Review: Tides

Tides is appropriately written by a sailor. The book taught me several things that I didn't know, even though I was taught how to sail in the San Francisco Bay Area, where a tide table consultation is required before leaving the slip --- with currents exceeding 10 knots through the golden gate, a sailboat will not make it in or out of the gate except during slack tide.

Things I didn't know:

• A tide coming up or down a river is called a bore. The largest tidal bore in the world is in the Qiantang river in China. (The pictures are impressive)
• I'd long assumed that tides are small in places like the Mediterranean was because of restricted flow through a funnel. This is false. The reason tidal variation is small in certain places (e.g., the Carribean) is because tides actually vary around various centers in the oceans, and the further away you are from the center, the higher the amplitude.
• The earth itself (not just the ocean) is also affected by the same gravitational forces that creates the tides:  

If the moon can cause such a stir in the ocean, wouldn’t it also affect the solid earth? Do our bodies, made of 70 percent water, have a tide? Yes and no. The earth is as rigid as a steel ball, but it does distort under the gravitational influence of the sun and moon. High tide on the solid earth varies from half a foot to three feet and spreads over such a large distance—about ten thousand miles—that it’s not perceptible. For example, a high spring tide might raise the sidewalks and buildings of New York by a couple of inches. You could never detect this as you walk down Broadway, because everything rises and falls together over a six-hour period (unlike on the coast, where the ocean rises and falls relative to the beach). The tide’s daily squeezing and releasing of the earth has long been known to affect water wells too. A Wisconsin well, about eight hundred miles from the nearest ocean, has a two-inch tide. An inland well in France increases its flow from sixty to ninety gallons an hour during spring tides. (kindle loc 1883)

The book itself is written English-major journalism style. Sometimes I get very impatient with this style, because all sorts of "color" that might be interesting to an English major is uninteresting when I'm in a hurry to learn information. Similarly, I roll my eyes whenever he does something English-major like, for instance, visiting the British Library to examine Newton's manuscript for "Principia" and then writing things like: "The equations didn't mean anything to me." He does this several times in the book, which had me wondering why he was bothering to burn all those fossil fuels getting to those exotic destinations just to throw his hands up at a little bit of math.

All in all, the book was interesting in the concepts and for its visual imagery of some of the places he visited. It probably could have been 50 pages long if he'd just condensed all the technical information into concise, easy to understand form, but I guess that wouldn't get a publisher interested.

Review: Betrayal of Trust

I read Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague in the 1990s but in the intervening years the USA always managed to avoid a major epidemic, so I assumed that her warnings had done the right thing. Then COVID19 happened and I realized we were just lucky. Which meant that her other book about public health might be similarly prophetic, so I checked out Betrayal of Trust (electronically) from the local library.

The book goes to great pains to separate public health from medical provision. The former is about prevention, and the latter is about treatment. She chronicles several major disasters that could have been mitigated (or even prevented) by a solid public health system: a bubonic plague outbreak in India,  the Ebola epidemic in Zaire, the rise of antibiotic resistant diseases (notably TB) in the former Soviet Union and the shift away from public health in the USA due to the perception that the big causes of mortality (cardiac problems and cancer) are non-contagious and therefore public health did not have to play a role.

Early on, Garrett points out that the big gains in life expectancy in the West were achieved long before antibiotics and other miracles:

Vital statistics data from England, Wales, and Sweden show that in 1700 the average male in those countries lived just twenty-seven to thirty years. By 1971 male life expectancy reached seventy-five years. More than half that improvement occurred before 1900; even the bulk of the twentieth-century increases in life expectancy were due to conditions that existed prior to 1936. In all, 86 percent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases.15 And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. In the United Kingdom, for example, tuberculosis deaths dropped from nearly 4,000 per million people to 500 per million between 1838 and 1949, when antibiotic treatment was introduced. That’s an 87 percent decline. Between 1949 and 1969 the TB death rate fell only another forty million cases to 460 cases per million, or 9 percent. (kindle loc 281)

During the Ebola epidemic, she notes that the requests for materials are very similar to what we're seeing during the COVID19 outbreak:

“Send respirator masks, latex gloves, protective gowns, disinfectant, hospital linens and plastic mattress covers, plastic aprons, basic cleaning supplies and cleansers, water pumps and filters, galoshes, tents …” It was not the high-tech equipment popularized in science fiction movies that would halt Ebola’s spread, Kiersteins knew. What Kikwit needed were the basics: soap, gear, and safe water. (pg 67)

She charts the rise of public health in New York City, which pioneered the initial systems that reduced the incidence of epidemic disease in the city despite the opposition of many to vaccines. But because circumstances were so dire, the public health department was authorized to use force. The trust in the public health system reached a high during the Polio epidemic:

In the fall of 1953 more than eighty thousand six-to-eight-year-old New York City schoolchildren rolled up their sleeves for shots of either Salk’s vaccine or a placebo. In 1954 and ‘55 tens of thousands of children nationwide enlisted as Polio Pioneers to serve as willing guinea pigs for the vaccine.185 And though every aspect of the Salk vaccine effort was mired in politics, ethical debates, and production and distribution snafus, there were never shortages of schoolchildren lining up for polio shots. The fear of polio was far greater than any parental concerns about the experimental nature of the vaccine.(pg. 315)

We can see the decline of public health occurred decades ago, during the shift in the late 1960s and 1970s:

Instead of emphasizing collective health and disease prevention, the path now would lead to further medicalization and individualization. Sadly, the data would later show that America was thereby exiting the period of her greatest health improvement since the Biggs era. Between 1968, when LBJ’s programs were in full swing, and 1975, when budget cuts had whittled such programs to the bone, the overall U.S. annual death rate had dropped 14 percent.323 Every health indicator had shown remarkable improvement. Cardiovascular deaths: down by 23 percent. Infant mortality: dropped 38 percent. Maternal mortality: plummeted an astounding 71 percent. That was the legacy of an aggressive war on poverty and expansion of health services for the poor. It occurred in a period that was denounced by the AMA and American Hospital Association as “regulated,” a code word meaning “very bad” or even “socialistic” in the New Right circles of rising political superstar California governor Ronald Reagan. (pg. 349)

The question is whether the USA still has the capacity to rebuild a robust public health system even after the obvious need for it. Garrett points out in a final chapter that a strong public health system is quite possibly the best protection against bioterrorism or genetically engineered bioweapon attacks. Unfortunately, she doesn't provide much hope as to whether such a system is politically feasible: the book was published in 2011, and there's no sign that in the intervening years much has been done.

Nevertheless, for a great discussion of the issues and lots of stuff I didn't know before, this is a great book. Recommended.

Review: Usagi Yojimbo - Yokai

Usagi Yojimbo - Yokai was an amazon giveaway. I haven't ever read any of the series before. The story revolves around Miyamoto Usagi, a dual-sword wielding samurai who apparently wanders about doing good deeds. He encounters a woman who has lost her daughter and agrees to help.

All is not what it seems, however, and soon he's embroiled in a supernatural battle and meets an old friend. The art is pretty, fully painted, but nothing that strikes me as being awesome. The story is kinda meh, but Boen was happy enough to have me read it to him. Typically, giveaways are intended to get you to look for more books by the same author/artist to read, but this left me cold.

Crush Vol 1

Crush Vol 1 was an Amazon giveaway. Lots have been written about how werewolves are a metaphor for a woman's menstrual period, so it's inevitable that some comic will take the metaphor and make it literal in a story.

The story revolves around Elizabeth, who turns into Crush whenever she bleeds, which includes that time of the month. Crush, is an amoral monster, who only barely resembles Elizabeth, but somehow she and her friends are convinced that the monster would never do something like kill. There's an unresolved long-running plot involving some other monster that's similar to crush and seeks her out, but it's never really explained in this volume, and doesn't seem special enough for me to want to pursue it.

The art is nothing special. It's clear that the artist wants to evoke Matt Wagner's Mage, but neither the story nor the art can quite live up to that!

Review: Scary Godmother

Scary Godmother was a kindle giveaway, and somehow Boen asked me to read it to him over several nights. Each story is self-contained, but it helps to read everything in order since  characters carry over from one story to the next. The art is cute. The text is simple and easy for kids to understand, and the plotline mostly targeted for little kids.

There's no explanation for any of the "scary" characters in the book, and how they live or come about. Your kid's expected to know all the myths (i.e., what's a vampire, etc). It's fun entertainment but I can probably count any number of other books that are worth your time.

Review: Plastics - A Toxic Love Story

Plastics is much less technical than I would have liked. It doesn't cover in great detail how plastics were invented, nor does it discuss, for instance, how the details of recycling plastics work. It does spend some time discussing the effects of plastics on your health, but again, without a lot of detail. What it does point out that I didn't know about, was the lack of regulation over chemicals and safety:

while twenty thousand chemicals have been introduced since 1976, the EPA has been able to require intensive reviews for only two hundred, and it has used its authority to restrict only five. The hurdles are so high, the agency could not even successfully ban asbestos, an undisputed carcinogen.

In Europe, the burden of proof is on safety rather than danger. European regulators “act on the principle of preventing harm before it happens, even in the face of scientific uncertainty.” Guided by that precautionary principle, Europeans began limiting DEHP and other phthalates while American regulators continued debating the risks. (The EU, for instance, barred the use of DEHP in children’s toys in 1999, nine years before the U.S. Congress passed similar legislation.) A new directive known as REACH (for Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals), adopted in 2007, requires testing of both newly introduced chemicals and those already in use, with the burden on manufacturers to demonstrate that they can be used safely. The agency charged with implementing REACH targeted DEHP as one of the first fifteen “substances of very high concern” to be regulated. (Pg. 106-107)

By the time we get to the Pacific Garbage patches (there are actually several garbage patches, distributed all over the world's oceans), we start to get a surprisingly balanced view of things:

The lighter, like every other piece of plastic debris they hauled up in their nets, was coated with a fine slime of microbes, including bacteria and phytoplankton—organisms that are essential to the health of the ocean. To his surprise, Karl found that the plants attached to such plastic objects are copious producers of oxygen, churning out even more from their polymer platforms than is normally produced in open ocean. The finding suggests that, at some level, the multitude of plastic debris may be “improving the efficiency of the ocean to harvest and scavenge nutrients and produce food and oxygen,” (Pg. 134)

The author (and the scientist quoted above) stopped short of saying that plastics in the ocean is a good thing, but as with many things it's not immediately obvious that plastics are an unmitigated evil. For instance, in comparison to paper bags, plastics actually have a lower carbon footprint: they're lighter and therefore the cost of shipping is much lower, and paper itself has issues:

Life-cycle analyses—studies that analyze a product’s cradle-to-grave environmental impact—have consistently found that, compared to paper bags, plastic bags take significantly less energy and water to produce, require less energy to transport, and emit half as many greenhouse gases in their production. Author Tom Robbins called the paper bag “the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature,” but that’s true only if you ignore the tree-felling, chemical-pulping, intensive-bleaching, water-sucking industrial production that goes into making that natural, potato-skin feel of a brown paper bag. (Pg. 158)

The book also disabused me of the idea that landfills are about decomposition. They're not. They're truly about waste disposal, and the goal is for landfills not to decompose, as that would add to their carbon footprint. The author's passion clearly lies with the environmental activism movement, and it's clear from her coverage of it, where she points out how quickly lip service the plastics industry fades once the spotlight on them disappears, and why the structure of the industry is such that it's difficult to get consistent action from them without government regulation:

The only players with significant financial resources to invest in recycling are the resin producers, the major oil and chemical companies, he said. But their top priority is “to make and sell virgin plastics.” As long as oil and gas prices are reasonably stable, there’s no financial incentive for the Dows, DuPonts, and ExxonMobils to get into the recycling business. Nor do they want to alienate the beverage companies that buy their raw plastics to make bottles. Meanwhile, the companies that make plastic products—which might be expected to have an interest in using recycled materials—are too fragmented a constituency to put together an all-out campaign for more recycling, said Rappaport. “The guy making trash bags has nothing to do with the guy making bottles. He’s got nothing to do with the guy making toys. It’s so fractured that nobody can get enough critical mass and money together” to put into developing the recycling infrastructure. (pg. 192)

Her visit to China's recycling center was also enlightening. Once again, the recycling happens there easily because the workers are getting paid $200 a month, which explains why plastic recycling doesn't happen on the coasts of the US --- China can outbid any US-based recycling center, and shipping from the US to China is incredibly cheap because container ships would be going back to China empty otherwise.

I started out the book rather negative, but by the end of the book realized that I learned a lot more than I expected. Recommended.

 

 

Rejuvenating old phones

Boen clamored for a phone since his big brother had my old Moto X4, so I dug up Xiaoqin's old Moto X Pure, which had a battery that wouldn't last 30 minutes. I looked at the iFixit site and discovered that it had relatively little glue, which was probably all gone because the screen had already been replaced once, so orderer the ZURUN 3400mAh replacement on Amazon. The replacement was fairly easy, though like an idiot I had 3 screws left over after the procedure which would affect the longevity of the product.

Similarly, Xiaoqin dropped her Pixel 3aXL and broke the screen. That phone was less than a year old, so it was worth sending out the phone for repair despite Google asking for $150. During the COVID19 crisis my wife and I didn't even consider going into the walk-in shop, despite their "essential" status. That would have probably saved some money.

By far the easiest repair, however, was the the Moto Z Play Xiaoqin's mom was using (also a pass down). That one started having battery problems as well, and I dreaded having to open up the case. Then I realized that the Moto Z series of phones have a mod pack ability that we never used, and now was the time to use it. Ordering a Moto Z Battery mod from eBay, when the mod arrived I removed the phone from the protective case, slapped on the mod, and handed it back. Everyone was surprised by how quickly the repair was done, and I was surprised that it worked. Of course, compared to the $16 the Moto X Pure repair cost, the Moto Z Play mod cost $50, but not having any screws left over must count for something!

In normal times you could just go down to BestBuy and have their technicians replace a battery for $50. Though for waterproof phones there's a big question as to whether the phone would stay waterproof after the operation, usually by the time the phone requires that level of maintenance you're no longer as worried about damage, and the phone was fully depreciated anyway! The rest of society might believe in throwing away old stuff, but I firmly believe that it's better for the environment if we keep using what we have for as long as possible.

Neil Gaiman's Likely Stories

In this 80 page comic, Neil Gaiman re-unites with Mark Buckingham to provide adult-oriented stories. The framing story is a pub, with dark stories that perhaps no longer seem so dark in the light of the very real crisis brought about by a pub in Ischgl. I read through the book in one night, and the stories had a mildly haunting quality, but nothing that's particularly outstanding. It wasn't a waste of time, but I'm not going to put a "recommended" tag on it.

Review: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Despite not liking his novels and his latest collection of short stories, I'd already had The Paper Menagerie on hold (in ebook form) at the library, and ended up reading it without high expectations. I have no regrets. Not only are most of the stories in this collection of higher quality, the entire collection as a whole explained to me why I found his other work uncompelling.

Ken Liu's best form is that of a short story. In a short story, he's capable of creating a coherent plot, sketching out characters that come to life, and even evoking emotions that elude him in long form. "The Literomancer", "Good Hunting", "The Paper Menagerie", "The Regular", "The Paper Menagerie", "All The Waves" are all award-worthy reads that are put together so well that I was astounded: not only are the subject topics germain (Liu kindly puts together a set of references in this collection for each story, so you can follow along his research), the characters are excellent and the cultural references uniquely his. Liu not only puts references to Chinese myths and history in his stories, but is also happy to explicate and work on Japanese history as well. "The Literomancer" in particular is happy to explain the intricacies of Chinese characters in a way that (to me at least) is not only familiar, but insightful.

The volume's longer form novellas demonstrate why his more recent work hasn't been appealing: his last story, admittedly inspired by one of Ted Chiang's stories, is bloated,  and overstays its welcome, with next to no character development, and despite the extensive bibliography, doesn't offer any new insight.

Nevertheless, even if you've read many of the stories in this volume, to read it in context and to explore his extensive makes revisiting them in this book well worth your time. Highly recommended.

Review: ANCOOL 5X Replacement Watchband for Fenix 5X

It was inevitable: while I'm nowhere near as hard on equipment as Bowen is, my Fenix 5X is still a daily wear device. 18 months after buying it and wearing it nearly continuously, I broke one of the eyelets on the wrist-band. And of course, it's the eyelet I use most often!

Garmin wants $50 for an OEM wrist-band, which is a bit rich. I've had mixed results from 3rd party vendors for things like cables, but I figured silicone is silicone, and it doesn't matter where it comes from. The ANCOOL band comes with a 12 month warranty, so I picked one up despite certain reviews claiming that it wasn't as comfortable as the OEM band.

Those reviews are wrong. The band is just as comfortable, and the easy-on-easy off nature of the band meant it was easy to swap back and forth. Recommended.

Review: The Making of a Manager

To a large extent, we are all products of our history and experiences. I spent my career at startups, so when I wrote Startup Engineering Management, I wrote a lot about the hiring process end to end. Julie Zhou, however, spent her entire career at Facebook, so for her, "working hard on recruiting" meant finding more time to interview.

The Making of a Manager is a good management book for people in precisely Julie Zhou's shoes: working at a hypergrowth environment after the growth has started, and with a ton of mentorship available and lots of money. The effect is that most of her advice revolves around the interpersonal sociology (what others would call politics):

if nothing my report said could convince me to change my mind, it’s insincere to act as if she had had a say. What if she responds, “Actually, I do have the time for it”? Or if she brings up a slew of other reasons why she’s the best candidate? I’d only be scrambling to give her another excuse, which would make her feel unheard. (Kindle loc 1333)

And her book also perfectly illustrates how low the expectations we have in industry for management positions:

at the point in which your team becomes four or five people, you should have a plan for how to scale back your individual contributor responsibilities so that you can be the best manager for your people. (Kindle loc 596)

Our standards for management are so low that we think that the management span of attention is at most 4-5. Compared to the great managers I know, who've successfully managed as many as a hundred people without intermediaries, most companies' approach to management guarantees that Zhou's perception is correct: if you do not give sufficient management training and set low expectations, that's precisely what you get.

Another interesting thing about Zhou's book is that Facebook was famously good about promoting from inside. So she assumes that's how everyone else operates and doesn't consider that other possibilities exist.

I don't want to put down this book. It's worth reading for the many practicalities of operating inside Facebook. It's incomplete, as opposed to a deeper understanding of how organizations should be constructed and operated, and doesn't provide those organizational principles. But if you're a Facebook employee newly promoted into management (and want to do the minimum so you can manage your 4-5 people) I bet this is an essential book and thereby is recommended.

Review: The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories is Ken Liu's giant collection of short stories. The stories run the gamut, from the title story (a fantasy set in the tradition of the Chinese martial arts stories), to a series of related short stories about a post-singularity, uploaded human digital world. Many stories explore contemporary technology trends though given the current state of the world, we're seeing how over-optimistic some of those projections are.

Liu cannot compared with his contemporary Ted Chiang --- some of stories (e.g., the ones about crypto currency) clearly do not age well and were probably written in a hurry. One of the stories in the book is actually an excerpt from one of his novels, which I thought was cheating, but obviously intended to sell his novel series, which was sort of lackluster.

But by and large, the stories were decent and made for a good break. Mildly recommended.

Review: The Spindle and the Sleeper

The Spindle and the Sleeper is another one of Neil Gaiman's young-adult/kids books in tandem with a talented illustrator. This is a mash-up of two well known fairy tales (the spoilers are in the title!) though unfortunately it only features 3 dwarves rather than seven.

The language isn't as lyrical as in say, Instructions or The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and the illustrations aren't nearly as beautiful as those in say, Stardust, which also had a better story. The best I could say of the book is that it's rather short (64 pages, and designed for fast reading especially since the many illustrations take up the full page).

Is this the first Neil Gaiman book where I couldn't put a recommended tag on it? yes it is. Good thing I paid $1 for it, but I really should have checked it out of the library, except that the library's closed because of COVID19.

Tactical Canvas Webbing Belt

I somehow managed to replace my all time favorite Eagle Creek money belt.  In between my previous purchase and this time,l I discovered that the price went up to a stunning $17! Too rich for me. I searched for a regular plastic/nylon belt on Amazon, and found a generic, made-in-China, tactical canvas belt.

The tactical part probably means it's black and if you taped it with electrical tape it might become quiet. For me, I just wanted to make sure that it worked. I cut it to the correct size, and then used a lighter to seal off the ends so they don't fray. At $5 a belt you're willing to do that. It works, and I won't make a fuss about it.

Recommended at the price.

Review: Aickar 1200A Car Jump Starter

Some devices are bought mostly as insurance, hoping you'll never need them. The Aickar 1200A is one of them. I already owned the Powerstation PX-3 Jumpstarter/Air Compressor, but it's a bit big to keep in the car all the time, so I bought the Aickar when it was on sale for $45 or so.

A couple of days ago, someone who shall not be named left the car lights on all night, and in the morning the battery was dead. I immediately took out the PX-3 Jumpstarter, but the 6-year old battery  wasn't sufficient to turn the motor. I feared for the worst, but the Aickar, despite having not been charged for at least 6 months, got the car started right away!

I'll still keep the PX-3 Jumpstarter because the tire inflator is too useful, and I'd recommend the Aickar 1200A too, but looking at the Amazon page it looks like it's been discontinued. That's the nature of these devices. I'd look for another similar device by a reputable company on sale and jump (sic) on it.

Recommended.

Long Term Review: Woom 5 Off

My relationship with the Woom 5 off got off to a rocky start, with major problems that were the manufacturer's fault (wrong pedals), difficult to swap wheels, and a front wheel that never got on correct (due to my inexperience). I've also never had a good experience with hydraulic brakes --- the ones on my Airborne Seeker for instance, would never stop squeaking or making noise, even fresh from a bike shop after a tuneup.

But after a rainy winter Bowen picked up mountain biking again, and he's significantly become more confident and sure-footed on the Woom 5. Steepish descents no longer bother him, and he's attempting flourishes on his bike that he never did before. The brakes aren't squealing at all, and even the rear wheel is beginning to be easier to swap. When I tried working on his old Woom 4 (which his brother is riding), I was immediately amazed by how much worse the brakes were and how much harder they were to work on.

I guess hydraulic disc brakes do have a good use case --- on kids bikes, where nobody sells bikes with caliper brakes, and where the kids weigh so little there's zero chance of them warping the discs and creating noise. There's a $180 premium between the Woom 5 and the Woom 5 off, but it's worth it not to have to deal with V-brakes.

Recommended.

Review: Remington Virtually Indestructible Grooming Kit

I shouldn't have been surprised that one of the items hard to find during the "shelter-at-home" orders turned out to be hair clippers. Amazon was all out of them, with delivery slated for the end of April. Fortunately, I found the Remington Virtually Indestructible Grooming Kit on Walmart, with a week delivery lag, and as of this writing you can still get them.

I got them and then realized that I didn't actually how to do a haircut or even mount the combs onto the clippers. I watched a youtube video, and proceeded to do my kids.

They didn't seem traumatized, and then I did myself (with Xiaoqin helping trim the parts I couldn't see, because I was too dumb to install a mirror outside). It's surprisingly easy to use, and at $25, one use would pay for itself. I might never want to pay for a haircut again!

Review: 6 Impossible Things

I picked up Six Impossible Things from the library since I was running out of audio books. This is one of the rare physics books you can read as an audio book, since most of time there's no oway it would work: equations and Feynman diagrams just won't work in audio format.

Rather than covering all the details about Quantum mechanics, the book explores 6 different interpretations of the fundamental equations: the Cophenhagen interpretation, the pilot wave/de Broglie wave interpreattion, the Many Worlds interpretation, quantum decoherence, the transactional interpretation. He concludes that they all yield the same results, so you can just choose which one you'd like to use.

It's short, mostly enjoyable, but unfortunately all too easily to forget. Still, it covered certain interpretations I'd never heard of before! Recommended.

Review: Word on the Street

I checked out Word on the Street and the first few chapters rehashed material that were already covered in his previous books, about language change, though in greater detail, especially the part about Shakespeare's language vs modern English. It's very clear that McWhorter is passionate about that topic and it's great.

Then the second half of the book covered Black English in far greater detail than I'd seen in any of his other books. A key point that he makes is that Black English doesn't have African roots, but instead came from the language of the indentured servants and other poor white immigrants from parts of the UK: Irish, Scottish, etc. It's a very compelling argument and very well done.

At the end of the book I realized that it was written during the Ebonics debate. Apparently, during that era, McWhorter was the  only Black linguistics expert willing to come right out and say that you shouldn't teach Black English in schools. His reasoning is that in every country such as Germany, Switzerland and Finland, kids come into the schoolroom speaking a local dialect that's as far apart from say, High German, as Black English vs Standard English. The school room, however, provides the immersion and standard English or High German training that's needed to succeed in society. Therefore, anything that reduces immersion time in standard English is necessarily a loss for the kids coming into the school room. He proposes instead, that the teachers are given training in Black English so that they understand that kids in lower grades who speak Black English are not speaking in a degraded form of English, but rather in an English dialect. Again, a very strong argument.

In any case, I wish I'd had this book around to read back when the Ebonics debate was going on, but better late than never. Recommended.

Review: RockBros MTB pedals

I've been teaching my kids to mountain bike, and unfortunately that involves a lot more hiking and pushing than riding.

On any given ride with the kids, my walk to ride ratio might be as high as 3:1 (push 1st kid up, walk back, push 2nd kid up, walk back, now pick up my bike and ride). SPD shoes aren't really any good for that much walking, so I decided to switch to the Rock Bros platform pedals for riding with the kids.

With a dab of grease, the pedals went in as easily as any other pedals I've ever used, which is good --- cheap they might be but at least the threads are precision cut. The riding on them are much worse than SPD shoes with SPD pedals, but much better than running shoes on SPDs, though not by as much as I'd hoped. The pedals come with gripper screws on them to provide some grip, but in reality, for someone used to spinning, these pedals are worthless for anything other than mashing down on. And when it comes to bunny hop, I can hop even less on these than I can on SPDs, which says a lot!

They're fine for what I'm doing, but I'm afraid that anything technical and I'm going to wish I had SPDs. Grant swears up and down that they don't affect efficiency, but I beg to differ. I certainly wouldn't want these for road riding.

But they're brightly colored and very visible. Can't complain, especially for the price. If you're looking for platform pedals, get these.

Review: Yowamushi Pedal Vols 8-12

There's a saying that all bike racers take the same amount of time to tell the same story, whether their race is a 3 week stage race or a 3 minute pursuit on the track. Given that Wataru Watanabe is taking in excess of 8 volumes to tell the story of a 3 day stage race, I'd say he should have taken on a 21 day race instead, as there's an excessive amount of padding in volumes 8-12 of Yowamushi Pedal.

Some of it is the nature of anthology comic books: each week these weekly anthologies devote only a small number of pages to each story (as little as 10-15 pages). As a result, the artist spends a couple of pages providing a synopsis of the story to remind the reader who just started reading or who might have missed a couple of issues.

Even so, by the end of volume 12 we still haven't gotten to the end of the stage race. As with the previous volumes, there's very little racing strategy. The protagonists and antagonists frequently ride side by side like idiots. Sure, these are teen bicycle racers but all it takes is one smart team to take advantage by drafting another team and the game ought to be over.

The best part of these books is that every so often the author/artist would take 4 pages out to describe a mountain bike race, or the various courses in Japan that the cyclists in the comics ride up, or even the bike parks that can be found in Japan. That makes the volumes not a total waste of time but is hardly sufficient to redeem the comics in the eyes of this cycling enthusiast.

Not recommended.

Covid19 Cycling

We have a "shelter in place" order here in the Bay Area, which means that you should stay at home and only depart your home for essential trips such as groceries, medicine, with one explicit carve out for exercise, whether it's cycling, hiking, or running. (I'm sure skateboarding, rollerblading, and scootering for fun are OK as well) All gyms are closed, as well as swimming pools.

Taking my kids out on the triplet, I've seen a lot of people who have obviously only been cycling in the gym: they might have shiny new bikes, but they're weaving all over the road, and many have no experience in hilly terrain (which is the best riding in the Bay Area). This is the worst possible time to have a cycling crash, as the ERs are overloaded and visiting the hospital might expose you to the disease.

I can't do much about COVID19 as an individual, but since Independent Cycle Touring contains a lot of instructions for someone who has to fix their own bike and discusses how to avoid crashes, and I'm guessing no one's about to plan a tour right now anyway, I can give it away just in case it helps someone.

You can get your free copy by clicking on this link and using COVID19 as a coupon code to checkout. The code will expire April 5th.

Review: How will you measure your life?

I picked up How Will You Measure Your Life expecting the usual business school professor memoir of self-congratulation and lots of business anecdotes. I was surprised to discover that it was a parenting book! Yes, there are business anecdotes and semi-case studies, but the majority of the book is about prioritization, namely how not to neglect the long term important stuff even though it's the short term stuff that provides positive feedback and reinforcement. For instance, I've definitely got friends who fit into this description:

For those of my classmates who inadvertently invested in lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help but believe that their troubles stemmed from incorrectly allocating resources. To a person, they were well-intended; they wanted to provide for their families and offer their children the best possible opportunities in life. But they somehow spent their resources on paths and byways that dead-ended in places that they had not imagined. They prioritized things that gave them immediate returns—such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus—rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children. And when those immediate returns were delivered, they used them to finance a high-flying lifestyle for themselves and their families: better cars, better houses, and better vacations. The problem is, lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process. “I can’t devote less time to my job because I won’t get that promotion—and I need that promotion …” (Kindle Loc 880)

 And of course, I'm always surprised by the number of people who like to outsource important parenting functions:

One of the most common versions of this mistake that high-potential young professionals make is believing that investments in life can be sequenced. The logic is, for example, “I can invest in my career during the early years when our children are small and parenting isn’t as critical. When our children are a bit older and begin to be interested in things that adults are interested in, then I can lift my foot off my career accelerator. That’s when I’ll focus on my family.” Guess what. By that time the game is already over. An investment in a child needs to have been made long before then, to provide him with the tools he needs to survive life’s challenges—even earlier than you might realize. (Kindle loc 1101)

 There's wonderful insight even into why what we do never seem to satisfy our spouses:

We project what we want and assume that it’s also what our spouse wants. Scott probably wished he had helping hands to get through his tough day at work, so that’s what he offered Barbara when he got home. It’s so easy to mean well but get it wrong. A husband may be convinced that he is the selfless one, and also convinced that his wife is being self-centered because she doesn’t even notice everything he is giving her—and vice versa. This is exactly the interaction between the customers and the marketers of so many companies, too. Yes, we can do all kinds of things for our spouse, but if we are not focused on the jobs she most needs doing, we will reap frustration and confusion in our search for happiness in that relationship. (Kindle loc 1364)

 Much of the book's notes go from child development to self-esteem development, and discusses how certain business case studies (such as Dell outsourcing production of components and eventually the whole machine to Asus until Dell could no longer compete) apply to the raising of children.

in outsourcing much of the work that formerly filled our homes, we have created a void in our children’s lives that often gets filled with activities in which we are not involved. And as a result, when our children are ready to learn, it is often people whom we do not know or respect who are going to be there...if your children gain their priorities and values from other people … whose children are they? Yes, they are still your children—but you see what I’m getting at. The risk is not that every moment spent with another adult will be indelibly transferring inferior values. Nor is this about making the argument that you need to protect your children from the “big bad world”—that you must spend every waking moment with them. You shouldn’t. Balance is important, and there are valuable lessons your children will gain from facing the challenges that life will throw at them on their own. Rather, the point is that even if you’re doing it with the best of intentions, if you find yourself heading down a path of outsourcing more and more of your role as a parent, you will lose more and more of the precious opportunities to help your kids develop their values—which may be the most important capability of all. (Kindle Loc 1646-1654)

 The book encourages you to let your children fail and suffer the consequences early, rather than setting them up to become fragile successful kids by overcompensating for them:

The braver decision for parents may be to give that child a more difficult, but also more valuable, course in life. Allow the child to see the consequences of neglecting an important assignment. Either he will have to stay up late on his own to pull it off, or he will see what happens when he fails to complete it. And yes, that child might get a bad grade. That might be even more painful for the parent to witness than the child. But that child will likely not feel good about what he allowed to happen, which is the first lesson in the course on taking responsibility for yourself...Our default instincts are so often just to support our children in a difficult moment. But if our children don’t face difficult challenges, and sometimes fail along the way, they will not build the resilience they will need throughout their lives. People who hit their first significant career roadblock after years of nonstop achievement often fall apart. (Kindle loc 1855)

There's even a great section about hiring executives, describing a common mistake among startups, which is to hire managers who've successfully run big company organizations with lots of support, rather than hiring managers who've built organizations handson from a small base, even if the resulting organization wasn't as large as the more conventional manager.

I enjoyed the book, highlighting section after section, and thinking about the strong parenting advice in this book. Recommended.

Review: The Silver Linings Playbook

I'm not a football fan, nor am I a big fan of modern dance, so it was only through an Amazon promotion that I got a copy of the audio version of The Silver Linings Playbook. Even so, I put off listening to it until I ran out of non-fiction, having had the impression from previous forays into novels via audible that they were boring and couldn't hold my attention.

What Ray Porter (the voice actor reading the novel) proved is that I was completely, utterly wrong. Not only is Ray Porter a great voice, but he actually acted out every voice in the novel differently (including separating the narrator's inner voice from his speaking voice), and presented the entire novel so well that I was sucked into listening to the novel start to finish despite my not being in the ideal audience for the book.

The story revolves around Patrick Peoples, who's just came out of a mental institution and is recovering from a traumatic, undescribed incident in the past. His wife has divorced him, but while he was in the institution he decided that it was because he was an unworthy husband, and has devoted himself to self-improvement, lifting weights, running, and reading the literary novels his ex-wife loved, having been an English teacher.

Moving back in with his parents at the age of 35, he has to negotiate the difficult relationship between his mother and father, catch up with his brother, and catch up with the world, which has changed significantly (to him) in the memory gaps he had while he was in "the bad place." He discovers that his brother got married, that he likes children, and his friends introduce him to a woman, Tiffany, who mysteriously starts running with him in the mornings.

When Tiffany tells him that she can liason with his ex-wife, he jumps at the opportunity, even agreeing to join Tiffany in a modern dance competition in an effort to win, and forgo watching or even talking about Eagles football games. The book then shifts into high gear and has a made-for-Hollywood ending.

The book provides a lot of background and culture about the nature of being a Football fan, and the lengths to which people would go to cheer their team on. It's a piece of American culture I haven't ever gotten into and providing an understanding of how it works is interesting (though hardly essential). What does come through, however, is how much humans (mentally stable or not) are capable of (and willing to) deluding themselves as to the nature of reality, and of course, for me, how important it is that the narrator/reader of an audible book can sustain the story. I came into this audio book skeptical that I could enjoy an audio novel, but came away impressed. That's makes it recommended by any standard.

Review: Ages of Discord

Ages of Discord is an unusual history book. If you grew up reading Asimov's Foundation series, you would have come across an interesting idea, Psychohistory, which is that with large enough numbers, you could predict the future by examining the large scale interaction of people, applying equations, and then you could affect the future by planning exactly around that.

Ages of Discord is precisely that book, except Peter Turchin doesn't seem to have read Foundation, and so chooses to call his study of history Cliodynamics instead. Regardless of what it's called, does Turchin's version work? Effectively, what Turchin does is to create a simplified model of society, dividing society into the haves and havenots (the elite, and the worker population are the terms he uses). He postulates that relative wages fall as the worker population increases, but because the have-nots have no political power, what creates social turmoil is when the relative wages fall for the elites as the number of people striving for joining the elite reduces the possibility that any given elite-educated person can actually join the elite. Because capitalism has essentially winner-take-all outcomes, you get situations where the elites fight over the scraps and that creates ages of discord.

After considering and dismissing several alternative explanations, they come to the conclusion that immigration results in a larger proportion of population who are both poor and cannot vote. This facilitates the move to the right and away from redistributive policies, which then causes income inequality to rise... My explanation of the observed association is based on the Structural-Demographic Theory: (1) labor oversupply (proxied by immigration) leads to (2) elite overproduction (proxied by wealth inequality) and heightened intraelite competition that, in turn, results in (3) elite fragmentation (proxied by political polarization).(pg. 94)

The mathematical models Turchin uses are straightforward, and with it he produces graphs and charts, including ways of measuring general population welfare indirectly that might surprise you:

average heights for native-born Americans, separately for men and women and for whites and blacks. Prior to 1970, despite some divergence among different segments of the population, the overall pattern was vigorous advance, resulting in gains of about 5cm across the board. After 1970, however, this vigorous growth regime was transformed into one of stagnation and even decline. The timing of the break point is somewhat difficult to determine, because adult height can be affected by environmental conditions at any point during the first two decades of life. I follow the practice established in Chapter 3 and plot data not by the year of birth, but by the year when individuals reached age 10, the midpoint of the growth period. Using this convention we see that the overall average (averaging over both gender and race, while weighting by the number of observations in each category) peaks during the early 1970s (Figure 11.1b). Comparing the dynamics of this index to real wages we observe that ups and downs in the average height tend to precede the ups and downs in the real wage by another 5–10 years (in addition to the shift of 10 years, resulting from plotting the heights data by the data of age = 10y). In other words, when the average population height is plotted not by the date of birth, but by the date of reaching the age of 15–20 years, there is a large degree of parallelism between the fluctuations of the real wage and average stature. A possible explanation is that the level of wages experienced by the parent generation has a most direct effect on the biological wellbeing of their children when they are going through their adolescent growth spurt. If this explanation is correct, then we expect that average stature will again decline as a result of decreasing real wages after 2003 and especially following the Great Recession. FIGURE 11.1 Changes in average height, 1925–1995. (a) Average heights of white and black men (left scale), and white and black women (right scale). Data source: (Komlos 2010). Data are plotted by year of reaching age 10. (b) A weighted mean (averaging over gender and race) plotted together with real wages for unskilled labor. Average height is plotted by the year of birth (top scale) which is shifted by 15 years with respect to the calendar year (bottom scale). (pg. 201)

 When you read the book, you can start to see why immigration is such a hot-button topic:

There are several reasons why labor supply grew faster than overall population growth, of which two appear to be most important. One big factor is immigration. In 2011 the total American work force was 153 million, of which 24.4 million workers were foreign-born (this number includes both legal and illegal immigrants). The proportion of foreign-born in the labor force is currently around 16 percent (compared with five percent 40 years ago). The second factor was the increasing number of women working. In the 1970s only 40 percent of women were in the labor force; today this proportion is close to 60 percent. If the labor participation rate of native women (so that we don’t double-count foreign-born women in the labor force) stayed at its 1970s level, today there would be 20 million fewer workers—an effect of nearly the same magnitude as that of immigration. (pg. 225)

 So what does Turchin predict with all his fancy models? There I'm afraid the book falls short. He ends the book simplying saying that what his graphs predict is that the 2020s will be an extremely turbulent decade, and saying that given what we know about the inputs to the model, we might be able to do something about it. That's pretty lame-duck dodging the question stuff. What would be actionable would be if he applied the same models to other societies to see whether the same Cliodynamics apply, so that if you wanted to you could at least consider an escape plan to a society that's not about to have civil-war levels of death and destruction.

Nonetheless, the book has interesting models, lots of interesting data, and has ideas worth considering, even if it doesn't provide anything actionable. It's dense reading, but recommended.

HRm Comparison, Garmin Fenix 5X vs Polar OH1

Arturo and I have long suspected that the Garmin line of watches have HR  readings that are science fiction, at least for the two of us. But during Boen's first ride up OLH, I finally got proof, since I wore both the watch and the OH1+ at the same time for the first hour or so. You can see that the Garmin never showed a HR above 150, while the OH1+ worn under a sleeve on my upper arm showed consistent HR above 170! (And since I was riding the triplet, my perceived effort matched the OH1 much more than the Garmin!)

This shouldn't be surprising. The OH1+ won the DCRainmaker shootout. I guess I should start wearing it more often! This is by no means a slight on the Fenix 5X, which is still by far my favorite daily wear device. The Fenix 5X is a big heavy watch and there's no way you can expect it to perform well given what we do.

Review: Elysium Fire

Elysium Fire is the latest Aliastair Reynolds novel.  Set in the revelation space universe, it's effectively a police procedural set in a constellation of habitats in space, tied together by neural implants that allow citizens to easily vote multiple times a day.

I'd read The Prefect back in 2009, and enjoyed it thoroughly, but didn't reread that previous novel before reading this one, and it's just as good as the prior novel, with fully realized characters, high tension, and a fully earned ending. It's a return to form, something I've longed for since re-reading House of Suns back in 2017. If there was any justice in the universe one of the wealthy on-line streaming companies that are funding TV shows would pick this one up (or The Perfect) and give us beautiful visuals that work with the story.

Highly recommended.

Review: The Four

The Four is the equivalent of getting your grizzled war veteran drunk, and then listening to him pontificate wildly about the state of the world. It's surprisingly entertaining and irreverent, but as with the above-mentioned drunk veteran, you will naturally take everything said with a giant sack of salt.

There are few better examples of what Pope Francis refers to as an unhealthy “idolatry of money” than our obsession with Steve Jobs. It is conventional wisdom that Steve Jobs put “a dent in the universe.” No, he didn’t. Steve Jobs, in my view, spat on the universe. People who get up every morning, get their kids dressed, get them to school, and have an irrational passion for their kids’ well-being, dent the universe. The world needs more homes with engaged parents, not a better fucking phone. (Kindle loc 1144)

 Everyone in the room speaks the same language (literally and figuratively), wears Hermès, Cartier, or Rolex, has kids at Ivy League schools, and vacations in a coastal town of Italy or France or St. Barts. Fill a room with middle-class people from around the world, and you have diversity. They eat different food, wear different clothes, and can’t understand each other’s languages. It’s anthropology on parade. The global elite, by contrast, is a rainbow of the same damn color. (Kindle loc 1210)

 A key component would be flipping the business model in education, eliminating tuition, and charging recruiters, as students are broke, and the firms recruiting them are flush. Harvard could foster the same disruption if they take their $37B endowment, cancel tuition, and quintuple the size of their class—they can afford to do this. However, they suffer from the same sickness all of us academics are infected with: the pursuit of prestige over social good. We at NYU brag how it’s become near impossible to gain admission to our school. This, in my view, is like a homeless shelter taking pride in how many people it turns away. (Kindle loc 1379)

Sprinkled around all this pontificating are pieces of advice, usually aimed at the  business school students he teaches:

Within your organization, figure out what the company is good at—its core functions—and if you want to excel there, have a bias toward one of those categories. Google is all about engineers: the salesmen don’t do as well (though it’s still a great place to work). Consumer packaged goods companies are brand managers: engineers rarely make it to the C-suite. If you’re in the discipline that drives the company, what it excels at, you will be working with the best people on the most challenging projects, and are more likely to be noticed by senior management. (Kindle loc 3509)

I enjoyed the book and the pontificating, but needed a palette cleanser afterwards. Mildly recommended.

Review: Yowamushi Pedal Vol 5-7

Starting from Vol 5, Yowamushi pedal jumped the shark, by introducing what I feared all along, the exposition and star treatment of "secret ninja skills" trotted out by competing cyclists, including one competitor who names his muscles, Frank and Andy (yes, it's funny).

The thing about cycling is that the history of cycling is replete with legends that could use illustration in manga or comic book form, like that of Eugene Christophe or even the stars of the past like Eddy Merckx. The fictional stuff in Yowamushi pedal can't even compare.

What makes it worse is that none of the team tactics deployed in real cycling races show up in the comic, including strategic placing of someone in a breakaway to try to break up the rhythm of a lead group, or even working together as a team to tire out an opposing cyclist.

I'm dejected enough to take a break from the series for a while after the promising earlier start. Not recommended.

Review: Ghost Rider (audio book)

I'll admit to never having listened to Rush before auditing  Ghost Rider, which was released for free by Amazon to commemorate Neil Peart's death. The book opens with Neil Peart telling you about how in the space of a year, he lost his 19-year-old-daughter Selena to a single-vehicle car crash, followed by his wife dying of cancer. That is the kind of loss you would never wish upon anyone, and of course, he does what any man would do in that situation, which is to go on a bike tour.

Well, he doesn't ride a bicycle (but he apparently used to, prior to his wife buying him a motorocycle), but a BMW touring motorcycle, and he heads off North from his home in Toronto up to Alaska, takes the ferry down to Vancouver, and then meanders and weaves all over North America, down to Mexico and back again, to Nova Scotia, and then somehow back in LA.

The journey is composed of narration, interspersed with letters to a motorcycling partner who's ended up in Jail. I normally think of rock musicians as being non-intellectuals, but unlike the stereotype of the drummer found in say, Spinal Tap, Peart was also the lyricist of the band. He reads extensively all through his journey, Jack London, Edward Abbey, all the desert and mountain classics. He's also ridden through much territory that I've explored, Glacier National Park, Waterton Lakes, Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, Sonoma, Sonora pass. Obviously on a motorcycle things go by much faster --- 600 miles a day wasn't uncommon for him, but he never seems to find solace except when being on the move, whether on the bike, or hiking, or visiting friends.

There's a certain romanticism in the book, and poetry, where he discusses caring for his little baby soul, a symbol of his rebirth after his loss. His personality traits he splits amongst a community of minds: the eponymous Ghost Rider, who's only happy while touring, a 14 year old girl, James Ellwood, his wanna be rock star and womanizer, and James Elwood Taylor, who would like nothing better than to write a story about his travels. All in all, I enjoyed the travelogue and his letters.

Both Pengtoh and Arturo have commented on my trips that I never seem impressed by people riding (or driving) motor vehicles. This book didn't change my mind: sure, there's adventure in having to siphon out all the fuel in your tank after someone mistakenly puts diesel in it, or having to get help righting your bike after it's been dropped (those motorcycles are too heavy for a single person to lift). But I certainly don't consider those problems on the same order of magnitude as those faced by a bicycle tourist on a long distance trip (and now that I've done it, the challenges faced by a family with young children on even a short bicycle trip).

Nevertheless, as something to listen to on a commute or to revisit places you've long forgotten about, it's not a waste of time. Lightly recommended.

Review: Yowamushi Pedal (Vol 1-4)

Unlike American comics, which are dominated by the superhero genre, Japanese comics have a wide subject matter (yes, there's even a comic-book about the board game Go). So I wasn't too surprised when my brother told me that there's a comic book called Yowamushi Pedal about road bike racing. It's even been made into a TV-show!

Ok, I'm a cycling enthusiast and have even read several books about bicycle road racing, but paying $13 a volume for cycling books is a bit much. Fortunately, the local library has the entire collection, and nobody ever checks it out, so I just dropped by one evening and grabbed the first 4 volumes.

It's not clear to me who the audience for the comic is. On the one hand, if you're already a cyclist enthusiast, you might not need the introductory-level style of a comic book. But if you're not one, why would you pick up a cycling comic book? I guess in Japan you might, just out of curiosity.

The story starts off very cute, Evelyn Stevens style. Sakamichi Onoda has long been making the 90km roundtrip to Akhihabara on a heavy commuter bike so he could spend more of his allowance on capsule anime toys. Upon entering high school, the local cycling champ watches him climb the steep grade to the campus while singing, and challenges him to a race. The local cute-girl bike shop mechanic helps him out by setting his seat height properly and cheering him on, and he discovers that his weekly commute has made him pretty strong. From then on, he joins the cycling team (supported by the love interest bike mechanic) and learns about serious cycling.

It's corny, and it features situations that would never happen (no, you can't just slap a front deraileur on a single-speed commuter bike to turn it into a 2-speed), but you have to approach the series with the wide-eyed sense of wonder that a little kid would have. Imagine what it was like the first time you had a bike with gears, or saw that people would wear special shoes to ride a bike. That's how you have to approach the series.

The plots are simple, and the characters stereotypical, but the author/artist clearly loves bikes (the books are broken up by little segments introducing a Japanese pro bike racer, or teaching you how to pack a bike to bring on a plan, all illustrated better than most cycling books). What really brought me over is the sense of joy he manages to convey on the page:

There's a sense that it's not just a sport. (There's no cycle touring in the books so far, more's the pity)

The bad parts of the book: well, for one, it's entirely about an all-male high school bike racing team, with all that entails. I don't know if this book would make any girls excited about cycling. The training regiment the team sets for its freshmen contradict any modern theories about how to properly train and rest, and the characters are just that bit over the top. The books are easy reading, and the art style while verbose (the author will happily take 20 pages to depict 10 critical seconds where somehow the characters manage to have back-and-forth dialogs that would take you a few minutes to talk through at normal speed), is not bad. I'll probably go back to the library and pick up the rest of the series.

Recommended.

Review: Beat Saber (PSVR)

I usually have a rule about finishing a game before I write a review, but I'll make an exception for Beat Saber. The game's been around for a while, since VR became available commercially, and had never gone on sale, but since we had a rainy November, December, and January, I bought it at full price and was surprised at how much we played it.

It helps that there's a very gentle learning curve, and then the difficulty ramps up quickly in campaign mode. But all the songs are unlocked right at the beginning, which means you can switch to party or solo mode and play them without pressure, setting difficulties to whatever you want.

The PSVR version seems no different than the Oculus Quest version, though the presence of wires on the headset proper sometimes interfere with your flailing around. The songs themselves aren't very good, and the DLC songs don't feature any artists I'd ever heard of. But other than that, there's very little to complain about for this game --- I never got motion-sick, and it is amusing to see the kids pick it up and do well. Some of the other songs can give you a pretty tough workout --- so much so that the headset might be drenched with sweat by the end of a heavy session, which is great when it's raining outside.

Recommended.

Review: Words on the Move

After reading Bill Bryson's lackluster book about English, I reflected that John McWhorter's audible series about human language was still by far the most memorable and interesting lecture series I heard last year, so I checked out his book Words on the Move from the library in hardback form. The book did not disappoint.

One thing that his lecture series touched on was that people don't really enjoy Shakespeare, and in a section of this book, he discusses why: many of the words used in Elizabethan times have drifted so far from their original meanings that their use is incomprehensible when presented in speech without prior study and preparation. Ever the pragmatist, McWhorter proposes that we present Shakespeare in translated versions, translating Elizabethan vocabulary into their modern equivalents. The examples he provides are compelling. In a further illustration of similar effects in modern times, he points to Moby Dick's use of certain words (e.g., "wonderful", "pitiful", and "earnest") that have drifted so far that we could never use them in the same way today. "Fantastic" is another word that has also similarly drifted.

The mechanics of why that drift happens and how it happens is similar to the story of telephone: each generation of new learners of the language puts their own twist on the enunciation, and eventually vulnerable syllables and sound drop off and we go from pronouncing "mate" like "mahtee" to "mayte". Entire categories of meaning can also shift, like "meat" used to mean "food", and "wort" usesd to mean "vegetables". Each of those words became more specific to a category, and another word moved in for the generalized meaning.

Upon reflection, this is one of those books where I should have bought the Kindle version. There are too many examples for me to retain, and it's worth reading multiple times. Recommended.

Review: Nimona

I clicked through the sample of Nimona, and found myself enjoying it enough to keep reading, so I checked it out of the library and read it in a couple of hours. The art is simple, as is the story, so what keeps you going are the characters, their interaction with each other, and the plot, which foreshadows a big reveal. The plot revolves around Nimona, a little girl who shows up to apply for the job of being a Villain's sidekick. Of course, she's not what she seems and her presence serves to throw the balance off everyone in the kingdom.

Unfortunately, the reveal never really solves the mystery,  though the climax of the story works and we get an interesting ending that still somehow fails to satisfy. The book is mildly recommended for that reason.

Review: Invisible Influence

Invisible Influence is the a book about social pressure, and how peers and friends influence us. Many of the examples in the book are probably familiar to you, such as the experiment in which actors influence a subject into denying the evidence of his own eyes about the length of a line. Similarly, you might have read about how second born children tend to pick non-academic pursuits compared to their first-born siblings:

Elite women’s soccer players tend not to be firstborn children. Of the twenty-three players on America’s 2015 Women’s World Cup team, for example, seventeen have older siblings. (pg. 64)

What's interesting that I did not know was that the most common opening lines in people of my social class is not at all pervasive in American society:

One of the first questions people from middle- or upper-class contexts ask when they meet someone is “What do you do?” Among the middle and upper classes, one’s job is considered a defining element of who you are. People pick their jobs because it is something they are interested in and passionate about, and they see those choices as expressing them as a person. It’s a signal of their identity. But in working-class contexts, “What do you do?” would likely not be one of the first things you’d ask someone. Or if you did, it might offend people. Because, for many working-class individuals, their occupation is a means to an end rather than a signal of identity. It’s what they do to pay the bills. It’s what they do because they need to provide for their families. (pg. 98)

Even more interestingly, there's a segment about how the names of hurricanes influenced baby names:

When we sifted through all the data, we found that hurricanes influenced how people named their children. Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, almost 10 percent more babies were born with names beginning with a K sound (compared to the prior year). After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, names that started with a soft “ah” sound increased 7 percent. That’s thousands of babies getting certain names, just because a big hurricane happened to hit. (pg. 154)

Now these numbers are small (10% means in a class of 20, 2 more kids are named Kevin or Kara than usual), but they're also statistically significant examples of people getting influenced. On an individual level, of course, there's no way for you to know what the influence on you was.

By far the most interesting application of this is the impact on how we do performance evaluations:

Unfortunately, many companies and classrooms use a winner-take-all model. The person who makes the most sales this quarter gets promoted. The top student is named valedictorian and speaks at graduation. While this strategy motivates people who have a chance at the top slot, it often demotivates those who feel they have no shot at winning. Someone who has only half as many sales as the leader may think they are so far back that they just give up. Students that are getting Cs or Ds may feel similarly. Getting an A seems impossible, so why keep trying? ... rather than comparing people to everyone else, some organizations give people feedback that compares them to the person just ahead of them. Opower doesn’t compare people to their best-performing neighbor, they tell people where they are in relation to neighbors with similar homes. Just like basketball teams that were down by a point, making each person feel slightly behind increases effort and performance.(pg. 219)

All in all, the book was worth reading, though the interesting insights like the one above were much less frequent. But it's short, so you can skim through the stuff you already know and only slow down to read the stuff you didn't know. Mildly recommended.

Review: Resmed Airfit N30

I bought the newly introduced Resmed Airfit N30 from Lofta because they offered a 30 day money-back guarantee, and because they had a decent discount.

The new nasal-cushion style of mask fits very differently from my tried-and-true Swift FX nasal pillow. Rather than having nacelles that fit into your nose, these are effectively a block of soft silicone material with two cut-outs where your nostrils are. The effect is very comfortable, with no abrasion whatsoever.

The problem with these is that they work great for one night, and then by the second night the wear from the first night means that the cut-outs will loosen up and no longer give great therapy. By the third night, the cushion is completely worthless. If this doesn't happen to you (I might be particularly tough on masks), then these are worth a shot.

Not recommended.

Review: The Names of the Dead

The Names of the Dead is a shallow, made for Hollywood story. The plot is predictable, the characters stereotypical, and even the places and settings feel like Hollywood cut-outs rather than full blown characters. It's major virtue is that it's short, written transparently, and made for easy reading --- an airplane novel.

The story revolves around James Wesley, who starts the book off in jail, only to be freed because his wife was killed in a terrorist attack. That's implausible. Then his CIA operators pick him up so they can hill him, and by himself he attacks and kills them instead, walking away and being picked up by the daughter of another prisoner. Also implausible. Of course it's a woman, and not only does she help him, she (coincidentally) has an open schedule and chauffeurs him all over Spain.

The amount of implausibility in the entire plot was so large, and the attention to detail so little, that I was convinced that the author must have been American. Who else would be so ignorant as to not know the children under 4 travel for free on the Spanish rail system and wouldn't need a ticket? Even more salient, who else would, having gotten a woman who'd helped them out in trouble, would refuse to get all the help they could in rescuing her and instead go into a hostage situation outnumbered just so they could show how macho they were?

Not recommended.

Review: The Fifth Risk

I bounced off The Fifth Risk the first time I tried to read it. The opening always made me depressed and sad, since it was obvious to me that the Trump administration was going to do its best to destroy the good parts about American government. The Audible gave away The Coming Storm, and lacking anything to listen to for a bit, I audited it and was about to write a review when I noticed that it was actually an excerpt from the book. So I checked the book from the library once more, and this time finished it, mostly because I stopped reading it as a litany of issues with Trump's takeover of the government and read it as a paen to the unsung heroes of the government. For instance, the Coast Guard research scientist who not only wrote the papers describing how various objects would drift in the ocean, but after spending a night with the search and rescue operations team, designed and engineered a tool for search and rescue team to use during actual rescues, pulling in data automatically, and calculate the search area to focus searches on.

He’d done what he’d done without asking for much for himself. Back in 1984, as a GS-11, he’d been paid less than $30,000 a year. After thirty-five years he’d risen to a GS-14 and been paid a bit more than $100,000. He hadn’t even expected the attention of others, outside his small circle of search-and-rescue people. It was nice that Taiwan’s Coast Guard wrote poems about him. But that sort of thing never happened here, in the United States. The Partnership for Public Service had shocked him when they sent him the note to tell him he had been nominated for a Sammie Award. But that was it—even after the partnership had made a big deal about him in a press release. Art hadn’t heard a peep from the media or the public or anyone else. He half thought his local newspaper might make him Person of the Week. After all, his own daughter had been Person of the Week, when she had worked on a project to clean up the town. It hadn’t happened for him. (Kindle Loc 2664)

We get to see how the politicians and the press try desperately not to give governments any credit, especially in red states:

“We’d have this check,” said Salerno. “We’d blow it up and try to have a picture taken with it. It said UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT in great big letters. That was something that Vilsack wanted—to be right out in front so people knew the federal government had helped them. In the red southern states the mayor sometimes would say, ‘Can you not mention that the government gave this?’” Even when it was saving lives, or preserving communities, the government remained oddly invisible. “It’s just a misunderstanding of the system,” said Salerno. “We don’t teach people what government actually does.”
(Kindle| Location: 1,191)
The sums of money at her disposal were incredible: the little box gave out or guaranteed $30 billion in loans and grants a year. But people who should have known about it hadn’t the first clue what it was up to. “I had this conversation with elected and state officials almost everywhere in the South,” said Salerno. “Them: We hate the government and you suck. Me: My mission alone put $1 billion into your economy this year, so are you sure about that? Me thinking: We are the only reason your shitty state is standing.” (Kindle Loc 1154)
“I worked in the little box in the government most responsible for helping the people who elected Trump,” said Salerno. “And they literally took my little box off the organization chart.” This troubled Lillian Salerno, and not just because she’d spent five years of her life inside that little box. It troubled her because it made her wonder about the motives of the people who had taken over the Department of Agriculture. (Kindle Location: 1,215)

You get to learn the details of the food stamps program, and the statistics are incredible, basically a huge percentage (87% or so) are the elderly and children, people who cannot be expected to work for their food. Yet any Republican administration will insist on calling them moochers.

Americans have been sold a bill of goods about the incompetence of government, even though examples from the rest of the world have repeatedly shown that healthcare, however, can be run by the government far more cheaply and effectively at lower cost than our corrupt private system. This book is a good antidote for that sort of thinking, but unfortunately, the kind of people who most need to read it will never get to it. Recommended.

Review: The Mother Tongue

After reading The Body, I set off to read another Bill Bryson book, and found The Mother Tongue. Having bounced off several other books about the history of the English language, I thought Bryson might be good about it. I was disappointed in the first several pages, where he repeated myths about languages (such as the Eskimos having 50 different words for snow) that are debunked by John McWhorter's great lecture series.

When you're finally past the introductory stuff, Bryson shows that he does have a good command of the language and the history of it, and how diverse it really was:

he related the story of a group of London sailors heading down the River “Tamyse” for Holland who found themselves becalmed in Kent. Seeking food, one of them approached a farmer’s wife and “axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys” but was met with blank looks by the wife who answered that she “coude speke no frenshe.” The sailors had traveled barely fifty miles and yet their language was scarcely recognizable to another speaker of English. In Kent, eggs were eyren and would remain so for at least another fifty years. (pg. 59)

 How quickly the language evolved is quite striking:

When Chaucer died in 1400, people still pronounced the e on the end of words. One hundred years later not only had it become silent, but scholars were evidently unaware that it ever had been pronounced. In short, changes that seem to history to have been almost breathtakingly sudden will often have gone unnoticed by those who lived through them. (pg. 92)

 He also has interesting observations about how strange the English present tense is:

In fact, almost the only form of sentence in which we cannot use the present tense form of drive is, yes, the present tense. When we need to indicate an action going on right now, we must use the participial form driving. We don’t say, “I drive the car now,” but rather “I’m driving the car now.” Not to put too fine a point on it, the labels are largely meaningless. We seldom stop to think about it, but some of the most basic concepts in English are naggingly difficult to define. (pg. 134)

 English, unlike many other languages is largely driven by common usage, rather than committees or official academies. This is by and large a good thing, since as linguists have discovered, our use of language is instinctual, and prescriptive impositions upon English in the past (like many scholars who tried to use Latin as an standard would tell you never to split an infinitive, which of course, is worthless advice) hurt the language more than they help:

Considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning. Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say “you was” if you were referring to one person. It sounds odd today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer—surprise, surprise—is that Robert Lowth didn’t like it. “I’m hurrying, are I not?” is hopelessly ungrammatical, but “I’m hurrying, aren’t I?”—merely a contraction of the same words—is perfect English. Many is almost always a plural (as in “Many people were there”), but not when it is followed by a, as in “Many a man was there.” There’s no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar. They are because they are. (pg. 143)

 There are lots of language facts about English usage was interesting as far as the cross-pollination between England and the USA:

Other words and expressions that were common in Elizabethan England that died in England were fall as a synonym for autumn, mad for angry, progress as a verb, platter for a large dish, assignment in the sense of a job or task (it survived in England only as a legal expression), deck of cards (the English now say pack), slim in the sense of small (as in slim chance), mean in the sense of unpleasant instead of stingy, trash for rubbish (used by Shakespeare), hog as a synonym for pig, mayhem, magnetic, chore, skillet, ragamuffin, homespun, and the expression I guess. Many of these words have reestablished themselves in England (pg. 171)

Of course, we like to think of English as being popular, but in fact, that is not so:

 Most estimates put the number of native speakers at about 330 million, as compared with 260 million for Spanish, 150 million for Portuguese, and a little over 100 million for French. Of course, sheer numbers mean little. Mandarin Chinese, or Guoyo, spoken by some 750 million people, has twice as many speakers as any other language in the world, but see how far that will get you in Rome or Rochester. No other language than English is spoken as an official language in more countries—forty-four, as against twenty-seven for French and twenty for Spanish—and none is spoken over a wider area of the globe. English is used as an official language in countries with a population of about 1.6 billion, roughly a third of the world total. Of course, nothing like that number of people speak it—in India, for instance, it is spoken by no more than 40 or 50 million people out of a total population of 700 million—but it is still used competently as a second language by perhaps as many as 400 million people globally. (pg. 181)

 The simple fact is that English is not always spoken as widely or as enthusiastically as we might like to think. According to U.S. News & World Report [February 18, 1985], even in Switzerland, one of the most polyglot of nations, no more than 10 percent of the people are capable of writing a simple letter in English. What is certain is that English is the most studied and emulated language in the world, its influence so enormous that it has even affected the syntax of other languages. According to a study by Magnus Ljung of Stockholm University, more than half of all Swedes now make plurals by adding -s, after the English model, rather than by adding -ar, -or, or -er, in the normal Swedish way. (pg. 182)

 All in all, the book was good reading, but not nearly as accurate (especially when Bryson wanders off topics into discussions of non-English languages --- the man clearly has no background in Asian languages!) as I would have liked, which casts credibility on his other books as well. I think John McWhorter or The Language Instinct is a better introduction to the general subject of linguistics. But hey, at least I didn't bounce off it!

Review: Super Graphic - A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe

Super Graphic is designed by Tim Leong, who was the Director of Digital Design at Wired Magazine. It's not a book about super-heroes --- there's lots of material here about the Archie comics, for instance, Voltron, The Walking Dead, or even Manga, with a great illustration showing how much variety there is in Japanese comic books, as opposed to American ones.

There's even a great panel showing you how to read a comic book (which my friend Scarlet Tang tells me is not as intuitive as I thought it was, having grown up with them). Some of the charts are particularly clever, for instance, the two panels of pixel-art graphics of some well-known superheroes that double as a chart of the popularity of various incarnations of such heroes! The Venn diagrams are also particularly entertaining, and a fun timeline of which characters were dead and for how long. There's even a decision-tree diagram of how The Punisher reacts to someone greeting him in a bar.

The graphs and diagrams are in no particular order, and it's clear that the entire book was designed as a coffee table book. On a 10" tablet, it's not as striking, but if you view it on a 4K screen with plenty of room, the experience is quite unlike any other book I've read this year.

Unique, and certainly recommended, especially at the current sale price of $1.99.

Review: Gut - The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ

Gut is a strange book. The author, Giulia Enders has a fun sense of humor (I guess that's what it takes to be a gastroenterologist):

Japanese researchers fed volunteers luminous substances and X-rayed them while they were doing their business in various positions. They found out two interesting things. First, squatting does indeed lead to a nice, straight intestinal tract, allowing for a direct, easy exit. Second, some people are nice enough to let researchers feed them luminous substances and X-ray them while they have a bowel movement, all in the name of science. Both findings are pretty impressive, I think. (Pg. 19)

The book thereby proceeds in fits and starts, lurching from subject to subject in an unpaced fashion. (How much of it is because Enders is German and this book was translated from German I don't know)

But there are some good tidbits, like:

Of particular interest to those fighting fat is that olive oil also has the potential to help get rid of that spare tire. It blocks an enzyme in fatty tissue—known as fatty acid synthase—that likes to create fat out of spare carbohydrates. And we are not the only ones who benefit from the properties of olive oil—the good bacteria in our gut also appreciate a little pampering. (pg. 53)

Nevertheless, the book is full of practical tips, though because of the translation, some of it seems a little confusing:

One example of bacteria dilution in the home is washing fruit and vegetables. Washing dilutes most soil-dwelling bacteria to such a low concentration that they become harmless to humans. Koreans add a little vinegar to the water to make it slightly acidic and just that bit more uncomfortable for any bacteria. Airing a room is also a dilution technique. If you dilute the bacteria on your plates, cutlery, and cutting board nicely with water, then wipe them over with a kitchen sponge before putting them away, you may as well have licked them clean with your tongue. (Pg. 227)

 Nevertheless, I enjoyed some of the interesting stories, and many of the stories were new to me, such as this one:

A group of South Americans had to learn that through bitter experience. They had the clever idea of taking pregnant women to the South Pole to have their babies. The plan was that the babies born there could stake a claim to any oil future reserves as natives of the region. The babies did not survive. They died soon after birth or on the way back to South America. The South Pole is so cold and germ-free that the infants simply did not get the bacteria they needed to survive. The normal temperatures and bacteria the babies encountered after leaving the Antarctic were enough to kill them. (pg. 240)

Recommended.