Review: Zero G

Zero G is an Audible-exclusive radio play written by Dan Wells. It's clearly intended for a younger audience (the protagonist is 10), but I listened to it anyway in case it's something that I can recommend to Bowen.

The production values are impeccable: there are multiple actors with the narrator having a different voice than everyone else. The intonation, acting, and stress are great, and the story goes out of its way to explain nearly every bit of science available, including the likely process of traversing interstellar space without FTL technology.

The world-building is iffy, though probably because it's done in service to the plot: the author clearly wanted space pirates, no matter if the economics doesn't make sense, and the plot holes in the story are big enough to drive a starship through, including a Turing-complete AI that nevertheless behaves like an idiot, and a starship strangely lacking in redundancy in life support systems.

Nevertheless, it'll be fun for me to listen to it with Bowen to see if he spots the plot holes and things that don't make sense. It's difficult in this day and age to find stories with little boys as protagonists (and an Asian boy at that --- I will note that the protagonist's voice actress is a girl, in common with many shows like The Simpsons), and I commend Amazon for bringing this into production, plot-holes and all. Recommended.

Review: Specialized BG Sport Full Finger Gloves

I'd poked holes through every finger of my old long-fingered gloves, Specialized BG gloves have always fitted me quite well, though they have the unfortunate habit of changing names year over year making it impossible to find stuff that used to work for you.

Since I'm ignorant of fashion trends and don't care whether I wear this year's or last year's models, I ended up searching online and finding Specialized BG Sport Full Finger Gloves discounted at a high rate from a reputable site. They arrived and are on the thin side, which is fine for California riding down to about 40F. Below 40F I find that they don't quite provide sufficient insulation, so you're better off with more insulated gloves if you're on an extended ride. However, I have a tendency to prefer to suffer a little rather than carry more weight, so these were just right.

The gloves have tips that are supposed to work on touch-screen cell phones. In practice, the tips work sometimes, and don't work other times, depending on the temperature, humidity, phase of moon, and other irregularities. I wouldn't buy these if you needed more than 50% reliability when it comes to operating a phone.

They pack up very nicely, and fit in my handlebar bag, which means they'll be handy on tour at all times. Being light and breathable, they'll dry fast as well. I like them and will recommend them provided you don't need too much insulation. They're definitely not waterproof, but at the price I paid for them, they don't have to be. Recommended.

Review: Judge Dredd Year One

Judge Dredd is pretty much of relevance only to those who grew up in the English colonies, with regular access to the weekly newsprint comic, 2000AD. Of course, from those pages came amazing talent like Alan Moore (Ballad of Halo Jones, Tharg's Future Shock), Dave Gibbons, Gary Leach, and Brian Bolland, but also iconic characters like Judge Dredd, ABC Warriors, Rogue Trooper, and Slaine the Celtic warrior.

Judge Dredd Year One appears to be a prequel, rather than a reboot. The unfortunate problem, of course, is that rather than take the "here's how Dredd became who he is" (Dredd's always been the caricature of the stoic, strong, silent fascist lawman), the story chose to portray him as being pretty much the way he's always been depicted in the comics, though perhaps a little bit too given to boast that he graduated top of the class in one-thing-or-another.

The story is pretty much classic Dredd, with time-travel, psionics,inter-dimensional travel, and lots of police action thrown in in short order.  There are no new revelations, and nothing of note, which makes it completely unremarkable. Not worth your time, unless you need a strong dose of nostalgia havinga grown up with the titular character.

Reread: Saga of the Swamp Thing Books 2-6

After reading Swamp Thing Vol 1, I realized that I'd never actually read the entire Alan Moore run of the Swamp Thing in one go, so I set out to do just that. Book 2 (love and death) launches the Swamp Thing's relationship with Abby Cable into being one of the most fully detailed relationships in comic books (especially in a comic book set in the DC superhero universe). It ties up all of the previous storylines neatly, and serves to prepare the reader for the next segment.

Vol 3 ("The Curse") introduces John Constantine (whose spin-off Hellblazer has proved so popular that it became a TV series)  ramps  into the American Gothic series of horror tropes, and while it might have been innovative at the time, has least withstood the test of time. The tropes (vampires, werewolves, etc) just don't seem that terrifying today, and I'm pretty sure even as a kid I probably wouldn't have been scared.

Vol 4 ("A murder of Crows") is marred by DC's need to tie in "Crisis on Infinite Earths" the first of many reboots. While the other tie-ins during that era were rather ham-fisted, Alan Moore cleverly stitched it into his American Gothic series by postulating that the rise of the horrors in previous issues were part of an attempt by a South American group of shaman/wizards to summon the ultimate evil. But even Moore's virtuoso can only do so much: there are many untied mysteries (for instance, the evil/shaman-wizard group is never heard from again, despite never having been dealt with properly, and one never learns why they thought summoning the ultimate evil was a good idea --- it didn't seem that they were able to control it or wanted to have anything to do with it). The introduction of most of the DC universe's mystic characters (Sargon the Sorceror, Zatana, Zatara, Doctor Fate, Deadman, the Spectre) is cursory, and while the death of some of these characters might be a big deal if you were a big fan of the DC universe, were never given sufficient build up that the pay off was worth anything. Even worse, it never feels as though their deaths made any difference to the plot, since the titular character seemed to have resolved everything without any of the sacrifices prior having done anything.

Vol 5 ("Earth to Earth") gets to start from a fresh slate. This is by far one of the most impactful (and politically courageous) volumes of its time. It features Abigail Cable being arrested for "indecent relations with a non-human", and then resolves in an all-out assault on Gotham City. One might expect the traditional "Superheroes fight and then become friends" trope, but Alan Moore, having established that the Swamp Thing is an Earth Elemental, takes that to its logical conclusion --- the outcome was never in doubt. The logical argument Batman makes for releasing Abigail was great: "What about that guy in Metropolis. Didn't he have a relationship with a human? Don't you have to arrest him too?" Perhaps the only weakness was that Luthor finds it too easy to deal with the Swamp Thing, but that's easily forgiveable, since the second half of the book deals very well with the apparent death of the titular character.

Vol 6 is a transition from the story arcs previously introduced into a series of  science fiction/horror stories. It is nothing short of a tour de force, showing off Alan Moore's virtuosity. Not only does he adept to different artists, he romps from various DC comics properties (Adam Strange, Green Lantern, and even Jack Kirby's New Gods) without missing a bit. There's a science fiction story in here illustrated by Bill Sienkewicz that not only takes advantage of his art style, but also ties together time travel, the Swamp Thing, and John Varley's Titan series of books while being its own story, all in a tightly knit 23 page comic book story. Nearly every 23 page chapter in this volume would be considered the pinnacle of any other comic book writer's career, but this being Alan Moore, I still don't think it compares to Miracleman. Some of the contemporary events of this volume sets the dates (there are references to Iran-Contra), and it's quite clear in the final polemic that Moore is a bleeding-heart liberal as he takes to tasks most of humanity's valuing of money and material possession over everything else, even the ecosystem that supports humanity's existence. But reading this in 2020, none of it is outdated, and in fact, Moore's indictment of the nasty aspects of humanity still stands as accurate, salient, and relevant, remarkable for something written in the 1980s for a comic book, which explains why the books remain in print today, while many of the much hyped and marketed contemporaries (e.g., Crisis on Infinite Earths) has faded away and no longer remembered (or even ignominiously ret-conned out of existence!).

Taken altogether as a volume of work Alan Moore's Swamp Thing is a masterpiece. It contains all of his hallmarks: a rewrite of a moribound and cheesy character and flipping around and demonstrating how much could be done with the character while holding on to its initial concept. Then Moore would play around with the concepts and take everything to its logical conclusion. In many ways Alan Moore's approach in later volumes feel a lot like Joss Whedon at his best. ("Oh yeah? You think my best stuff is in the dialog? Let me show you an episode with no dialog!") There are entire issues where Moore (to various degrees of success) explores an aspect of comic book writing (e.g., there's an entire issue of Swamp Thing rendered entirely in monochromatic blue!), and by and large he succeeds. If you haven't read any of Alan Moore's work, I still think Miracleman or The Watchmen is still far more accessible (and in the case of Miracleman, I actually think is superior to Swamp Thing). But if you've skipped Swamp Thing because of its horror-B-movie reputation you owe it to yourself to ignore that reputation and read Alan Moore's run. You will not be disappointed.

Review: What Doesn't Kill Us

What Doesn't Kill Us suffers from a fundamental problem with science as explained by English majors, which is that the plural of anecdotes is not data. The thesis of the book is that the Wim Hof method of continual exposure to cold temperatures along with a certain method of breathing exercises allows you to control your immune system consciously, improve your fitness, and allow you to (amongst other things) summit Kilimanjaro in 2 days without altitude acclimation (the climax of the book).

Early on in the book, there's a pursuit of a theory that brown adipose tissue (BAT, or Brown Fat) is the mechanism by which these metabolic effects work. But we quickly discover that that's a dead-end:

just under 2 weeks cold exposure almost reversed the symptoms of diabetes. As one of the pioneering researchers on BAT, van Marken Lichtenbelt predicted that the metabolic changes would come with a corresponding increase in their BAT levels, but when results from the PET/CT came back it turned out that most of men had the same levels of BAT as when they entered the study. Cold exposure had changed the men’s underlying condition, but the lightning that van Marken Lichtenbelt was trying to bottle must have come from somewhere else. (pg. 102)

After that brief flirtation with science, Carney gives up and goes whole hog into the multiple-celebrity theory of scientific proof.  We get a cameo by Orlando Bloom practicing this, an exposition of Laird Hamilton's adoption of the Wim Hof techniques, an exploration of the new "tough mudder" style of obstacle course racing, and the aforementioned Kilimanjaro record-setting summit.

All of these are effectively small group studies, usually without controls, and definitely without statistical success. Every one in the sample sizes is self-selected, and though some of the anecdotes are impressive (an arthritic blacksmith regains control of his muscles, a Parkinson's sufferer halves the dosage required to keep his Parkinson's under control), they fall into the "ok, if you're this desperate, you might as well try this. You've got nothing to lose" category.

There's some evidence that our climate controlled environment might not be great for us, and that it's good to get exposure to nature, but there's no systematic teasing out of how much exposure makes a difference, and how this folklore is better than your mom's "you'll catch a cold" folklore.

As an entertaining piece of journalism the book's fine. It's also a decent airplane read. If you're desperate for a solution to your immune problems it might be worth looking into the method, but the entire account is far from scientific.

Review: Did you just eat that?

You've probably heard of the 5-second rule, or the story the electric hand dryers spew germs all over the bathroom. Did you just eat that? covers all these personal hygiene topics and more from a scientific point of view, right down to publishing the procedures for replicating their studies.

Ok, most of the stuff is just common sense: yes, eating food off the floor is unsafe even if you picked it up with 1s. They trace the origin of the 5-second rule myth to Julia Child picking food that'd fallen off onto a stove top (not the floor!) and somehow that story turned into a generic rule. Wow.

The stuff that I was surprised by was that yes, electric hand-dryers are really much worse than paper towels for personal hygiene, and that yes, you need to put the toilet seat cover down before you flush or you'll aerosolized any bacteria in your stool! Also, the most bacteria-ridden item in a restaurant? The menu! Definitely wash your hands after touching the menu!

The different types of dip have different anti-bacterial properties, but surprisingly, the mechanical viscosity of the dip matters much more for preventing the spread of germs caused by double-dipping that both chocolate and cheese dips will outperform salsa, despite the salsa's higher acidity.

There are a few questions I have: if you wash your hands for 10s instead of 20s, how much bacteria is left? Those practical questions were not asked or answered in this book.

The book was a quick short read and you'll never look at a restaurant menu the same way again after after reading it. Recommended.

Reread: Saga of the Swamp Thing Book 1

The thing with reading a lot of comic books is that after a while you realize that none of them can hold a candle to Alan Moore's work, or at least, your memory of Alan Moore's work. Not even Neil Gaiman, who can do character development well but couldn't plot his way out of a paper bag.

Saga of the Swamp Thing was Alan Moore's breakthrough opus in the USA. It opens with a bang, but having recently read Miracleman, I realize that there's a parallel that wasn't obvious when I read the two separated by significant amounts of time. Both reveals are followed by the appropriate protagonists becoming extremely incensed to the point of murder. It's quite clear that Moore lifted the Swamp Thing's reveal directly from his work on Miracleman.

The villain, such he is, however, is much more sympathetic than the ones in Miracleman. The setup for the second book takes its time, however, though with the benefit of hindsight one can easily see the foreshadowing happening. The American Gothic series of Swamp Thing comics was very well reviewed, but looking back, I think it's not anywhere close to Alan Moore at his peak. Nevertheless, middle of the pack Alan Moore is still way better than say, J. Michael Straczyinski. Recommended.

Review: The True Queen

The True Queen is a sequel to Sorceror to the Crown. The events in this novel take place after the events of Zen Cho's earlier novel, but the lead characters are completely different. It revolves a pair of sisters who've lost their memory and are on a quest to understand their past and what caused them to forget who they were.

The novel is written in a transparent prose, and the characters at first seem like outright idiots, making you want to slap their faces for being so willfully stupid. By the middle of the novel, however, the plot becomes obvious and you understand why they had to behave the way they are. In retrospect, you can see the character flaws that caused them to behave the way they did, rather than just having to do what the plot requires.

The characters from the first book show up, but most of them are sideshows rather than main characters. Zen Cho would have made a great DM, because she kept the main characters having to do stuff, because the great heroes of the past are too busy working on other important problems. The reveal when it comes does seem inevitable, and I didn't feel cheated.

The big seams in the world building are that by unifying the magic of the Indonesian islands with that of the English faerie, you end up with a mish-mash of stuff that doesn't quite fit together, and doesn't make thematic sense. On the other hand, you could argue that it's all magic anyway, so why would you get so picky.

All in all, a great book to read while you're sick in bed. Recommended.

Review: Symphony in C

Symphony in C is Robert Hazen's book about everybody's favorite element, Carbon.  Far from a dry recounting of its properties, Hazen describes not just the creation of carbon in the hearts of stars and its unique place in the periodic table, but the evolution of earth's deep carbon cycle.

Interesting stories include:

• The great oxygenation event affected not just the biosphere, but also minerals, as minerals reacted with the oxygen that was in the air and changed their properties.
• Coal is formed during the several hundred million years in which nothing could digest cellulose. Once fungi learned to digest cellulose, trees dying no longer made coal. That's why there's a limited amount of coal in the ground.
• Life on earth will continue despite humans killing themselves by making the climate too hot for primates to survive. The majority of the biosphere are made out of single-cell microbes, and those will do just fine in the absence of humans.
•  Carbon dating is only useful for dating items in the near past (50K years or so). Once past that, the limits to our C-14 counting methods means that we don't have accuracy any more. Furthermore, modern changes to the atmosphere (from atomic explosions to the dramatic increase in C-12 content created by our burning fossil fuels) means that future generations might not be able to easily use carbon dating to date objects from our era.

There's much more other stuff, including a discussion of various theories of how the first single-celled creatures created, to the creation of Eukaryotes. It's mostly good, though Hazen is all too fond of his "symphony" metaphor and tries to use music terminology throughout, which was annoying at times.

Nevertheless, good stuff and well worth the easy listening (I listened to the audio book edition).

Recommended.

Review: Sorcerer to the Crown

Sorcerer to the Crown is a mash up of Jane Austen with a dash of the Napoleonic wars. The setting is a world in which magic exists, and that England even has a royal sorcerer as an official position. To prevent the world from drifting too far off history, the story has it such that sorcerers on both sides are forsworn from entering the battlefield.

Into this milleu, the plot revolves around a couple of outsiders: an African ex-slave who through a sequence of unlikely events becomes the royal sorcerer, and a child abandoned by her father when he drowns and brought up in a magical finishing school for girls. The two characters meet, interact, and of course have adventures that reveal all their secrets to each other.

The writing was transparent, the plot moves quickly (unlike say, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, where the plot moved at such a glacial pace that I abandoned the book long before my library loan period was up). All the words are spelled English-style, rather than American style, lending the book a nicely English flavor.

Recommended as a light airplane novel. Too many attempts to write fantasy have drowned in recent years due to annoying affectations in the writing style, so it's important to single out transparent prose when you see it.

Review: Talking to Strangers

Talking to Strangers is Malcolm Gladwell's book about making sense of other people, and why we're so easily fooled. Written in his trademark, breezy style, it's a fast and easy read that nevertheless provides some color for some of the famous incidents you might have read about/heard about, while not providing any easy answers.

The story that Gladwell tells is that it's easy for people to fool us because there's a huge penalty for paranoia (the story of Harry Markopolos, who discovered that Bernie Madoff was a fraud but couldn't get the SEC to follow up on it is enlightening --- the poor guy got so paranoid that he ended up carrying a gun and becoming a recluse, convinced that everyone else was in cahoots with Madoff), while there's strong societal pressure to "go along to get along,."

The flip side of it is that if you don't conform to society's idea of how you should behave in certain circumstances (like Amanda Knox, whose roommate was murdered), then you're going to pay a penalty for not behaving that way and people will be suspicious of you no matter what, even if you're perfectly innocent.

Then Gladwell dives off into meandering themes: alcohol (Brock Turner), suicide (Sylvia Plath), and finally policing (Sandra Bland). Gladwell nicely avoids the nice and pat answers (such as the Paul Eckman micro-expression stuff which has by now been well and goodly debunked) and points out that people are so bad at judging facial expressions that a face to face interview is much worse than not meeting someone in person.

Well worth the short time you'll spending reading the book. Recommended.

Review: Permanent Record

Permanent Record is Edward Snowden's account of his career with the CIA and NSA as an independent contractor/employee and how he came to become a whisteblower of mass surveillance. Maybe for someone who hasn't been in Silicon Valley for a while the story about mass surveillance might be a new one, but I think anyone who hasn't lived under a rock over the past decade or so has realized that the private sector is probably the biggest offender of privacy, and that the public in general, is pretty OK with the so-called invasion of privacy.

The deeper story for me, of course, is how much the IT outsourcing of the CIA and NSA to the private sector has probably meant that those organizations have lost control of the critical infrastructure surrounding their work.

In any case, I'm a firm advocate of the Transparent Society view of privacy. I don't think anyone should have any privacy, least of all the rich and powerful.  I think that for all intents and purposes we have already lost privacy, and the right thing to do is to point the same technologies towards the politically/materialistically powerful and hold them accountable for the world we're in.

Did I enjoy the book? It was good reading, but I found Snowden's pontificating tiresome --- at no point did he point out how the alphabet-soup government agencies did anything particularly egregious, compared to what Alphabet/Facebook companies have done. Certainly if my children did what he did, my reaction would be: "What? For what gain? Who have you benefited?"

Review: Netflix's The Witcher

I came to the Netflix series having read a number of the books and played The Witcher 3 all the way to the end.  The series essentially adapts a number of stories from The Last Wish, and one of the best things about that first book was that it retold a number of familiar western fairy tales with a twist, such as Snow White, or Beauty and the Beast. Sure, there's an over-arching plot, but that wasn't at the forefront of that first series of short stories. (To be honest, the video game does a much better job than the books of giving you a plot that's coherent) I was suprised that the Snow White story didn't get played up as much as it was in the original.

The series deviates from the book in giving Yennefer an origin story that's not bad, but also doesn't provide any of the little twists that would have been in character from the books (or the video game, whose writers did an amazing job of providing plots that were entirely inline with the books).  The sword play and choreography is well done, though not so good whenever CGI monsters are in play. The CGI is not of a high quality and will age the worst.

Episodes 4 and 6 are the best of the series in providing the sort of twists that the stories in the book are known for, while episode 3 is the classic opening sequence that everyone knows from the first video game, and is well done enough that if this was your exposure to the story it's worth watching. The episodes are only loosely connected (yes, there are 3 timelines being told simultaneously, and the plot doesn't mark what order the timelines are in).

In any case, the TV series is a successful adaptation, and sets up for a second season well. I'd recommend viewing it.

Review: Noric Flash Waterproof Camera Float

The biggest problem with a waterproof camera is that you want it to float when you're snorkeling and you want it to be neutrally buoyant when diving. The Nikon W300 as I learned to my misfortune a couple of years ago sinks. With that in mind, I bought the Nordic Flash Waterproof Camera Float. The package comes with 2 floats and two quick release buckles which you then attach to the camera's anchor/neck-strap points. Even though rated for 200g, it floats well enough when attached to the Nikon W300. The float is wide enough for an adult to slide all the way up past the elbows, and the quick release is handy to drop the float if you need to dive. (That's a good way to lose the float if you're doing so in open water, however!) Together with the float, the camera is bulky enough that it tends to fall out of the pocket of my swimming shorts, but fortunately I was always able to find it again in the swimming pool. I have reasonable confidence that if I ever drop the camera again while paddle-boarding I'll be able to find it again in short order, rather than watching it disappear into the depths.

Recommended.

Review: Lifespan - Why We Age

David Sinclair comes with impeccable credentials: Harvard Medical School, and editor of the journal on Aging. His book, Lifespan, is a book mostly about the research that has achieved miracles in animal trials, but have yet to make it into clinical trials for people. Basically, in the lab, achievements have been made such as regrowing the optic nerves of mice, and reversing aging in mice. Unfortunately, as you read the book you realized a lot of this stuff is stuff you heard about ages ago, such as resveratrol, which turned out to have negligible benefits for human health or lifespan. Sinclair doesn't dwell on that and moves on to brag about other achievements in the lab.

OK, what can you do to live longer? Sinclair details his diet regiment, which includes NMN, resveratrol, asprin, and metformin (yes, that drug used to treat diabetes is claimed to extend life in people without diabetes). He also follows  Ray Kurzweil's regiment of getting blood draw every few months to check for biomarkers of aging. The book recommends intermittent fasting (Sinclair says he skips lunch most days), exercise (but not very much exercise --- he mentions just trying to keep his step count high and lifting weights on weekends and doing the sauna and ice baths), and as a result, despite being 50 he says he has not a single gray hair.

Part of the book is a huge diatribe about how aging should be treated as a disease and therefore deserves more funding than it toes.

All in all, the book provides health advice that you already know (eat less, fast occasionally, avoid meat and animal proteins), and doesn't seem to have high standards on actual evidence on human subjects of the drugs and supplements he recommends. As he says, there's no shortage of volunteers for his regiment, and the effects of reversing aging should be pretty obvious, so I'm now curious as to why if the animal experiments are so compelling, there isn't a rush of research into this area. Society is definitely full of billionaires who would like to live longer!

Review: Green Lantern - No Fear

I'm old enough to remember that Hal Jordan was the definitive silver-age Green Lantern. Of course, then there were Guy Gardner and others introduced, just before I stopped reading the comics. Apparently, Hal Jordan got brought back just before getting a reboot in this series, so I checked it out of my Kindle Unlimited selection and discovered that the book was no good. Maybe it's because I've been binging on Alan Moore, but the book uses many pages to tell relatively simple stories, while the characters don't ever go through epiphanies or significant changes. I'll pass on continuing to read further adventures.

Review: Hellboy Seeds of Destruction

The entire Hellboy collection is free on Comixology, so while I had a free trial (that I have every intention of cancelling), I decided to try it, remembering the movie with fondness. The art is crude and lacking in detail, but the characters are full of evocative references though unfortunately, with relatively little development. The lead character protagonist, is big on hitting things and not very big on philosophy, thinking, or talking, so don't expect a lot of cerebral action.

While the book has rave reviews (and obviously the movie was pretty good), it wasn't enough to keep me reading past a couple of the collected volumes. Maybe there's some good revelation or character development later on that justify the rave reviews, but not from the first two volumes of this work.

Review: Alan Moore's Top Ten

I was reflecting on how none of the comic books I'd read recently came up to anywhere near Alan Moore's old work, and decided to checkout Top Ten from the Kindle Unlimited library. Top Ten imagines a world in which everyone's a superhero, and follows the travails of an imaginary police station set in such a multi-verse.

Moore as usual does a great job of throwing all the tropes into play with a density of story that does in one 22 page comic book what lesser authors would spend entire graphic novels detailing. Unfortunately, as an ensemble cast, none of the characters really do a good job of becoming a character that you're emotionally involved in. Furthermore, Moore doesn't quite take the story to the extremes that he does in say, Miracleman, which is still a better work.

Nevertheless, many of the story arcs are great, though unfortunately it feels like the series was ended before its potential could really be fulfilled.

Recommended.

Review: Amazing Spiderman - Coming Home and Revelations

While I had a Comixology trial, I decided I might as well read the Straczynski Spiderman run. Coming Home is the first volume, and Revelations is the second. Not suprisingly, Straczynski's a better Spiderman writer than he is as a creator of his own worlds. With its set of rules pre-defined, Strazynski's take on Spiderman is reasonable. Even better, his improvement to the mythos was to strip away Aunt May's ignorance of who Peter Parker was, and the handling of that revelation was done delicately, without ham-handedness or easily. I was impressed in ways I wasn't for Rising Stars. Recommended.

Cabo San Lucas Trip Report

I was very jealous of Arturo's whale shark snorkeling trip. The last time I tried to see whale sharks I got completely unlucky  with weather and my trip got canceled. For thanksgiving when Xiaoqin suggested we go to Cabo San Lucas, I decided up front that we would try to see the whale shark. I'd arranged with Cabo Expeditions, who were kind enough to make an exception for Boen even though he was well below the age cut off. They requested that we brought our own life jacket and snorkel for Boen. I would later discover that VIP Tours out of La Paz would have taken kids of any age and supplied all the necessary gear.

I also organized a snorkeling trip for Saturday, using our hotel credits to do so. While in previous years, Bown had been happy to do ziplines, this year he stated "no ziplines." I guess the San Diego trip had made him to sea world had made him scared of heights with the roller coasters that flipped upside down which even gave me a little bit of a thrill.

For this trip, we brought along the Nikon W300, and the EOS M5 with just 2 lenses, the 22/2mm and the 50mm/1.8 with adapter. (Photo Link for the trip)

We arrived and had a free day, but immediately after that a storm blew in and cancelled our whale watching trip. Fortunately, we had a week, and promptly rescheduled for Friday and opted for a yellow submarine trip on Thursday that turned out to be not very interesting because of murky water. On Wednesday, we paid a visit to downtown Cabo San Lucas as well as San Jose de Cabo. Both obviously catered to American tourists on medical vacations, with lots of pharmacies targeted for Americans.

The Whale Shark trip happened and we did get to see a Whale Shark:

The process was a long wait, with a 2 hour drive to La Paz, and then when  we cleared into the National Park waters, we were told there were 19 boats ahead of water, so the tour operator just parked the boat on a beach and we ate lunch while waiting. When we got a chance to do it, the guide would direct the captain to steer near the whale shark, and then we'd get in the water and the boat would swing around in circles until we were ready to board. Our first encounter spooked the whale shark and it swam away, so we had to get back in the boat to repeat. Fortunately, with an hour trip we were able to scan around and finally found one that was moving slowly and we got plenty of pictures.

The next day we did a snorkel trip, but the water was murky. On our last day, we were supposed to visit Cabo Pulmo for a snorkel trip, but the tour operator canceled on us despite perfect weather. My guess was that it being a Sunday they wanted the day off and just made up some excuse to not do the trip. We booked a taxi to Santa Maria beach where Boen finally managed to see some fish.

On our finaly afternoon I finally persuaded Boen and Bowen to try the water slides and they had a fun time.

We did achieve all our objectives, but I'm not sure I need to repeat this trip. The Carribean is still a better place to visit.

Review: Woom 5 off

Bowen's been mountain biking enough that I bought him wider tires for his Woom 4. Of course, while corresponding with Woom about the maximum tire size I could fit on the 4, the owner casually mentioned that the Woom 5 off was going to be available soon.  He met the height requirement (50") right on his birthday, so I ordered the Woom 5 off. We expected to hold on to the bike for several years between Bowen and Boen, so I ordered a pair of "road" wheels as well so we could easily swap between mountain bike and road bike configurations.

The salient features of the Woom 5 off vs the regular version (other than the $200 premium) are the carbon fork and the disc brakes. The off also comes  with wider ties, suitable for mountain biking. I'm well known for my dislike of disc brakes. However, I hate the cantilever/V-brakes that come with the regular Woom bikes even more: those are even worse!

My lack of experience with disc brakes meant that putting together the bike was an unusually bad experience, culminating with Woom sending me off to the local bike shop to resolve a persistently bad brake rub situation that turned out to be partly my fault (I didn't realize that the big plastic piece that came with the wheel was the disc brake side axle washer), and partly theirs (the rotor was out of true). Woom paid for the work, which turned out not to be expensive ($18), but obviously made me feel very good about company. The spoke protector was also out of alignment, and they had sent me 2 left-sided pedals instead of a left and a right! This was an unusually poor experience, but Woom made everything right.

The bike is light and Bowen loves it. The easy stopping power of the discs meant that his hands no longer hurt on steep off-road descents, which was one of the main reasons to go with a disc brake! The wide tires are surprisingly light, and if you're not a stickler like me for maximizing your kid's experience with cycling, I'm not sure it's worth the expense of an extra set of wheels to get the lower rolling resistance of road bike tires. (Though I could be wrong --- if Bowen decides to go touring on his single this would be an essential purchase anyway!)

Color me impressed. It's extra expensive, but if you have more than one kid in the family, it's probably worth springing for the disc brake version of the Woom bikes rather than the regular. The reduction in hassle compared to cantilever/V-brakes in itself would be worth it.

Recommended!

Review: Rising Stars Compendium

I tried to find Rising Stars after reading Straczinski's autobiography, and to my surprise it wasn't available from the library. Fortunately, it was available through Comixology Unlimited program with a 30 day free trial, so I checked it out that way.

Good Superhero books are difficult to write: all the tropes have been explored at this time, and the giants of the field, Watchmen and Miracleman (both written by Alan Moore) have yet to be surpassed even decades after Alan Moore has left the field.

Unfortunately, Straczinski's Rising Stars doesn't come close to any of the giants. It's not even as good as Frank Miller's run on Daredevil collected in Born Again.

The premise of the story is that a single event caused the birth of a hundred odd kids with super powers, and of course the government gathers them together and brings them up together. The consequence of this one time event is explored. There are a few interesting twists (such as a person who's invulnerable but has no other super powers), but mostly there aren't any interesting new twists save for a single villain whose multiple personality disorder manifests her powers.

The story starts with a murder mystery, but the murder mystery is unfair (the power behind it was never disclosed to you until after the fact), and the resolution to it is unsatisfying. Then the last third of the book gets really hokey and unbelievable. You might think that this is an unreasonable  expectation for someone reading a comic book to expect believability, but in this case it was so egregious it was dumb. (no, radiation poisoning is not a contagious disease!) To top it off the ending is hokey and  dumb.

I can't recommend this book. I don't understand why it got any of the acclaim it did.

Review: Magic for Liars

Magic for Liars appeared in several year's end "best-of" lists, so I picked it up with high hopes. It's set in a parallel world to our reality where magic exists, and the novel takes place mostly in an imaginary private school in Sunol. The viewpoint character, Ivy Gamble cannot perform magic, but is the sister of a talented magician who's part of the faculty at the Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, and when a teacher at the school dies, Ivy as a private investigator, is brought in despite the authorities pronouncing suicide.

So far so good. A murder mystery, a magical high school, and a viewpoint character who can get the magic system explained to her by the magical characters, and by grit, smarts or a combination of other personal qualities, will solve the mystery, lead a denouement, and grant us closure.

At a high level all of those properties are true of this book, and the setting is somewhat fresh and there are a few red herrings thrown in. Yet the book fails on several levels:

1. The magic system is never explained, so the mystery is not fair. In other words, at the denouement, rules that were previously laid down in the novel were broken, so the reader has no prayer of solving the mystery on his or her own, except through the meta-mechanism of: "it's always the spouse." This is unsatisfying for many obvious reasons.
2. Despite the setting being a school, there's not enough faculty or students in the novel to grant you a feeling of reality. You get the impression that this is a play that's designed for 5-6 characters, and despite the apparent setting you're stuck talking with/thinking about the same 5-6 characters. (Which means that if you took a random guess you would be right 1/6th of the time)
3. OK, you can claim that (1) is never necessary in a Raymond Chandler novel. But Chandler's novels (and many sterling examples of the genre, such as Altered Carbon) have protagonists that are witty, sardonic, cynical with brilliant turns of phrases, while Sarah Gailey's Ivy Gamble is an alcoholic person who's out of touch with herself, and shows no scintillating wit.

I got to the end of the novel, but didn't feel that the pay off was worth the effort. After I was done I felt like cleansing my palette and going off and reading some decent Raymond Chandler instead.  If this novel wins any awards it'll be because of politics rather than good writing (like All the Birds in the Sky) Not recommended.

Review: The Art of Negotiating the Best Deal

I've done quite a bit of negotiating for clients, on several occasions negotiating 7 figure sums (and in one case RSUs that turned out to be worth in the 8 figures), but I'm always trying to improve my art. The Art of Negotiating the Best Deal is a great courses audio series that came highly recommended.

The first couple of lectures were repetitive, boring stuff. It's not until chapter 8 where Professor Freeman gets into BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Settlement), which I feel is the first effective method (and the most effective method for most engineers) when it comes to negotiating compensation: basically, if you don't have any alternatives that pay better than the company you're negotiating with, then you have no leverage.

Starting with chapter 8, however, Professor Freeman gets into a framework for negotiating that I think is potentially useful, including a framework for discussing different types of negotiations: distributive negotiations (zero sum games) vs non-distributive negotiations. One interesting point  that he makes is that stepping away from the negotiating table and taking time to prepare is a great approach and often improves outcome. This fact alone explains why my clients frequently do better than clients who try to negotiate on their own: to make full use of my services they have to step away from the negotiation and call, e-mail, or text me and wait for a reply, and that distance keeps them from panicking and accepting a suboptimal offer.

Similarly, the framework introduced in chapter 14, "I FORESAW IT" is a good one to use and encourages people to try for creative negotiations.

There are several places where Freeman clearly doesn't negotiate as much as I do in certain domains. For instance, he claims that you can negotiate vacation as part of a compensation package. In my experience, it's very rare that companies do so. On the other hand, some of his case studies are great: there's one example in chapter 14 where an apparently great deal turns out to be a terrible one, and Freeman explains why and how.

For parents, there's also a chapter about negotiating with kids. (It's a stand-in for negotiating with difficult people) It's good and I wish there was more of that in this audio series.

All in all, I thought the series could stand more of the case studies I described above, but even I learned quite a bit from it so I can recommend it!

Review: Becoming Superman

Despite not being a fan of J. Michael Straczynski after reading Superman - Earth One, I picked up his autobiography Becoming Superman, which received rave reviews. It's a book that deserves its rave reviews.

Straczynski's childhood life was horrific, ranging from a mom who dropped him off the roof of a house, to an abusive, alcoholic control-freak dad. It's a clear ode to a man who was clearly a dandelion, who as a teenager that he decided to be whatever his dad wasn't. (Some of us who didn't have abusive childhood made that decision as well, but obviously we didn't have so much of an anti-role model as Straczynski). His parents apparently successfully killed one of his siblings, and his horror of childhood was such that in his early adulthood he had an irreversible vasectomy just so he wouldn't be able to father any progeny.

The story of Straczynski's life is interspersed with a mystery, a name repeatedly showing up in his childhood mentioned by his parents, which later shows up as a denouement for the autobiography. Along with all this is a rinse and repeat expose of what writing for Hollywood is like, his time on various TV animation series, and how he tried to fight the censors, some of whom actually thought that the Necronomicon is a real book.

This book answers a few question I'd always had. For instance, why was Babylon 5 so unwatchable for me, despite getting all those rave reviews. And of course, all the politics behind how Deep Space 9 came to be.

In any case, I found this book not just profoundly readable, but also fun to read, despite all the horrific scenes and descriptions of Straczynski's early life. Recommended! The book makes me want to read more of his comics, even though Superman - Earth One didn't make me a fan.

2020 Book Reviews

2020 Books of the Year

Non-Fiction

• The Big Picture
• Passage of Power
• Becoming Superman
• Lifespan - Why We Age
• Permanent Record
• Talking to Strangers
• Symphony in C
• Did you just eat that?
• What doesn't kill us
• The Body: A Guide for Occupants
• Gut
• Super-Graphic
• The Mother Tongue
• The Fifth Risk
• Invisible Influence
• Words on the Move
• The Four
• The Ages of Discord
• How will you measure your life?
• Word on the Street
• The Making of  a Manager
• Plastics: A Toxic Love Story
• Betrayal of Trust
• Tides
• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
• Born Standing Up
• The Algebra of Happiness
• How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm
• Achtung Baby!
• Uncanny Valley
• Tomboyland
• Hacking Darwin
• Mother Knows Best
• Democracy in Chains
• Complexity
• Physics of the Impossible
• The Tyranny of Merit

Fiction

• Magic For Liars
• Sorcerer to the Crown
• The True Queen
• The Names of the Dead
• Elysium Fire
• The Spindle and the Sleeper
• The Hidden Girl and other stories
• The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
• Neil Gaiman's Likely Stories
• Scary Godmother
• Tales from Earthsea
• Dune
• The Road
• Sex and Vanity
• The Calculating Stars
• The Night Tiger
• Spellbreaker
• The paper Magician
• The Awakened Kingdom
• How Long 'til Black Future Month?

Audio Books

• The Art of Negotiating the Best Deal
• Zero-G
• Ghost Rider
• The Silver Linings Playbook
• Six Impossible Things
• The Masked Rider
• Swearing is Good For You
• The Invention of Surgery

Comic Books

• Rising Stars Compendium
• Amazing Spiderman: Coming Home and Revelations
• Top Ten
• Hellboy
• Green Lantern: No Fear
• Saga of the Swamp Thing Vol 1
• Saga of the Swamp Thing Vol 2-6
• Judge Dredd: Year 1
• Superior Spider-man
• Nimona
• Yowamushi Pedal Vol 1-4
• Yowamushi Pedal Vol 5-7
• Yowamushi Pedal Vol 8-12
• Crush Vol 1
• Usagi Yojimbo - Yokai
• Snow, Grass, Apples

Review: RAVPower GAN Slim 45W USB-C charger

I hesitated over buying the RAVPower GAN charger for a long time, only opting to pull the trigger when I knew I had a trip upcoming where I was going to bring my XPS 13. With 45W of power over USB-C, this replaced the 144g Dell charger with a much slimmer and lighter 78g device. I was worried that the device would be awkward to use because of its long flat profile (no doubt for better heat dissipation), but it turned out that my biggest problem was that the device is too easy to pull off a power socket (no doubt because its long body provide lots of easy leverage).

Nevertheless, as only one of two chargers I brought on this trip, it did its duty charging the laptop, various phones, and also the tablets and camera (with a USB-C to USB-A dongle). In use, the device got warm but never got hot, and it's reliable about charging everything I own. Recommended. While there are lighter devices out there, they tend to cap out at 18W or 30W making them useless for charging the laptop.

Review: Nikon W300

After losing our AW130 last year, I waited until May to replace it with the Nikon W300 this year for the Shasta Trip, but didn't use it all that much during the trip, so waited until this past snorkeling trip to review it.

The image quality and other attributes of the device hasn't changed much between revisions --- the zoom range is identical, as is the resolution, etc. I would review all those aspects, since I mostly only notice what changes.

First, the UI seems to have degraded. It's no longer easy to switch scene modes, but the camera seems to do a good job of selecting which mode to use so I'm not going to gripe too much. What's impressive though is the wireless connectivity, which used to upload downgraded photos via the Nikon Camera app. Now, a new app has been tasked with this, and it's called Snapbridge. This connects to the camera via Bluetooth, and now downloads full resolution pictures to your phone without having to open up the camera and pulling out the SD card. Usually by the time we returned to the hotel from a snorkeling trip all the photos have uploaded to the phone and are ready for sharing.

I looked around for other waterproof cameras and none of them have the depth rating (100') that the Nikon has, and I've had very bad experiences with waterproof cases in the past, so this is still the camera I recommend for divers and snorkelers.

Review: Vaincre Kids Snorkel Mask

I'll state up front that there's a ton of controversy over the concept of a Snorkel Mask, with some claiming that it's dangerous, while others claiming that it's because of either a cheap knock-off or use misuse. These masks are intended for surface snorkeling only, and not for free diving, so it's quite possible that some people killed themselves by free-diving in it. Examining the snorkel mask, it's also quite possible that an improper design could cause air exchange to be a problem. Of course, Americans can make nearly anything dangerous.

That said, I bought the Vaincre Snorkel Mask because try as I might, we could not find a snorkel with a mouthpiece that would fit Boen. It is my belief that the elimination of concerns about breathing is the biggest obstacle to learning to swim, as my experience with Bowen bore out. Bowen was the kind of kid who would follow instructions, but Boen wasn't, so with him I had to get him a snorkel mask so he could breath through his nose instead of trying to do that while wearing a mask/snorkel and then choking.

Our first day of swimming bore this out. Boen loved it so much that he wore it into the Jaccuzzi.

Then the next day we took Boen and Bowen on the whale shark tour, and once he saw that Bowen had a mask and snorkel just like daddy's he refused and insisted on wearing a regular mask and snorkel as well.  But he just couldn't fit it into his mouth and never made it off the boat. Then he tried again the day after at an easy snorkel tour and would still end up breathing water instead of air.

On the final day of our trip we went to Santa Maria Beach and finally, Boen was willing to wear the snorkel mask into real snorkeling conditions. The difference was nothing short of a revelation. Not only could he see fish for a change, with his fins he happily pushed away my hands and chased after them by himself. While it wasn't a super long trip, it was clear that he was happy and comfortable in the water in ways that he wasn't before using the snorkel mask. In the pool, he's now confident that he can swim and propel himself, which wasn't true before.

Now I will state that I was always monitoring the kid (anyone in real snorkeling conditions with a 4 year old has to do that anyway!) and checking for any signs of distress or pain. But on the same Santa Maria trip Bowen had much more struggle with his snorkel and mask, and needed to abandon the entire attempt without even seeing a single fish, so you can have problems with any kind of equipment. The onus is always on you to check on your kids using this stuff.

With that in mind I'll recommend this piece of gear. Boen would never have been able to snorkel without it, so put me in the "these things are safe if intelligently used" camp.

Review: Passage of Power

Passage of Power is Robert A Caro's biography covering Lyndon Johnson's career between the last year of his time in the Senate (including his unsuccessful run to be the Democratic nominee against John F Kennedy) and the 100 days after his assumption of the presidency after Kennedy was assassinated.

The selection of time period was so that Caro could have a rising arc and end on a triumphant note. Basically, Johnson under-estimated Kennedy as a politician, and failed to campaign early enough or sufficiently strongly to claim the primary. Then when asked to be his running mate, Johnson looked at the odds and decided that 1 in 5 Vice Presidents got to be presidents without having to be elected, which was pretty good odds by his standards.

Those 3 years as Vice President proved to be demonstrative about how much loss of power affected Johnson. Stripped of the power he had as majority leader, he became obsequious, humbling himself but still not getting anywhere near the levers of power.

The death of JFK made Johnson presidency and effected an immediate transformation. Caro by no means is a huge fan of Johnson, but he makes several good points: first, because JFK wasn't a master legislature and spent very little time in the senate, both his major bills (the tax cut and the civil rights bill) were stuck in the senate. Only Johnson, with his grasp of what was going on could have pushed both of JFK's bills through, and it wasn't just because of sympathy for Kennedy's policies:

“Startled officials at the Government Printing Office” picked up their telephones to find that the caller was the President, ordering them not to close for the weekend in case the Finance Committee report was completed, one account said. Then a “flabbergasted” Elizabeth Springer picked up the phone to find the President of the United States on the line to tell her that the Printing Office was waiting for the manuscript. “No other President of the United States,” this account said, “had ever been quite so familiar with the minutiae of the legislative process.” (Kindle Loc 12863)

He had never had a gift for (or even much interest in) the more pragmatic requirements of Senate warfare: for learning, and using, the rules. (Russell “knew all the rules … and how to use them,” Johnson had told him in that Oval Office lecture. “He [Johnson] said liberals had never really worked to understand the rules and how to use them, that we never organized effectively, … predicting that we would fall apart in dissension, be absent when quorum calls were made and when critical votes were taken.”) Nor had he ever had a gift for organization; or for counting votes without false optimism. (Kindle Loc 13002) 

It was also because Johnson was under the gun if he wanted to win the presidency for himself in 1964: 

“I knew,” he was to tell Doris Goodwin, “that if I didn’t get out in front on this issue, [the liberals] would get me.… I had to produce a civil rights bill that was even stronger than the one they’d have gotten if Kennedy had lived.” And there was, as always, something more than calculation. Assuring Richard Goodwin there would be “no compromises on civil rights; I’m not going to bend an inch,” he added, “In the Senate [as Leader] I did the best I could. But I had to be careful.… But I always vowed that if I ever had the power I’d make sure every Negro had the same chance as every white man. Now I have it. And I’m going to use it.” (Kindle Loc 12980)

 Overall, the major point of the book is that history has tended to belittle Johnson's accomplishments in 1964 and 1965 with major legislature and programs, in the light of his later issue (Vietnam, etc). While parts of the book felt like padding, most of it was not, and all of it was worth reading. Recommended.

Review: The Big Picture

The Big Picture is Sean Carroll's philosophy book. I wasn't sure what to expect when I was reading it, and the early part reminded me of his Great Courses series  on Time. But once past that, he goes into ontology, ethics, and as well as that philosophical question: "What is Real?" The unique part of this, of course, is that Caroll is a physicist, so we get a unique view on what Quantum Mechanics means in terms of What is Real.

I especially loved the section on ESP and Telekinesis, having never heard someone explain it quite this way: in particular, since we've pretty much uncovered all the forces that can affect us (both on the microscopic or macroscopic level), there's very little chance that there's another force that can affect the world, so ESP/Telekinesis advocates have literally nothing to work with. (This also applies to stuff like force fields and other science fiction apparatus)

There's a great section about Bayesian statistical thinking, and how to evaluate priors and how to apply that to theories, but again, Carroll takes a twist and applies it to "how should you think about the existence of God?" This is all done with a scientist's enjoyment of exploratory thinking, and interjected with a personal memoir that I enjoyed reading.

Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, a majority of philosophers and scientists are naturalists. But in the public sphere, at least in the United States, on questions of morality and meaning, religion and spirituality are given a preeminent place. Our values have not yet caught up to our best ontology. They had better start catching up. When it comes to deciding how to live, we’re like that first fish flapping up onto land: faced with a new world of challenges and opportunities, and not yet really adapted to it. (KIndle Loc 6351)

I really had enjoyed this book. Sure, there's lots of stuff in here that you've probably read about before, but the unique twists that Caroll brings to that material, be it quantum mechanics or Bayesian statistical thinking are worth the time. Recommended.

Books of the Year 2019

This was an unusually prolific year for reading 102 books! Granted, many of them were audio books, and some of them were kid's books, but this is the largest collection of books I've read in a year since as long as I've been keeping track.

This was also an unusually short year for fiction. Of course, that made the selection easy: Ted Chiang's Exhalation easily took the prize for the best fiction all year. In the current climate of door-stoppers being the standard for fiction, Chiang's devotion to quality over quantity stands out. Part of it is that he has a day-job (as a tech-writer, which is actually a decent paying job), and so can afford to work on his fiction and polish it. The other part of course, is that the man has consistently good ideas. You owe it to yourself to read Ted Chiang.

For non-fiction, there's much more to choose from and therefore a tougher choice, since the selection I made this year was unusually broad. For sheer impact on my thinking, I'll nominate Master of the Senate. Non-fiction books tend to try to engage your cerebral side (after all, you're trying to learn something), but few attempt to engage your emotions, but this one does, and not with any loss to the facts and arguments that the book presents. It's a long, intimidating book, but I think it's well worth your effort. If you're an American voter, you owe it to yourself to read this book. It's a piece of history that truly teaches you how the modern American landscape came to be.

Other great books that I read in the non-fiction category include Sex At Dawn, a radical rethinking of the traditional view on human social reproduction, and an example of how you can make good arguments in what is an extremely controversial topic. Kochland is also well worth your time.  It's very clear to me that when the inevitable environmental collapse happens, we're going to look upon this era with a strong sense of how greed overtook our sense of responsibility. It's unfortunately already too late to bring the Koch brothers to justice, but if there's any justice in this world, that brand of capitalism will be eviscerated from human society --- if we survive.

As a parent, I can't turn down books about child development and parenting. If you have middle-schoolers who might be headed for college, How to Become a Straight-A student is worth recommending to him or her. For parents themselves, Voice Lessons for Parents jumps out at me as being particularly important for Bay Area parents, who have a tendency to turn into tiger parents. Unfortunately, the people who most need to read it probably won't, and it's very likely that if you actually want to read a book like this, you probably won't need it as well. Wow, when it comes to good non-fiction this year there was a huge selection.

Comic Books: I ended up rereading Miracleman, and you still can't find a comic book story out there that's any better. Unfortunately, it requires a ton of context for the subversion of superhero troupes to be completely satisfying, but independent of that it's so well written and such a good story that if you've never read it you should.

Review: Spider Holster Black Widow

For cycle touring, I tend to just carry my camera in my jersey pocket. I can reach it, grab the camera, turn it on while moving it to position, and shoot when in place. (It's much tougher to do that with phones because the latency involved and the awkwardness in getting the camera in place isn't great, but it's possible)

Recently, I've been mountain biking. With kids, I carry not just snacks, and a tire repair kit, but also a camping hammock. That means a backpack, which blocks access to cycling jersey pockets, so I've been making do with cycling underwear, and a belt-mounted camera case. The zipper'd case, however, is awkward --- in the time it takes to take the camera out, I might have missed the decisive moment. Worse, when I put the camera back, I have to take the time to zip it up.

The Spider Holster Black Widow looked promising. It comes with a pin which you attach to the tripod mount (they claim it won't interfere with the SD card or battery case, which is false!), and then you wear the holster on your belt. A retaining mechanism keeps the camera solidly in the holster, requiring a lever to be pulled while unholstering the camera (which is surprisingly doable with one hand). The clever part is that when placing the camera back in the holster, the snap-down mechanism pops right in, allowing you to do this with one hand. The entrance is wide enough and designed in such a way that you can get the bolt in 100% of the time.

I'm well aware of the alternate camera slings such as the BlackRapid. They work for running and hiking, but not biking, where the lack of an attachment will cause the camera to swing and hit you or get tangled in the bars. The various chest mounts are better, but my experience with chest mount is that you feel it all the time, especially if you're breathing hard.

In practice, the Hoslter works fine, but has a few characteristics that you might want to be concerned about. First, it offers no protection: I noticed my camera knocked against say, door sills if I walked too close. Theres' enough degrees of freedom that it won't break, but if you fell off your bike you could easily smash the camera against the ground. The second issue is that if you wear a T-shirt tucked out, there's a chance that when you want to reholster the camera, your T-shirt flaps over the holster, then you'll have to take an extra second to slide the pin under your shirt to plug it back into the holster.

Niether are major issues. The first solution is to use a rugged camera (TG-5) or just accept the fact (as I do) that if you want good pictures you have to risk good equipment. There's no two ways around it. The second is to tuck your shirt in.

The device seem sturdy, and can probably be used with bigger cameras than the compact GR-3 that I've been using. On the other hand, for one handed operation, none of the mirrorless cameras would be acceptable (they require a second hand to uncap the lens cap, and mountain biking throws up enough dirt that you won't want to ride with your lens uncapped). Certainly it's a good option for walking around town with a small DSLR or mirrorless camera while being a tourist. Recommended.

Review: Master of the Senate

Strangely enough, the library didn't have the ebook version of Master of the Senate, but it had the audio book version, so I grabbed it.  This is a massive tome, coming in at over 18 hours of listesning time, and it took me 3 renewals of the book to get to the end.

To say the book is an incredible achievement is an under-statement. Certainly, the book deserves all the awards and accolades it has won, and filled me in on much of the American civics lessons that I should have had but never got as an immigrant.

The book starts with a great explanation of the structure of the senate, and where it fits in the legislative bodies of the federal government. It explains how the senate was intended to be the government's bulwark against change, and how that has served successfully in various parts of American history, as well as how it fails by being overly conservative. The exposition is intelligent, descriptive, and an example of clarity in both writing and great use of examples to illustrate the author's points.

The coverage of Lyndon Johnson's ascent to the senate and how he went about gathering political power is also exciting. This was a guy who truly could talk out of both sides of his mouth, to look conservatives to conservatives, and sound sympathetically liberal to the liberals. In other words, he was an out and out liar and a great example as to why nobody should ever trust a politician.

And yet, Robert Caro manages to make you feel for Johnson. For all his faults, his naked hunger for power, and his raw ambition, Caro makes it clear that only Johnson could have delivered the 1957 civil rights act, the first such act in well over 80 years. And the historical accounts of the times is nothing short of detailed and amazing. I'm not normally an empathetic person,  but the chapters of the book detailing conditions in the American south would leave me boiling with rage, while every other chapter would have me nearly in tears with how the South treated its blacks. The description of the Emmett Till case and how two white people could literally get away with murdering a 14-year-old boy is so well told that you can feel the bitterness seeping off the the book.

Many Americans (especially those of us who are immigrants and are in technical profession) tend to have give an understanding of history a low priority. We want to look at the future, and it's obviously easy to denigrate the causes important to those of other races. This book, so clearly relevant to our current times, shows why that is a mistake: without a clear understanding of history, without a good sense of how bitterly fought and hard won civil rights were in this country, it would be impossible to understand why and how the current political battles are fought. After listening or reading to how various historical figures would rather shut down schools than allow black children to attend white schools, you will more easily understand why universal healthcare is so difficult to achieve in this country --- there are many who would literally rather die than see members of other races get the healthcare they need.

If the cause of civil rights was not important to you before, you'd have to have a heart of stone for it not to be important to you after reading this book. Highly recommended.

Review: American Shaolin

I had a great time reading American Shaolin. At this point, the "New China" part of the title have been obsolete, and of course, when the book was written China's rise was already apparent which made the publishing of this book quite timely.

On the other hand, there's no question as to Matt Polly's achievements: how many people would drop out of Princeton, travel to China, learn Mandarin, and live at the Shaolin monastery for 2 years learning to be a bad-ass learning Kung-Fu? The parts of China that he visited then are quite different now, and everyone he knew has long moved away. But nevertheless, the books's well-written, the style transparent and enjoyable, and the Chinese language use accurate.

Polly, for instance, is surprisingly insightful about Taiwanese immigrants:

The truth was that John's father was like many successful Asian immigrants. He was educated, an engineer, so his move to America was a matter of choice, not desperation, and therefore represented the gamble of a lifetime, a bet that his and his family's life would be better in American than back in Taiwan. The problem for Taiwanese immigrants is that their birth-nation---perfectly positioned between huge consumer markets in the West, the technological savvy of Japan, and a huge pool of cheap labor in mainland China---refused to remain a backwater, which made keeping ahead of the Wangs that much more stressful. By the late eighties, Taiwanese doctors, engineers, and businessmen were waking up across America to discover that their second-rate classmates who had never been smart of ambitious enough to emigrate were now extremely rich VPs of sales at Taiwanese microchip firms. (Pg. 267)

 The book has sufficient number of such pithy insights combined with humorous situations for it to be a lot of fun to read. Better, it doesn't come across like a self-aggrandizing white guy's view of Asia, and has a mostly accurate view of Asia. That's pretty high praise, and good reason to read this book. Recommended.

Review: A Wrinkle in Time (Graphic Novel)

I never actually read A Wrinkle in Time, but the graphic novel was easily checked out electronically from the local library, so I picked it up and plowed through it in a few hours. It's a throwback to the 1960s, in both political context and in tone.

The story revolves around Meg, whose physicist father has disappeared for an unknown reason, but the mystical old woman living in a haunted house somehow has the answer. When I got to the explanation of the tesseract, I realized that this was probably the novel that inspired all the science fiction stories/illustrated novels that I'd read in the 1980s, meaning that the book is influential enough that the "space travel by a folding of space-time" is now a trope and the explanation and illustrations that accompany it are somewhat common.

The emotional part of the story is familiar to many of us, but is still told quite well, and definitely worth introducing to kids. The spiritual aspects of the story including the biblical quotes feel very much out of place, mostly because the Christianity that's often in media and politics today is no longer associated with physics, science, math, or compassion, but it's quite likely that a child approaching the comic without having to spend too much time dealing with evangelicals might not have the same association as I do.

Bowen probably won't get very far with this book because he doesn't seem to like  fiction, but perhaps if I tell him it has math in it I might fool him into reading it and getting the emotional maturity part.

The art in the comic is decent. It's all in black and white, and at the right level of abstraction. All in all, entertaining and worth your time. Recommended.

Review: World Class

World Class is Teru Clavel's book about comparative public educational systems.  She compares 4 different systems:

• Hong Kong (pre-school and early elementary school)
• Shanghai, China (pre-school and elementary school)
• Tokyo, Japan (pre-school, elementary, and middle school)
• Palo Alto, California (middle school)

First of all, you have to recognize how privileged Clavel and her family is. Her husband is a Wall Street (Morgan Stanley) banker who gets promoted and an expat position. If you know anything about how cushy expat positions are for spouses, the monies involved are substantial and the amount of help you get with relocation is also ridiculous.

Secondly, her children (all 3 of them) look Caucasian. This is a big deal. In particular, local residents of Shanghai don't even necessarily get to attend public schools in Shanghai. She admits that the staff of at least one of the schools her kid attended only accepted her kids illegally because they wanted photos of her caucasian kids in the school brochure. So the treatment she gets isn't necessarily representative of what a local resident might get.

OK, with that aside, I think that Teru's a brave person. I certainly wouldn't subject my kids to pollution in Shanghai during their developing ears (she noted how bad the pollution was as an adult, and kids are much more vulnerable). Nor would I have been sanguine if my son came home pledged as a member of China's communist party, but she took it all in stride as part and parcel of getting a top-notch public education with diversity and no compromises as far as academics is concerned. Maybe my growing up in a more or less totalitarian country makes me super-sensitive to this sort of stuff.

As everyone from Asia knows, US schools (especially public schools) cannot hold a candle to Asian schools in terms of academic challenge and difficulty. I will note that she glosses over the advanced stuff: my friends from India, for instance, have commented that they're actually a fan of the US approach to Math in Silicon Valley, because the kids do more than just learn a fixed set of problem solving skills and actually seem to understand the material at a deeper level. But of course, I don't know how much of that is because these immigrants do tons of coaching at home anyway, and are happily making up for the American school system.

Furthermore, it's quite clear that everyone in Japan is effectively a free-range parent, letting 6 year olds take public transit and go to school. (Crime in most Asian countries is a tiny fraction of what you see in American schools, and there are no school shootings, etc) But Clavel seems oblivious to the fact that the reason why Asian schools can do so well with so high a student/teacher ratio is that they actively stream and clump kids of similar caliber together, so teachers can teach to a group that's not too diverse in ability.

For me, the most interesting part of the book was when she moved to the Palo Alto school district, and finally views the American school system like an outsider. As I've mentioned before, I think that the American school system is bat-shit insane, simply because there are no national standards, and the tests are a joke. She eventually gives up and moves back to New York City and enrolls her kids in private schools, because public schools in the US are just a joke. This is as strong an indictment of the American school system as you can get.

This is a great book and fun and engrossing to read. I made it through in 2 days, and wish I was reading it on the Kindle instead of the paper copy so I could have highlighted it and posted quotes in this review for you to see for yourself. Recommended.

Review: That Wild Country

That Wild Country is a memoir of Mark Kenyon's various trips in the backcountry, hiking, camping, fishing, and hunting, along with a minor history of the wilderness in the USA. It's a short and easy read, which is about all the virtues of the book.

Kenyon was a marketing person at Google. You can tell, because there are all sorts of places in the book where he exaggerates for effect. For instance, he'll take up how tough a hike is, or how "he'd never been camping before", and then later on in the book he'll mention in an aside that his parents had taken him to Rainier National Park and the Hoh Rainforest in the Olympic National Park as a kid, and then you realized that some guy who's been hunting all his life cannot possibly be incompetent enough for an easy hike on a marked trail in a US National Park to be challenged!

The history, some of which I've heard before, is less obscure, but again, it's very shallow, with little detail about how the Wilderness Act got enacted, and even less detail about how the Koch Brothers keep trying to get the public lands as a gimme. He talks a lot about how the Hunters and Fishing enthusiasts were the ones backing the #KeepItPublic movement, but again, no statistics, no history, and no evidence. I might believe him, but again, why am I reading your book if you're not going to give me evidence and reason to believe me, especially after your attempt at "incompetence literature" destroyed your credibility? There's no mention of how (for instance), the MTB community had to get a seat at the table by threatening to join the "Wise Use" movement after continuously being marginalized by the Sierra Club, something I still don't forgive the Sierra Club for.

I do believe that public lands are a virtue, and obviously I'm raising my kids to enjoy and use that heritage. But the book's shallow approach and exaggeration isn't doing the cause any favors.