far away the car was!

When mounted on my single bike right side up, the radar appears to have a little more range (since it's higher), and would could detect and display multiple cars coming at me. The vibration alert would only activate for the first car, so if you're on a busy road, you wouldn't get a constant buzzing on the wrist annoying you.

The device is not magic. On a twisty descent or climb, a car can round the corner and be almost immediately on your tail. The radar will pick it up, but probably too late to do you any good. Then again, on a twisty descent I'm going to take the lane and the visual warning that something's behind me is a good idea as I won't be able to hear it.

All in all, this is a device that does what the advertising says it does, and does it without drama. I appreciate that. Recommended.

Review: Waterfi Swimcast

The Waterfi Swimcast is a chromecast audio device stitched together with a battery and then wrapped in a waterproof'd housing and then bundled with a set of waterfi short-cord headphones. Despite my relative happiness with the Diver MP3 player, I'd discovered that I was very bad at changing the playlist downloaded to the music player, and hoped that the ability to pick say, an Audible audiobook for the duration of the swim would give me much needed variety during my swim session. The kickstarter version of the unit at $99 was cheap enough that I decided to give it a shot.

The first version of the device arrived, charged up, promptly overheated and died. I sent e-mail to Waterfi, and they immediately shipped me a replacement unit while I shipped the defective unit back. Great customer service!

The best part of the Swimcast is the bundled short-cord headphones, which you can acquire separately from Amazon at $30 per set. These are simply speaking the best headphones I'd ever used while swimming. Because they're short, they don't get tangled up when you put them away. Nor do they ever add resistance to your swim, and despite appearances, they're tough enough that when the Diver MP3 player falls off the goggles they stay in my ear!

Unfortunately, the Swimcast itself is a big bust. This isn't a problem with the unit: at home, it charges up great, and streams music and audio just fine. It's just that public swimming pools have overloaded WiFi, and the private swimming pool I use occasionally has the WiFi router setup so that my phone can't reach the Swimcast, even when both are paired to the same WiFi access point. The net result is that it's not actually practical to use this unless you're in the population with great WiFi in a swimming pool. Oops!

All in all, I'd say the short cord headphones are the best part of the package, but you can buy those for $30 each, so there's no need to pay $150 for the Swimcast. I don't think I'll ever get to use this. If you live near me and have access to a swimming pool with great WiFi, you can come by and borrow the unit.

Review: Vizio Smartcast M70-E3

The renter wanted a TV in the rental unit, and was willing to pay for it, so we gave them our old TV, and went shopping for a new one. Costco had a highly reviewed Vizio M70-E3 for under $1000 with a 5 year warranty, so I bought it and brought it home with help from Costco's employees loading into the tiny car.

Replacing our older 60" TV, the newer device had feet spread further apart, so it barely fit on the TV stand. Unlike the older TV unit, the smart TV features built into this one is actually worth using! It happily streamed Amazon Prime video, YouTube, and Netflix without breaking a sweat, and the latency was relatively low. This meant that there was no need to get a streaming TV unit like the Roku or FireTV to go with it.

To my disappointment, there doesn't seem to be a lot of HDR content available from my favorite streaming service, which is Amazon Prime Video. And of course, even 4K streaming probably won't hold a candle to the higher bandwidth of BluRay or Ultra BluRay HD. I did watch Blue Planet II on it, and the picture quality is impeccable even without paying for the Ultra HD version, indicating that the 4K upscaling is very well done.

When I decided on a HDR source, the obvious two choices were the XBox One X or the Playstation 4 Pro. If I didn't already own a PS4, I would probably have gone with the XBox One X, since that came with a UHD Blu Ray player built in. But with several years of PS4 content (much of which is actually HDR compatible), and the availability of the Spider-man PS4 Pro edition at a reasonable price (i.e., not the $550 that it's going for on the open market now), I went for the PS4 Pro. This turned out to be a good move, as the game that's bundled in with that unit was astonishingly good, and it's very useful to have cloud save enabled portability for the game to move between living room and bedroom.

HDR + 4K is a very subtle change from 1080p. I played the game both on the Vizio M70 and on an ancient 1080p LG TV hooked up to a PS4 (non-pro). Since the two TVs were in separate rooms, it was impossible to make side-by-side comparisons of picture quality. The Vizio unit driven by the PS4 Pro was subtly better, but I'd be hard pressed to point out the exact places in the picture where HDR was making a difference. Insomniac Studios did such a great job making the two versions equivalent that I could detect no frame-rate or gameplay difference between the two systems, despite the viewing distance I used for the 1080p TV being much less than the viewing distance I used for the 4K HDR TV. Both units were equally immersive and beautiful, but if you spend a lot of time playing on the 4K unit, you'll go back to the 1080p TV and realize that it's quite a bit dimmer, and the sunsets just don't look as nice. The picture is also not as sharp. But it's nowhere as big a jump in quality as the introduction of DVD players was, for instance.

Because of limitations of the human eye (which by the way, is not universally applicable, since my brothers and I all have better than 20/20 vision when corrected with glasses), the general consensus is that for most American living rooms, any screen less than 70" is a waste of time for 4K. But HDR is a significant improvement and does make for a gorgeous display with content that drives it. My hope is in the future we'll get more content with HDR and it will make a significant improvement in the viewing experience. In the mean time, I'm not convinced that even in 2018, it would be worth upgrading a 1080p unit to 4K. Since the prices are now comparable to equivalent 1080p screens however, if you're buying new you might as well get a 4K HDR unit, and this one is a good one, especially if you can find a good deal.

Recommended.

Review: Whiskerella

Bowen is now reading so well that he's able to finish books by himself, including Whiskerella, and the previous book in the hamster princess series, Giant Trouble. Right now, I can still keep up with his reading, but I can see a time in the near future when I won't be able to keep up with what he's reading.

Whiskerella is the send-up of Cinderella, and involves a poor girl hamster who's forced by an evil fairy godmother to attend balls she doesn't want to go to in order to entice a prince into marrying her. The send up of the familiar fairy-tale tropes is hilarious, and quite a bit better than some the previous books in the series. And of course, it's always fun to read about a fairy-tale princess who'd rather beat things up than wear a nice dress, no doubt a great role model for kids.

The book is fast paced, mixing up prose with comic book balloon dialogues, and therefore suitable for any kids transiting into books with more text and less pictures. (Not a problem with Bowen,who seems to prefer text-heavy books to comics, much to his comic-book-loving father's chagrin)

Recommended.

Review: China Rich Girlfriend

China Rich Girlfriend is the second book in Kevin Kwan's rich people trilogy that started with Crazy Rich Asians. As the title implies, this one is about the wealthy Chinese rather than wealthy Singaporeans.

With more mandarin and less Hokkien, the book is chocked full of footnotes, which are at least as much fun as the main text. What I didn't notice the first time (but my old ACS pal Terence Chua pointed out) is that some of the names in the book are funny in-jokes that are only available to those who speak Hokkien. Some of them are as funny as Neal Stephenson's "Hiro Protagonist."

The first half of the book is a made-for-Hollywood extravaganza worshiping the gods of wealth and conspicuous consumption. Not being a fan of fashion or luxury brands, most of it went by for me in a blur that's only peripherally related to the plot. When the plot gets going in earnest, it turns out to be shallow, but at least Kwan doesn't get lazy and we get a new villain instead of a rehashed version of what the first novel was.

The book's a breezy easy read, and a great airplane novel. I've already placed a hold on the next book in the series.

Review: Free Food for Millionaires

After reading Pachinko, I saw that Min Jin Lee had another book called Free Food for Millionaires. I checked out the book and instead of a foreword or preface, the book had a long essay about how she wrote the book under trying circumstances and struggled to complete it. I felt obliged to read the book after that.

Unfortunately, the book is horrid. The main protagonist, Casey Han, a Korean American who graduated from Princeton with a full scholarship, makes one incredibly bad decision after another. She continually spends money she doesn't have, goes into debt, ignores offers of help from friends, takes up relationships she shouldn't have, has affairs she shouldn't have, and does crazy messed up things. If this was one of your friends you would shake her or just stop dealing with her because being that kind of messed up would eventually screw you over too.

I kept reading in the hope that the book has some redemptive value. But it doesn't. The book ends with the protagonist making even worse decisions and I wanted to scream. I want the hours I spent reading the massive 577 page tome back. Go read something else. Or play a video game. Or watch a movie. This book has no redeeming value and is not worth your time.

Review: Hamster Princess - Ratpunzel

Ratpunzel is book 3 of the Hamster Princess series. Each book in the series takes a familiar fairy tale and plays with it, though some fairy tales are more obscure than others.

Ratpunzel, of course, is a variant on Rapunzel. This one is less interesting than the previous one, as Ratpunzel doesn't actually let down her hair, but lets down her tail. There are some fun little jokes here and there for parents who are reading it to their kids, but mostly I'm having Bowen read it because it's at a level that's perfect to him. (Yes, Amazon lists it as a grade 3 book, but I'm not letting Bowen see that --- it's fine for your kid to read a couple of grades ahead and ask you questions, though apparently Bowen doesn't have any trouble understanding it)

I can't recommend the book otherwise. Read it if your child is interested. It doesn't contain anything objectionable whatsoever.

Labor Day Lassen Volcanic National Park Trip

My complaint about last year's backpacking trip was that I continually heard jet plane noises all day and all night. So this year, Arturo suggested Lassen Volanic National Park. The big concern was the smoke from the recent fires, but a check on the webcam seemed to show crystal clear views. On Friday August 31st, Arturo drove all of us up to Red Bluff, where the smoke filled the air and Bowen started coughing. We quickly checked into our hotel room and turned on the AC, whereupon his cough went away.

The next day, we went into the National Park and at the visitor center, Arturo got a backcountry permit just before the mad rush landed upon our volunteer ranger. The ranger told him that the area we'd planned to visit, the cluster lakes had been burnt 2 years ago and might not make a good trip. He suggested a longer loop. We visited the mud pots and Lake Helen before heading over to the trailhead by Summit Lake.

It was 11:00am by the time we got going, so the first thing on the agenda was lunch. Since there was a steep climb following the lake, we just ate lunch at the summit lake.

After lunch, the trail headed steeply uphill to about 7000' before it started descending. I felt tired, which was strange because I'd slept well the night before. Then I realized that it must have been the altitude. "I swear I was fully acclimated when climbing Stelvio earlier this summer!" "You lose it fast!" Darn. Your body is the laziest thing on the planet. Bowen also started whining. The backpack, which had his water bladder, his bunny, and some clothes started to become too heavy for him, and Arturo feeling sorry for him, just took his entire pack and strapped it onto his backpack.

We realized that our original goal of heading to Rainbow Lake had to be modified. We got to Echo Lake, but a big sign on the lakeside said "No camping" in no uncertain terms. So we proceeded on to Twin Lakes, where at the side of the trail there was what looked like a perfect campsite. We put down our packs and scouted around and it looked great, so we pitched our tents and then went swimming in the lake.

Lakes in Lassen Volcanic National Park are the strangest things in the world. In the Sierras, you'd see streams clearly feeding a lake, and streams flowing out of a lake, but in this park, there was no apparent source or sink! Arturo guessed that these were lakes formed from spring snow and the lake levels would diminish over the summer and then get refilled over winter. There were "tide lines" along the lake that supported this view. But this phenomenon meant that every lake in the park was a surprise: you're not going to hear a stream as you approach, and that's the typical cue that a lake is nearby for the rest of us.

After the swim, we got changed and walked to the other lake that was part of the Twin. We looked for a loop trail around our lake, but it wasn't there. When we got back to the campsite, we saw a doe and two babies. They were completely unafraid of people and sauntered around our site. "We'll have to take down all the clothing that's drying overnight before turning in tonight," said Arturo. "Deer will eat anything that's got even a bit of salt in them."

We had dinner and discussed what to do next. Doing the rainbow lake loop that the volunteer ranger had suggested was clearly too ambitious, so we had to choose between staying at Twin Lakes and doing a day hike, or going through the burnt area based on the original plan that Arturo had. We stared at the map and I noted that the ranger had mentioned that the burnt area was around Cluster lake. "Did he say anything about Big Bear or Little Bear lakes?" "No, so there's a chance it could be unburnt." We didn't have any information, but at least there was an alternative. "Besides," I said, "If it turned out to be horrible, it's only 3.5 miles away from the car and we can have a long day and find a National Forest service campground to camp at." "Let's wait till tomorrow morning and see how Bowen feels."

Since we had all day on the second day to do whatever we liked, we slept late and woke up at 7:00am, getting a beautiful picture of the reflective lake. We'd ran out of drinking water in all our hydration packs, and so Arturo gave Bowen a lesson on how to purify water using Aquamira, a chlorine based purification system that gave a much less objectionable taste than the usual iodine tablets, but at the expense of the complexity of setup, and of course, the lack of iodine supplementation.

 We packed slowly and only got underway at around 9:00am, and headed down to the second Twin Lake and the trail intersection with rainbow lakes. The twin to our lake was slightly bigger and quite pretty, with a larger established camping area right next to the Pacific Crest Trail. At that intersection, we saw the backcountry ranger station, and met our first PCT through-hiker, who was going south bound.

The burnt area became very obvious, and we soon lost our constant tree cover. Despite the burn, the trees were not burnt to the ground, just that all the leaves were gone. The day before, Arturo had taught Bowen how to distinguish pine from fir trees, but today there couldn't be any distinction. One interesting thing, though, was that with the leaves stripped from the trees, sound traveled very well. As a result, whenever we got close to any kind of ridge that could reflect sound, any shouting would bring back a bunch of echoes. Once Bowen discovered this, he would repeatedly shout and scream just to hear the echoes. The nice thing about the backcountry is that with no one else around to be disturbed, he could do this until he got tired of it, with no one telling him to shush.

Bowen had stuffed his cap into the sleeping bag prior to my packing it, so he didn't have a hat today. I offered him mine but after a half hour of wearing it he got tired of it and gave it back at me. We had lunch at Feather lake on the only sheltered section of it. This was followed by a chain of lakes one after another, some not even named. The named ones included Silver lake and Cluster lake, where there was a trail intersection with the Noble Emigrant trail. "That's strange," said Arturo, "I have a marker here on my GPS. I must have hiked here on the Emigrant trail, had lunch at the lake, and then checked out the intersection before turning around."

Bowen got tired of carrying his backpack again and once again Arturo packed it into his bag. Upon reaching Big Bear Lake, we spotted what could be a nice campground on the other side of the lake from the trail, and voted to check it out. "That way we won't have to share Little Bear lake with the father/son pair that passed us earlier." comment Arturo.

There was a site, but it wasn't legal. The flat spot was less than 100' from the water. "What will the ranger do if they catch us?" "He'll make us pack and and move." Bowen thought about it and decided to keep hiking to Little Bear lake, which was just over a little hill from where we were." On the way there, however, we witnessed a burnt tree fall over, making a thunderous cracking sound. Once we got to Little Bear, we spotted a nice looking flat area that would make a great campground, with no burnt trees nearby to fall on us.

We pitched our tents, unrollwed all our sleeping mats and bags, and unpacked, then sat on the logs to recover. After we'd rested, we went for a swim in the surprisingly cold lake, though once you were in there and swimming, it was obviously much warmer than the usual snow-melt-fed Sierra lake.

We swam until we got cold, made decaf coffee and tea, and then had dinner. We looked at the map and computed that it was 3.5 miles to the car. "Let's see. If we get up at 6:00am, have an efficient breakfast, and left by 8:00am, we could be at the car by 11:00am, and that means with a 6 hour drive we can be at Fenton's at 5:00pm for dinner!" Bowen declared he wanted 2 packets of oatmeal for breakfast, and that was all we had, so I'd have to eat lunch for breakfast, but that was OK, because with such a short walk we could definitely make it to the car before then, and Arturo knew there was a sandwich shop before the park exit. Since no fires were allowed because of the dry conditions, Bowen had to make his marshmallows on the camping stove again.

The next morning, I got up at 6:30am, and started making hot water. We took our time with our breakfast, leaving at 8:46am. The hike out was uneventful and cool, since it was still early and we were now in a forested area. When we returned to the lollypop part of the loop I didn't recognize the trail at all!

Bowen this time happily carried his entire pack all the way. Clearly, he had acclimated to the altitude as well, since the day actually have quite a bit of steep climbing right at the start. We got back to the trailhead at 11:30, stopped for lunch at Manzanita lake, and then headed right to Oakland on the lightest traffic I'd ever seen and had dinner at Fentons before returning home. What a great trip!

Review: Granite Gear Crown X60

Massdrop had a Granite Gear Crown X60 for $120. The Amazon price appears to be $200, so this is a significant discount. My old Lowe Alpine Contour IV was a 6.5 pound pack, though it carried a lot more, while this one was 40 oz or 2.5 pounds. The pack comes in Regular or Long, and if you're 5' 10", you're as tall as you can be before you must switch to the long, which weighs just an once more.

The pack is a single compartment with no separation, which means you can efficiently pack clothing, etc. around irregularly shaped items. The hip belt (removable and adjustable) has 2 zippered pockets, which are big enough to swallow the G7X Mk II)The lid has 2 slim pockets which are just the right size for cycling gels or little packets of peanut butter, and can be detached easily.

On our backpacking trip I carried 2 sleeping pads, 2 sleeping bags, both our clothing, lunches, pillows, and all assorted camping gear for a 3 day trip. It's an effective carrying system and had external straps for tying sandals, tent, and quite possibly a bear canister or sleeping bag. Compared to my old backpack all the buckles are a lot smaller, as are the straps. The main weight savings must come from the frame: it's now a plastic stiffener rather than metal. Nevertheless, the item comes with a limited lifetime warranty, which means that the smaller size didn't mean that the items were more fragile.

After carrying for 3 days, I was quite impressed. I think if I had to do it all over again, I would have gone for the longer version of the pack, but the pack itself was cheap and light and I'd buy it over again with no regrets.

Recommended

Review: Klymit Static V2 sleeping pad and pillow

Costco had the Klymit Static V2 sleeping pad with pillow at an astounding price of $80 for 2, so I picked it up for our annual backpacking trip. It's much more compact than the thermarest, which meant that 2 of them would fit in my Granite Gear Crown 60 backpack easily, along with the pillows. These pads are rated R1.3, which means that they're astoundingly low insulation, but since the intention is only to use them during the summer, it's OK.

The marketing literature claims 15 puffs to blow them up. I counted 20 puffs. There's an air escape valve so you can't over pump the pad. My advice is to pump it up to the limit, because that adds to the comfort. At night, if it gets cold enough, the air inside the pad will shrink in volume and your Bowen will wake you up and tell you to add more air to the mattress.

The shape of the mattress is great, and the texture keeps you from sliding off the pad. The pillow is also surprisingly good, and didn't leave me regretting the weight it took to bring them along. The kit also comes with a repair kit, and if you're carrying 2 of these you can save some weight by bringing only one repair kit but I didn't bother.

All in all, for the price, it's an astonishingly good deal. Recommended.

Long Term Review: Rivendell Silver Shifters

I've had the Rivendell Silver shifters on my custom road bike(s) since 2009, and on the tandem since 2017. The internal ratchet mechanism is the old-style suntour power-ratchet style, and that makes shifts reliable and also compatible with any speed deraileur and cassette. By the way, people have contended that it's impossible to friction-shift 9 speed and 10 speeds, but I've never had any problems and rarely miss a shift. One of the nicest features of these shifters is that as the cable frays, you can feel it when you shift, and that tells you you need to buy new cables and install them. Brifters just break with no warning whatsoever, and many once broken are impossible to repair. In recent years, my friends have all switched to brifters, but I'll note that none of them has kept a bike for as many miles as I have.

The plastic washer on the outside of the shifter is a bit fragile, cracking and breaking at the drop of a hat. But it doesn't seem to affect performance: I just turn the screw a bit tighter and what's left of the washer keeps working. I do keep a set on hand just in case things go really wrong, but given how much abuse I give my bikes these show no signs of ever wearing out.

You can buy them as part of the Bar-End kit which includes the Shimano pods, or if you're replacing the indexing shifters on a Shimano bike you can just buy the downtube kit for a lot less. These don't ever seem to go on sale but I'm happy to pay full price for them, because they're so very good.

Highly recommended.

Review: Samsara

Baraka is the only BluRay in my collection I ever wore out from watching it too much. (It also got loaned out quite a bit, so it wasn't just me) But somehow I missed Samsara when it came out in 2011! Well, it made it into the Amazon Prime Video free selection so I watched it.

As with Baraka, it's a movie without words, so you can take your non English-speaking parents to watch it, for instance. It's full of beautiful images from the natural world, as well as images from the not-very-natural world, all juxta position. The movie was filmed in 70mm, so the quality of the image is nothing short of amazing.

For me, it didn't have the same impact as Baraka. The opening sequence, while haunting, hardly has the same impact that the snow monkey scenes in Baraka did. The time lapse photography, which was rarely seen when Baraka came out, is now a common staple in many documentaries, so as a viewer I no longer found it fresh.

Still, if  you watched Baraka and enjoyed it, you should watch Samsara at least once. It might not be as impactful as Baraka, but it's still very different from the other stuff out there. Recommended.

Review: Words of Radiance

Words of Radiance is the second book in the Storm Light Archive series. The first book was The Way of Kings, which I reviewed 2 years ago. Each book in the series is 1,000 pages, so it's a giant book to read.

If The Way of Kings was Kaladin's story, this book is mostly Shallan Davar's story, told also partly in flashback. Unlike many other multi-book series, things do happen in this novel, and reveals come fairly fast and furious, especially towards the end. The plot exposition never stops, and the character development for Shallan Davar is much more interesting than that of Kaladin, mostly because she's a much more optimistic character, and witty to boot.

As with The Way of Kings, the magic system in the novel is consistent, interesting, and a character in and of itself and tied to spirits in the world.

As an adult, I no longer have time to waste on books that drag on without point, but I placed a hold on the next book in the series immediately after finishing this one, indicating that I liked Words of Radiance enough to recommend it.

Review: Blue Planet II

BBC's Natural History unit has a well deserved reputation for being the best in the business. I'd go so far as to say that their documentaries look better than most of the multi-million dollar fictional TV series you can find, which is surprising because those TV series have the benefit of controlled studio lighting and don't have to spend multiple years hunting down footage in the wild.

Blue Planet II is part of this tradition, and is the most amazing TV series I've ever seen. When Amazon had a $10 sale on it and I had a few slow shipping credits to use, I jumped on it, and it was worth every penny. The image quality is nothing less than superb, even over streaming video, and the details are amazing, both on a 70" 4K TV and on a 42" 1080p screen.

The sequences are amazing, ranging from the grouper spawning scene to the one where the film unit caught a cuttlefish pretending to be female to sneak into a dominant alpha male's lair, and cuckolded him right before his eyes. My jaw dropped in scene after scene, which made me watch even the "making of" video that came as part of the set.

There, I continued to be blown away. For instance, the first time they tried to shoot the grouper spawning scene they failed, missing the spawning by a few hours. So they returned a year later with a big enough scuba team to get 24 hour coverage of the grouper in order to get the shot. For the "boiling seas" sequence, they first tried Australia but got unlucky to start filming at the start of El Nino. They waited 18 months before approaching the shoot by using chase helicopters and following a pod of dolphins. The TV show took 4 years to make and the results more than speak for itself.

There are several sequences where the camera got so close to the action that I thought to myself: "This must have been shot by an underwater drone. There's no way the fish let them get that close." Then you see the "making of" video and in some cases not only was it a person shooting it, in some cases the guy was free diving, not even wearing scuba gear! The skill and dedication of the unit is nothing short of amazing.

Needless to say, this TV series comes highly recommended. If you watch nothing else this year, watch this one.

Review: Of Mice and Magic

Of Mice and Magic is the second book in the Hamster Princess series. While Harriet the Invincible was based on Sleeping Beauty, this one is based on the Twelve Dancing Princesses. I'd never heard of that story before this book, so unfortunately, any nuance in the adaptation is lost on me.

This one wasn't as funny as the first book, but Bowen still liked it and we went to the library to ge the third one.

Review: How Music Works

I bought the audio book version of How Music Works without knowing who David Byrne was, or even being a fan of the Talking Heads band. a testimony to what having a ton of good reviews coupled with a good sale would do.

I started listening to the first chapter and it blew me away. This was clearly a guy who'd thought hard and deeply about music, with a beautiful statement on how the music venue (ranging from the jungles ans savannah in Africa to the club venues like CBGB) affected the music that's produced. I was impressed and immediately looked up who David Byrne was and listened to a few songs by the Talking Heads.

Part of the book is strongly autobiographical, detailing how he was inspired by Japanese kabuki and other Asian performing traditions to stage his famous Stop Making Sense concert, where stage sets would get moved in during songs, starting from a bare empty stage to a full on band. I even watched the concert for myself, and even though many of the songs didn't move me, it was quite clear that every move had been thought through and rehearsed.

One shock I had was when listening to the Talking Heads David Byrne didn't sound anything like the audio  book's narrator. I shouldn't have been surprised, but maybe you would be too.

Many of David Byrne's sympathies are exactly where mine lie, so I'm afraid you're going to consider my review of this book biased. He rails, for instance, against the dominance of classical music in music education. He notes that the faults of music notation mean that nuances of non-classical music such as groove just don't make it into notation, and hence many classical musicians just cannot "rock". Not only can't they perform like a practiced musician of the genre, they literally cannot hear the difference. Despite that, children get educated classically because that's "harder." He points out that music education should be redirected towards self-expression and composition, rather than an over-emphasis of technical expertise and replaying older pieces. He thinks that rich people donating to operas, symphonies, or ballets as a balm for their guilty conscience is pathetic, and expresses sarcastic surprise that real criminals and mobsters didn't get into that act, since it's obviously been so successful for the billionaire CEOs who would donate to the opera house while laying off rank-and-file workers.

I could go on and on about the great stuff I learned in this book. But it's best if you just discover it for yourself. If I had any stereotypes in my head about "dumb rock musicians who can only write repetitive lyrics but can't hold complex thoughts", David Byrne wiped those caricatures clear off my brain by the second chapter and proceeded a complete re-education campaign. He even has a chapter on how to grow a musical ecosystem which sounds like it would be much more effective than the frequent prescriptions in business magazines about "how to grow the next Silicon Valley".

That's not to say that he doesn't have his flaws (in doing research for this review I learned that he broke up with the rest of his band during an interview with a newspaper, hardly the act of a non-self-centered rock star), but I feel like I learned even more from this book than from the well respected (though classically-oriented) Great Courses entry. That makes this book highly recommended and a no-regret purchase.

Review: Giro Jag gloves

I was packing for this year's tour of the alps and the gloves I'd been using all year were dead and clearly wouldn't survive the tour. It was too late to wait for Amazon to deliver a new pair, so I just biked over to the local bike shop. They didn't carry my favorite Specialized BG gloves, but they had Pearl Izumi and Giro.

Giro was now a verboten brand because of their association with the gun manufacturer, so I tried the Pearl Izumi first, but it was a poor fit. Plus, the gloves I had just discarded for poor durability were Pearl Izumi, so the Jag it was.

These were very comfortable, and about the only thing they're missing is a pull tab so you can pull them off  your hands. They've stood up to all the touring abuse I put them through, and I missed them when I thought I lost one of them in the wash after getting back home. (I've since found the pair, but not before I bought a pair of Specialized BG gloves from the internet)

Recommended, but they're still owned by evil gun manufacturers, so buy other brands if you can.

Review: Fire TV Cube

For the living room, we  had an echo dot hooked up to the sound system and the harmony hub. It's great to be able to turn on everything with voice, but I didn't have a good solution for the bedroom setup.

The Fire TV Cube, however, looked like it solved the problem. You hook it up to the TV, and it has IR blasters that would control the TV, soundbar, and also do smart things like say, "Switch to Playstation" and it would set the HDMI inputs on the TV to the appropriate thing. It's even smart enough not to use its built-in speakers for music, and would be smart enough to turn on the soundbar and use it.

There are interesting limitations that I wish it didn't have. For instance, it only has a HDMI output, and doesn't have sound output (either headphone jacks or RCA output), so it can't directly output to the soundbar, forcing the device to turn on the TV to stream music to the soundbar. It doesn't have a Bluetooth hub built in, so it can't turn on or control the Playstation. Of course, to solve these problems require additional hardware, and the integrated voice control has its own problems. For instance, to turn up the volume you have to talk, which interrupts any movie you're watching.

Nevertheless, the device works for what its intended for, and works well enough that I won't be returning it. Amazon has done a good job figuring out what people want, and how to make it good enough. Recommended.

Review: Stress and Your Body

I listened to Stress and Your Body, and kept thinking about how familiar it all sounded. Turns out it was all a rehash of another audio lecture series by the same author. Being Human, and Biology and Human Behavior.

The content of the lecture series is fine you've never heard it before. For instance, why are symphony conductors so long lived? It's not just because being up there on stage and waving your baton is excellent aerobic exercise, it's also because they have a lot of control. Apparently, it's not uncommon for the musicians to have to ask the conductor for permission to go to the bathroom in the middle of a practice! Having that much power is apparently great for longevity. (And there you have it, the answer for why women live longer than men)

Anyway, the book's thesis is that the stress response is great. In the short term, it does a lot of good things for you, boosting your cognition and reaction time in those moments when you're running away from the tiger. It's chronic stress that's bad for you, because the human brain has the ability to turn on that stress response for things where raising heart rate and reducing digestion won't help you for, such as the need to pay a mortgage.

The book does provide some solutions for managing stress, but some of it is not as good as you might imagine. For instance, there's an experiment where they got students training to be social workers to visit people in nursing homes to see if that additional human interaction was good for them. And indeed it was great. But then when the experiment is over and the students stopped coming, the folks in the nursing home deteriorated to a much worse baseline than the controls who never got that additional interaction. So it's not like you can do this as a temporary thing, it has to be ongoing.

The lecture series is fine, just don't be me and buy the other books Sapolsky has done: he's pretty much been mining the same material over and over again, so you're bound to start thinking: "Hm... I've heard this before, even in the same voice!" Otherwise, if you've never heard any Sapolsky before, it's recommended.

Review: The Magicians Season 1

The Magicians was a fair-to-mediocre novel by Lev Grossman billed as "Harry Potter for Adults".  That actually meant that the TV series had potential, because it's quite possible for the TV series to be better than the book.

Indeed, I appreciate almost all the changes in the TV series, except the selection of Jason Ralph as the actor for Quentin Coldwater. Ralph appears to have no emotional range, and just walks through the entire 13 episode series with a surly look on his face. He never quite sells any of the relationships Quentin has with other characters in the show. The TV series brings in many elements of the second book, The Magician King as well, which is great, because as in the book, Julia's story is far more interesting than Quentin's. She's also a much more interesting character.

The big reveals in the series are well done, and the rest of the setup (Fillory as Narnia, the visit to Antarctica) was a lot of fun. The boring part of the book was also eliminated, which is a wise decision --- alcoholism is too mundane for a TV series about fantasy.

If you've read the books, I think you'll like the TV series better. If you haven't, this is actually a fairly good TV series and worth your time.

Review: Beauty - A Novel

Beauty reminds me of a "made-for-tv" movie. The plot is straightforward, as is the narrative, and the characters live right up to their stereotype. The story revolves around Carol McLean, whose job at the start of the novel is that of a hatchet-man: flying in to shutdown a firm for liquidation. But she's always wanted to run her own company. Unfortunately, she's about to be laid off in favor of someone cheaper, but at her last shut-down she sees an opportunity.

The story then revolves around a fictional New England fishing town where a fish-sticks factory is located. The factory is slated to be liquidated, but McLean (who was nicknamed "Beast" until she meets a local fisherman who renamed her "Beauty") discovers that the old plant had potential and decides to try to revive it and run it as a going concern instead. The rest of the story relates the obstacle she overcomes (from raising funds to negotiating her exit) in a straightforward way without interspersing narratives or plot twists. There's also a straightforward romance that has no mystery.

The most unrealistic piece of the novel is the protagonist. There might be people who just want their own company but don't care what line of business it's in, but that definitely doesn't strike me as very likely.

The novel is short and easy to read, and would make a decent airplane novel. I'd recommend it as such, but there are probably more interesting reads you can find with relatively little effort.

Review: Needful Things

Needful Things is Stephen King's novel about a curio shop with a soul-collecting owner. You've probably visited one, but King managers to turn his curio shop into a mirror of the small New England town that reflects the human soul's neediness and attachment to material objects.

The hero of the story is Alan Pangborn, who apparently is a recurring character who survived a previous Stephen King novel. As a protagonist he too suffers from a past that eats away at him, but is otherwise a very sympathetic sheriff who tries very hard not to scare the kids he has to interrogate.

The story centers around the eponymous curio shop which sells the object of the customer's desire, but with money being the secondary medium of exchange: the proprietor, Leland Gaunt, asks in exchange that the customer do him a favor. The favor turns out to be something that creates and amplifies the strife that's already present in town, ranging from a neighbor's dislike of a barking dog to the clash of the Catholic church against the Baptists for opening the of a casino night.

King's writing is his classic transparent prose: easy reading yet descriptive. His depiction of life in a small town is also evocative, and made for fun reading. There are moments of grossness and horror, but by and large, the book relies on psychology and the feeling of inevitability to achieve its effect. Certainly, while reading this book I got the feeling that an external operator who knows the right button to push on all factions of a society can get them to fight each other while ignoring an external enemy that can burn a town down. The whole thing works as a great metaphor for what has overcome American society in the past 3 years, making this a particularly appropriate read for recent events. The novel was written in 1991, so there's no question of King using current events to drive his novel, unless you believe he had a crystal ball.

The ending of the novel, of course, gives you no hope that there's a non-magical solution for a society that's already in the throes of this type of external intervention. This novel is the last one set in Castle Rock, and Pangborn's solution to dealing with Gaunt isn't one that anyone could possibly hope to use in real life.

Nevertheless, I found the novel compelling and deeper than it looks on the surface. Recommended.

Review: Limar Ultralight Helmet

I've been disappointed by helmet technology over the last decade or so, as helmet improvement appears to have stalled. Helmets haven't gotten any lighter, they're definitely not cooler, and they still don't wick sweat away from your eyes well. I saw the Limar Ultralight for sale, and hoped it would make a significant difference from the free helmet I wear daily. It's supposedly the lightest helmet ever, at around 230g, but that comes with a lot of caveats.

For instance, I'm typically a S/M in any other helmet size. The Limar gets its lightweight helmet by calling its S helmet an M. If you remove all the padding for the helmet, it fits, but now you've got the scratch velcro anchor points scratching your head, and you've got not sweat wicking material at all, and you've got no room for a sweatband.

Needless to say, I returned the helmet and got my money back.

Review: Misbehaving - The Making of Behavioral Economics

Misbehaving is Richard Thaler's memoir of how Behavioral Economics went from being a backwater of economics to becoming mainstream enough that he got to win the Nobel Prize. It's a great read and much deserving of your time.

First of all, you get all the references to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work on psychology that revealed the fundamental short-cuts that human brains tend to use whenever it's confronted with complicated problems. The result is that humans don't resemble anything close to the "rational man" so frequently assumed in economic theory and analysis.

Thaler's a characteristically modest academic, not given to blow his own horn. This is great, and he discusses his difficulty in convincing the general community that the anomalies he discovered were of note and impacted policy that mainstream economists were prescribing. So for instance, retirement plan policy are largely focused on tax incentives, but not about how easy it is to sign up for a retirement plan and whether or not to prescribe a correct strategy.

Sometimes the invisible handwave is combined with the incentives argument to suggest that when the stakes are high and the choices are difficult, people will go out and hire experts to help them. The problem with this argument is that it can be hard to find a true expert who does not have a conflict of interest. It is illogical to think that someone who is not sophisticated enough to choose a good portfolio for her retirement saving will somehow be sophisticated about searching for a financial advisor, mortgage broker, or real estate agent. Many people have made money selling magic potions and Ponzi schemes, but few have gotten rich selling the advice, “Don’t buy that stuff.” --- Page 52

Furthermore, the  idea that the competitive marketplace would punish mismanagement of corporations or businesses and drive them out of business fails in that businesses have gotten very good at manipulating market structure and the political environment to preserve themselves:

In my lifetime, I cannot remember any time when experts thought General Motors was a well-run company. But GM stumbled along as a badly-run company for decades. For most of this period they were also the largest car company in the world. Perhaps they would have disappeared from the global economy in 2009 after the financial crisis, but with the aid of a government bailout, they are now the second largest automobile company in the world, a bit behind Toyota and just ahead of Volkswagen. Competitive forces apparently are slow-acting. (Pg. 52)

He notes that frequently, many company CEOs want to  increase risk-taking, while employees are risk averse. Thaler makes a great observation: if you tie compensation to results, rather than the reasoning that leads to funding the risky project, then managers would generally try to only fund projects that are guaranteed to make them look good.

Whenever there is a time lapse between the times when a decision is made and when the results come in, the boss may have trouble remembering that he originally thought it was a good idea too. The bottom line is that in many situations in which agents are making poor choices, the person who is misbehaving is often the principal, not the agent. The misbehavior is in failing to create an environment in which employees feel that they can take good risks and not be punished if the risks fail to pay off. I call these situations “dumb principal” problems. (Pg. 190)

I hope the above quotes give you an idea of how great a book this is. If you're involved in business in anyway,  you should read this book. If you want a good understanding of how much of a death-grip the Chicago school of economics and the rational expectations assumptions had on policy prescriptions and economics thinking, this book also provides a fantastic history of how hard it was to change the paradigm.

There are too many reasons to read this book. Go find a copy and read it. Highly recommended.

Review: A couple of fountain pens

Bowen's teacher was complaining about his writing. My solution was to get a handwriting practice book and then pens and make him practice. He didn't enjoy it though, and the pens get lost a lot.

I remembered my years as a kid in Singapore schools practicing with a fountain pen. Fountain pens can only be held in a particular way, which makes them great for getting everything right. The Pilot Metropolitan was cheap, which is important for something that's going to be handle by a kid. Dropping a fountain pen on its nib will pretty much destroy it.

Well, Bowen didn't like the fountain pen either, but I discovered a very nice property of a fountain pen. Nobody else in the house wanted to borrow one, which meant that my fountain pen could always be mine, and I'd always have a pen instead of constantly losing it. The fine nib is scratchy, and the built-in squeeze converter holds very little ink, so I went in search of a better pen.

I ended up with the Kaweco Classic Sport, also in a fine nib. This pen's a little more expensive, but it writes much smoother than the Metropolitan, and is also much smaller. Unfortunately, the pens don't use interchangeable cartridges, oh well.

What surprised me about the pens is that modern fountain pens seem to be much better than the stuff I had in school. They don't leak, even on airplanes. (I carry a pen to fill out custom forms, and again, it's such an exotic instrument that nobody ever asks to borrow mine)

I have to say that I'm surprised by how nice it is to have a fountain pen. I never would have guessed it.

Long Term Review: Sony WH1000XM2

When I first reviewed the Sony WH1000XM2, I hadn't used them on an airplane. On the flight to and from Europe this time, I used them on the plane. Wow, they are amazing on an airplane. They've completely cut out the airplane noise. Music sounds great.

And comfort? Bowen hates headphones, and he grabbed them from me and tried them, and never gave them back to me, falling asleep with the headphones on his head. I was so happy that he fell asleep and I got to steal them back.

If you fly on a regular basis or have a long flight ahead of you, these are the headphones to get. Highly recommended.

Review: Deep - Freediving, Renegade Science, and What Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves

I listened to Deep as an audio book. I expected a short, fairly easy listening book, and what I got was a long book full of scientific research, interesting people, and stories, interspersed with all sorts of random facts that would be too much to enumerate in a book review.

The story starts with free diving. OK, free diving is fun, and anyone who's ever done any snorkeling is going to love this part of the book, since it's about the amazing breath holds and how to get down to very deep depths without the bother of scuba gear and other annoying issues. Unfortunately, the sport of free diving seems competitive and driven by the one-upsmanship that happens whenever human beings start to compete with each other. The author describes competitors who black out under competition, one man who was paralyzed from the damage caused, and a man who died under competition conditions. This is not a sport you're going to be encouraging your kids to get into. And it's not even fun: most of the competitors dive with their eyes closed, because goggles would slow you down!

Fortunately, James Nestor decided it was pretty pointless as well, and goes on to other areas of oceanographic research in addition to finding an instructor and training to free dive. He even meets the Ama, the Japanese free divers who have a multi-generation tradition of Pearl diving. The book covers many topics such as the attempt to tag sharks near Reunion using free divers.

There's extensive coverage of dolphins and whales and echolocation, as well as an interesting visit to the Marinas trench, as well as the world's deepest underwater tour submarine. All in all, listening to this book took me months and provided lots more material than I expected.

My only complaint about the book is that the author uses the same voice to depict all the other characters he meets, which sometimes sounds like he's caricaturing them. That's a really minor complaint.

This book comes recommended, and is worth your time.

Review: Hamster Princess: Harriet the Invincible

Hamster Princess - Harriet the Invincible is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, but with a modernist take that's quite charming. It's nominally for Grades 3-7, but Bowen could read entire chapters out loud with only a handful of words that I had to correct him on, so the take the grade level thing with a huge sack of salt.

I've been reading a chapter every night to him: it's fun reading (and obviously not as daunting as The Two Towers, which is the bonus reading he gets every night as well). The protagonist is obviously not the demure princesses of old, but the feisty, cliff-diving, sword wielding modern princess. There's even math in the form of fractions, and the wall of text is frequently interrupted with cartoons or comic book panels, which is great. The writing is not as amazingly fun as Thieves and Kings, but I've lost all hope that Mark Oakley will ever get around to completing that story.

My only complaint is that the men in the book are all whiners. Since little kids whine all the time, I would very much like my boys not to have whiner role models. It's OK for the princes to not be the heroes or protagonists, but there's no need to have all the males be whiners.

Recommended. I'll see if Bowen wants more Hamster Princess books tomorrow.

Review: Netflix's Altered Carbon

To say that I'm a fan of Richard K Morgan is an understatement. I've bought and read everything in the Takeshi Kovacs series, including Altered Carbon. I'm not usually a fan of TV, however, so when I heard that Netflix adapted it into a TV Series, I didn't even think about using my free trial. Then some idiot signed up for Netflix using my e-mail address, essentially deciding to turn on my free trial for me.

OK, so I started watching it to see if it was any good. I'm not going to hold back from spoilers, because that's the only way a fan of the book can properly review the TV series. The big change is that Reileen Kawahara got changed from being the big bad to Kovacs' sister. That's probably done to heighten drama, but doesn't make any sense: the series depicts Kovacs going from CTAC conditioned soldier to shooting down members of his own squad, and then asks us to believe that he would RD (real death) his own sister. The actor portraying Ryker's sleeve simply wasn't good enough to convince us that Kovacs would do this.

Other changes: the Envoy training is changed from being part of the protectorate to being part of a Quellist uprising. This is of course unbelievable in and of itself, so Quell herself becomes the inventor of the sleeving technology. They also weakened the Envoy conditioning.

The latter is the worst part of the conversion in the TV series. In the novel, Kovacs is smart, and figures everything out. In the TV series, he's a reactive person who only figures anything out when he has it shoved in front of his face and it's so obvious even the dumbest person in the audience can understand it.

There are lots of tonal changes. For instance, the book is actually much more brutal and violent than the TV series (I know: if you've seen the TV series, you wonder how it could actually be worse, but the interrogation at the Wei clinic is one major example --- in the book Kovacs is sleeved into a woman's body so that the torture would be more effective, something that probably wouldn't be acceptable when shown to a mass audience). That's understandable and I'm quite OK with it.

All in all, the TV series could be seen as quite good if you haven't read the book. If you have a choice, however, read the book first. If you've already seen the TV series, go read the book. I re-read it for this review and it's a different experience and significantly better. Morgan manages to restyle Raymond Chandler for a more cynical world, and brings a unique stamp on it that's compelling reading. It might be a great mindless read, but if you pay attention, it's got much deeper themes in it that's worth your attention as well.

Review: 3M Safety Glasses

One of the kids in Bowen's school showed up with these cool wrap-around safety glasses that appeared to fit him really well, so I asked his mom where she got them, hoping that they wouldn't be too expensive. The response, "his grandfather got them from Home Depot. They're 3M safety glasses!"

I never visit a physical store if I can help it. It turns out that Amazon sells them in a 4-pack for $10.36, and you can get them in gray or in clear. The sidepieces are flexible enough to wrap around even a little kid's head, and the nose pieces are soft enough that neither Bowen nor Boen have complained about them. You've probably seen lots of pictures of Bowen wearing them on this blog, so you can decide for yourself whether they're fashionable enough for your kid. All I care about is that Bowen likes them enough that when he lost his dark glasses in Italy, he'd rather wear the clear ones than the dark glasses we bought as replacements at the first store we found that had them, and it's more important that my kids wear eye protection than that they look fashionable.

At these prices, you won't cry if the kids loses them, sits on them, or abuse them in any way. They're sturdy enough to survive a bike tour and then some. Eye protection is essential even if you're not cycling: UV exposure can cause cataracts.

I hope my sons never need prescription glasses. As long as they don't, these are the best bang for the buck UV/rain/wind/dust protection anywhere. Recommended.

Review: Google WiFi

I usually try to stay away from Google's hardware consumer products: it's quite clear to me that Google's product managers suffer from a severe case of Apple envy, and as a result tend to go for an unimaginative copy of Apple products rather than technical excellence.

Our problem is that the house we're currently living in is huge, too much even for our old "Dark Knight" router to cover. There was a sale on the Google WiFi 3 pack during the Amazon Prime Day, so I picked it up, hoping the mesh network coverage will work out.

The marketing literature claims 3000 square foot coverage. In reality, that's going to be true only if you have the primary unit in the optimal section of the house. Since we couldn't choose where to put our primary unit, the coverage isn't quite there. I was surprised by how close the units have to be: the instructions say the units have to be about 2 rooms apart, which is about 20' or so. The wifi units don't really work together: they all want to link themselves to the primary unit rather than doing an extra hop through an intermediate wifi point. So much for smart configuration.

Setup is easy, though time consuming, as the setting up of the WiFi unit requires an app which seems to take forever to run. The unit in the office got a wired connection to an ethernet hub and serves 4 computers. Speeds on computers in the unit reading and writing to our Windows Server in the equipment closet went from about 50Mbps to 150Mbps, which is a significant speedup.

Unlike the Dark Knight router, Google WiFi serves only one access point, rather than letting you split coverage between 2 bands. This makes covering units very easy (only one WiFi password to remember) but also means for instance, that you can't deliberately set certain devices to certain channels to avoid conflict. Google claims that the software does the right thing automatically, and provides testing features in its app for you to check wifi speed.

The units require a reboot about once a month or so. The irritating part about this is that the mesh would break down and tell you inane things like: "move the mesh wifi points closer together" even though the units had worked correctly the day before. You just have to pick the "reboot" option and hope everything comes together.

All in all, Google WiFi was surprisingly decent for a Google hardware product. As of this writing, the TP-Link Deco (based on the same hardware) is cheaper ($170) and comes with Alexa, so it's potentially better, but I've had bad luck with TP-Link hardware in the past, so I'm not about to experiment. It's nowhere as good as having wired Ethernet all over the house, so if you have an option there I'd still recommend that you run wires.

Recommended.

Review: Dark Matter

Dark Matter is Blake Crouch's novel about a man who's kidnapped by a mirror world substitute. Rather than a serious or speculative novel, it's structured as a thriller, and doesn't spend much time actually discussing quantum mechanics, despite the author's proclamations.

The protagonist, Jason Dessen, is kidnapped and drugged one day, and wakes up in a world where he's a famous scientist, and he was never married and had no kids. He discovers that his alternate world counterpart has invented a machine that can traverse the multiverse, and he escapes to find his family.

Crouch is a screenwriter, so the novel reads a lot like a movie would, with lots of action, dialog that performs exposition instead of stream-of-consciousness descriptions, and obvious places where the camera cuts from scene to scene. The writing is fast paced and smooth, and zero thinking is required on the part of the reader as everything is spoon-fed to you.

This makes Dark Matter a reasonable airplane novel, and can be recommended as such. If you want deeper stuff go elsewhere.

Review: Nomatic Minimalist Wallet

If you're like any regular cyclist, jersey pocket space is at a premium. This leads to certain routine behaviors like getting a zip-lock bag and just putting in a bit of cash, health insurance cards, id, and just one or two credit cards into it before going on a bike ride so the jersey pocket can contain other stuff like food or your garage opener.

I saw the Nomatic Wallet on sale (2 for $15), and decided that it might be a nice alternative to a zip-lock bag. I didn't expect to like it as much as I do, to the point where I've pretty much retired my 3-year-old BigSkinny.

The wallet has a main compartment that will hold a few cards (the claim is 15, but I'll be surprised if you can stick more than 8 cards in there). On the other side, there's a key and cash wallet. You shouldn't attempt to stick coins in there (unless it's very few coins) or you will almost certainly lose them.

In use, it's fast to get cards out of the wallet, but much slower to get cash or keys out. The wallet bunches up the cards together so that you'll notice if the wallet falls out of your pocket when you're sitting down, for instance, which is a good feature, and better than the zip-lock bag solution, where if the cards are diffused, you might not notice the entire bag falling out of your pocket.

For travel use, I still think the BigSkinny passport wallet is the right solution for most people, but for domestic use where you're not carrying passports this has turned into my daily use wallet, to my surprise. Recommended.