Review: The Longevity Diet

Having recently read a crack-pot diet book, I was wary when I saw The Longevity Diet. To my relief, this is not a crackpot diet book. Valter Longo instead of peppering his text with anecdote after anecdote, refers to clinical trials, and is careful to couch his conclusions with caveats:

Quinn, who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and was about to undergo chemotherapy. Shortly after the story appeared, one of the judge’s friends called me at USC and informed me that Quinn had been fasting for eight days. I was horrified. “That’s crazy,” I said. “Please tell your friend to start eating immediately.” (Loc 1667)

 Similarly, he discusses his theory that too much protein is actually bad for you, especially if it triggers growth hormone:

Although obesity is known to increase one’s risk of diabetes, protein intake may be just as big of a factor. One study following forty thousand men for up to twenty years showed a twofold increased risk for diabetes associated with a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet.7 Those results are consistent with our 2014 study of six thousand people in the United States indicating increased diabetes risk in those with the highest protein intake, although the small population size limited the significance of our results. (Kindle Loc 1957)

Note that he refers to a 6000 person study as a small population size and discusses the difficulty of generalizing from a small sample size to the entire population.

OK, let's look at Dr. Longo's arguments:

1. It's well known that the Mediterranean diet is good for you, but certain other places in the world (e.g., Okinawa Japan, and Loma Linda, California) also have a history of producing long lived humans
2. The commonality between the diets of all these places is a high emphasis on plant based diet, low use of processed food, low dependence on animal based protein (and not too much protein at that), and the use of fish as the main source of protein.
3. Fasting has been a human tradition in the past, including intermittent fasting. Clinical trials indicate that a fast-mimicking diet (FMD) has positive results for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy: reduction in nausea, as well as more effective elimination of cancer cells, and faster recovery.
4. Diet should vary depending on needs throughout the life cycle. In adult and middle age, a lower calorie diet with less protein is associated with better longevity, while in old age (past 65), increasing protein intake becomes more necessary to preserve muscle and increase weight for better survivability of age-related illness

His recommendations for healthy people is to adopt a traditional diet. The most cranky type of this advice is to eat what your ancestors ate, the reasoning being that your ancestors would have figured out what foods had poor fit for your genotype. This struck me as the most iffy part of the book, indicating that a German person who moved to say, India, shouldn't eat curry, even if that diet was adapted for the region for certain specific reasons.

The diet recommendations are fairly strict: 0.31 to 0.36 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day. That's about 40-47g of protein per day for a 130 pound person (an 8oz steak, for instance, has 56g of protein, blowing that budget out of the water). The rest of your calorie intake pretty much has to come from complex carbohydrates and "good oils" like olive oil!

One limitation of the book is that the doctor thinks that exercise is an hour of fast walking a day (or fastish cycling), and doesn't factor in diets for people who might be more active (or say, engaged in strength training). The book continually warns that if you're over 65, the fasting protocol is not for you, and that you should try to do it only as part of a clinical trial, etc. and then proceeds to tell you how it works! He does point you at a commercial program called ProLon, but disclaims that he's making any money from it.

The fasting protocol looks doable (1 transition day, 5 days of very little food, and then 1 transition day), so it's the long term diet that would be difficult to maintain, though the book does have a recipe in the back that has recommendations (basically, no animal protein means milks, yogurts, etc have to have plant-based substitutes), with only an occasional egg.

In any case, I can't dismiss this book as a crack pot diet book, but the program seems challenging and worth investigating if you're trying to lose weight (I'm not), or have some other health issues. The caveat says to not try this if you're already diabetic without medical supervision though!

Reread: A Wizard of Earthsea

I got fed up with the story and decided that I'd stop reading The Girl Who Drank the Moon to Bowen because it just wasn't worth my precious time with my son. I picked up a classic instead: A Wizard of Earthsea. OK, so it's rated as a 7th grade book, but it's actually very short, and the language is so beautiful I was enthusiastic to read it every time. (My wife had to stop me from going on with the book on many nights, because the language was so compelling)

Every word flows, every line reads as though it was meant to be read aloud. When we got to the end, Bowen said, "Wait, that's so short!" And then he asked me to get the next book in the series, The Tombs of Atuan. That's a much darker book, though similarly short, so we'll see if he persists through it.

I've now decided that I'm just going to fill up my reading time with Bowen with classic novels and stories instead of trying to find "modern" books that might not be any good. I'm guessing that after this we'll probably move on to The Sword in the Stone. (He bounced off Prydain, unfortunately!)

Review: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (Vol 12)

I recently let my subscription to the magazine of fantasy and science fiction lapse, mostly because they had raised the prices, but also because I decided that it was just easier to get one of the Year's Best collections especially since those would go on sale at the end of the year for $0.99.

My pick this year (simply on the basis of price) was The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, edited by Jonathan Strahan.  I've had good luck with his past editions, and since Gardner Dozois passed away, his "industry standard" collections will no longer compete with Mr. Strahan's.

The book consists of 30 stories, with a fair number of really good ones. Good stories include: Zen and the Art of Starship Mainteneance, Probably Still the Chosen One, A Series of Steaks, Carnival Nine, Eminence, Sidewalks, My English Name, The Secret Life of Bots, The Smoke of Gold is Glory, The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine, An Evening with Severyn Grimes, The Worshipful Society of Glovers, and Belladonna Nights. One of those stories (My English Name) I'd already read in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but the others were all new to me. I was surprised by the large number of stories from tor.com (which is a free webzine) and Clarkesworld (which is a fairly recent new magazine), indicating that the major magazines (Analog, Asimov's and F&SF) aren't a major influence on Strahan, though now I'm suspicious that those stories from tor.com were cheaper to reprint than the ones from other magazines.

In any case, a 45% hit rate is pretty decent. Recommended.

Review: Classics of English Literature

In my continuing effort to fill in gaps in my education, I picked the great courses program Classics of English Literature as my next listen. It turned out to be a great listen, and a great survey work of English literature. The emphasis, the lecturer points out isn't "literature in English", but English literature, so American literature is explicitly excluded.

Starting from Chaucer and Shakespeare, and then with lesser known older works by Samuel Johnson (even with a detour through the King James edition of the Bible), the lecturer, John Sutherland evokes the grand landscape of English literature and culture and how it's reflected in English literature. As part of all that, we get biographies of the great authors, Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Austen, the Bronte sisters, E.M. Foster. Wow. All of those biographies were short, context-setting, and stuff I'd never known, not even from say, my visit to Wordsworth's Dove Cottage. We also got a good look at the war poets like Owens and Sassoon. We got multiple views of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". Even H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle were included as the representatives of genre literature. We get a detailed examination of the rise of the novel, and its commercial requirements, as well as the obligatory examinations of Charles Dickens. Just about the only English literature not touched by Sutherland was of course, the work of the Inklings (Tolkein, Lewis, etc).

The series of lectures even covers why there were no great English plays in the 19th century ("a black hole"). It turns out during that time, all plays had to be approved by the royal chamberlain, which led to a censorship and thereby English theater didn't participate in the grappling of ideas.

Sutherland's enthusiasm about the great works of English literature is infectious (though I'm still not ready to tackle Middlemarch or Wuthering Heights), and intriguing enough. It's also a nice change from the heavy technical reads and listens that I've been otherwise reviewing here on this blog. Recommended.

Review: Human Errors

Human Errors has one of the best premises I'd ever seen for a science book. The idea is that there are plenty of books extolling the wonders of the human body, how well designed it is, how delicately controlled it is, etc. But this is the book that focuses on the bugs in the design of the human body. And boy there are many bugs (as anyone over the age of 40 can attest). For instance, I've always contended that the human nose/sinus system is the worst design anyone can come up with, and this book confirms that:

There are a variety of reasons for why we’re so susceptible to sinus infections, but one of them is that the mucous drainage system is not particularly well designed. Specifically, one of the important drainage-collection pipes is installed near the top of the largest pair of cavities, the maxillary sinuses, located underneath the upper cheeks. Putting the drainage-collection point high within these sinuses is not a good idea because of this pesky thing called gravity. While the sinuses behind the forehead and around the eyes can drain downward, the largest and lowest two cavities must drain upward. Sure, there are cilia to help propel the mucus up, but wouldn’t it be easier to have the drainage below the sinuses rather than above them? What kind of plumber would put a drainpipe anywhere but at the bottom of a chamber? (Pg. 10)

Indeed, the book confirms that other mammals like dogs, horses, and cats simply just don't suffer from the constant respiratory colds that humans do, because their sinuses drain correctly. Our heritage is due to the flattening of our noses (probably a result of sexual selection).

Similarly, nearly every athlete you've met who's an active runner, tennis player, basketball player, or soccer player will have had their knees go wrong. The knee is another badly designed body part:

 In quadrupeds, the strain of running and jumping is spread among four limbs, and the limb muscles absorb most of it. Once our ancestors transitioned to bipedalism, however, the strain was spread over two legs instead of four. This was too much for the muscles by themselves, so our bodies recruited the leg bones to help with the strain. The result was that human legs became straightened so that the bones, rather than the muscles, could bear most of the impact. Compare a standing human with a standing ape: a human’s legs are fairly straight, while an ape’s legs are bowlegged and usually bent. This straight-leg arrangement works out okay for normal walking and running. But for sudden shifts in direction or momentum—when you’re running and then stop short or when you make a sharp turn at high speed—the knees must bear the force of this sudden, intense strain. Sometimes, the ACL is simply not strong enough to hold the leg bones together as they twist or pull away from each other, and it tears. (Pg. 23)

 I book even came up with some human defects that I didn't thin about. Consider the frequent exhortation to eat a variety of foods in order to get all the micro and macro nutrients that we need. Why the heck do we need so many crazy micro-nutrients?

Some people’s diets don’t give them everything they need, and even people who get everything they need can’t always absorb it properly. So sometimes, we need a little boost. That’s why we’re always being told to drink milk, for instance; it gives us the calcium that we need but can’t produce in sufficient quantities ourselves. Now compare our demanding diet with the diet of the cows that produce that milk. Cows can survive on pretty much nothing but grass. They live long and perfectly healthy lives and produce delicious milk and rich meat. How can these cows thrive without a delicate mix of legumes, fruits, fiber, meat, and dairy like humans are told to eat? Forget cows; look at your own cats or dogs. Consider how simple their diets are. Most dog food is nothing more than meat and rice. No vegetables. No fruits. No supplemental vitamins. Dogs do just fine on this diet and, if not overfed, can live long and healthy lives. How do these animals do it? Simple: they are better designed for eating. (Pg. 36)

The book goes on to describe how our vitamin C generation gene is literally broken. It's in our genome, but some mutation disabled it ages ago so now we can't make our own vitamin C.  Similarly, we can't extract iron from vegetables easily, and worse, our intestinal system is so badly designed that our large intestines generate vitamin B12, but only the small intestines can absorb it, so all the vitamin B12 our body creates gets dumped out with our stools. Take that, intelligent design!

I spent the first 50 pages of the book highlighting one great passage after another, and fully expected to give the book nothing less than 5 stars by the time I was done reading it, but after the first 2-3 chapters the book sort of ran into a brick wall. Part of it is that my recent reading of Sex at Dawn has revolutionized my view of human reproduction, so his inveighing of our "lousy" reproduction system rings false to me. (Human fertility simply would not have been an issue in the tribal hunter-gatherer lifestyle, though obviously death from childbirth and infant mortality would have been a big issue, but that's a property we share with all animal life!) Similarly, his analysis of our lifestyle diseases like obesity and cancer again don't seem like design flaws rather than the inevitable trade-off evolution had to make between reproductive fitness and long life.

By the time we get to the human brain defects (well worn in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow and obviously not covered as well in this book), I was only reading hoping to get a few more gems out of it, and didn't get it.

In any case, I felt like the first half of the book was awesome, and covered material not covered anywhere else, but the second half of the book was full of padding and material better covered elsewhere. Nevertheless, the book overall is worth reading (especially if you haven't read as widely as I have about prospect theory), and comes recommended.

Review: Science News

It never ceases to amaze me that the cost of print magazine subscriptions is usually less than the cost of digital subscriptions (though many magazines to be fair, bundle it so that a print subscription comes with a web subscription). My biggest issue with the print+digital bundle is that my preferred long form reading is on the Kindle.

For the longest time, I've been looking for a magazine that covers science that's not written for English majors. The New York Times' science coverage, for instance, is frequently shallow, leaves out nuances, and tends to reflect journalistic tendencies to cover "both sides" rather than focus on the science. (One famous example was when one of their journalists covered "both sides" of the evolution/creation story as though both sides had a point!)

Science News turns out to be a $27/year subscription on the Kindle, and $50/year in print. The coverage isn't shallow. For instance, their February issue covers the recent "Vitamin D disappointments" studies in great detail, and includes all the nuances (basically, over a 2 year period, cancer rates are down 25%, but over a longer term the differentiation between the supplement and non-supplement groups narrows, indicating that vitamin D doesn't actually prevent cancer, but might slow it down). As a biweekly, each issue only has 2 "features", which are long, 3000+ word stories that cover a topic in detail. The rest of the issue is full of short updates (e.g., about what the far side lunar rover is doing, or some preliminary study results).

All in all, I'm impressed, both by the price and what you get. Recommended.

Review: Masters of Doom

I usually try to borrow books from the library, but my rule is that if the Kindle edition is $5 or less and the library doesn't have it in Kindle format, I'll buy it. Masters of Doom was a $2 sale and well worth the read.

I actually met both John Carmack and John Romero when I worked on the DOS/Windows RPC tunnel which enabled the DOS version of Quake to talk to the internet. At that time, Quake was pre-release, and the entire Id software team after we'd done getting the code working, would fire up a Quake server, then type in a cheat code to give me all the weapons as a handicap, and then proceed to slice and dice me up with their axes. (I was not then, nor ever a twitch gamer capable of keeping up with anyone who'd spent any amount of time with FPS's)

In any case, I'd met the folks involved, but of course, never knew their backstory, and in fact didn't play any of their games before Doom or after Quake, which made this book a perfect way for me to catch up. (I'd heard about Commander Keen and Daikatana, and certainly Quake Arena, but my involvement in PC games had gone away after that)

As an overview, the book is great. It does spend a lot of time explaining technical detail at a level intended for a non-programmer who might not know who Michael Abrash is (those of us who were PC assembly programmers knew him as a god), but the book is a great way for me to remind myself that yes, I was there at the dawn of eSports, when Carmack first gave away his Ferrari as part of a Quake tournament to Thresh. (I'd even met Thresh in person)

The great part of the book was that it analyzed what made the team of Carmack and Romero so great, and why neither Id nor Ion Storm had great success after the team fell apart. In any case, if you enjoy FPS games, this book is an essential must read. If you're a programmer in the corporate world, it's a great read to remind you that yes, 2 guys in a garage can produce something great without needing all that corporate apparatus around them, and even better, that it is possible to stay small and still be incredibly successful.

Recommended!

Review: Sex At Dawn

Sex At Dawn is a book with an argument, so let me summarize the argument in the book:

Traditional views on the evolutionary nature of sex in humans are that humans are a naturally monogamous species, with rampant cheating. This view does not line up with the following evidence:

• Human male-female dimorphism is about 20% (men are about 20% larger than women on average), making us more like Chimpanzees and Bonobos than like Gorillas and Gibbons.
• Human male sexual organs display signs of having been evolved for sperm competition, rather than monogamy/harem-like structures: these includes testicles hanging outside the body in vulnerable locations, high sperm count, with coupious amounts of seminal fluid (which can actually vary depending on how recently the male has seen its mate), and preference.
• Human females also display signs of having evolved for non-monogamous mating: human females are the louder of the couple when having sex (i.e., issuing calls for more mates to join in the sperm competition), human females can keep having orgasms far longer than a single male can keep it up, and human females also do not display any overt signs of ovulation but remain sexually active throughout the month.
• Studies of humans in hunter-gatherer societies that are nomadic show that extreme egalitarianism is practiced: this includes sharing of food, and even rituals of observed sex and group rearing of children, contrary to the "selfish-gene" hypothesis where time, energy, and resources spent raising kids that don't carry your genes are considered "wasted." In practice, entire tribes would raise the children collectively, with men not necessarily knowing whose child is whose. Children in such societies experience a much more stable childhood life than the traditional "nuclear family" with a high chance of divorce.

There's lots of evidence in the book hammering in the details of each of the arguments made above, but that's the gist of the argument. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and much time in the book is spent on both producing evidence (some of it cultural and observational: at one point they mention the famous "fake orgasm" scene in "When Harry Met Sally" wouldn't have been funny if it was Harry who was faking it), and pointing out that the traditional view of human monogamy doesn't have nearly as much evidence supporting it as previously supposed.

One interesting observation the authors make is that these traditional forager societies tend to be female oriented rather than male dominated, and they hypothesize that the creation of agriculture was what drove the current patriarchal society we see in the modern world. The book ends with a call to action for families to explore alternative structures rather than live unhappily in (sexual or otherwise) frustration. There are a few examples, but they do observe that children of 2 parent households do better by far than children of divorced households, and plead for parents to use their understanding of this book to design better (or at least less frustrating) lives for themselves.

I thought the book was very well argued and the evidence in favor of their view of human sexuality compelling. The book has revolutionized my thinking about human reproduction and evolution, and definitely makes many other books I've read about human sexuality that rely on the traditional, male-oriented patriarchy model of family formation obsolete. It also explains many phenomenon that might have puzzled you or me, such as why are relationships so hard, even between couples that really like each other, and why human fertility seems to be decreasing. Highly Recommended. I wouldn't be surprised if at the end of this year I named this book to be the book of the year.

Review: Rogue Heroes - The History of the SAS

After reading the brilliant The Spy and the Traitor, I went back and picked up Rogue Heroes from the library, hoping for another great read. After all, the SAS was the first "special-forces" unit anywhere in the world, and some of its original members might still be alive and available for interviews.

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Macintyre's research this time came mostly from the War Dairies, the log and and action reports from service officers and NCOs. The kind of people who volunteer for special forces service aren't the introspective types and were unlikely to be the types to write well. Now, most of WW2's war fighters were conscripts, so early on in the war there were professors of Philosophy amongst the troops. One of them wrote a poem which became known as the "Paratrooper's Prayer":

Martin came across a notebook, in which Zirnheld had written a poem. It has since become known as the “paratroopers’ prayer,” and was adopted as the official poem of French airborne forces. I ask you, O Lord, to give me What I cannot obtain for myself. Give me, my Lord, what you have left. Give me what no one asks of you. I do not ask for repose Nor for tranquillity Of body or soul. I ask not for riches, Nor success, nor even health. My Lord, you are asked for such things so much That you cannot have any more of them. Give me, my God, what you have left. Give me what others don’t want. I want uncertainty and doubt. I want torment and battle. And give them to me absolutely, O Lord, So that I can be sure of having them always. For I will not always have the courage To ask for them from you. Give me, my God, what you have left. Give me what others do not want. But give me also the bravery, And the strength and the faith. For these are the things, O Lord, That only you can give. (Kindle Loc. 2471)

 Aside from occasional gems like this, unfortunately, the rest of the narrative is bone dry, without much tension. Many of the SAS's early strikes were fiascos, including a "reflective-of-bad-judgement" parachute drop in the middle of a thunderstorm which resulted in unnecessary death and no impact on the enemy. The SAS, ironically, ended up getting driven to their attack sites by the Long Range Desert Group instead for their early success.

The organizational history behind the SAS is also interesting, basically with David Stirling being one of the aristocrats using his connections so he could do whatever he liked. An examination of his merits probably would have had someone else running the show, but the British military sociology at that time (and quite possibly even now) being what it is, it would take someone in the upper class to be able to get the remit to form an out-of-the-box unit anyway. Stirling would get himself captured in an operation and spent much of the war as a POW, though he was apparently the POW with the most number of escape attempts. True to form, he escaped a lot, but staying escaped was apparently not his strong suit.

The book covers the entire WW2 campaign, including the work in Italy, France, and Germany. The travails the men of the SAS suffered was nothing short of astounding, and the casualties and betrays are described in detail, but with none of the verve in Macintyre's previous books. The book doesn't cover how the SAS approach led to modern day special forces, though it does mention the formation of Delta Force as a result of an exchange program with the US.

I'd still recommend the book as it does make good reading. Just don't expect the level of quality that's in Macintyre's other books. Macintyre's first love is espionage, and it clearly shows.

How Alexa captured me as a customer and dragged me into the post smartphone era

I can clearly remember when I knew I'd been captured by Garmin as a customer: it was when I bought their stupendously expensive Smart Scale, which I still use every day. I had a similar epiphany last week, when I started using Alexa on my Moto X4 instead of Google Assistant.

Here's what happened. During Prime Day, I snagged an Audible membership for about $5/month for 3 months. I used it to buy several audio books, all of which were quite long. Google Assistant can start Audible, but for whatever reason it's unable to tell it to resume playing the last book I was listening to. Alexa on the Moto X4, however, not only can do that, but can also fetch the book I want to listen to by title and resume at the last known point. I took a look at the app and to my surprise, what the Alexa app on Android phone doesn't do is to start Audible and start the book, but instead, directly streams the audio from Amazon's server by itself without starting that app! Not only does this mean I don't need to have the Audible app (I do anyway so that I can cache books on the SD card), the latency is also much lower than having Google Assistant start the Google Music app and have it start playing. I haven't tried, but I'm pretty sure the Alexa app also streams music directly without starting the Amazon music app.

I shouldn't have been surprised, but because of my history working for Google and using Google products, I knew that in a million years, no Google product manager would take this approach. I systematically broke down how I ended up with no less than 3 Alexa products in regular use: the Fire TV Cube, the Echo Dot, and now my Moto X4. The Echo Dot was the easiest to explain: it was so Bowen could listen to audio books (again, from Audible).

The Fire TV Cube turned out to be a great entertainment center control device, and now replaces our Logitech Harmony Smart Control Hub, which I sold. Google doesn't have an equivalent unit, because to have one would be to acknowledge that other devices exist outside the Google eco-system, which apparently is a no-no, leading to the elimination of the headphone jack/audio output port from not just Google's phones, but also the Google Home smart speaker series of devices. Which meant that the nice speakers in the living room are now "owned" by Alexa, and so my wife added an Amazon Music subscription, even though all my personal music was sync'd to Google Music. Doubling down on higher end audio, Amazon is even launching an amplifier that supports Alexa.

Similarly, I ended up using Amazon Photos for RAW photo backup, because it was already folded into the Amazon Prime subscription, which bundled in TV shows for the kids that are turning out to be very good. And because of that Prime subscription (as well as the huge collection of books on Amazon), we now have 2 Fire HD8 tablets that the kids use as general purpose Android tablets as well as just video streaming.

I scratched my head as to how Amazon ended up with me as a loyal customer despite my background, and I realized that this was where Amazon's product design/product managers trumped Google's superior engineering. Sure, Alexa is not bilingual, while Google Home/Voice Assistant is. But since all that speech recognition is done in the cloud anyway, I'm comfortable waiting for Amazon to implement it eventually (or if it doesn't, we've learned to live with the limitations). But not having a device that can hook up to our entertainment system meant that Google Home speakers was never in the running for the living room. You can't upgrade hardware that doesn't have the proper I/O channels, while you can easily upgrade software in the cloud!

Similarly, not having a decent e-book reader meant that the default e-book reader of choice was always the Amazon Kindle, which has superb integration for my favorite book vendor of choice, the local library. And ever since Google abandoned the low end Nexus 7 tablets in pursuit of Apple-like prices (and presumably profit-margins) for Android tablets, that meant that the tablets would default to Amazon's ecosystem as well, since no one else is selling decent tablets at $50 each.

What would I do if I was a Google product manager trying to counter this onslaught? There are probably some things Google will never do, like produce a decent e-reader, so that's probably out. But bringing back a decent low-end Android tablet is probably something Google can do, since it has done so in the past. I'd bundle Google's services: Google shopping express, Youtube Red (or whatever it's called), Google Drive storage/Google Docs should all be bundled in together in one price. Put out a Fire TV Cube equivalent with sufficient control for other devices in the living room (an I/R blaster is enough) Even all that might not be enough, but at least it would make it feel like Google is trying. As it is, it definitely feels like Google doesn't have a coherent, integrated strategy where everything fits together, while Amazon does (and at a very high value to price ratio!). Google's strategy feels like a company that's chasing after Apple's customers, but with none of the integration, social prestige, and marketing prowess that Apple puts into its efforts.

Reread: Alan Moore's Miracleman

I rarely re-read books, and comic books, in particular, don't age well, with very few exceptions. The most notable of all exceptions, of course, is anything written by Alan Moore. Boen recently saw my old issues of Miracleman, and asked me to read them to him. I was happy to oblige, though I noted that he quickly drifted away after I started. The themes might be a bit too mature for him. In the years since my precious copies were bagged, the legal issues surrounding the book appear to have been resolved, and you can now buy them on the Kindle or on paper. You need to buy and read them in the following order:

1. A Dream of Flying
2. The Red King Syndrome
3. Olympus
4. The Golden Age (by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham)

Re-reading them as an adult, these are stunning. A Dream of Flying, for instance, does a massive ret-con on the original Marvelman Family series. (For those who don't know, Marvelman was a rip-off of the Shazam series, complete with Young Marvelman saying the word "Marvelman" as his transformation mantra) In 5 short issues, we get a full explanation of where those powers really come from, what those chintzy stories from the 50s really meant, and no, it wasn't really just "all a dream."

From here on, you get an unrolling of the implications of what a world full of superheroes is like. And sure, Watchmen might be more nuanced and full of symbology and all sorts of English-major goodness, but Miracleman really tells the story of what a true, honest-to-goodness superman type superhero would actually do to the planet, and shows the true devastation inherent in an honest-to-goodness superhero brawl in a metropolitan area like London would be. The images are unlike anything you've seen anywhere else, and they put other comic books to shame.

Other, lesser writers and artists have tried to retread the same themes, most notably The Authority. But for literacy, a sweeping introduction of alien races, etc. in just a few pages, Alan Moore is the master of the medium, and these comic books, written at the height of his maturity in the later issues are amazing. Sure, there are a few plot holes (though Gaiman backfills some of them), for instance,

Dr. Gargunza's plot to take over Winter's body couldn't have worked and he would have realized that once Winter's eyes opened to look at him from the womb.  Furthermore, why didn't they try the safety override word that Dr. Gargunza use on Kid Miracleman?

But those are minor nitpicks. This is a stunningly great series, and well worth the time I spent to re-read them, and the money spent buying the issues that were missing from my collection to read. Highly recommended. If you don't read any other comic books, read the ones by Alan Moore!

Review: The Girl Who Drank the Moon

The Girl Who Drank the Moon is the 2017 Newberry Award winner and has won many book awards for 5-7th grade readers. I checked out the book from the library for Bowen to read, but got curious and read to the finish before he did.

Unfortunately, the book is mostly padding. While there are a great many psychological plot points (grandmother setting up a spell that would end her life? deep and tough), the book never does anything with them and has very little pay-off.

Certainly, nothing that can be compared with A Wizard of Earthsea. Disappointing. I switched Bowen's reading back to A Wizard of Earthsea, and I was astounded by how much more enthusiastic I was when I was reading to him. Lesson learned: there's plenty of classics. The more modern award winners seem more driven by prize-related politics than by actual quality writing.

Review: The Spy and the Traitor

The Spy and The Traitor is a historical account of the double agent Oleg Gordievsky. Gordievsky was a spy for the UK MI6 during a critical period, just as Mikhail Gorbachev had become the leader of the USSR. Since he was perfectly placed as chief of political intelligence in the London Bureau, MI6 was in a unique position to choreograph and brief both sides (Thatcher on the home front) of the discussion during their talks.

The book is remarkable both in terms of narrative and tension. It's usefully describes Gordievsky's position, how the KGB worked, and how MI6 worked. It included interviews with his second wife (and quotes from the first wife that were on record), and describes what it takes to be a spy: nerves of steel and an ability to hang on to his druthers despite being drugged by a truth serum and under KGB interrogation. This is much better than any James Bond novel (or even any of John Le Carre's that I've read)

The novel is an intense page turner, and I found myself reading it in exclusion to all else. It's a great book and well worth your time. You probably shouldn't even visit the Wikipedia page I linked to for Gordievsky before reading the book. That's how good it is.

Highly recommended.

Review: Pacific - Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs...

Pacific (with ginormously long subtitle) is Simon Winchester's history of the Pacific from 1950 onwards. It's a tour de force with surprisingly interesting insights and history, and well worth your time.

The book starts with the use of Bikini and various other islands for atomic bomb testing. This stuff will have you angry and (if you're liberal) you might understand why many Americans have an inherent distrust of government:

had the islanders been Caucasians, then official inquiries would have been instantly convened, congressional committees would have been revved into high gear, presidential apologies offered, compensation packages showered like rain. But these were not Caucasians—they were mere Marshallese people, colored natives, members of a subject citizenry, a population now to be firmly contained and kept simply fed, watered, and, above all, docile. So there was never to be any inquiry of substance or value. The victims had worth not as members of any society, but as specimens—of importance principally to science. They might as well have been cadavers handed over to anatomists. They might as well have been branded with the term used by Japanese in their notorious human vivisection experiments—their human victims they called maruta, “logs of wood,” a deliberately dehumanizing description, given to lessen the crime. These innocents from Rongelap were America’s maruta, people rendered up as logs of wood. They were to become no more than the accidental subjects, serendipitously offered up to a group of faraway radiation scientists, of a detached, unemotional, and top-secret clinical study, a project of supposed significance for all in the ever more radioactive postnuclear world. And for a while it seemed this project would remain top secret—except that an army corporal named Don Whitaker glimpsed a group of the evidently very sick islanders in their hastily built camp on Kwajalein and wrote to tell his relatives in Cincinnati, who were sufficiently horrified by his letter to pass it to the local paper, the Cincinnati Enquirer. (Kind Loc 1507)

Then there's the history of North Korea, and how Korea came to be divided in half. (The history of how that line was divided will surprise you!) There's a brief history of Australia, and how it resisted immigration from brown people for a long time, illustrating that America's not unique:

 The Labour Party, purportedly the champion of the working man, turned out to be the most vocal in keeping Australia as pure as pure could be. “Two Wongs don’t make a White,” said a Labour Party immigration minister in 1947. Under the strictly enforced rules, no madmen could come in, no one afflicted by an illness “of loathsome or dangerous character,” no prostitutes, no criminals; nor could any “Asiatics” or any “coloureds” enter, either; and for good measure, no one who failed a written dictation test, an examination that could be given to an unwary applicant at a moment’s notice, and in the language (not necessarily English) of the immigration officer’s spontaneous choice. Sometimes the officer would, for his own amusement, choose to have his applicant write out the test in Gaelic, to be quite certain of a ban. (Kindle Loc 4559)

There's a history of the Sony corporation, and how it came to develop the transistor radio. It's a great history and well worth your time. I'd encourage you to read it. And finally, the book ends with a celebration of the return of traditional Polynesian sea navigation skills, and how the American Bi-Centennial celebration actually helped preserve that dying skill.

The book covers an amazing range of topics (some of which, like the history of surfing, I haven't even touched on in this review), in an amazingly short space, none of which felt like padding, all of which was interesting and well written. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, especially if you're from any of the Pacific-rim states, and if you have any amount of curiosity at all. It's easily available from the local library, being more than a few years old, and I will go looking for more Simon Winchester books to read and review!

Review: Biology - The Science of Life

Biology was one of those gaps in my education, so I decided to bite the bullet and listen to the Great Courses offering: The Science of Life. At 72 30 minute lectures, this was a 36 hour listen and took more than a month.

Prof. Nowicki chose to organize the class in 3 themes: information processing, development, and resource processing, dividing the course into 3 equal segments. Within each segment, he would operate in increasing hierarchy of scales: from molecules to cells to organs, individual animals, species, and eventually at the ecological or planetary scale. This was a great organizing principle, since if you got lost in what he was talking about, you could at least slot it into place in the overall architecture of the course.

This course is comprehensive, starting from an examination of DNA/RNA and its discovery. (Including a description of the central dogma, which turns out to be a framework rather than a dogma). This part of the course was familiar with it, and put me in a state of complacency.

The development part was much harder, and I got lost in several sections as to how cells become what they are. By the time we got to resource processing I was overwhelmed with the description of ATP and the various energy cycles and controlled energy release that occurs in cell.

However, in all cases, Nowicki was a great lecturer, with strong enunciation and a willingness to explain how the pieces fit in together. I'm glad I paid money for the lecture series, as it did take far more than the 3 week library checkout period to get through it, and it's plausible that I might want to come back to it in the future.

Recommended.

Review: Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link Wi-Fi Enabled Air Purifier

Recently my wife complained that one room in the house was particularly cold. I got out the ancient dish heater, rated at 1000W, and it solved the problem but she complained that the heater was noisy unless it was turned up all the way to the max.

The Dyson Pure Hot+Cool Link was on sale and received raved reviews, so we ordered one to try. The item was fairly big and heavy, and came with a remote. Unfortunately, the remote doesn't even have all the functionality required to operate the device: you have to pair it with the app to be able to manually change the fan speed.

The device turns out to have a maximum power consumption of 2100W, but it didn't feel that way. The dish heaters heat intensely in a small area, so they feel warmer than the diffused Dyson. If you turned up the fan, it got noisier, but the amount of heating diffused throughout the room meant that it warmed up slower. It's nice that it rotates and also purifies the air, but air purifiers cost much less than $450, so it wasn't worth it to keep it just for the air purifier.

We ended up returning this and sticking to the older style dish heater.

Review: Amazon Photos

I have a storage array at home that stores 1.8TB of photos. The edited photos go up on Google Photos and Facebook Photos (at the free tier resolutions), but the RAW files have been staying at home, and started getting nervous about off-site backups. I was getting all ready to pay up for SmugMug, but one day Amazon helpfully reminded me that unlimited photo storage (at full native RAW resolution) came along with Amazon Prime, which we were paying for anyway!

I proceeded to download the native Windows app, installed it, and pointed it at all the folders (including some network folders) and it started uploading at my full comcast speed of about 150GB/day. Note that Comcast will give you 2 free months of overage over 1TB, so if you're going to do this, make sure you start at the 1st of a month.

To give you an idea of what it would cost on rival services, Google would charge $10/month for 2TB ($120 per year), and Smugmug would charge $35/year. But seriously? I'm not going to point someone viewing my photos at a site that's starting with smugmug! Since we have a FireTV Cube, we can now see our photos on the big 4K display by talking to Alexa.

To be honest, I'd been looking at cancelling our Prime subscription. Since the kids have pretty much outgrown diapers (for a while the savings from Amazon mom on diapers more than covered the cost of a Prime subscription), 2 day delivery never seemed worth $120/year. But take $40 off that (and for the kids shows that they watch), now Amazon Prime starts to look like a decent deal again.

In any case, if you're an Amazon  Prime member and need off-site photo storage, you might as well use it!

Review: Marvel Comics - The Untold Story

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is the history of Marvel, the company from inception to its acquisition by Disney. I was a Marvel shareholder during the brief period of time when it was public but before it was acquired by Disney, and maybe if I'd read this book I wouldn't have been a shareholder.

More than anything else, the book reads a lot like a biography of Stan Lee, who was in many ways the front-man for Marvel during the silver age of comics. Bombastic and with a talent for self-promotion, Stan claimed at least partial credit for many of the characters we see around the world today: Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Hulk, Iron-Man and the Avengers. He certainly had the writers-credit billing for most of that period, but the book does a good job of explaining that he mostly filled in the dialog balloons and captions after the artists had pretty much drawn the stories, so to a large extent, while he might have had detailed plotting discussions with the artists, he wasn't actually responsible for the detailed exposition of plot or character. This is why when Alan Moore showed up with his full scripts, it was a much more radical reimagining of what comic books could be.

I learned many things from this book, including a ton of back-biting and in-fighting amongst the Marvel employees over creators rights and credit sharing. I also had this realization that many of the comic book stories were written by very young writers, certainly, many of them never even made it to college, and overseen by Stan Lee, who himself was in his 40s during the silver age.

It was quite apparent by the 1980s that Stan Lee was more interested in breaking into the movies than staying interested in comics. Because of the book's focus on Marvel rather than DC, the British Invasion (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, etc) is largely missing from the book.

All in all, I thought the book was very comprehensive, but I wish there were more details. I came away with several questions, such as why did Ari Arad finally succeed in getting Spider-Man placed in Hollywood while Stan Lee continuously met with failure? How did the sale to Disney eventually happen?

But other than that I thought it was a pretty good book. Recommended.

Review: The Plant Paradox

The Plant Paradox is written by Steven Gundry, a physician who was formerly a cardiac surgeon. It goes counter to a huge amount of conventional wisdom, but rather than provide statistical evidence or controlled double-blind studies on a large number of subjects, he provides anecdote after anecdote.

The claim of the book is that lectins (found in beans, whole grains, eggplant, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, lentils, and nuts) are attempts by plants to kill the animals who eat them. So Dr. Gundry proposes a largely lectin-free diet, preferring white rice to brown rice (!!), and insists that if you must eat beans you need to pressure cook them to destroy all the lectins. He insists that legumes such as peanuts and cashews are also unhealthy, and you should stick to macadamia nuts, pecans, and walnuts instead. He recommends sweet potatoes and eggs, and only certain types of dairy products.

The claims Dr. Gundry make are fairly extensive: going on his diet would eliminate IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), lower your weight, and even cure cancer! That's when my BS detector went up. The only reason I even got through the book was that Dr. Gundry included enough information that matched up with known science (less meat in your diet is better for you, eat smaller fish so you get less exposure to mercury contamination, blue light is bad for your sleep) that I got fooled until I got to the preposterous claims that had no controlled studies to line up with them. That was when I realized that this was a crackpot diet book.

The style is also awful. The book is repetitive, and could easily be about 70% shorter.

Not recommended.

Review: The Perfectionists - How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

The Perfectionists is a scientific history of precision. It's a heck of a lot of fun to read, even about stuff that you might already know about. The book starts with a description of how precision came about, and a (now familiar to most engineers) description of the difference between precision and accuracy.

It then takes off into the develop of the steam engine (the first application of precision fittings), and then works its way into the increasing precision as required in the construction of guns, then automobiles (it turns out that the mass production assembly line required way more precision than the hand-built high end cars of the Model T era) and jet-engines. The jet-engine failure mode description is nothing short of astounding, and well worth your time. I'm afraid to even summarize it because I will get the description of the book wrong.

Then we get a great exposition about both the failure and the repair of the Hubble telescope, one of the most demanding repair jobs  you can imagine. The final chapters are devoted to the construction of silicon chips (which demand nanometer accuracy) and time keeping.

Simon Winchester covered this topics in a relatively short amount time, in readable, compelling prose, and without excess verbosity or inane, irrelevant personal stories. Recommended!

First Impressions: ResMed Air Mini

A few years ago, the marketing director at ResMed and I got on the phone and I blasted them about the ResMed S10. Not only was the S10 now bigger and heavier with a non-removable humdifier, it required a 24V input, which meant that all my accessories for running it while sailing were no longer compatible. I told him that I wanted a small, lightweight machine for hiking, camping, and traveling in general. He promised that ResMed was working on something.

When Philips announced the Dreamstation Go, I thought about jumping ship, especially since it came complete with an integrated battery solution. But in the end it was still significantly heavier than the HDM Z1, and I've always had an issue with the Respironics algorithm. (ResMed's algorithm works better if you have moderate to severe apnea like mine: https://youtu.be/lzCCgNLya_g)

Last year, ResMed announced the AirMini. I was promised one to test, but it never worked out, and I found that my contact at ResMed had left. Since I still had my HDM Z1 for my summer tour, I wasn't in a hurry to replace it. In addition, in their infinite wisdom, ResMed didn't have an official battery solution for the AirMini! The reviews for the AirMini was mixed, with some people complaining about the noise. The HDM Z1, whatever its virtues is a very noisy machine, so I was wary about spending my own money on a machine that wasn't going to be a significant improvement.

Over the holidays, Lofta ran a 15% off promotion. Coupled with a 30 day money back guarantee, I jumped on it. The AirMini required a new mask, and wasn't compatible with the SwiftFX that I'd been using, though there are after-market 3-D printed solutions for that (it looks like a Chinese company has picked up the design and is now officially selling it on Amazon). When everything arrived, I unboxed it and tried on the new mask. It fit, perhaps even better than the ResMed AirMini. I'm in the habit of touring without a humidifier, so I tried it without one. The noise problem isn't a problem at all, and it's as quiet as my (now 7 year old) ResMed S9. I'm told that it's quieter if I put in the humidifier. I did wake up with a dry throat, so I guess for California conditions you need a humidifier. Unlike the HDM Z1's HMEs, the ResMed humdifier is good for 30 days, which means you only need one for a 3 week tour of the alps, but in exchange it costs more, and if you intend to use this as a full time machine, it'll cost more to run than distilled water.

The machine, mask, humidifier, and power adapter together weighs 651g, which is 110g lighter than the travel weight of the HDM Z1, HME, its power adapter, a standard hose, and my Swift FX mask. It's lighter but would by itself wouldn't justify a change, though the lighter weight of the package means that even with a heavier battery (the Pilot-24), the AirMini is still lighter than the HDM Z1 for backcountry camping purposes. .The HDM Z1 comes with a 30W power adapter, while the AirMini comes with a 20W power adapter. Unless you have your pressure settings turned all the way up, your power draw is likely a fraction of what either power adapters can put out, so if you're good at power hacking you might be able to somehow get a lighter weight adapter that puts out less power. The HDM Z1 battery, for instance, is only 45Wh, while a standard Pilot-24 Lite has 90Wh. (HDM Z1 now sells an extended battery with 99Wh capacity). Either machine weighs in significantly less than the advertised weight (844g) of the Dreamstation Go (sans power cord, mask, or humidifier!). (All my measured weights are available in an Excel Spreadsheet)

The app is great, and walks you through setting up the machine, and detecting leaks. I'm mostly impressed by how nice the mask is. My intention was to keep the S9 as a machine for home and sailing use, but I'm now reconsidering since it'll be so nice to keep the weight down even for sailing trips. I've ordered a 3rd party battery for the AirMini, and will review it when I've used it on a camping/sailing trip. My guess is since I'm stuck with tossing out a humidifier after 30 days whether I use it or not, I'll use my AirMini for at least 30 days after every camping trip.

In the mean time, if you're worried about noise for the ResMed AirMini, don't be. It's much better than the HDM Z1, and I'll be selling my HDM Z1 in favor of this.

Review: Astounding: John W Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and the Golden Age of Science Fiction

I make no apologies that science fiction is my favorite genre of fiction. While mainstream fiction is about people, science fiction is about how technology changes people, and well written fiction frequently tells us how to live with the constantly changing technological landscape we deal with.

Astounding is more than anything else, a biography of John W Campbell, Jr, who through his magazine Astounding (which he later renamed to Analog) shaped science fiction from the 1930s to the 1970s. Because Campbell's true legacy wasn't just the stories in the magazine he edited, but the writers he worked with, the book had to cover Asimov, Heinlein, and Hubbard as well.

There's lots of stuff in here that I didn't know before, and of course any biography of Hubbard, for instance, had to cover his founding of the Church of Scientology as well. (The book does debunk the story that Hubbard's writing of "Dianetics" was a competition with Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land") All the famous stories are covered, as well as the nurturing of talents such as Asimov and Robert Silverberg. If you're a fan of science fiction, you're going to recognize name after name and titles of story after story in the book, simply because Campbell was so central to the selection and writing to those stories. Campbell viewed himself as a manager of writers, doling out plots and stories to writers so that they would create the stories he envisioned, but in the writers' own style. That's why, for instance, the original Foundation trilogy are so different from the ones that Asimov wrote in the 1980s, after he had passed out of Campbell's orbit.

The book doesn't adopt a worshipful tone of either the illustrious editor or his writers. For instance, Campbell was a rascist and in his later years, dabbled in scientology, crack pot science (investing in various perpetual-machine-type scams) and tried hard to push study of psionics as a serious endeavor. Asimov, as many women friends and acquaintances had told me, would be classified as a serial sexual harassment perpetrator today. (The same has been said of the late Gardner Dozois, who passed away recently) Since I was never very active in science fiction fandom, I knew most of these people through their work, and it's definitely true that their work rarely feature women scientists.

This was a long book, taking me weeks to read, and if it was a novel, I would be complaining that the story drags on and on. (Not being a fan of Hubbard's work, I was unhappy with how much time the book spent on Hubbard, though it's interesting to how one goes about setting up a multi-billion-dollar religion that generates huge revenues --- religion truly is the best legal scam!)

I can recommend this book to every science fiction fan. It's truly an impressive work of history, and well worth your time. But if you don't know who Campbell, Heinlein, Asimov, or Silverberg are, then you're better off reading their stories first. Their work is much more interesting than their lives, and continues to inspire the many technological artifacts that you use in daily life around you.

Long Term Report: Fenix 5X

Since I acquired my Fenix 5X, I've taking it on a sailing trip, and finally used it for navigation on a family hike. The device with its sapphire glass is still pristine looking, and I've subjected it to more abuse than most.

During my sailing trip, I tried to use it to find out where I'd dropped my camera. Only then did I realized I should have learned the use of the device better: I could set a marker and use "return to start", but "return to start" had two options, and one of them would try to reproduce the course, which wasn't what you want on the water. You wanted a beeline. So read the manual before trying to use it in anger.

For navigation, surprisingly enough, Garmin Connect is actually a decent website for generating a navigation course and then sync'ing to the Fenix. I like it better than RideWithGPS or Komoot, which was a surprise. Much of it is because neither of those do a good job of sync'ing with the Garmin. Unfortunately, none of these apps as yet have a reasonable mobile version, so it's desktop app only.

As with other Garmin devices, the full array of activities supported is nothing short of astounding: paddleboarding, kayaking, hiking, mountain biking are all the tip of the ice berg. Club riding season will soon be upon us and I'll provide a full report on how that works going forward. And of course, nothing beats real world experience when touring, so look for a report on that. In the mean time, the device is still highly recommended.

Review: The City That Never Sleeps (PS4 Pro)

The City That Never Sleeps is an expansion to the Spider-man video game on the PS4. Most DLC are not a good deal compared to the main game, and clocking in at $25 retail, this one is not an exception. Worse, they are designed for the most enthusiastic player of the video game: the person who's mastered all the systems, finished the main game, and wants more, so the difficulty level gets ramped up.

This DLC meets all the above criteria, but since it came with my PS4 Pro, and I did platinum the original Spider-man game, I decided to play it. The way you activate the DLC is odd. You go into the in-game menu, and then switch campaigns and pick which of the 3 DLC parts you wish to play. This turns off all the other campaigns, and is one of those cases where the game's commercial nature conflicts with the game design: since the 3 parts of the DLC were clearly meant to be played in order, Sony/Insomniac should have just sold it as one DLC and then merged them all together! This would have solved many of the problems with the DLC, which is that the main story map was designed for a very busy game, where you could pick off many sub-goals on your way to the main objective, while separating each section of the DLC left you with an empty map with nothing to do between main objectives except to swing around and hope for a randomly generated encounter.

My worst fears were confirmed in the first DLC, where a chase sequence required much better button mashing than I expected. I actually left the game for a while and played other stuff, but after a few patches either the game designers made the sequences easier or I got better at the game by sleeping, and I made it through. The side missions were much too hard, however, so I abandoned any attempts at doing them and just bee-lined my way through the main mission DLC content. The main mission was much easier, and had a decent story, which is that of Hammerhead attempting to take over the city in the aftermath of the original video game.

The game is mostly fun, though as I expected, the combat missions got tougher and tougher, eventually making it so that I couldn't get through any encounter without dying multiple times. To be honest I have no idea whether my skills improved or whether I just replayed the encounter(s) enough times to get through by dumb luck. The final boss fight finally introduced new mechanics which were intriguing and fun enough, though again, I died multiple times but at least the checkpointing was generous enough that I finally "beat" the game.

Would I have paid $25 for it? No way. The content is worth $10 at most, but the most important thing that David desJardins convince me of is that video games, books, and movies should be evaluated as "worth the time spent" rather than monetary value, and in that sense the DLC offered quite a bit of fun in exchange for your time. It's flawed, but maybe Sony/Insomniac will release a "definitive edition" of the video game that has all the DLC integrated (and turn The City That Never Sleeps into a side mission like the Tombstone side mission in the main game), which will alleviate many of the issues in the video game's design. Or you can wait and pick it up for cheap on a sale.

Recommended.

Review: Envy Apples from Costco

I'll admit that when I first saw the "envy apples" demo cart at Costco I was very skeptical. I've tried all sorts of Apples over the years, and basically, only the Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, and Fuji Apples are up to par. From Costco, I think only the Fuji were worth the money. The expensive Honeycrisp apples, for instance, tasted like crap.

The Envy apples, however, blew me away. One bite just sent me into heaven. There's a hint of honey and everything else about the Fuji which I loved. It's crispy and yummy. I  bought a dozen and took it home. When Bowen tasted one, he couldn't stop eating and I think we went through 2 apples in one sitting.

Highly recommended. If you see it at Costco, get a box. You'll be impressed.

Review: Why We Sleep

I picked up Why We Sleep thinking that this might be one of those "stupid pill" books for me. After all, not only am I a sleep apnea victim, I'm one of those lucky people who've slept quite well all his life. My CPAP therapy has made it such that I only really need slightly less than 7 hours of sleep a night, and I've never needed an alarm clock! I also read The Promise of Sleep, written by the pioneer of sleep studies.

But wow, what a difference 9 years makes. Sleep science has advanced quite a bit, and a lot of my knowledge was obsolete. For instance, Dement's book mentioned that you shouldn't be afraid of sleeping pills. We now know that sleeping pills just sedate you, and don't actually generate sleep of the natural kind. There's also better therapies available for insomnia now, chiefest of which is CBT-I Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia. Wow.

There are way more practical tips in this book on how to get better sleep. In particular, setting a bedroom temperature lower is counter-intuitive:

 The need to dump heat from our extremities is also the reason that you may occasionally stick your hands and feet out from underneath the bedcovers at night due to your core becoming too hot, usually without your knowing. Should you have children, you’ve probably seen the same phenomenon when you check in on them late at night: arms and legs dangling out of the bed in amusing (and endearing) ways, so different from the neatly positioned limbs you placed beneath the sheets upon first tucking them into bed. The limb rebellion aids in keeping the body core cool, allowing it to fall and stay asleep. (Pg. 276)

Yup. Please show this to your Asian mom who keeps tucking you back into your blanket after you've fallen asleep. While you're at it, you might want to get her to lower the nightime thermostat:

A bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3°C) is ideal for the sleep of most people, assuming standard bedding and clothing. This surprises many, as it sounds just a little too cold for comfort... (Pg. 277)

Another tip is to take a hot bath just before bed. I've had doctors advise me to take a hot shower before bed before, to wash away pollen and other allergens so I don't introduce them into bed. But the reason for how the hot bath works is counter-intuitive:

A luxury for many is to draw a hot bath in the evening and soak the body before bedtime. We feel it helps us fall asleep more quickly, which it can, but for the opposite reason most people imagine. You do not fall asleep faster because you are toasty and warm to the core. Instead, the hot bath invites blood to the surface of your skin, giving you that flushed appearance. When you get out of the bath, those dilated blood vessels on the surface quickly help radiate out inner heat, and your core body temperature plummets. Consequently, you fall asleep more quickly because your core is colder. Hot baths prior to bed can also induce 10 to 15 percent more deep NREM sleep in healthy adults. (Pg. 279)

This is amazing stuff. Prof Walker also debunks several past theories about why sleep evolved biologically:

 Sleep, it turns out, is an intensely metabolically active state for brain and body alike. For this reason, theories proposing that we sleep to conserve large amounts of energy are no longer entertained. The paltry caloric savings are insufficient to outweigh the survival dangers and disadvantages associated with falling asleep. (Pg. 175)

We also now know that sleep-deprivation is its own form of Dunning-Kruger: Sleep deprived individuals perform worse, but don't know that they perform worse, so don't know that they're sleep deprived, which encourages them to think that they don't need to sleep more!

With chronic sleep restriction over months or years, an individual will actually acclimate to their impaired performance, lower alertness, and reduced energy levels. That low-level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm, or baseline. Individuals fail to recognize how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health. (Pg. 137)

All in all, this is an amazingly good book, and well worth your time. Highly recommended!

Review: Endure

Most of my favorite activities can be classified as endurance sports: cycling, hiking, swimming/snorkeling, and (recently) stand up paddle boarding). I picked up Endure thinking that it would give me insights as to how improvement in those sports could work. Alas, the book's mostly about running, which is one of those sports I'm not super-interested in.

All through the book are interspersed chapters on the attempt by Nike's tech people to engineer a sub-2 hour marathon by deploying groups of runners so the primary runner can draft, and providing a super-shoe.

British researchers found that skipping breakfast resulted in a 4.5 percent drop in 30-minute cycling time trial performance at 5 p.m. that afternoon, even though the subjects had been allowed to eat as much as they wanted at lunch. (Page 180)

So don't skip breakfasts. That's great. Another intriguing section of the book discusses an attempt to switch people into high fat diets with extremely low carbohydrates so that for multi-day endurance events, you don't have to carry so much food. Apparently, not all weight loss after a long event like a marathon is water loss!

Part of the explanation, according to University of Cape Town researcher Nicholas Tam, is that not all the weight you lose is water. During prolonged exercise, “you will use fat, and you will use carbohydrate,” he explains, “and once you’ve burned it up, it’s not there anymore.” The chemical reactions involved in burning fat and carbohydrate produce two key by-products: carbon dioxide, which you breathe out, and water—which actually adds to the amount of fluid available in your body. Even more significant, your body stores carbohydrate in your muscles in a form that locks away about three grams of water for every gram of carbohydrate. This water isn’t available to contribute to essential cellular processes until you start unlocking the carbohydrate stores, so your body sees it as “new” water when it’s released during exercise. For decades, these factors were assumed to be insignificantly small. But in 2007, British scientists at the University of Loughborough estimated that a marathoner could conceivably lose 1 to 3 percent of his or her body mass without any net loss of water. (Pg. 171)

 Another tidbit discusses how even at 1900', you get significant performance loss from reduced oxygen. But other than these 3 tidbits, the rest of the book was about the relationship between pain and endurance sports, and how brain training can improve performance (but there's no free lunch, that brain training also takes time, and you can't skimp on your marathon training because of your brain training). There's nothing about technique (though there's one about freediving, but nowhere close to the coverage we got in Deep), very little about injury prevention (not even the discussion of the barefoot running stuff that became popular a few years ago), and nothing about the joy of motion.

I also wanted answers to questions like: "Why do cyclists ride at 90rpm on flat ground, but it feels easier to ride at lower rpms on serious/long climbs?" None of that was addressed here.

The book wasn't a complete waste of time, but it came pretty close. I wouldn't recommend it though.

Review: Army of None

Army of None is a book about Autonomous Weapons and how the AI revolution could potentially play out for war fighting. The scope of the book is huge, ranging from the history of automatic weapons to the ethics behind the rules of warfare and an exploration of where automation is used in the wild to varying results.

The book is written by a former Army ranger, and so it goes into tedious details about stuff you may or may not be interested in, such as the intricacies behind the Pentagon policies about autonomous weapons and the various treaties involved in landmines.However, he points out several issues that you may or may not have thought of:

• AI spoofing is real, and in a situation where human life is on the line, there's no guarantee that an adversary can't make your image recognition/targeting intelligent system misidentify something.
• The place where fully automated agents are active in the wild is on Wall Street. On Wall Street, automation-driven flash crashes are so frequent that the trading systems now have back-stops and back-offs, and they get triggered on a regular basis.
• Highly complex systems such as nuclear reactors or highly automated weapon systems such as the Aegis Combat System are so complex that failures are "normal." To counteract such failures, the navy has developed an operation protocol around the Aegis such that the automation is always kept on a tight leash. At all times, navy personnel have their fingers on the button to turn off the system as soon as it has done its job. To a casual observer, the operators of an Aegis system exhibit no trust whatsoever as to the reliability of the system and the automation. But this protocol took more than 2 decades to develop, and before it was developed the system targeted a civilian aircraft and killed everyone on board, so this protocol was warranted.
• By contrast, the Patriot Surface-to-Air System introduced during the Persion Gulf War demonstrated 2 cases of fraticide. Both incidents were traced to the operators having too high a trust in the automation of the system. 
• Banning autonomous weapons won't work: history suggests that an effective weapon will be deployed as soon as it provides an advantage, and then a race to use that weapon most effectively will occur. Keeping humans in the loop when everything is moving at machine speed will cost you a war.

All in all, the book was long winded and took its time getting around to many points, but it was worth the read, pointing out interactions between systems that I didn't think of before. Recommended.

Review: Math with Bad Drawings

Sometimes, I'll watch as Bowen puts down an advanced book he's been reading, and revert to reading a pre-school book more suitable to his brother. I call those moments "taking a stupid pill." It's fun to do something easy once in a while, just so you can reassure yourself that the things you knew were the things you knew.

Math with Bad Drawings is a great book to read when you're taking a stupid pill. It covers all math/statistics/probability you already know, including probability, statistics, etc. In the opening chapter he covers Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe, which is a fun game that I've now taught to my wife and Bowen. That, alone was worth the cost of the book.

The drawings are pretty bad, and even worse on the kindle edition. Sometimes I didn't even bother zooming in to read the cartoons, because they're not very funny anyway. Much of the coverage is rather pedestrian, though if you haven't been reading too many science books they might not be familiar to you. There's a section on trusses that's fun, and in an obvious homage to Martin Gardner, a description of the game of life, though unfortunately, at a rather shallow level.

Would I recommend this over a Martin Gardner book? No. But if you're having a day when you took a stupid pill, this book is much more accessible than Martin Gardner, and is much more readable. Hey, how often would you find a math book I'd recommend that would make for a light airplane read? Recommended.

Review: Agent Carter Season 1

Agent Carter got stellar reviews, and came up on Woot for $8 shipped. I figured it was a low risk, and at 8 episodes, wouldn't be an excessive burn on time. I was right on both counts, but hadn't figured out the biggest issue with reviews of TV shows.

Reviewers don't watch the entire TV show in order to review a series. They watch at most a couple of episodes, and then provide that impression. Agent Carter's first couple of episodes are decent. They're decent not because of the plot (which is dumb and uninspired) or the acting (which is reasonable), but because of the image quality, set, and beautiful people involved. In addition, the writing is very feminist, illustrating all the issues with being a woman in the 1940s and 50s trying to make it in a male dominated profession.

That's great. But that's not enough to carry even a short 8-episode show. As a result, after about 4 episodes you feel like even the mediocre plot is being dragged out an d stretched far beyond what could be done, and by the end of the series you feel a complete lack of drama and tension: the fight scenes are short, nothing like the fabulous ones seen in Daredevil. I can see why even though the show was a critical darling it couldn't draw (and keep) a long term audience.

Not recommended.

Review: Complications - A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

I'd read a bunch of other Atul Gawande's books before, but I somehow missed his early book, Complications. No matter, that just means there's no wait at the library when I checked it out.

Complications reads a lot like a collection of separate magazine articles (or columns) strung together and then arranged by theme. This is by no means a bad thing: you can read each chapter separately, or skip around as you wish. I chose to read it in sequential order.

Medical stories are challenging for me to read, especially for someone who's had health scares in the past (or know friends who've been on the receiving end of medical procedures recently). The chapters in the book frequently allude to what makes doctors different: a software engineering error might cost money or time (or both), but you don't regularly kill people or cause people massive pain directly when you make a mistake. A doctor suffering from a bout of depression (as described in this book) could cause damage that no amount of malpractice insurance can cover. Worse, the medical system itself works to try to protect physicians from honest errors but can be slow to act when someone repeatedly (or even deliberately) causes harm.

The book meanders from topics such as how doctors learn, whether patients should make all the decisions regarding their care, and the nature of doctor's intuition and persuasiveness. All the chapters are worth reading (though some might make you more queasy than others) and many make you feel grateful that you're not the patient who needs to have the procedure described. Some will make you question the nature of free will and human decision making, such as the chapter on gastric bypass procedures that suddenly cause its patients to voluntarily eat less!

The book is short, a quick read, and full of great stories and occasionally, great insight. Recommended.

Review: Anker Powercore Speed

While there are many sailors who are willing to run their generators all night, I have this ethic where the goal when anchoring or mooring is to turn off the generator as quickly as possible. This time, our boat actually had new enough batteries that running the generator for 2 hours around dinner time was sufficient.

Now, 2 hours isn't nearly enough to get all the phones, cameras, electric toothbrushes, kindles, etc. charged. I had a big collection of battery banks (some were gifts, some were bought for cheap on sale), but for a sailing trip like this, what I wanted was a QC battery bank: I didn't care how slowly it put out the power, but I wanted it to charge fast when plugged into a quick charger. Strangely enough, this was a difficult feature to find.

I ended up with the Anker Powercore Speed with QC3. From empty, it would charge to 70% full within 2 hours, which kept all the electronics we brought with us fairly happy. This is an unusual case, but if you're in the market for something like this, nothing else will do. Recommended.

Day 10: Great Harbor, Peter Island to Road Town, Tortola

 It rained twice the night before, waking me up and getting me to take down much of the laundry. I got up at 5:00am, ate a leisurely breakfast and made coffee, and then when the crew was up and running we raised the sail on the mooring ball and then set sail at 7:00am. It would have been a 20 minute motor, but we were determined to sail as much as we could, given that Conch would only open at 8:00am.

We said goodbye to the beautiful islands, and the sun came out and gave us a send-off, though with light winds it took us 40 minutes to get into the harbor deep enough where we took down the sails and picked up a mooring buoy. We tried hailing Conch but they weren't open and so called the oncall number and told them we were waiting.

Conch characteristically only opened up at 8:30 and got us a captain to dock us, but once we were onshore the checkout was also characteristically fast, with everything squared away (except final fuel costs etc) by 9:15am, whereupon a taxi showed up and took us to the Beef Island airport, where everything was also uncharacteristically on time. Our trip was over. However, on the plane over to San Juan we met the crew of the monohull who had sailed into White Bay the morning we were leaving, and had another chance to reminiscence about our fabulous trip. Their first mate was a 12 year old boy who was on his 3rd cruise in the BVIs with his Dad. I quietly reflected that this was Bowen's 5th sailing trip, and perhaps some day he too, could help manage the boat.

Day 9: White Bay, Peter Island to Great Harbor, Peter Island

We got up to a very quiet morning, with no generators nearby to wake us up. We could hear crickets and birds from Peter Island, as well as a cat! I got out the paddleboard and got Bowen on it and we prepared to paddle to the beach, but on the way there, I knocked Bowen's hand with the paddle and the camera flew into the water. I swam after the camera but to no avail. I immediately restarted my Fenix to mark the location and paddled over to the boat to get Mark, as Arturo had gone snorkeling.

I was devastated, as I had neglected to  back up the superlative pictures from the day before, having only elected to pick a few to post on social media. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been so upset but at the time I was determined to find it. We strapped on our scuba gear with the last of our full dive tanks and used the Fenix to navigate back to my marker. I now know that we probably didn't visit the right location as I didn't really know how to use the device properly. But it wasn't a wasted dive, as we saw the giant nurse shark that Xiaoqin had spotted the day before. It was very well camouflaged on the sea floor against some canvas and dinghy ladder racks (quite possibly there was a pier on the island that got destroyed by the hurricane).

After we ran out of air, we went back to the boat, and got out the paddleboard and tried to find the camera but in vain. At 10:00am I declared the search a failure, just as a monohull pulled in to the Bay and set up anchor.

The night before, we had determined that we were out of food. So a night in Soldier Bay (which would have been quiet and isolated) was out of the question, as we would either have to reprovision (not worth it for such a short trip) or we'd have to stay somewhere with food. I'd previously radio'd the Deliverance but got no answer, and later found out that it was out of commission for the duration of our stay.

We motor'd out of White Bay, fully expecting to raise sails but upon exiting the Bay discovered that we were so close to Soldier Bay that by the time we got the sails up it would be time to take them down again, so we sailed to Soldier Bay, and got in some fantastic snorkeling, seeing some of the cuttlefish we'd seen last time, except in much larger numbers! Of course we had no pictures, having lost our underwater camera.

After eating the last of our food, highlighted by the fact that our lunch (frozen Pizza) was spoiled. We thought about how that could have happened and realized that it must have been spoiled before we'd gotten it onto the boat 10 days ago. We'd also had several loaves of bread spoil during the trip.

It was a nice easy sail to Great Harbor, where we got a mooring ball well away from the Wily T's, not willing to put up with loud music after the isolated, quiet night before. Arturo and I made a scouting trip to the Wily T's to pick up a menu and chat with the bar-tender, who told us: "No shirt, no shoes, no problem!" I took out the paddleboard and paddled around the harbor, graced by a rainbow.

Being on a paddleboard is like being on a bicycle. You can paddle up to nearly any boat and they will talk to you, so I took advantage of this. I first paddled up to Serenity Now, which had a Laser dinghy attached to it. The person who sailed the dinghy was a German expat now living on Costa Rica, but showed surprisingly little interest in the provisioning, only saying that he'd paid for it and had no idea how to dinghy came to be attached to the cat. Fortunately, the owner/master of the boat showed up, introduced himself, and told me that he'd had to go all the way to a resort in St. Thomas where he knew the manager, and persuaded her to rent him the dinghy for the duration of the German fellow's charter. Confidentially, he told me that the thing was a massive pain, as he had to demast it every night and haul the dinghy up onto the deck!

I then visited the Maverick, a Horizon Yacht Charters boat mastered by another German, along with his wife and daughter. They were on a long trip through the warm places of the Carribean, and were cheerful to chat about Hamburg and other places in Germany, also asking me about the diving in the area. Horizon didn't allow them to visit Anegada, and so they were curious about that as well.

I then visited a boat crewed by North Carolinas, and they told me that they also used to charter with Conch, but found a place 30% cheaper, called Captains Compass. They praised the owner's work ethic and said that he only had 5 boats, so we'd have to book early to get the discount. I would later work out that with the 10 for 7 deal, the discount over Conch was less than 10%, but for years when we couldn't get the discount they were definitely worth checking out.

It was Xiaoqin's birthday the next day, so we headed over to Wily T's exactly when the kitchen was opened for dinner and ordered a meal where everything was eaten, as there was nothing left on the boat to eat! The two boys of course ate up mommy' birthday cake, fighting over the Key Lime Pie as though it was the last dessert on earth! I'd last been on the Wily T's in 2008, 10 years ago, and it was a new boat in a new location. The bartender told me that the Bight on Norman island was now a much quieter place because the Wily T had moved here, but that this was a quiet night.

We had a short sail the next morning, but had to return the boat promptly, so the evening was spent packing up our stuff in readiness for our returning the boat.

Day 8: Cooper Island to White Bay, Peter Island

We woke up early in the morning and motor'd to Dead Chest before Arturo reminded me (kindly) that the Rhone was off Salt Island, not Dead Chest. This doubling back cost us an extra 20 minutes, but we were once again the first boat on the mooring balls, though another boat arrived and we moved our mooring after a snorkel check so as to have a shorter swim.

The 2 dives on the Rhone (with a surface interval during which I took Bowen snorkeling with warnings from Mark and Arturo not to do duck dives and free dives) were astonishingly good, with a giant reef shark that visited us on both dives, and plenty of wildlife to see, including a turtle!

After the dives, we ate lunch and then proceeded to motor to White Bay on Peter Island to see if it was worth an overnight. The chart briefing on Conch told us that it was a quiet place to spend the night, but the beach was marked as "off limits" because of the Peter Island resort. The wind was too light to sail, so we headed there purely on motor. Along the way, we looked for Carrot Shoal's dive balls in case there was diving, but it was very clear that those dive balls, like those at Lee Bay, had been swept away by the hurricanes and had not been replaced.

Indeed, the bay itself had buoys marking off the swimming area, but the next bay over which was still quite close, Welch Bay, was open. So we dropped anchor there in 15' of water, and then dove the anchor. Arturo said that the anchor wasn't quite dug in, so I dove the anchor, but by the time I'd got there the anchor had dug in. With a catamaran, 50' of chain was more than enough, as the weight of the chain kept the chain nearly horizontal at the shackle, which would end to keep the boat dug in. I was willing to add more chain, but on the catamaran it was a hassle: you'd have to raise the anchor, get the bridle off, let out more chain, and then put on the bridle. We'd already had several issues with the bridle, so we opted not to dick with it.

The snorkeling turned out to be quite good, given the small size of the reefs. Xiaoqin went out to the point and found a shark. We chilled for a bit and at 5:00pm, I got out the paddleboard and paddled to the beach with Xiaoqin, where after a couple of employees left, we got the beach all to ourselves. Along the way, we saw goats which we had heard from the beach!

The beach was superlative, with super  soft sand. It was quite clear that there used to be 4 gazebos on shore, but all but one had been destroyed by the hurricanes, and it was quite feasible that that one standing one had been restored prior to our arrival, along with the cordoning off of White Bay, which peeved me.

We took a few final sunset pictures and went back to the boat during the civil twilight.

That night, after dinner, the bay lit up with occasional flashes of bio-luminescence. Since we were the only boat in the Bay, there was no light pollution and no humming of generators to destroy the mood.  The star gazing was superlative, especially after we turned off all the lights in the boat except the floor lights, and I was astonished to find that after 8:30am with the pending moonrise, the light pollution from the moon was enough to destroy our stargazing.

This is the classic signature experience you can only have in the BVIs, where you can easily charter a sailboat and be the only boat in a Bay with everything to yourself. Those who travel to the area by cruise ship or on land resorts will never have this experience, and while I felt sorry for them, I was also happy that not too many people have discovered this lifestyle, as the last thing I wanted was for more neighbors in our little slice of heaven.