Spain 2022: April 16th - Olot Hiking

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We were starting to wake up on a Spanish schedule. 8am instead of 6am, but today we had to take our proctor'd COVID19 tests. Arturo recommended that we took our tests the day before, so if we tested negative we had time to make alternative arrangements. That sounded smart. The tests were fairly straightforward, and I was quite happy I brought along my Logitech Brio camera, which had an adjustable stand which made it easily possible to point the camera at the test boxes. One of our tests were defective, missing the important liquid ingredient needed to make the test --- eMed's personnel immediately put a note in so that they could send us a replacement, and I was very grateful that I had opted to bring all 6 tests, rather than just the 4.

 Once we were all done with our COVID19 tests, we left the apartment, though not without mishap. This time, I stalled out at the garage exit, and it took several tries before I successfully exited the garage. Fortunately, there was no pressure, and we made it to Olot in no time, but all the parking lots were full. Fortunately, there were restaurants nearby with huge parking lots that they were happy to let us use in the hopes that we'd have lunch there.

Boen started being annoyed at having to walk so much again. To be honest I should have more sympathy. Every night, my Garmin was registering at least 20,000 steps! He was obviously at his limit. After the purchase of a coke and some calming down, Boen decided to hike with us, and we got a chance to explore one of the volcano calderas. When we were done nobody was hungry, so we decided to drive to Banyoles, where we bought takeout food and ate at the same bench Mike Sojka and I had eaten at 3 years ago.

The Pyrenees which were still snow covered were clearly visible from the lake, and I was reminded again how close we were to the French border. Girona was truly in an ideal location, with 2 hours driving to ski resorts, and of course the Pyrenees offered world class cycling, though perhaps not as good as the alps.

We returned to Girona, stopping at a big supermarket for many bags of the toasted Hazelnuts that Xiaoqin had discovered and enjoyed. They were cheap and very tasty, and having a car made it easy for us to load up! The problem was, they wouldn't last 2 weeks when we got home!

Back at the apartment, I was determined not to waste my last afternoon, and walked onto Girona to buy Xuxos for the kids. The town was very happening, complete with street vendors and people singing Arias on the streets, so when I came back I told everyone to get ready so we could go out walking. We walked past the Girona Cathedral and noticed that there were no lines, so we walked in.

You cannot be a D&D player and not be impressed by the Cathedral's artifacts. (Marc says the Cathedral is the second biggest in square area in Europe, the biggest being in Rome) They have a thousand year old book, 900 year old tapestries, all sorts of artifacts, and a beautiful courtyard, and of course lots and lots of stained glass windows and sarcophagus.

After the visit, we walked around town and got ice cream near the bridge nearest our apartment. With a calm river in the background it looked nothing short of beautiful.

Dinner was excellent and fast --- we were done by 9:00pm for a change, which was a good thing, since we had to drive all the way back to the Barcelona airport and return the rental car.

Review: A World Without Email

 I wasn't very impressed by Deep Work, so I skipped a few Cal Newport books but checked out A World Without Email when I heard his interview with Ezra Klein. I will note that even though I didn't recommend Deep Work, I do have a lot of sympathy for his idea that Slack and other contrivances of the modern world are the tool of the devil, and in many cases we'd all be better off without them.

A World Without Email has an incorrect title. Since most of the evils that used to plague email has now moved on to Slack and other instant messaging platforms.  The biggest contribution Newport made in this book is his coining of the phrase "Hyperactive Hive-Mind" to describe the default behavior of interrupt-driven slack-addicted employees and managers.

 The start of the book  is promising, since it points out that even managers/leaders in the hyperactive hive-mind suffer:

As the number of these messages increases, the manager becomes more likely to fall back on “tactical” behaviors to maintain a feeling of short-term productivity—tackling small tasks and responding to queries—while avoiding the bigger picture, George Marshall–style “leadership” behaviors that help an organization make progress toward its goals. As the paper concludes: “Our research suggests the pitfalls of e-mail demands may have been underestimated—in addition to its impact on leaders’ own behavior, the reductions in effective leader behaviors likely trickle down to adversely affect unwitting followers.” (kindle loc 528)

It even points out a particularly nice policy, which I thought was great:

 when Arianna Huffington’s company Thrive Global explored how to free its employees from this anxiety while on vacation (when the knowledge of piling messages becomes particularly acute), it ended up deploying an extreme solution known as Thrive Away: if you send an email to a colleague who’s on vacation, you receive a note informing you that your message has been automatically deleted—you can resend it when they return. (kindle loc 830)

 The disappointing part of the book is when Cal Newport suggests alternative to the hyperactive hive mind. The solution turns out to be... Kanban Boards! Agile/Scrum/Kanban workflows are well known in Software Engineering for years. In a small team of 3-4 people, I've successfully used Kanban boards and daily standups to organize and continually make progress. They are great. Similarly, his description of XP are also familiar, and in previous jobs I've frequently had to exhort team-mates to stop the infinite thread of doom on github/gitlab reviews and dive into pair programming sessions together. Async might be the epitome of remote work, but I've frequently found that synchronous meetings/pair programming/shared screen debugging sessions to be far more useful. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that even in a remote work environment, having everyone on the same time zone so that synchronous meetings/development/discussion can happen is too frequently under-rated as an important factor in team success.

I did, however, enjoy the discussions about various non-electronic mechanisms for implementing kanban and other agile workflows. At the end of the book, I realized that Cal Newport has answered the IT productivity paradox. There's nothing that modern electronic tooling that could not have been implemented with paper and pencil (and a little bit of walking around), which explains why all that investment in computer technology has not paid off whatsoever (and even gone negative --- my Ubuntu laptop crashes far more often than my Windows box, for instance).

This is a good book, however, for trying to get people to understand why we should change the default "Hyperactive Hive-Mind" workflow. All managers and tech leads should read this book.

Spain 2022: April 15th, Petradella, Cala Pedrosa

 

We woke up late, leaving the old town only around 9:30am, but it was an easy drive to Peratallada, a classic old town with a watch tower, intact moat, and other old buildings that had empty parking lots when we arrived but full parking lots when we left, along with a fair number of cyclists visiting. I noted that they had rural B&B/accomodations which might make for a nice rustic stay.

We left Peratallada around 11am, driving on towards the coast. Near the Sant Sebastian lighthouse, we saw parking spots and people getting off to walk. Well, of course we were going to do so. Boen once again complained about having to do more hiking, this time, having to be carried by Xiaoqin.

The view from just below the lighthouse was nothing short of astonishing, and reminded me how beautiful the Costa Brava area was, and how different it was from California. California's coastal towns sprawl and eat up huge amounts of real estate. Spainish ones are compact, and while built up, look beautiful and pristine, leaving much of the coastal environment relatively untouched.

At the tourist information booth, I picked up a brochure that noted that there was a hiking trail behind the lighthouse, and the walk to Cala Pedrosa was only half an hour. Walking around the lighthouse revealed a hotel/restaurant, a watch tower which charged admissions, and an archaeological site that depicted life here from pre-historic times! Once we got started on the hike proper, however, Boen balked and refused to walk. Xiaoqin opted to stay with him while Bowen and I headed on down.

We weren't at the beach for more than 15 minutes before Boen showed up with Xiaoqin, having been persuaded that it was more fun to hike down than to wait at the lighthouse for everyone. The kids loved playing on the beach, and there was even a restaurant serving meals. I hadn't intended to eat there, but I'd neglected to bring food, and I noted that there was a fixed price menu, so when Bowen asked to eat we sat down and ordered the fixed price menu (with a minimum order of 2 servings).

The waiter seemed exceedingly surprised that I could read the Spainish menu, but it was quite obvious what the food was (seafood soup or salad), and then either noodles or rice, and then desert. I told the waiter what I wanted and the food got delivered and we ate them in windy conditions.

The trail would go on, but the next stop was a 3 hour hike, so we opted to walk back to the car, and drive straight to Marc's place, where he took us on a hike to the local viewpoint, showing us where the cork trees were harvested.

We returned to Girona. There was a lot of police control because of the Easter parade, and the police questioned the presence of my car in old town until I showed them my remote and said I had underground parking at the place I was staying. After that they smiled and waved me through. Dinner was at Restaurant Normal, run by the same famous 3 brothers that Marc told us about the day before. I found the food a little disappointing, with the duck breast not as nice as expected, though the Beef Wellington was very good. On the way home, we ran into the Easter Parade, which featured people dressed up in costumes very similar to the ones made infamous by the KKK, but surprisingly have a completely different origin and religious purpose, with no known connections between them. Right at the end were the roman soldiers, with their armor polished to a shine.

We went to bed at a reasonable hour, and I reminded myself that the next day was our last full day, which meant that we should take our COVID19 proctor'd rapid tests in order to return home.

Spain 2022: April 14th - Girona Food Tour and City Wall Walk

 Boen had been coughing since we got to Barcelona, when I realized that I'd forgotten to pack his asthma inhalers. So when the morning rolled around I decided that since we had time before the food tour started, we should visit a pharmacy and get an inhaler. In the US, even with good insurance (ours doesn't have a deductible!!), our albuterol/ventolin inhalers would cost around $80 a pop. But we were in a country with the 7th best healthcare system in the world (the US sits somewhere around 22nd), and a walk down to the pharmacy when it opened got us a full Ventolin inhaler (no prescription required!) for 10 EUR and another 3 EUR for cough syrup, no insurance to deal with, and no deductibles to worry about. I reflected to myself that most Americans don't travel enough. If they did, there'd be widespread intense anger about an incredibly inequitable health system that not only drives people into bankruptcy, but creates unnecessary paperwork and stress even for those who are privileged.

The Girona Food Tour company is run by Marc, a Dutchman raised in Spain. We were the only persons on our tour, so effectively we had a private tour. Marc was a true foodie, giving us not just a food tour, complete with an explanations of the breakfast foods, and a visit to the market Mike Sojka and I had walked past multiple times but never went in, but also pointing to various structures and details in Girona that I'd walked past.

There was a visit to the chocolate shop, the ice cream shop, and high end places (including detailed stories of how a certain set of 3 brothers became the culinary talk of the town. Marc did a great job talking to the kids, and explaining everything in terms he could understand.

We ended up at a Paella place for lunch, with great seafood. We made a reservation for Saturday night.  Marc took us back to the office where we settled up the bill, and he gave us ideas for doing a visit to the coast the next day and possibly visiting his house.

After that, we went back to the AirBnB for a rest, and then did the classic Girona city wall walk. Boen, despite his cough being better with the Ventolin, protested about doing yet more walking, so I ended up carrying him up to the wall, but once on the wall proper he had a lot of fun and started walking by himself.

Xiaoqin had reserved a place at Divinum, a 1 star Michelin restaurant in Girona that Bowen was very excited about. This time, he was determined to eat everything backwards from the directions. He did that and claimed that the effect was just as good as following instructions.

The problem with Spanish dining hours was that by the time we were done it was midnight! We walked home, got the kids into bed, and then fell into a deep sleep.

Review: Packing for Mars

 I was inspired to read Packing for Mars while auditing How Science Shapes Science Fiction. Written in 2011, it's still reasonably up to date (the physics hasn't changed), and mostly explores what NASA has done in terms of preparing to go to Mars.

The other thing the book  is good at is that it presents a non-rose-colored view of what it meant to be an astronaut. As you can imagine, being an astronaut isn't actually that cool. First, you're in intimate quarters with your colleagues all the time with no privacy, and in  many cases stuck in a tiny room with no possibility of getting out, but you also have relatively little control over your life, with mission control constantly telling you what to do. Even worse, during key parts of the flight like take-off or landing, everything is automated anyway as the stresses of launch or re-entry mean that you can't possibly be in control of the craft.

 I once joked that nobody would write about adventurers going to the toilet, as there would be more interesting things in the plot. Well, it turns out I was completely wrong:

The fecal bag is a clear plastic sack, similar to a vomit bag in its size, holding capacity, and ability to inspire dread and revulsion.* A molded adhesive ring at the top of the bag was designed for the average curvature of an astronaut’s cheeks. It rarely fit. The adhesive pulled hairs. Worse, without gravity or air flow or anything else to foster separation, the astronaut was obliged to employ his finger. Each bag had a small inset pocket near the top, called a “finger cot.” The fun didn’t stop there. Before he could roll up and seal the bag to trap the offending monster, the crew member was further burdened with tearing open a small packet of germicide, squeezing the contents into the bag, and manually kneading the germicide through the feces. Failure to do so would allow fecal bacteria to do their bacterial thing, digesting the waste and expelling the gas that, inside your gut, would become your own gas. Since a sealed plastic fecal bag cannot fart, it could, without the germicide, eventually burst. (pg. 271)

 Turns out that rather than putting chefs or people who try to make food palatable in charge of supplying food to the astronauts, NASA chose to put a veterinarian in charge instead. The kind of food produced was therefore tasteless and apparently NASA spent a lot of fuel putting up food packages that came back down with the astronauts as nobody could eat it.

IRONICALLY, IF YOU wanted to minimize an astronaut’s “residue,” you could have fed him exactly what he wanted: a steak. Animal protein and fat have the highest digestibility of any foods on Earth. The better the cut, the more thoroughly the meat is digested and absorbed—to the point where there’s almost nothing to egest (opposite of ingest). “For high-quality beef, pork, chicken, or fish, digestibility is about ninety percent,” says George Fahey, professor of animal and nutritional sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Fats are around 94 percent digestible. A 10-ounce sirloin steak generates but a single ounce of, as they say in George Fahey’s lab, egesta.* Best of all: the egg. “Few foods,” writes Franz J. Ingelfinger, a panelist at the 1964 Conference on Nutrition in Space and Related Waste Problems, “are digested and assimilated as completely as a hard-boiled egg.” That’s one reason NASA’s traditional launch day breakfast is steak and eggs. (Pg. 300)

In contrast, the Russians just give their astronauts an enema the day of the launch instead. 

I also really enjoyed the section on the socialization of astronauts:

All through the space station era, the ideal astronaut has been an exceptionally high-achieving adult who takes direction and follows rules like an exceptionally well-behaved child. Japan cranks them out. This is a culture where almost no one jaywalks or litters. People don’t tend to confront authority. My seatmate on the flight to Tokyo told me that her mother had forbidden her to get her ears pierced. It wasn’t until she was thirty-seven that she summoned the courage to do it anyway. “I’m just now learning to stand up to her,” she confided. She was forty-seven, and her mother was eighty-six. (pg. 36)

There's also a ton of gruesome stuff about what happens to  bodies in the context of a spacecraft accident or failure, which nobody seems to talk about:

 Cruising speed for a transcontinental passenger jet is between 500 and 600 miles per hour. Do not bail out. “Fatality,” to quote Dan Fulgham, “is pretty much indicated.” A windblast of 250 miles per hour will blow an oxygen mask off your face. At 400 miles per hour, windblast will remove a helmet—as it did to Bill Weaver’s SR-71 copilot. His visor was blown open and acted like a sail, snapping his head back against the neck ring of his suit and breaking his neck. At 500 miles per hour, “ram air” blasts down your windpipe with enough force to rupture various elements of your pulmonary system. An unnamed test pilot mentioned in a paper by John Paul Stapp ejected at more than 600 miles per hour. The windblast pried open his epiglottis and inflated his stomach like a pool toy. (This worked to his advantage, as he had ejected over water. “The estimated three liters of air in the stomach substituted as flotation gear, which he was in no condition to inflate,” wrote Stapp.) (pg. 261)

All in all, if your child tells you that she wants to be an astronaut, this is a great book for her to read. The writing is humorous, covers all the topics you wouldn't have thought of when it comes to a year-long trip to Mars, though on one of the topics (Sex), even Mary Roach couldn't find actual researchers who would admit to any results. The thoroughly enjoyed the book and can recommend it to anyone. 

Spain 2022: Barcelona, Cadaques, and Girona

 For Spring break, 2022, we spent a week in Spain. It was too short a trip to bring bikes, so we did a bunch of walking in Barcelona, Cadaques, and Girona. This is the index page for the trip, with day by day report.

Trip Photos

• April 10th San Francisco to Barcelona
• April 11th: Barcelona - Mont Junc and the Beach
• April 12th: Barcelona to Cadaques
• April 13th: Cadaques to Girona
• April 14th: Girona Food Tour and City Wall Walk
• April 15th: Petradella, Cala Pedrosa
• April 16th: Olot Hiking
• April 17th: Girona to San Francisco

Spain 2022: April 13th Cadaques to Girona

 

The hotel breakfast was scrumptious, filling, and generous, and the kids were finally done with jet lag, sleeping until 7:30am. After breakfast, we packed everything into the car, moved it into the requested hotel parking space, and then went to exchange our electronic coupon for tickets at the House Museum. The house museum opened at 10:00am, but if you were there early, they'd let you in 10 minutes early. They let you in in batches, so as to not crowd the space, and masks are required indoors.

I'm not usually a big fan of museums, since for paintings, etc., I rarely feel the need to see the original artwork, and virtual tours instituted since the pandemic seem to be pretty good. But Dali's house was an exception, left the way he had it was an artist's working studio and home, and the level of detail was really cool to see, such as the mirror that enabled him to claim to be the first man in Spain to see the sunrise from his bed, the hoist and rig that enabled him to paint huge canvases while sitting down, and even the gardens and grounds.

The outside laundry drying area was interesting, with view cutouts into the wall that provided glimpses of the sea. Even his swimming pool was unusual and different, decorated with a combination of the artist's taste and child's whimsy. It was definitely worth a visit, with us watching the video documentaries in the outdoor viewing area for far longer than I would have expected.

After the museum, I decided we had time to go visit Cap De Creus, the place we had attempted to hike to the day before. I noted from a display in the hotel that while it was forbidden to drive there during the summer months, it was perfectly fine to do so now, so we drove the scenic, rugged road to the lighthouse, making a note to myself that it would have made a perfectly nice bike ride. Once there, we took a hike, exploring the coast. It had been forecasted to rain, but it was doing so in a very vague way.

Boen started complaining about the amount of walking required, claiming that the museum tour qualified for exercise. We finished the hiking by 1:00pm, but no one was hungry, so I decided to show everyone Llanca on our way to Girona. The drive was as exciting as the bike ride had been 3 years ago, but I don't know if Xiaoqin saw much of it as she fell asleep in the car. Bowen thought the coast view was impressive, however, and Xiaoqin woke up as we got to Llanca in time to find us a restaurant.

Restaurant Miramar turned out to be a 2 star Michelin restaurant that uncharacteristically had room for us at lunch! The menu was crazy expensive, but heck, it was raining and we had no place to go in a hurry, so we signed up for the experience. Bowen was very impressed by the choreography, and the initial opening dishes where they told him what order to eat what in, but was unimpressed by the entree. I myself have never been impressed as far as how good the food tasted by any Michelin restaurants I'd ever been to with the exception of Funky Gourmet, which unfortunately was a victim of COVID19. For my money, Kebab & Curry in Santa Clara probably has better food than any of the 1 or 2 star Michelin restaurants in the Bay Area. (Kebab & Curry was so good that Michelin had create a special no-star category for it and other restaurants like it) I explained to Bowen that Rosenlaui and that magical day in Les Rauffes in France with Mike Samuel were excellent culinary experiences, but were inaccessible to most people. Xiaoqin, of course, begged to differ and accused me of brain-washing my kids into thinking that cycling was far better than eating.

After lunch, we drove to Girona, where I was led down a street blockaded for construction in order to pick up my keys for the AirBnB I'd rented. The rental management company gave me incredibly complex directions for getting into the apartment. I'd recalled that old town roads were blockaded by bollards so car drivers couldn't drive into old town Girona. It turned out that those bollards were controlled by a remote control that owners of those apartments had and could be lowered. You then had to drive around 5mph until you got to the garage and then drop your car (in a leap of faith) down a steep grade into the basement parking. It was terrifying doing this in a stick shift, but you know what, a Dad who agreed to take his kids up the Stelvio this summer cannot be faint of heart, so I did it without a hint to my kids that this was difficult.

We then walked around town and went to Volver first for Empanadas and then to El Carrito Barri for steak. We bought yogurt and other sundries at the local supermarket. The total price was less than 10% of what we paid for Miramar but was pretty satisfying. We went to bed at a reasonable hour and anticipated the Food Tour I had organized the next morning.

Review: How Science Shapes Science Fiction

 How Science Shapes Science Fiction is a great courses program about how science is used and abused in science fiction. Professor Charles Adler clearly loves science fiction and is widely read and up to date on the science, which I thought was great. I found myself placing holds on books he recommended, as well as following along each topic, even the ones where I thought I knew something about with enjoyment.

There's one section where he talks about flight dynamics. There's a graph in this section that I'd never seen before, plotting the logarithmic weight, wingspan, and power required to achieve flight. There's a clear straight line, though with exceptions, such as human powered flight. He uses this to explain the trade-offs required in designing a dragon, which I thought was an awesome exposition on what thought processes has to go through when a writer designs a world if he or she really wants the world to follow known laws of physics.

What I loved about the great courses series (as opposed to say, Masterclass) is that the lectures are never shallow, and the professors never talk down to you. For instance, his discussion of Dune doesn't just go into the ecology of the planet (and the ecology of the Oregon Dunes where Frank Herbert was inspired by) but also what happened in Herbert's life that caused him to write the novel. Similarly, his discussion of on designed languages explores the origin of Quenya in Tolkein, and brought many details to life.

I found myself listening to this series in preference to my usual diet of podcasts, etc. That makes this series recommended and well worth your audible credit.

Spain 2022: April 12th Barcelona to Cadaques

 I was in my nightmare: the car was stuck on the slight upslope from the garage, and kept stalling out whenever I tried to put it in gear. Nothing I did seemed to work, even the old trick of using the handbrake to keep the car from moving backwards while I put it into gear.

Spain 2022: April 11th - Barcelona, Mont Junc and the Beach

 

Of course we weren't granted an exception by the jet-lag gods, and all woke up at 2am, took more melatonin and tried to sleep more fatefully.  My own Garmin said that I slept for 7 hours, proving that Garmin's sleep tracking might as well be science fiction. We ate breakfast, and in the morning light walked up the pedestrain path to Mont Junc, for which I had bought the first entrance tickets (10:00am) because I was confident of our jet-lag.

With plenty of time ahead of us, we made progress slowly, exploring every playground and seeing what the Barcelona playgrounds were like, and still made it to the castle at 9:30am, well before opening time.

The views from the castle were great, and we walked about halfway around the castle grounds outside before we were let in. The place was isolated and uncrowded, alleviating any concerns I might have had about COVID, though masks were still required.

After we had our fill, we hailed a ride to Cerveceria Catalana for lunch, a tapas place Xiaoqin had found from WeChat. The place was pretty empty when we showed up, but soon Asian tourists showed upone after another.

Boen had been asking for Creme Brulee for his birthday, and I told him the Creme Catalan was pretty much the same thing, since the French border was less than 2 hours drive away. He and his brother ordered one each and we re quite happy.

The day was young and I wanted the kids to get more sunshine, so we walked to the beach. I had forgotten my belt at home, so I took the opportunity to buy an obvious fake belt from a street vendor for 10 EUR, overpaying. There was actually a nice shop selling genuine leather belts with spanish leather for 33 EUR. In retrospect that was a better buy, but I still much prefer the fabric money belts that I've been using and don't see myself wearing the expensive Spanish leather on my travels or on any other occasion.

Dinner that evening was at a tapas bar called Quimet & Quimet, which was kinda exotic but the kids were kinda bored with it, so we ate a very light dinner before absconding to the nice gelato shop we had found the day before. We took more melatonin pills in what I was sure would be a lousy night of sleep.

Review: The Wanderings of Odysseus

 After reading Black Ships Before Troy, I decided I liked it enough to checkout The Wanderings of Odysseus from the library. This retelling of the Odyssey feels to me a lot less insane the the story of the Iliad, where at least motivations are somewhat good, instead of the insanity that seems to be what ancient warfare was.

The writing style was fairly transparent, and a lot of characters from the prequel showed up in the sequel. It's a great way to learn the story of the odyssey without having to read a poem.

Spain 2022: April 10th San Francisco to Barcelona

 The ultra cheap flights from years past were gone, but I spotted an Iberia Airlines direct flight in the realm of $700 a person for Spring Break. Spring break is too short to bring the triplet, but it was sufficient for Bowen, Boen and Xiaoqin to get a feel for Barcelona and Girona. I also decided that since I didn't manage to make it to Cadaques last time to visit the Salvador Dali House Museum, I'd make up for it this time. The Costa Brava had impressed me the last time as well, so I'd show it to them as well.

Our flight was late by nearly two hours--I would later find out that this was par for the course for Iberia Airlines --- the airline company, LEVEL, serviced Iberia's San Francisco to Barcelona direct flight, and was famous online for a level of disorganization that led to frequent trip delays and vocal unhappy customers.

I'd discovered that booking.com now offered a taxi service, which for what my AirBnB host told me, was comparable to just showing up at the airport and booking a taxi, but the taxi driver would show up and greet us as we exited baggage claim! We cleared customs with astounding efficiency. To my surprise, our vaccination cards weren't even checked! Arriving at the AirBnB, we had been told that the host would greet us, but instead her cleaning crew was responsible for letting us in and giving us the keys. The cleaning person was an obvious immigrant, and she kindly let us know the wifi password, gave us the keys, and then left us to our own devices.

The kids were very excited about the balcony, but we were all very hungry, so we immediately absconded to buy some groceries for breakfast (I was pretty sure we would awake long before any grocery stores would open because of jet lag), and then walked over to La Tasqueta de Blai, and had what would turn out to be the best tapas of the entire trip!

Next to the restaurant was a gelato shop, that was similarly excellent. We walked back to the apartment, took showers, and took melatonin pills before going to bed, hoping that the jet-lag gods would grant us an exception.

Review: A Thousand Brains - A New Theory of Intelligence

 A Thousand Brains is Jeff Hawkins' book about the way the neocortex of the brain works, and the implication it has for building machine intelligences. The premise of his book is as follows:

• The neocortex is uniform in structure and function, and under a microscope, no parts of the neocortex looks any different from other parts
• We can abstract away the non-neocortex portion of the brain as being unimportant for the development of intelligence
• The brain is a prediction machine (he previously covered this in an earlier book, On Intelligence), and is constantly predicting what will come next and comparing its predictions with the actual sensory input
• The unit of cognitive function in the neocortex is the cortical column
• All cortical columns behave the same way by learning and building a model of its inputs, but differ in function mainly in what inputs it is wired to. For instance, a cortical column wired to the eyes will be trying to recognize and build models based on vision, while a cortical column wired to more abstract thinking as input will be operating on abstract concepts
• Learning is the process of building a model. The only way to build a model of a physical object is to move around and explore it from multiple perspective --- consider how we build a model of a building by walking through its rooms, and how when you see a novel object you'll turn it and look at it from different angles
• Along with the model, there are reference frames, which tell you about the relationship between pieces of the model. You have a model of your own body, and the reference frames tell you about the relationship between your various body parts like fingers, which is how you can recognize a mug in the dark by touch or just by holding it, even without other inputs
• Recognition of an object or where you are is done by a voting process, a multi-sensory associative schema where all the salient evidence from your senses is brought together and the models that most closely match that input triggers the recognition and the prediction.
• The model of the world or object is what knowledge is, not words, not data structures or labels. When you're asked a question about an object, your model of that object is what you use in order to answer those questions
• Consciousness is a portion of your neocortex wired up to examine its internal state, with the ability to playback and remember what has happened in the past.

Hawkins (perhaps arrogantly) claims that this is the overall framework theory of how intelligence works, and that while the details might have to be refined, this framework will prove to be true. (There's substantial controversy about this claim, so take it with a grain of salt)

There are a few implications of this:

The neocortex never stops learning models. Every shift of attention—whether you are looking at the dishes on the dining table, walking down the street, or noticing a logo on a coffee cup—is adding another item to a model of something. It is the same learning process if the models are ephemeral or long-lasting. (kindle loc 1566)

 In particular, Hawkins claims that today's neural network models do not hold reference frames, which are key to knowledge, and therefore cannot learn and build models:

Robot designers are accustomed to using reference frames. They use them to keep track of where a robot is in the world and to plan how it should move from one location to another. Most roboticists are not concerned about AGI, whereas most AI researchers are unaware of the importance of reference frames. Today, AI and robotics are largely separate fields of research, although the line is starting to blur. Once AI researchers understand the essential role of movement and reference frames for creating AGI, the separation between artificial intelligence and robotics will disappear completely...Today’s neural networks rely on ideas that Hinton developed in the 1980s. Recently, he has become critical of the field because deep learning networks lack any sense of location and, therefore, he argues, they can’t learn the structure of the world. In essence, this is the same criticism I am making, that AI needs reference frames. Hinton has proposed a solution to this problem that he calls “capsules.” Capsules promise dramatic improvements in neural networks, but so far they have not caught on in mainstream applications of AI. (kindle loc 1904-1909)

 The implications of this for human learning is also significant. For instance, a lot of child development specialists criticize schools for not being good for learning, mostly because childhood has been transformed from being largely spontaneous and exploratory into something where kids are effectively jailed in a building and supervised continuously:

 from when she was five years old, Lenore would walk out of her house and walk to school on her own. It was about 15 minutes away. When school ended, Lenore would leave and just wander around the neighborhood freely on her own. She’d play games with the other kids that the kids would spontaneously organize, they’d run around, and she would go home when she was hungry.

That was how all childhood was, essentially, in the world at that point with very few exceptions. Children played freely with other children without adult supervision for most of the time. This was crucial for them. By the time Lenore was the parent in the 1990s, that had ended. She was expected to walk her kids to school, wait and watch them go through the door — even when they got pretty old — and to be there waiting at the gate to collect them at the end of the day. By 2003, only 10 percent of any American children ever played outdoors. So it essentially ended.

Childhood became something that happened either behind closed doors under tight adult supervision. And it turns out there are loads of things in this enormous and unprecedented transformation in childhood that are important for attention. Let’s give you a real no shit, Sherlock one: exercise.

Kids who run around can pay attention much better. The evidence for this is overwhelming. One of the single best things you can do for kids who can’t pay attention is let them go and run around. We have stopped that, right? Even before Covid, we stopped that.

We imprisoned our children. In fact, the only place where our kids get to feel they’re roaming around at the moment is on Fortnite and on World of Warcraft. We can hardly be surprised that they’ve become so obsessed with them. There are lots of other changes. Children learn when they play freely what’s called intrinsic motivation. (Ezra Klein interview 2022 02 11, New York Times)

So Hawkin's advocacy of learning through movement for AI can be compared to free range parents' advocacy of freedom for children to explore.  I found that fascinating to think about.

The last part of the book describes the way religion, right-wing theory, and other institutions have been constructed to hack the neocortex and use that to spread false believes. He notes that that false believe memes have to have the following characteristics:

1. Cannot directly experience: False beliefs are almost always about things that we can’t directly experience. If we cannot observe something directly—if we can’t hear, touch, or see it ourselves—then we have to rely on what other people tell us. Who we listen to determines what we believe. 2. Ignore contrary evidence: To maintain a false belief, you have to dismiss evidence that contradicts it. Most false beliefs dictate behaviors and rationales for ignoring contrary evidence. 3. Viral spread: Viral false beliefs prescribe behaviors that encourage spreading the belief to other people. (kindle loc 2758)

He applies this to vaccine denial, climate change denial, and the flat earthers. The final part of the book is a plea to teach kids about false believes and innoculate our children about how such false beliefs are harmful. Looking at the state of the world, I definitely believe that he's on the right track.

In any case, the entire book is well worth reading, and very much worth your time. I devoured it in a few evenings and didn't regret any time spent reading it.

 

The Sandman: Act II

 After listening to The Sandman, I used one of my audible credits and downloaded The Sandman Act II. There are two long story arcs, Seasons of Mists and A Game of You, and a large number of standalone episodes. As with the original comics, the standalone episodes are far better than the long story arcs, where Gaiman has a tendency to write himself into a corner and then allow the plot to peter out.

The sound production is outstanding, even more so than in the first part. One of the most consistent improvements in the audio/visual arts over the past 20 years has been the steady improvements in the depiction of non-Western cultures in media. We've gone from incomprehensible pidgin Mandarin in Firefly to The Sandman, where a childbirth scene in a Hong Kong hospital is depicted in completely correct and unaccented Cantonese. Color me much impressed.

As with the previous audio production, the big benefit of the audio presentation (aside from the obvious ones --- for people who can't read comics or who are visually impaired) is that Gaiman has no choice but to draw your attention to important details. That makes it hard for you to miss details that might be skipped if you're the type of person to read just all the words of the page and just glance at the pictures.

I can assure you that I'll happily jump in and pay for a month of Audible when Act III shows up and will just use an audible credit to get a copy of it. That's how good this series was. Highly recommended.

Review: A Man Called Ove

 A Man Called Ove is a book about a grumpy old man. At the start of the novel you're given a poor impression of him, but as the book progresses, you get more back story about how he came to be the way he was, and he starts opening up to people in his life, including the immigrants who move in next door.

To some extent, the book plays into the stereotype of typical men:

Whatever the case, he had eaten in advance so he could afford to let her order whatever she wanted from the menu, while opting for the cheapest dish for himself. And at least if she asked him something he wouldn’t have his mouth full of food. To him it seemed like a good plan. (kindle loc 1646)

There's the constant obsession with cars:

 Three years later Sonja got a more modern wheelchair and Ove bought a hatchback, a Saab 900. Rune bought a Volvo 265 because Anita had started talking about having another child. Then Ove bought two more Saab 900s and after that his first Saab 9000. Rune bought a Volvo 265 and eventually a Volvo 745 station wagon. But no more children came. One evening Sonja came home and told Ove that Anita had been to the doctor. And a week later a Volvo 740 stood parked in Rune’s garage. The sedan model. Ove saw it when he washed his Saab. In the evening Rune found a half bottle of whiskey outside his door. They never spoke about it. (kindle loc 2949)

 As entertainment goes, the book is a little cliched, and grants everyone involved a happy ending, but once in a while there's a gem:

“Loving someone is like moving into a house,” Sonja used to say. “At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather for its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it’s cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.” (kindle loc 3639)

 The book is easy to read, with very short chapters, and I found it enjoyable light entertainment. Don't expect anything serious and you won't be disappointed.

Re-read: Exhalation

 When Ted Chiang's Exhalation came out on sale, I bought it. Re-reading the book, I found myself really enjoying The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, the title story, and The Truth of Fact, the story demonstrating how writing changes the way we think, and how an accurate lifelog would impact the way we think by forcing us to confront ourselves in truth, and not allowing our malleable memories to lie to ourselves about who we are.

It's a great book. If you haven't read it, you should. And if you read it a while back, you owe it to yourself to read it again.

Review: Amazon Unbound

 Amazon Unbound is Brad Stone's follow-on to The Everything Store. It starts off where the earlier book ended, with a focus on the development of Alexa/Echo, the introduction of AWS and its successful attack on the database market, and of course, Amazon Prime, and various other products. It also provides a deep look at the people who ran the logistics behind Amazon.

What I didn't realize was that Amazon spends way more than Google on R&D:

In 2017, Amazon spent $22.6 billion on R&D, compared to Alphabet ($16.6 billion), Intel ($13.1 billion), and Microsoft ($12.3 billion). The tax-savvy CEO likely understood that these significant R&D expenses for projects like the Go store and Alexa were not only helping to secure Amazon’s future but could generate tax credits or be written off, lowering Amazon’s overall tax bill (kindle loc 974)

This is astonishing, since Google prides itself on being a technology company, and has been able to attract (and retain) engineering talent, while Amazon has never been competitive, especially when you take into account its stingy benefits package and back-loaded stock compensation package.

What's more, the book revealed a major event in which Bezos decreed that managers should have no fewer than 6 direct reports. This resulted in many upper managers stealing groups from lower level managers, causing a cascading scramble down the chain and the departure of many managers who had few direct reports:

 “When most big companies go through this, they usually announce they are going to have layoffs,” he said. “You can stick around or get a severance. But Amazon to this day never announced how many people they were trying to get rid of, so it created a culture of fear, which they probably prefer.” The informal, musical chairs–style reorganization allowed Amazon to avoid the internal and external stigma of announcing layoffs. (Kindle loc 3817)

 Stone doesn't mention that by forcing people to depart voluntarily Amazon also doesn't have to pay severance packages. Even in the case where they famously raised wages to $15/hour, there was an ulterior motive:

Earnings in Amazon fulfillment centers varied by state, but some employees were making as little as $10.00 an hour, which was above the $7.25 federal minimum wage. The S-team weighed a number of proposals from operations chief Dave Clark, including incrementally raising wages to $12 or $13 an hour. Instead, Bezos opted for the most aggressive plan, raising the entry-level U.S. hourly rate across the board to $15. At the same time, he compensated for at least part of the additional expense by discarding supplemental sources of worker income, such as stock grants and collective bonuses that were awarded to employees based on the performance of their facility. The move was tactically brilliant. Amazon had surveyed its warehouse workers over the years and found a large majority were living paycheck to paycheck and would rather have the instant gratification of up-front pay than stock grants. By getting rid of the grants, Bezos not only helped to partially offset the pay increase but eliminated another incentive for unproductive or disgruntled low-level workers to stay at the company for more than a few years. (kindle loc 5164)

The book's at its best when it dives into Amazon's logistical push and stuff that while you know had to happen behind the scenes, isn't widely reported. It's at its worst when it discusses Blue Origin (which is unrelated to Amazon) or Jeff Bezos' affair and divorce (which is subject to a lot of attention). I found it enjoyable and a compelling read, with the boring stuff easily skipped one chapter at a time.

I think there are better books about Amazon (e.g., Working Backwards), but still found this one worth reading.

Review: Hades (PC)

 In 2019, some colleagues of mine were raving about Hades. Not being willing to pay full price, I waited for a sale, and when Epic Games offered it for $16.24 and stacked a $10 coupon to bring it down to $6.24, I decided to pay for it, since the Playstation version was unlikely to drop its pricing for Hades to that level for at least a few years.

Hades is touted as a rogue-like. Randomly generated dungeons, limited number of lives, and restricted saving to prevent save-scumming. You start out with one weapon type, and each time you go through the dungeon, you have the chance to grab power-ups that can be used to unlock weapon types, special abilities, and even add rooms to the dungeons that have a chance to aid you rather than hurt you. As you progress, you unlock conversations with various characters, eventually being able to stack special effects as favors from Gods, and tackling tougher and tougher levels until you manage to hit and beat the final boss.

I'm sure other people are better at the game: it took me 51 runs before I managed to beat the boss. As you play the game you learn which effects stack well with which other effects, and which choice of weapons (you're incentivized to change weapons through a mechanic that rewards you with more persistent reward bonuses) demand the selection of which abilities, and when to pick trade-offs like increased wealth vs better power-ups.

The reason this game drew me in while other rogue-likes didn't is the increasing impact of your power-ups over time. As you accumulate them, you make further progress, even if you're unskilled at controller movement and couldn't dodge an attack to save your life. This meant that I was more and more willing to do another run since I knew it wouldn't be wasted. Furthermore, the meta-game was deep enough that I started approaching it as a resource allocation problem.

The kids loved the story enough that they became more interested in Greek mythology as a result. So now they know the names of Poseidon, Hermes, Thanatos, Eurydice, Orpheus, and Demeter. Many people claim that video games have no educational value, but my guess is those people are also the same people who claimed that comic books have no value, yet I impressed my GP teacher first day at RJC by naming the president of the USA during WW2, something I learned by reading a Batman comic.

I did the game through 10 defeats of Hades, and I still found it fun enough to want to keep playing. That's rare! I hardly ever revisit games that I "finished".

The game was fun, and I hardly ever finish games, so that means I'll put a recommended tag on this.

Review: Black Ships Before Troy

 I read on some website that Black Ships Before Troy was a good retelling of The Iliad by Rosemary Sutcliff.  I checked it out of the library since the copy that was illustrated by Alan Lee was long out of print and it was listed as a children's book. My kids ignored it until they started playing Hades, whereupon they suddenly became interested in Achilles, Aphrodite, Zeus, and other members of the Greek mythology. They even started calling Black Ships Before Troy the Hades book.

The art was not up to the standard I expected from Alan Lee. The story is well written, if simplified, but the content of the Iliad was unabridged. That means it's all there, the adultery, the horrific violence, cruelty, and inexplicable behavior (some of which is attributed to the gods). I read a couple of chapters a day to the kids, sometimes wincing as I did so, but they took it all in with aplomb.

I have no patience for poetry, so am unlikely to ever read The Iliad. If you're like me, this is by far the most approachable version and it's uncensored. Enjoy!

Review: Who Gets In And Why - A Year Inside College Admissions

 Who Gets In And Why is a book about the perennial topic of interest amongst Asian parents - college admissions. It takes a pragmatic, market-oriented approach to college, and basically divides colleges into Buyers and Sellers.

Sellers are the brand name colleges that everybody knows the names of, with big endowments and no problem getting students who are accepted to enroll. What this means is that those colleges do not have to discount their tuitions, and even if you got in, the price tag might be higher than you expect from all the marketing you hear about "Need-Blind" admissions:

the euphoria of Wellesley’s acceptance was followed by the disappointment of its financial aid offer. Grace didn’t receive a dime. In my terms, Wellesley is a seller. Nearly half of the students who are accepted end up enrolling. It’s prestigious enough and desirable enough that four out of every ten undergraduates pay its $75,000 annual price tag. As a result, financial aid from its $2.1 billion endowment is based mostly on need. (kindle loc 3664)

Buyers, on the other hand, can't count on a high number of accepts attending, and don't have huge endowments:

 Compare, for example, two private universities in upstate New York. Colgate University, with a sticker price of $72,000 per year, accepts just over one-quarter of applicants and spends less than 1 percent of its financial aid on merit-based discounts. Colgate is a seller. But just up the road in Troy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with a nearly identical sticker price, spends one-quarter of its institutional aid budget on merit-based aid. Yet both schools attract top-tier students with average ACT scores of 32...Buyer institutions don’t “craft” an incoming class the way sellers do. Buyers “make” their class by enticing students to apply, usually through an application process that is as simple as posting to Instagram. Then they enroll students by offering hefty discounts on their sticker price using what are euphemistically called merit scholarships. One of the schools at the fair, Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, hit their enrollment target of 640 incoming students in 2019 only by offering discounts that averaged around 70 percent. With that coupon, the typical freshman paid around $14,000 of Susquehanna’s advertised $48,000 sticker price for tuition. (kindle loc 840-849)

 Effectively, the entire college game in the USA is rigged in favor of the elite colleges. Of course, what that means is that the entire process is as opaque as possible, with some schools trying to become sellers by trying to reject more applicants. As a result, you get more students applying to more colleges, and that drives down admission rates:

Several urban universities, including New York University, Boston University, and the University of Southern California, also transformed themselves from locally focused commuter schools to international brands. This re-sorting is largely why today’s admissions process seems so intensely competitive and anxiety-ridden to parents who went to college in the 1980s. It’s not that there are so many more top-notch students applying to college; it’s that the top ones from Los Angeles and Chicago and Atlanta and Buffalo are now all applying to the same selective schools. And they’re applying to way more of them. (kindle loc 652)

 Selingo, of course, can't break out of his own American-centric and cultural blinders. For instance, he claims:

When the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans in 2019 about eight admissions criteria colleges should consider, grades and test scores topped the list, by far, well above athletic ability, race, or first-generation and legacy status. The reality is that by using only those two measures there are simply many more qualified applicants than there are spots at any selective school. Think about this: of the 26,000 domestic applicants for admission to the Class of 2019 at Harvard, 8,200 had perfect grade-point averages in high school, 3,500 had perfect SAT math scores, and 2,700 had perfect verbal scores. But Harvard had only about 1,700 spots to offer. (kindle loc 1379)

But of course, that's completely artificial: an examination of the way other countries' university system does admits, for instance, would indicate that the problem  is with the lack of nation-wide standardized testing that's rigorous. Few parents in China or India (or even Canada or Germany) would complain about their admissions process the way Americans complain about theirs. Their examination standards are high, and hardly anyone ever scores a perfect score on their exams. In fact, at the end of the book Selingo finally admits that the US system is inferior in both social equity and in the social goal of actually education all students who can contribute to society with the benefit of a college education:

In the United States, prestige in higher education is measured by how many students a university rejects. While the philosophy on Wall Street is that growth is good, within higher education the prevailing wisdom is that increased size comes at the expense of academic quality and reputation. But that philosophy isn’t shared across the globe. In Canada, for instance, the three most-prominent universities—the University of Toronto, McGill University, and the University of British Columbia—enroll nearly 150,000 undergraduates. That’s more students than the top twenty-five U.S. universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings combined. Even as the number of full-time undergraduates at U.S. colleges and universities has grown, enrollment at the nation’s most-selective and elite institutions has barely grown at all. There have been a few, modest exceptions. Stanford enlarged its freshman class in 2016 by about a hundred students. Yale expanded the class entering in 2017 by about two hundred students, the first expansion at Yale in forty years. They should expand the size of their incoming classes even more, and so too should the rest of the Ivy League and other top universities. (Kindle Loc 3993)

 There's a lot of detail in this book, some of which has also been leaked in recent years especially about legacy admits, the Asian penalty, and why athletic admissions are much more of a sure thing than regular applications:

For athletes, getting into a selective school is a matching game played with coaches rather than a lottery played with the admissions office. Athletes and coaches must first find each other and be a good match. Once that happens, the coach becomes the applicant’s guide and advocate, assisting him through the admissions process...Georgetown allocates about 158 slots out of 1,600 in its first-year class to coaches in twenty-two sports. Bucknell holds 170 slots out of about 970 seats in the class. The University of Virginia earmarks 180 slots out of 3,700 spaces in the class...At Amherst, another 60 to 90 admissions spots go to “coded” athletes with top academic qualifications, but who the report noted are “admitted at a much higher rate than the general admission rate” for nonathletes with similar qualifications. In all, that means Amherst dedicates somewhere around 157 admissions spots to athletes a year—when the total incoming class is only about 490 students. By making room for so many athletes, Amherst makes it so much harder for everyone else to get in. It rejects nearly 9,000 students from a pool of 10,000 applications. Like most elite colleges, Amherst is trying to become more racially and socioeconomically diverse. But its athletic teams are largely white and wealthy...no hook was stronger in assisting the prospect of an applicant than athletics. The study revealed that minority and legacy applicants got a thumb on the scale, while athletes received a whole fist. If the average applicant had a 40 percent chance of admission to one of the schools based solely on test scores and other variables, that student’s probability for getting in skyrocketed to 70 percent if he was an athlete. In other words, an athlete was about 30 percentage points more likely to be admitted than a nonathlete with the same academic record. (kindle loc 2377-2447)

And for those who're eyeing this approach, Selingo notes:

 The fastest growing high school sports for boys are fencing, volleyball, and lacrosse; for girls, it’s lacrosse, fencing, and rifle. (kindle loc 2437)

 All I can say is with this amount of insanity in the process, it's astonishing that US colleges still have the reputation they do, rather than becoming denigrated as the cesspool of corruption and outright bribery that they actually are.

In any case, the book was great and if you have kids who might attend college, it provides good tips and interesting insights.

Review: The Sandman Audible Audiobook

 I was skeptical of Amazon producing The Sandman as an audio book. Graphic novels are notoriously visual mediums if well written, and eliminating the visuals would be crippling, I thought. I expected a pale shadow of the original book, with much of the story abridged.

I was never so glad to be wrong. The soundscape presented is lush, and the story is completely unabridged, matching my memory of the graphic novels, and eliminating none of the kitschy DC Superhero references and cameos. The voice actors are great, and Gaiman himself serves as the narrator. The audio production was so good that I found myself saving episodes for the early hours of the morning so I could plug both earbuds in to get the full experience, rather than trying to listen to it in the car. Given that I treat most audio productions as multi-tasking fodder, this is high praise indeed.

The first act is a great deal, covering the first 20 issues of the graphic novels (the first 3 books as originally published as paperbacks). Gaiman wrote additional description of scenes that were provided as pure visuals. What's great is that unlike a comic book, where your eyes might slide over important details in the picture on first reading, Gaiman's additional descriptive narration ensures that you cannot miss details that he considered important.

I have friends who cannot read comics either because they're visually impaired, or because the skills required to read comic books is something you can't easily pick up as an adult for many. (It astonished me when people told me that they couldn't figure out which panel came next on a page) To those people, I can recommend The Sandman audible edition as an excellent production worthy of its runtime.

Highly recommended.