June 17th: Scuol to Nauders

My 2018 tour with Bowen featured a fateful promise that I would come to regret: breakfast in Austria, lunch in Switzerland, and dinner in Italy. When I planned this year's tour, the trip from Scuol to Nauders looked to be short, and I looked for lodging on the Italian side, but couldn't find any! It turned out that I had made a mistake on booking.com --- rather than keeping everyone in one room, I should have looked for 2 rooms, which would have opened up lodging options. But I might not have tried very hard --- memories of that painful day in 2018 had left a deep impression on me, and in fact that morning when I set out from Scuol, I felt like I needed a rest after 2 hard days in the mountains without prior acclimatization.

The descent from Scuol down to Martina was fast, with some pedaling required here and there, but in the cool still air of the morning very pleasant, though once in the shade the kids complained about being cold and put on their down jackets.

Once down in Martina, we made a right turn onto the Nobertspass road, and proceeded up the numbered turns (which weren't too many). Cyclists marveled at seeing the triplet bike, and would ask us for photos. One cyclist from Germany said she was headed to Castelrotto that day. Castelrotto was famous but it looks very generic from the bike path, which is why I'd never thought to stop there.

Being relatively fresh and not exhausted by extreme efforts to make it to Martina, we made easy and short work of the pass and made it to Nauders at 11:00am. Upon arrival at the hotel, we were too early for them to give us our rooms, but said we could take the cable car up to the Mutzkopf, where a hike could take us to a couple of lakes.

We walked to the cable car to discover it was an open air chair-lift which took mountain bikes. In fact, the ticket agent was nonplussed when we showed up asking for lift tickets without bikes. It then dawned on me that we were still wearing bike clothes, but of course, our bikes were not suitable for extreme downhill and I hadn't thought to rent mountain bikes in town! I was surprised that there wasn't a mountain bike rental place right next to the lift!

We were positioned to sit on the chairs and then sat down. Of course I immediately committed a boo-boo, which was that I hadn't noticed the chair restraints which was a safety bar overhead that you had to pull down after the chair was in flight, and so sat on the entire ride thinking about how amazing it was that nobody had fallen off the lift while drunk and sued the entire outfit out of existence for having a lack of restraints!

The hike itself was pleasant enough, but nothing spectacular after we'd visited Scuol. I'm sure if we had more time, energy, or better hiking shoes we could have done something higher and more ambitious, but it was a warm day and there were many tree houses to distract the kids until we got to Schwazersee. We didn't feel the need to visit other lakes, and so started heading back.

One interesting feature of the European culture is the widespread acceptance of smoking. When we got back to the lift, the place was swamped with cyclists, but you could smell the tobacco smoke in the air. Whereas you'd almost never see a mountain biker light up in California, apparently mountain biking culture in Austria was such that it was more than acceptable to burn up your lungs prior to a ride. After all, you don't have to pedal uphill --- the chairlift is there to do the climbing for you!

 We returned to the hotel, and I discovered how rare GoPro dealers were in Europe. I expected to be able to find a bike mount for the GoPro at any bike shop, but none of the shops were dealers and hence didn't carry any accessories! The hotel did serve a half pension dinner, so I was once again able to eat my fill, especially from the salad buffett.

I had thought about how we were going to tackle the Stelvio, and at dinner I unveiled my plans: at Prato Allo Stelvio, I would use the e-bike to deliver luggage to the hotel first, and then come back and ride the triplet up the mountain without luggage. I could do that for all 3 days of the Stelvio climb if necessary, and this approach would raise the success of our attempt to climb the Stelvio dramatically! I went to bed much more confident that we would be able to execute this plan.

June 16th: Davos to Scuol

 "Now it's raining really hard!" declared Bowen. "Yeah, I don't know if we're going to make it. Let's at least sprint for that cafe over there!" We parked the bike and ran indoors before sheets of water came down from the sky, along with lightning and sounds of thunder.

June 15th: Pragg-Jenaz to Davos

 Boen had started coughing at night, dashing my hopes of making it to Austria or Italy before having to hunt down his medication. I spoke with our hostess, and after some misunderstanding, established that her doctor right down the street was her kids' primary care physician and they had Ventolin in stock. We were warned that we would have to pay cash since we were from out of the country, but anyone who's faced the US medical system will discover that European healthcare system with no surprise billings and an upfront declaration of cost is a tiny mosquito bite compared to the hummer-sized disaster that many doctor visits in the US can generate.

It started raining, so we started bundling the kids up in rainjackets, making them take off the pants they had already put on. In the ensuing confusion, we left Bowen's hiking pants behind. We also somehow managed to lose the pin that was on Xiaoqin's GoPro bike mount, rendering her GoPro useless until we got to Bolzano.

At the doctor's office, we showed them photos of our US medication, and they immediately sold us Ventolin and Seretide, the Swiss equivalents of Ventolin and QVAR, without a doctor visit or consultation. My guess was since it was a doctor's office they didn't have to jump through the hoops that a pharmacy would have had to do. The nice thing about being in a small village is that the doctor's office will also stock all the medication you need, so there's no need to run from the doctor's office to a pharmacy.

From prior research on the internet, I'd read that past Kublis, the bike path degenerates and becomes a disaster for traditional trekking bikes, which meant bad news for the triplet. Despite this, we took a wrong turn and ended up on a nasty dirt bike path that I could barely ride up with the kids dismounted. Of course, that Daddy gets to ride and kids have to walk made the kids determined to stop using the bike path and ride the steep pavement up to the main road, which actually had a reasonable grade!

The road eventually met up with what looked like a limited access (no bikes allowed) road! We puzzled over it by the side of the road for a while, until a kind motorist stopped, got out of her car, and told us that if we went down the other fork of the roundabout, there was a bike path which was signed that would take us to Kloster. Sure enough, that bike path sign was there, but we were glad she stopped and told us to look for it because we might not have seen it otherwise. I was learning that bike path signage is just not a priority, even in Switzerland which otherwise has no issue spending money on infrastructure.

The bike path took a detour and showed us a gorgeous waterfall in the shade before we rode more uphill into Kloster where after a few wrong turns we ended up at Kloster-Platz at the supermarket right next to the train station for lunch. After lunch, Xiaoqin and Boen decided to take the train to Davos, while Bowen and I would attempt the ride over Wolfgang pass, which I'd never done before.

The ride over Wolfgang pass has a deceptive quality to it, which is that at the decision point where you have to decide between the dirt road and the official highway, most of the traffic on the road had been drained over to use the tunnel under Fluela pass. So at that point, you would be fooled into thinking that since traffic was light, it was ok to take the road. But soon after that, the traffic from the tunnel now joins the main highway, and you are completely committed to riding the road at that point, since your hard earned ascent would have to be undone! So Bowen and I fell into this fatal trap. To rub salt into the wound, there was road construction in the final kilometers of the climb, so we had to put up with dust, dirt, and rough roads!

The descent from Wolfgang pass over to Davos was short --- only 100m, though we got a nice view of Davos Lake, and a diversion down to the lake as part of the bike path to get us out of the heavy traffic. We made it down to the serviced apartments just as Xiaoqin and Boen had gotten the keys, so we got everyone settled in --- the apartment manager had given us 2 rooms in 2 different buildings, parked the bikes, took showers, used the washing machine (the last time we would get a chance to do so on the trip), and then upon learning that there was a Fondue restaurant, the kids demanded that we go there.

The ride to the Fondue restaurant was beautiful, reminding me how even the most mundane ride in Switzerland is gorgeous, taking us past streams and fields. The dinner was OK --- we did finish most of the Fondue, and bought breakfast for the next morning from the supermarket next door before returning. The forecast was for rain the next day, but with increasing possibility of sunshine during the day. I got the laundry out and dried, and slept decently, waking up once again at 2am but no longer distressed and sleep deprived.

Review: Continental GP5000 700x25

 I've avoided Continental tires on my bicycles for years and years, since every sidewall blowout I saw at the bike club were from Continental tires. I ran Gatorskins for a couple of tours on my tandem, and they were hard wearing tires (I never wore one out before the sidewalls began to look nasty), but Michelin Pro tires were cheaper and didn't have sidewall blowouts.

The good Michelins weren't available in 700x32, so when the GP5000s became available in 700x32 size I mounted them on the triplet before a tour and road them. One tire died from a sidewall blowout, but the other wore through normally. Then Michelin raised the prices on its road tires to a nose-bleed $55/tire from my usual sources (and believe me, as a cheap skate I buy them from far and wide to avoid paying consumer prices), while Continental tires could be had for around $40 each if you shopped carefully.

I ended up with the GP5000 700x25s, and ran one long enough to wear out a tire. First of all these run narrower than the equivalently sized Michelins (which don't matter much except that the Michelins top out at 25mm). Despite abuse, their sidewalls don't seem to be more fragile than the Michelins --- the high end GP5000s are made in Germany, rather than somewhere in Asia, which means that they're constructed differently than the Gatorskin or lower end tires.

I finally wore one out after 4350 miles, 2105 on the front and 2245 on the rear. By comparison, my last Michelin went for 3921 miles (don't know the exact mix of front and rear), so approximately 11% more tire life for a 34% reduction in cost, which makes the GP5000s a much better deal than the equivalent Michelins.

After I run out of 700x25s, I expect to switch to the 700x28s on the Continentals to get wider tires on my single. I would expect increased tire life, except that the tread depth on the 28s appear to be thinner! The 25mm GP5000 have 0.2mm more tread rubber than the 28mm, which explains why the 28mm tires are only 14g heavier than the 25mm tires. By contrast, the 32mm tires are only 0.1mm less thick than the 25mm. Looking at the chart, it looks like the GP5000 25mm tires actually  measure 26mm, so I guess what that means is that the Michelin 25s actually are more like 27mm.

Regardless, the numbers don't lie. The Continental GP5000s are a better deal and at least equivalent quality to the Michelins. I expect to be running these for the foreseeable future. Eventually I might decide that the 45g difference between the 28s and the 32s to be not worth the bother and just run 32mm tires on all the bikes, but I fear is that if the tread lasts too long I'll once again run into the dreaded sidewall blowout.

In any case, I think these will be my standard tires for the foreseeable future. Recommended.

Tour of the Alps 2022

 From June 13th to July 2nd, we executed a Tour of the Swiss, Austrian, and Italian Alps and Dolomites. The ride encompassed 437 miles, and 25,994' of climbing. We had 2 flat tires, 3 train transfers, 1 bus transfer, and 1 private taxi transfer (which we turned into a hiking day). We had one day of riding in the rain, and 3 days of lost riding to food poisoning. We also took a voluntary zero day, which was spent swimming at Lago di Fie. After the trip, for an extended epilogue, we visited my favorite hotel in the alps, Hotel Rosenlaui (the first for Bowen since he was a baby, and the first for Boen ever), where we did a couple of days of hiking and site-seeing, with Savitha tagging along. This was both Boen and Xiaoqin's first bicycle tour in the alps proper.

This is the index page for the day by day trip report, as well the consolidated picture album and equipment reviews.

Pictures

• Full Resolution Pictures

Day by Day Trip Reports

• June 12th: Prologue
• June 13th: Opfikon to Weesen
• June 14th: Weesen to Pragg-Jenaz
• June 15th: Pragg-Jenaz to Davos
• June 16th: Davos to Scuol
• June 17th: Scuol to Nauders
• June 18th: Nauders to Gomagoi
• June 19th: Gomagoi to Hotel Franzenshohe
• June 20th: Hotel Franzenshohe to Hotel Alpenrose
• June 21st: Hotel Alpenrose to Vetzan
• June 22nd: Vetzan to Bolzano
• June 23rd: Bolzano Rest Day (Lago di Fie swimming)
• June 24th: Taxi Transfer Bolzano to Arraba
• June 25th: Arraba to Cortina D'Ampezzo
• June 26th: Cortina D'Ampezzo to Bruneck
• June 27th: Bruneck to Sterzing
• June 28th: Train Transfer Sterzing to Innsbruck
• June 29th: Train Transfer Innsbruck to Landeck, Bus Transfer Landeck to Galtur
• June 30th: Galtur to Feldkirch
• July 1st: Feldkirch Food Poisoning Layover
• July 2nd: Train Transfer Feldkirch to Zurich
• July 3rd: Epilogue - Rosenlaui's Romantikweg
• July 4th: Epilogue - Reichenbach Falls, Aareschlutz, Rosenlaui Schlutz
• July 5th-6th: Epilogue - Luzern/Zurich/San Francisco
• Reflections

Equipment Reviews

• Moosetreks Feedbag
• GoPro Hero 8
• Ortleib Backroller Pro Plus Panniers
• Gorewear C5 Shakedry 1985 jacket
• LowePro GearUp Wrap/LowePro GearUp Mini Pouch
• Granite Talon Tyre Levers with Master Link Pliers
• Amazon Basics Medium Point and Shoot Camera Case
• USB C to Micro USB Adapters
• Walz Cap
• Pixel 6 Touring Review

June 14th - Weesen to Pragg-Jenaz

 I was still jet-lagged, waking up at 1am, which wasn't actually that bad, since I could go downstairs, take all the laundry up, and hang it up so everything was dry by 8am! I then took another melatonin pill, but still had trouble sleeping for another couple of hours. The supermarket was closed by the time we were done with dinner the night before, so we didn't have anything available for breakfast except for the leftover snacks, clif bars, and Gatorade chews brought with us from California. I ate some of the leftover snacks and bread, and the kids would claim they weren't hungry, but by the end of the day I would discover that nearly all of our cycling food was gone, meaning that they had made use of their feedbags and were chomping away all through our ride.

Xiaoqin had neglected to bring a second pair of bike shorts and decided to borrow mine instead. (Fortunately, my shorts from the previous night had dried enough that I could wear it) I guess being married means that you need to share bike shorts as well, in sickness and in health!

It had been 12 years since I'd last been in the area, but my memories of the surprisingly non-flat ride along Walensee were born out. There was even a climb when we had to get off the bike and walk, while Xiaoqin's e-bike had no problem managing the climb. After that, the ride along the lake was beautiful, though the water not as calm as I'd hoped, with a breeze blowing through creating ripples.

In downtown Walenstadt, I found an open bike shop just across the street from the water fountain where I was filling up my water bottle, and walked into it hoping to get help. The mechanic spoke even before I opened my mouth, "I'm so excited about your bike even before you walked in!" he declared. With that, when I showed him my front derailleur and explained what happened with TSA, he clucked and declared, "You should be so mad --- this is not OK. I hope I have a long enough cable to fix this." When I showed him the DaVinci cable splitters, he immediately figured out how they worked, and had me moved the bike to his shop so he could do an installation. I asked Xiaoqin to take this moment to buy herself a new pair of bike shorts. "Couldn't I just keep using yours? They fit so nicely!" "But on a rainy day they won't dry in time and both of us will be stuck with wet shorts!" The one time I'm authorizing my wife to pay expensive swiss prices for clothing is the one time she's reluctant to do it, but she eventually agreed that she needed a second pair of shorts.

After that, it was a flat ride up the valley towards the Rhine River, where we would follow the Rhine to Bad Ragaz and Landquart before starting the climb over to Jenaz. There's an alternate route that would take you over to Maienfeld, but I noted that it introduced additional climbing on a day when we didn't need any. In fact, upon leaving Walenstadt we immediately faced a climb which exercise our newly installed front derailleur, which worked to perfection!

In Landquart, I got hungry and we stopped by a migros to buy snacks, cherry tomatoes, ice cream, chocolate, and (disappointing to Xiaoqin), hazelnuts that turned out not to be roasted and therefore weren't very yummy. Coming out of Landquart, the bike path turns into dirt, but it was only for a couple of kilometers before dumping us out onto a frontage road along the river. This was a common place for kids to ride --- we saw a group of school age children riding along the same route, and the triplet got plenty of stares.

The climbs were occasional, coming in between towns, but then flattening out in a series of stair steps. Riding into Pragg, I noted that the Hotel Sommerfeld looked like it was closed, which explained why I couldn't get reservations there instead of having to book an apartment. I wasn't too sorry about that --- the apartment had a washing machine, and I liked the prospect of not having to do laundry for the first 3 nights of the tour.

We got to the apartment and had a hard time communicating with the apartment owners, but it turned out that they'd left the keys for us, so after that phone call we managed to get ourselves installed and get all the equipment charging. The owner told us that none of the restaurants in town were open, so I had to head down the hill with Xiaoqin's e-bike to buy groceries.

There wasn't really much to do other than that, so after using the washing machine and hanging everything up we just went to bed!

Review: Doctors - The History of Scientific Medicine

 I listened to Doctors - The History of Scientific Medicine on a travel trip while flying between continents. It was a great listen, covering early medicine (who was Hippocrates, who was Galen, and how did Galen set back medicine for 1200 year) to the various folks who invented antibiotics, anesthesia, and surgery. For each person selected, you get a biography, context about how he or she performed the discoveries, and the impact of the procedure, concepts, etc. Some of the descriptions can become graphic, so be warned, but it's well worth getting over the squeamishness to get into how the modern medical world became the way it was. I listened to it all in one go because it was so good! 

June 13th - Opfikon to Weesen

 

"I am very sorry," the hotel receptionist said, "But we cannot allow you to leave your bike cases here for so long --- luggage service is only meant for a day, not for 20 days!" "But I sent messages confirming that you will let me store luggage here?!" "We have no room."

June 12th - Prologue (Zurich)

 I was frantic - there was only one middle piece derailleur cable. I checked both Trico Ironcase boxes, and then I checked the checked baggage. There was no cable. I was sunk. I cursed myself for not stowing the middle piece cables properly. I cursed the powers that be at TSA that routinely opened bike boxes without taking care that all the pieces in the bike box stayed inside the bike box. But it was Sunday, and none of the bike shops were open. I was distraught.

Review: Upheaval

 Upheaval is Jared Diamond's history book about how nations respond to crisis and constraints. It's an unusual book for an academic, since it's written entirely from a personal perspective, rather than an academic treatise. It covers seven countries: Finland, Japan, Chile, USA, Germany, Australia, and Indonesia, which are all related only by Diamond's personal connections, history, and other relationships. What's even stranger is that the framework Diamond uses is that of an individual facing a personal crisis, be it externally imposed (the Cocoanut Grove fire) or personal identity/mid-life crisis, such as Diamond's own crisis in graduate school, where he almost abandoned his PhD to attempt to become a translator for the UN.

Having said that, I really enjoyed the book precisely because of this personal perspective. For instance, in his section on Finland, he not only describes Finland's winter war with Russia, he also describes his own faux-pas, expressing his incredulity that Finland felt the need to appease Russia to the point of self-censorship in the press, when he felt certain that the US wouldn't allow Russia to invade. The fact was that during the Winter War, Finland got zero help from allies and were left to fend for themselves with massive proportional casualties for its population. Without understanding of this, it's nearly impossible to understand Finnish culture.

The entire book consists of insights like this, covering the Meiji revolution, Pinochet's dictatorship of Chile (and how surprising it was to both the CIA and the Chileans themselves). Similarly,  his description of  Australian history covered its slow realization that it had interests separate from Britain, and his coverage of Germany described how Germany (unlike Japan) faced up to its role in 2 world wars and actively apologized with sincerity about its actions.

The direct relevance of this book is pretty obvious from Diamond's telling. The US is in denial about it's flaw and relative decline, choosing to blame other countries or external factors for its problems:

the major democracy with the greatest inequality is the U.S. That’s been true for a long time, and that inequality of ours is still increasing. Some of those measures of rising American economic inequality have now become frequently quoted and widely familiar. For instance, the share of unadjusted national income earned by the richest 1% of Americans rose from less than 10% in the 1970’s to over 25% today. Inequality is rising even within the ranks of rich Americans themselves: the richest 1% of Americans have increased their incomes proportionately much more than the richest 5%; the richest 0.1% have done proportionately better than the richest 1%; and the three richest Americans (currently Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett) have combined net worths currently equal to the combined net worths of the 130 million poorest Americans. The percentage of billionaires in our population is double that of the major democracies with the next highest percentage of billionaires (Canada and Germany), and seven times that of most other major democracies. The average income of an American CEO, which was already 40 times the income of the average worker in the same company in 1980, is now several hundred times that of the company’s average worker. Conversely, while the economic status of rich Americans exceeds that in other major democracies, the economic status of poor Americans is lower than that in other major democracies... Within the foreseeable future, the U.S. will experience urban riots in which plastic strips of police tape won’t suffice to deter rioters from venting their frustration on affluent Americans. At that point, many affluent Americans will receive their own personal answer to the question, “Does it cause any harm to rich Americans that they live surrounded by poor Americans?” One answer is: yes, it causes personal insecurity... Despite our growing population, state funding of higher education has grown at only 1/25th of the rate of state funding for prisons, to the point where a dozen U.S. states now spend more on their prison systems than they do on their systems of higher education...All schoolteachers in South Korea, Singapore, and Finland come from the top third of their school classes, but nearly half of American teachers come from the bottom third of their classes. In all my 53 years of teaching at the University of California (Los Angeles), a university that attracts good students, I have had only one student who told me that he wanted to become a schoolteacher. (kindle loc 4962-5088)

 As the history of the various other countries describes, the denial of problems and blaming of external factors does not have a good outcome. He also observes something that I observed as well in American society, not only with regards to itself, but many American corporations also have it: 

belief in American exceptionalism translates into the widespread belief that the U.S. has nothing to learn from Canada and Western European democracies: not even from their solutions to issues that arise for every country, such as health care, education, immigration, prisons, and security in old age—issues about which most Americans are dissatisfied with our American solutions but still refuse to learn from Canadian or Western European solutions. (kindle loc 5885)

I remember as an engineer asking a Google VP during a Q&A as to whether Google felt that it had anything to learn from other companies that had grown quickly. The answer that came back was an assertion that Google had such scale that no other companies had anything to teach it. I would read later on a description by a Microsoft PM that Microsoft had such scale that a reduction in the size of the postcards it sent materially affected revenue significantly because of postage. It's pretty clear that the lack of humility seems to be prevalent throughout American society amongst its powerful and high status folks.

For this insight and many others, I consider this book well worth your time. I learned much about Indonesia, Australia, Finland and Chile that I wouldn't have, and I never would have had the time to separate research so many different countries. Recommended.

 

Review: Rationality - What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

 Rationality is Steven Pinker's book about living in a post-truth era. He starts by giving an overview of logic and syllogisms, a rigorous, mathematical approach to determining the truth of statements. This is all well and good, and then notes that humans aren't really built to actually use those tools:

Another cause for gloom is that for all the talk of a replicability crisis, the myside bias is only too replicable. In The Bias That Divides Us, the psychologist Keith Stanovich finds it in every race, gender, cognitive style, education level, and IQ quantile, even among people who are too clever to fall for other cognitive biases like base-rate neglect and the gambler’s fallacy.31 The myside bias is not an across-the-board personality trait, but presses on whichever trigger or hot button is connected to the reasoner’s identity. Stanovich relates it to our political moment. We are not, he suggests, living in a “post-truth” society. The problem is that we are living in a myside society. The sides are the left and the right, and both sides believe in the truth but have incommensurable ideas of what the truth is. The bias has invaded more and more of our deliberations. (Kindle loc 4421)

He notes that in fact, as far as identity-signaling:

 the best identity-signaling beliefs are often the most outlandish ones. Any fair-weather friend can say the world is round, but only a blood brother would say the world is flat, willingly incurring ridicule by outsiders.38 Unfortunately, what’s rational for each of us seeking acceptance in a clique is not so rational for all of us in a democracy seeking the best understanding of the world. Our problem is that we are trapped in a Tragedy of the Rationality Commons. (Kindle loc 4465)

There's an indictment of how science is taught in schools and museums:

 Science is often presented in schools and museums as just another form of occult magic, with exotic creatures and colorful chemicals and eye-popping illusions. Foundational principles, such as that the universe has no goals related to human concerns, that all physical interactions are governed by a few fundamental forces, that living bodies are intricate molecular machines, and that the mind is the information-processing activity of the brain, are never articulated, perhaps because they would seem to insult religious and moral sensibilities. We should not be surprised that what people take away from science education is a syncretic mishmash, where gravity and electromagnetism coexist with psi, qi, karma, and crystal healing. (kindle loc 4589)

He points out that the kind of conspiracy theories that are popular are actually fairly accurate when it comes to the workplace:

The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon writes that the Amazonian Yanomamö have the word nomohori, “dastardly trick,” for acts of treachery such as inviting neighbors to a feast and then massacring them on cue. Plots by enemy coalitions are unlike other hazards such as predators and lightning bolts because they deploy their ingenuity to penetrate the targets’ defenses and cover their own tracks. The only safeguard against this cloak-and-dagger subterfuge is to outthink them preemptively, which can lead to convoluted trains of conjecture and a refusal to take obvious facts at face value. In signal detection terms, the cost of missing a real conspiracy is higher than that of false-alarming to a suspected one. This calls for setting our bias toward the trigger-happy rather than the gun-shy end of the scale, adapting us to try to get wind of possible conspiracies even on tenuous evidence.57 Even today, conspiracies small and large really do exist. A group of employees may meet behind the back of an unpopular colleague to recommend that he be let go; a government or insurgency may plan a clandestine coup or invasion or sabotage. Conspiracy theories, like urban legends and fake news, find their way into rumors, and rumors are the stuff of conversation. Studies of rumors show that they tend to convey threats and dangers, and that they confer an aura of expertise on the spreader. And perhaps surprisingly, when they circulate among people with a vested interest in their content, such as within workplaces, they are usually correct.58 (kindle loc 4618)

What causes those same conspiracy theories to metasize is when they spread through networks of uninvolved people:

 The problem is that social and mass media allow rumors to spread through networks of people who have no stake in their truth. They consume the rumors for entertainment and affirmation rather than self-protection, and they lack the interest and means to follow them up. For the same reasons, originators and spreaders suffer no reputational damage for being wrong. Without these veracity checks, social media rumors, unlike workplace rumors, are incorrect more often than correct. Mercier suggests that the best way to inhibit the spread of dubious news is to pressure the spreaders to act on it: to call the police, rather than leaving a one-star review. (kindle loc 4632)

 This ought to send you into a deep depression, but Pinker is still optimistic, noting that this sort of irrationality has been with the human race since the dawn of time, but nevertheless we've managed to reduce infant mortality by getting rid of incorrect previous theories about infection and managed to eliminate slavery, grant women the right to vote, etc. Clearly, the book was written before the January 6th insurrection, but hey, Pinker's always been a Pollyanna, talking about how good life is today. In many ways he's right, but obviously I have little faith given how low our vaccine uptake is. Still, the book's well worth reading for the many insights and little pieces of data here and there in it.

Review: The Particle at the End of the Universe

 I listened to The Particle at the End of the Universe as an audiobook. I thought it was a fun listen, as it covers not just what the Higgs Boson is, and why the Higgs Field matters, but also the history of the ideas behind it, the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider and its failure of funding, and how the physics community pivoted around the Large Hadron Collider instead. So it's science history, plus all out geeking out on colliders and accelerators as well. I learned a bit about "big science" and where all that money goes, and of course, how much CERN contributed to big data and computer science. An easy and light read.

Review: The World Atlas of Coffee

 The World Atlas of Coffee was available for $1.99 as a kindle book, but I realized that it was actually a coffee table book and checked it out from the library instead. I expected it to be a catalog of beans and coffee and where it's grown and how to taste the difference between them, and from that point of view it actually worked. But I learned much more than that! For instance, I learned that I'd been using the aeropress wrong --- as soon as you finish stirring you should insert the aeropress plunger into the coffee tube and not push it in. This maintains a partial vacumn and prevents the coffee from dripping through into the cup below before it's had a chance of doing extraction!

Another example of how useful it is: I learned that everyone who taught me to use a french press is also doing it wrong. You're not supposed to push down on the plunger before pouring. The idea is that the plunger acts as a filter for you to pour out the coffee, and plunging it in before pouring could force fine coffee particles to leak into your liquid coffee.

Just for these two pieces of information alone you should read this book. Recommended!

Review: Now

 Now is Richard Muller's physics speculation about the nature of time. Richard Muller's an experimental physicist, so his opinion carries quite a bit more weight than the typical man in the street. Also, most other books about such speculations are written by theoretical physicists, so his is quite a different view, especially since he covers much of the experimental work that other books don't.

Since it's partly a speculative work, Muller doesn't abstain from providing discussions about what is or isn't physics and his quotes are frequently quite pithy:

Physics is arguably that tiny subset of reality that is susceptible to mathematics. No wonder physics yields to math; if an aspect of existence doesn’t so yield, we give it a different name: history, political science, ethics, philosophy, poetry. (kindle loc 3559)

He also points out several interesting things about say, the nature of black holes:

 Recall the calculation showing that it takes infinite time to fall into a black hole. A similar calculation shows that it takes infinite time to form a black hole, measured in our time coordinate. All that material has to fall, effectively, an infinite distance. So unless the black holes already existed at the moment the universe was created, unless they were primordial black holes, they haven’t yet reached true black-hole status; there hasn’t been enough time (from our outside proper frame) for the matter to fall the infinite distance that characterizes a true black hole. And there is no reason to think that any of the objects are primordial (although some people speculate that one or more might be). (kindle loc 1229)

Muller also doesn't hesitate to talk about how he's willing to consider things that are not provable by physical laws true. Ultimately, he provides his own speculation, that time is created by the expansion of the universe, similar to the expansion of space. He proposes experiments that might falsify his explanation one way or another, but doesn't discuss whether or not we're coming close to a conclusion. He dismisses many other approaches to the consideration of time, such as using the second law of thermodynamics, considering them not even wrong, since the use of such mechanism doesn't lead to any useful predictions.

All in all, I enjoyed the book and considered it well worth the time spent reading it. At the very least it's got an unusual, experimentalist bent that will be different from other works written by theorists. 

A transition to 1x Drivetrains

 For a couple of years now, I've been hearing a creak and clack on my bicycle whenever I pedaled hard, but would disappear when I stood up. I replaced the chain, and the problem persisted. I looked for a crack in the chainstay, and didn't see any. Then one day at the end of January, I looked at the seat tube, and there it was, a crack around the seat tube just above the front derailleur clamp. I conferred quickly with Carl Strong, shipped the bicycle up to him, and he confirmed that yes, it was the derailleur clamp that cracked the tube, but that there was no way a clamp should have done that. He searched through his records and discovered that the seat tube and top tube were from a defective batch where heat treatment had not happened. He promised to build me a new frame, putting me near the front of the line.

I called around to see who could build me a frame. Rivendell didn't have any frames my size handy, and the closest that came was R&E cycles in Seattle, who could build me a new frame in 6-8 weeks, they thought. Grant loaned me a Charlie Gallop prototype for a week, but he wasn't going to sell me that bike, and while it was a fun enough bike, it wouldn't have been a good substitute for my custom touring bike, though I decided that I would place an order for a Roadini whenever Grant got a new batch in. Having cracked 2 titanium frames I think I can justify having a backup road bike!

Since I had the frame stripped anyway, I decided that now was a good time to try a 1x drivetrain. The problem with 1x12 was that they all needed a new wheel or a new freehub body for my white industries hub. Those xD/xDR drivers for the T11 hubs were not to be found for love or for money, so I gave up on that idea. The NX Eagle 11-50t cassette was one possibility if I wanted 12 speed, it wasn't compared favorably to the Deore groupset. The M5100, however, was available and reasonably priced, if on the heavy side. The Shimano 12-speed MTB groups all require a wider wheel spacing (135-142mm) and so weren't even under consideration. What is surprising is that the 11s MTB cassettes fit onto 10s wheels without any modification --- it turned out that the only reason Shimano introduced 11s road specific groups was because the racers would disdain running any cassette with as big a sprocket as 30t, and with smaller big sprockets the chain would rub against the spokes of a 10s wheel!

I did the analysis on the weight and to my disappointment it would come up to be a wash. Sure, I'd lose the left shifter, 2 chainrings and the front derailleur clamp and cable, but the increased weight of the m5100 11-51 over the 11-36 was 314g, and the total savings of all the other parts was only 340g. Nevertheless, after Pengtoh mentioned how much he disliked his front derailleur, I realized that there were many occasions when I would avoid shifting the front simply because I didn't want to risk dropping the chain, and the few times when I did drop the chain it was annoying.

I ordered the m5100 cassette 11-51, the m5100 SGS rear derailleur, an ultegra 11s chain, and a microshift 11-speed MTB bar-end shifter. You need the MTB specific bar-end because Shimano increased the pull ratio of the 11 speed MTB rear derailleurs, so my old 10-speed silver shifters wouldn't be able to shift the whole range of gears. I eschewed getting even a barrel adjuster because experience has taught me that the way I ride and the places I ride will simply get the indexing out of adjustment faster than I can keep it adjusted. I considered getting the DiaCompe 11-speed downtube shifter, but when I mentioned that to Carl, he thought that a braze-on on the thinnest part of the downtube wasn't a good idea, so I stuck with a bar-end shifter. I also got new bar tape. I also splurged and got the RX810 GRX crank, since I wanted to save the triple for the Roadini, which did have downtube shifter bosses for my Silver downtube shifters. In retrospect, I should have just ordered a Wolf-Tooth 38t chainring for the Ultegra triple, since after trying the 1x for a few weeks I cannot imagine going back to a triple chainring setup.

It took 2 months for Carl to deliver me a new frame, and I got very bored riding my MTB everywhere, though I did find a few interesting trails around my neighborhood to tide me over. When the frame arrived, I put it together, learning the hard way that it's easy to put together the 11s cassette's 11t sprocket in wrong. Then I learned the hard way what the B-screw was for, and how you have to adjust it carefully or the derailleur would move too close to the cassette in the middle gears and interfere with upshifts! It took a few rides to get the headset/fork all settled in, but once I got it together I quite enjoyed it. There are shifting challenges since I'd gotten used to shifting 10-speed on my triplet and on my previous singles, but a few days with the bike made me realize that I hardly ever used the 13t sprockets on my bikes with multiple chainrings, and that indeed I had frequently stood up and stomped on the pedals to get over steep sections rather than gear down because I didn't really want to bother with the shift to and from the granny --- the extra lower gears don't come into play unless you plan for it and are willing to take the hit because you know it's going to be that steep.

My initial rides with the new low gear were grindy --- in low gear the cage would rub. But after adjusting the B-screw that grind went away and now the bike is quiet in all gears. In the extreme range the chainline definitely looks funny, but so far it's been perfectly functional and quiet. And of course, the bike no longer makes that creak/clack when pedaling hard since the frame isn't cracked! I discovered that it's possible to install the Shimano Ultegra 11s chains wrong --- the logo needs to face away from the bike, and the words are supposed to read right side up on the upper side of the chain. Trust Shimano to make something that used to be idiot-proof something that's easy to get wrong. After 300 miles I fixed the reversal, and to my surprise the drivetrain became more noisy. I had it checked at a local bike shop, and the employee said I did it right. The answer is to stop buying Shimano chains and switch to non-directional chains like KMC and SRAM.

Looking at the gearing, it looked like I could get a Wolf-Tooth 36t chainring for the bike for touring, and get a 19inch gear, which was what I had back when 11-34 cassettes were the norm rather than 11-36. When touring, I'd be restricted to an 88" high gear, but when I toured with Arturo, the only time he missed a 100" high gear was one day in Austria when we had a tailwind and a downhill. I could definitely live with that.

When putting the drivetrain together, I thought the 11-51's top gear would hardly ever gets used: to get to use the 40/11, I'd have to be riding at 30mph at 100rpm. To my surprise, I found myself doing that far more often than I would back when I had a 3x setup --- I simply never thought to shift to the big chainring/small sprocket because it was too much hassle, but when it was easy to just slam the shifter to the small sprocket I'd do it all the time! 

To my surprise, I discovered that I was a little faster over the local climbs than on my triple. What happened was that on the triple, I'd get down to the 39/36 (29" gear), and not bother trying to get to the 24/28, 24/32, or 24/36 unless I was anticipating steep stuff. On the 1x drivetrain, I could go from the 40/39 (28" gear - just slightly lower than the 39/34), and if it got a little steeper I'd just shift down to the 40/45 or even 40/51 on dirt before bottoming out. I took the bike over all the steepest local hills I could find: Montebello Road, Bohlman-On-Orbit Bohlman, Black Road, and Rapley trail. Sure, my low wasn't as low as the 24/36, but making the shifts convenient and not risking chain drops meant that I actually used more of those gears. As usual, the engineer in me got confounded by the human factors, which turn out to be much more important than numbers on a spreadsheet. And all this despite lots of studies showing the 1x has more drivetrain friction/drag than 2x or 3x, because of the extreme chain angles in lower gears! It turns out that running a 24t chainring is much less efficient than a 40t chainring, and I bet that means the actual frictional drag difference is a wash for someone who was running their 3x drivetrains out of spec anyway (officially, Shimano would only have supported 30/39/52 on my Ultegra SL). As usual, the default Shimano gearing works only if you're a strong 25 year old but wouldn't work at all for anyone else. This default position explains why SRAM has been steadily gaining market share --- the 1x setups are actually far better and more easily customizable for only moderately strong cyclists.

I think left to my own devices I probably wouldn't have switched to a 1x gearing, but now that I have it I can see why it's taken off --- with 11 speeds at the back and a wide enough range, there's no need to put up with the additional issues of having a front chainring or derailleur. During this testing period I did an aggressive ride with Bowen on the tandem and dropped the chain no less than 3 times despite having a chain watcher installed. The unreliability of triples definitely means that I will do my best to ride only 1x from now on. This is one of those technologies that the tourists will adopt long before the racers will do so. In fact, I think I should consider it on the triplet, where a chain drop is very disruptive (and it's hard to coordinate easing off on the pedals when shifting), and I care even less about the high end! When I build up my backup road bike this summer I anticipate going all in on 1x as well. That's how good it is! All in all, I think the 1x11 and 1x12 are good enough to justify the expenditure and hassle to switch over.

Review: The Next Great Migration

 The Next Great Migration is a book about migrations. It's written by an immigrant herself, and starts off with a great story:

My grandmother used to cry when she heard that, in America, her son washed the dishes after dinner. In the flat she’d raised him in, dishwashing was a job for the day laborers, who crouched on their haunches on the slimy tiled floors of the common washing area and slept on thin rough mats on the terrace. (kindle loc 359)

I remember my parents telling me that their family would visit the USA and then nix any thoughts of moving there when they realized that domestic help was so expensive that essentially nobody had any. 

To my surprise, the book covers animal migration as well as human migration, with large chunks of the book about the historical view of migrations as expressed by scientists. I learned that Carl Linnaeus, the inventor of the scientific naming convention of science used since the 1800s, fundamentally considered migration impossible --- he viewed that God created all species in situ, and that migration was an aberration.

As a result, scientists had a blind spot regarding long migrations, and it wasn't until the invention of radar before scientists realized that long distance migrations were a reality, and happened frequently:

Dragonflies migrated from the eastern United States to South America, flying hundreds of kilometers every day. Tiger sharks, assumed to be permanent residents of the coastal waters around Hawaii, turned out to travel thousands of kilometers out into the sea. Scientists’ assumptions about their provincialism, a shark researcher from the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology said, “were completely wrong.” (kindle loc 3685)

Similarly, of course, we know a lot now about human migration and how the Polynesians colonized the islands of the pacific using skills that are pretty much lost today.

 What the book doesn't cover in detail is in its title, about how climate change will drive the next great wave of migrations. That migration is alluded to, and the author definitely is pro migration, and frequently laments that treatment of human migrants and refugees. I'm an immigrant myself, so I understand where that sympathy is coming from. On the other hand, democratic societies that ignore the desire of existing citizens to limit the influx of people can end up being unstable, and it's beyond the scope of the book to cover that, so she doesn't cover the much more important political story, except to state:

The researchers found that the antimigrant politician found his greatest support among people living in places experiencing a rapid influx of people who’d been born elsewhere. The states that Trump won were not especially diverse. The diversity indexes in those states were lower than the national average, ranking in the bottom twenty of the fifty states. But in the counties that Trump won, the low diversity index is changing rapidly, rising nearly twice as fast as the national average...In the United States, nearly a third of us are less than one generation removed from an act of international migration. Every year 14 percent of us move from one part of the country to another, crossing borders into states with different laws, different customs, and different dialects, some of them as distant from each other as New York City and Casablanca or Cartagena...Almost 25 percent of people in France, nearly 20 percent of those in Sweden, and 14 percent of people in the United States estimated that immigrants receive twice as much government support as natives—which isn’t true in any of those countries. (kindle loc 4629-4692)

All in all, I enjoyed and can recommend the book, but it left me mildly dissatisfied.

Review: How to Take Over the World

 I checked out How to Take Over the World hoping to find some true villainous schemes to take over the world that might work. To my disappointment, this book turned out to be rather pedestrian. Rather than taking over the world, most of the book seem focused on "How to Satiate Your Ego."

For instance, there's an entire chapter on shooting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere as a counter to global warming. That doesn't seem very supervillain to me. There's another chapter on how to be remembered millions of years into the future (the author proposes effectively recreating the voyager spacecraft and putting your own dead body in it rather than instruments).

The chapters on creating your own secret base (floating geodesic domes) and creating your own country (seasteading) turn out to spend a lot of time explaining how people failed doing it instead.

If you take the attitude that the book's really using the supervillain theme as a way to get you to read about the various facts Ryan North has shoveled into the book, then it makes a lot more sense. There's lots of stuff about how the internet works, as well as anti-aging technology that's just coming down the pipe.

Overall, the book's written in a humorous, friendly style, much like What If?. I would recommend it as an ideal follow up to that book if you enjoyed it!

Kudos to Swytch Bike customer service

 We bought and installed our Swytch bike in December 2020 which meant it was well out of warranty when one day in the middle of our ride, the battery pack stopped delivering power, I didn't actually expect them to grant us a repair. Yet when I contacted their customer service, they readily provided a new Tour battery. That battery worked for exactly one ride, and then the battery stopped providing power again.

This time, they scheduled a video call to diagnose the problem. After the diagnosis of a bad controller, they declared that this was a bad battery pack, but they had no more battery packs to give us, so this time, they sent us two Pro packs, each with a range of approximately 30 miles, so together they would provide 60 miles of range, at the inconvenience of having to cycle between the batteries to charge.

To my surprise, the Pro pack actually seemed to provide the motor with more kick, and while swapping between batteries is not ideal, the lighter single pack meant that it's more practical for use around town or for commuting, etc. I installed a rack on the bike so that a second battery can be carried.

One of my biggest concerns with buying a Swytch kit was the potential lack of customer service. These folks proved my concerns unfounded. I'll heartily recommend the kit for anyone!

Re-read: Black Orchid

 While rummaging through my collection of comics for Boen, I found Black Orchid, one of Neil Gaiman's first graphic novels. It's mostly been forgotten in recent times, and in the re-read, I found several interesting foreshadowing of what Gaiman would write.

For one thing, this was the first instance of Gaiman using his signature, "build up to a climax for you to expect a massive combat scene, and then deflate it with a whimper." He would use this repeatedly later in his career, including that infamous scene in hell where the lord of dreams goes to hell prepared for a fight and then gets handed the keys to hell instead.

There are lots of holes in the work otherwise: the characters aren't well developed, and his use of other DC universe characters are weak. We get some idea of what Black Orchid can or cannot do, but no clear understanding of where it all comes from. We get a tour of the DC universe's plant-based characters (Swamp Thing, Poison Ivy, the Flouronic man) but nothing that really ties them all together.

The art is nothing short of outstanding, with Dave McKean's paintings and mixed media work reminding me a lot of Bill Sienkiewicz at his best.

Overall, it's a good book, but nothing that indicates that Gaiman would rise above all this to become one of the greats. Worth reading.

Review: Park CC-4 Chain Checker

 If you read Pardo's overview of chain checkers, you'll understand that the only accurate chain checker ever made was the Shimano TL-CN40/41/42. The two pin design measures pin-to-pin wear and doesn't over-estimate chain wear. It was also not made any more and I simply made do with CC-2s, CC-3s, etc because that's what I could find. I knew I was probably replacing chains prematurely, but it wasn't a big deal for 10-speed chains.

Well, for 11 and 12 speed chains, not only are they more expensive, you also have to replace them when the wear reaches 0.5% elongation, instead of 0.75%. My less accurate tools were going to start increasing my mainteneance costs significantly. Dan Wallach told me about the Park CC-4, and one look at the design showed me that it was a reincarnation of the TL-CN40, but with a detent, so you could use it for both 10 speed and 12 speed chains. I immediately bought one, and low and behold, a chain that the CC-2 said was at 0.5% elongation actually wasn't elongated at all!

At $15, it won't take 2 years for the cost savings in chains to pay for the cost of the tool. If you ride 11 or 12 speed chains, you need one. Even for 10 speed chains, it'll probably save you money, just not as quickly. Recommended.

Review: The Evidence for Modern Physics

 I picked up The Evidence for Modern Physics during an audible sale, since from the title I thought it would be a description of physics experiments that verified or corroborated many modern theories. I was not disappointed. Professor Don Lincoln is a great lecturer, with a dry sense of humor that had me listening to him in the early mornings with rapt attention.

He starts with the verifiable stuff, like relativity (including an interesting experiment involving atomic clocks on planes down to a modern version that was so sensitive it could detect the slowdown of clocks that differed from each other by as little as one foot!), quantum mechanics, spectography, and the expansion of the universe.

Then he goes into cosmology, discussing the evidence for the Big Bang (the famous story of the discovery of the CBM) the expansion of the universe, and then into more speculative stuff that hasn't been proven such as dark matter, dark energy, inflation, and quantum gravity. Along with his discussions of the experiments include a bunch of history of the ideas. Lincoln points out that the difference between reading science history and science textbooks is that textbooks present a cut-and-dry view of science, while history really shows how many wrong hypothesis were raised and proven wrong before a theory was found that explained all the evidence.

This was a lot of fun, and great listening. Highly recommended.

Review: Age Later

 Age Later is a book about healthspan and the lifespan of centenarians.  It examines how long lived people run in clusters of families, and that there's actually not much you can do to join them as of today, given how much of it is genetics. There's no correlation between diet, exercise, healthy habits, and living past 100. Many of the people interviewed and studied smoked, ate badly, and/or didn't bother to exercise, so their genes basically got them through life despite any of the bad habits that they had. You can view this positively or negatively. On the one hand, if you have good genes, it almost doesn't matter what you do --- what's important is picking your parents and grandparents carefully. On the other hand, if the scientists ever figure it out, they can basically eventually give you a pill to grant you those superpowers and it won't matter what else you do --- even smoking would be OK.

The book covers current studies --- one apparently promising one is metformin, which apparently does great stuff, so much so that Singapore considered putting it in the water supply:

Singapore’s population also has a very high life expectancy, at nearly eighty-three, and that’s why I am consulting for Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s office. To give you an idea how desperate the government is to head off a crisis, one of the questions that officials asked me is whether metformin should be put in the water supply. (My answer was no, of course.) (Kindle Loc 2106)

There's another fun section where he talks to Senate Appropriations Thad Cochran from Mississippi:

 A good example of the diverse challenges of raising money for a particular piece of the health care puzzle is what happened when I requested funding from the Department of Defense, which invests significant resources into disease research. During my meeting with then Senate Appropriations chairman Thad Cochran, who’s from Mississippi, I made sure to tailor my pitch to his sense of regionalism. “You know, your state is doing really poorly,” I said. “You have more strokes than anyone, you have more cardiovascular disease.” “Why is that?” he said. “Well, there are two answers. First of all, your people take less metformin than any other state. But there’s really a much more important reason—your people are victims of the good food of Mississippi, this food you can’t stop eating.” He burst out laughing. “That’s great! I’ll remember that! I’ll use it! My people are the victims of the good food of Mississippi. I love it.” (Kindle Loc 2048)

This story highlights why I will never be a good politician. No way would I have come up with that line. OK, let me walk back a bit about the part about exercise:

 Hands down, the most important intervention we have for aging is physical exercise, which has positive benefits for males and females at every stage of life...we know that physical activity is crucial to health span and will increase your chances of passing age eighty. The benefits of exercise for both the young and the old are greater than the benefits we have seen from any particular diet....The interesting thing about exercise is that, in theory, it should be bad for us. It induces oxidative stress, which appears to contribute to aging and disease, and it increases the breakdown of muscle tissue as well as causing some inflammation. And yet exercising is good for us at every age. So what’s going on? (kindle loc 2373-2411)

Clearly there's a ton of room needed to figure out why exercise actually works. There's a study on the effect of metformin on exercise, and apparently metformin's side effects include reducing the impact of exercise on muscle growth, but nevertheless, the people involved do get stronger. They just don't get more/bigger muscle for whatever reason.

There's a section dismissing HGH (human growth hormone) as a good therapy --- there are apparent side effects (like increased chance of cancer), and basically, HGH is most useful for people going through puberty and only prescribed or recommended if they have some genetic defect that prevents them from growing during puberty. What's interesting is that the longest lived people have least response to HGH, except at the megadoses present during puberty.

Another section on diet discusses fasting. Basically, he recommends skipping breakfast. Apparently, not only is it the least important meal of the day, it prolongs your fasting state which does good things for longevity.

All in all, the book doesn't provide easy answers, and does a good job explaining how the author views longevity, while providing optimistic directions. Recommended. 

Review: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

 Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is a history of the English language, sort of. I've thoroughly enjoyed John McWhorter's books in the past, and this one is no exception. In fact, it might be even better than his others, as it's that rare academic argument that's written for non-specialists. McWhorter makes 2 points in the book that he claims are missing from traditional academic histories of the English language. First, that English gets a number of grammatical constructs from the Celtic languages:

German, Dutch, Swedish, and the gang are, by and large, variations on what happened to Proto-Germanic as it morphed along over three thousand years. They are ordinary rolls of the dice. English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights. Did you ever notice that when you learn a foreign language, one of the first things you have to unlearn as an English speaker is the way we use do in questions and in negative statements? (page 1)

He provides multiple examples if what he calls "the meaningless do", something that doesn't exist in other Germanic languages, but does exist in the Celtic languages. 

His second thesis is that English is comparatively easy, compared to not just the other German languages, but also the Indo-European languages:

English, as languages go, and especially Germanic ones, is kind of easy. Not child’s play, but it has fewer bells and whistles than German and Swedish and the rest. Foreigners are even given to saying English is “easy,” and they are on to something, to the extent that they mean that English has no lists of conjugational endings and doesn’t make some nouns masculine and others feminine. (pg. 89)

This, he claims, is the result of the invasions of the Vikings, who had to learn English as adults, and couldn't understand the nuances of Old English, stripping away genders and many other gramatical markers.

The Scandinavian Vikings left more than a bunch of words in English. They also made it an easier language. In this, in a sense, they clipped Anglophones’ wings. The Viking impact, stripping English of gender and freeing us of attending to so much else that other Germanic speakers genuflect to in every conversation, made it harder for us to master other European languages. To wit: so many people spoke English the way a lot of us speak French and Spanish that “off” English became the seedbed for literary English. (pg. 135)

As a bonus, McWhorter provides a 3rd argument that has only a little bit to do with English, which is that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is complete bollocks:

 Decade after decade, no one has turned up anything showing that grammar marches with culture and thought in the way that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claimed. At best, there are some shards of evidence that language affects thought patterns in subtle ways, which do not remotely approach the claims of Whorf. (pg. 138)

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis despite being false gets lots of popular exposure in novels, movies (think Arrival), and even many non-fiction books. McWhorter claims we like that meme and propagate it because we want it to be true, not because there's any particular reason to believe it is. Here he points to Russian:

All would agree that certain changes have occurred in prevailing beliefs in that country over the past thousand years—from brute feudalism under the tsars to Communism to glasnost to the queer blend of democracy and dictatorship of today. Yet Russian grammar during that time has always been the marvelous nightmare that it is now. Russian has changed, to be sure, but without equivalents to the Celtic adoption and the Viking disruption, and nowhere near as dramatically as English—and in no ways that could be correlated with things Peter the Great, the Romanovs, or Lenin did. (pg. 149)

 One interesting thing is that McWhorter never claims how great English is, and makes no attempt to counter-balance his description of English as an odd duck amongst languages. Perhaps at this point, with English dominating so much of the globe as the most popular second language, there's no need to defend English, but I actually think English being easier to learn and use and being relatively comprehensible even when a non-native speaker mangles it is a feature, and not a bug.

In any case, the book is full of great ideas and a lot of fun. It's also short and easily read. Try finding that combination anywhere else. Highly recommended.

Review: How the Earth Works

 How the Earth Works is a Great Courses audio/video series on geology. I never took a geology class in college and thought it would be interesting and was not disappointed in the course. It covers many topics, including astronomy, biology, ecology, hydraulics, plate tectonics and even earthquakes. I was astounded by the breadth and depth of Professor Wysession's work.

Over the course of 24+ hours, we get answers to questions like:

• Could that scene in the Superman movie where Kal-El squeezes a lump of coal into a diamond ever work? (The answer is no, because in addition to pressure it also takes time to form diamonds from coal)
• Why are the minerals on the planet clustered together in mineable form rather than scattered diffusedly over the planet's crust?
• How do plate tectonics work?
• Why are the deepest parts of the Ocean close to the continental plates rather than in the middle of the Ocean?
• Can we predict earthquakes?
• How likely is it that there's another earth-like planet in the galaxy? (the answer will surprise and disappoint you)
• How were the underground aquifers created? How is the water in them replenished?
• Why do underground caves not just collapsed instead of being formed?

I really enjoyed this series and will probably listen to it again. If you skipped geology classes in college, this class is for you. Highly recommended!

Review: Powerhouse

 Powerhouse is Steve LeVine's book about the race to create NMC 2.0 batteries. It revolves around Argonne National Laboratories, Envia Energy Systems, and  a smattering of Chinese and Korean representatives. The book doesn't try to give a detailed description of the battery technology and the actual development of the technology but instead tries to describe the key personalities and scientists involved. This approach is kinda sucky, because the politics behind the science is pretty ugly.

There's lots of description about talent poaching, as well as the not-quite-Theranos antics of Envia's CEO and CTO, as well as the jockeying for position amongst the Argonne scientists for promotions and plum positions. It was also interesting that the patent licensing actions of Argonne National Labs resulted in bonuses for the scientists involved. The book also describes all the effort into getting funding for a "Battery Hub" an industry + academia partnership. But the amounts of money involved was paltry, something that a company like Google or Apple could fund out of pocket change, reminding us how little money we spend on basic research, and how much of a bargain it is.

Unfortunately, it looks like NMC 2.0 never panned out.

Review: Driven - The Race to Create the Autonomous Car

 Driven is an account of the rise of the autonomous vehicle industry. It traces the rise of the industry from the initial DARPA Grand Challenge, providing excellent background for various of the actors in the industry that has risen since then, many of whom, including Jiajun Zhu, Chris Urmson, Sebastian Thrun, and of course, the infamous Anthony Levandowski would end up building their own firms. When you look at the book, it's easy to see how the early improvements led people to believe that autonomous vehicles would be common reality in 2020: the first Grand Challenge had no robots that finished the course, but by the time the second Grand Challenge had started, nearly 7 teams had finished the course and there was a genuine race. By 2007, the DARPA Urban challenge had produced several teams who could navigate urban environments, including GPS-blocking tunnels and parking lot environments with bicycles and other objects. To any observer it must have seemed as though the road to production was well along its way. By 2010, Google was spinning up Project Chauffeur, with incentive programs that would rival the payout of many startups, but without the risk.

The story follows the story as a journalist can, but perhaps without an engineer's background, didn't see that the "Larry Page 1K Challenge" was too easy to game: the book describes the engineers basically repeating the runs over and over until the conditions made it possible. That's like playing a video game by save-scumming: just save and reload until the random number generator gave you an outcome you wanted. That sort of challenge made it easy for companies and executives to fool themselves into thinking that they had achieved significant milestones.

The entire book is was worth reading and compelling reading I bought it hoping to read it on a plane and ended up finishing it the morning before the plane ride. It's well worth reading for its management lessons (and its ethical lessons), as well as providing you with a realistic view of how far away the industry is from realizing the original DARPA vision. In many places its as compelling a story as any fiction you'll read. Recommended!

Review: The Handmaid's Tale Graphic Novel

 I kept bouncing off The Handmaid's Tale, so I finally resorted to the graphic novel edition to see if I could finally actually make it through.  The art in the book is bland and not expressive, and but the story is told in such a way that's coherent and comprehensible. Atwood's vision of a patriarchial society that treats women as nothing but breeders by religious fundamentalists might have seemed like fiction when it was published, but in the world of 2022 with an extremely conservative supreme court about to overturn Roe v Wade seems eerily prescient. The hypocrisy of such a society is exposed and clear, though perhaps in the light of what we see today perhaps her vision isn't apocalyptic enough. What's apparent is that the religious fundamentalists in this country don't view the book as a warning, but as a playbook with which to realize their horrific vision of a uniquely dystopian timeline.

As far as being a graphic novel, this one can't hold a candle to the best of say, Alan Moore. I compare the narrative portion of The Handmaid's Tale with say, Valerie, and it's clear that Moore is the stronger writer with as unique a vision as Atwood, but with a better command of visual as well as written form. Nevertheless, Atwood's dystopia in the light of 2022 seems far more real than the world of V for Vendetta.

Recommended.

Review: Q-Squared

 I picked up Q-Squared because I had good memories of Peter David's writing, even though I'm not actually a fan of Star Trek the next generation. The story probably would have made for a fun Star Trek movie or TV episode, involving multiple-timelines, mirror universes, and Q, a sort of omnipotent energy being. It relies heavily on your understanding of the characters from the TV show, though not so much that I couldn't pick up who Beverly Crusher was, as well as the different versions of Riker, Worf, et al.

It does highlight how non-Science Fiction the Star Trek universe actually is, with regular violations of physics, and more importantly, extremely humanoid aliens who can be portrayed by actors with make-up. I'd say this book would have been great for a die-hard Star Trek fan, but probably isn't suitable for those who got annoyed with regular Star Trek's lack of adherence to physics.

Review: Specialized Recon 1.0 MTB Shoes

 After just 5 years of use my Pearl Izumi cycling shoes died from the straps falling apart. There was a mild sale on the Specialized Recon 1.0 MTB Shoes, so I bought a pair. My favorite feature of these shoes is that their toebox is wide, which came as a relief after multiple years of using SIDI shoes which are pointy. They come with 3 velcro straps, which are much stickier than anybody else's straps. I tried them when mountain biking and found the walking features very good as well. I like these enough that I find myself wearing them a lot more than I expected, as opposed to say, switching out to my stiffer SIDIs for harder rides. In fact, I found myself even eschewing my stiffer SIDI shoes on a long ride where I might have to walk.

I shopped around and looked at the Recon 2.0 and 3.0, but the BOA straps looked like they would cut into my forefoot. As a result, I think the 1.0 are actually the most comfortable shoes for touring and mixed gravel riding.

Just for the wide toe box alone, these shoes are well worth considering. Recommended.

Update: After the 2022 Tour of the Alps, I've decided that I liked these so much that I bought a second pair as a spare.

Review: Hydroflask 32oz Lightweight Wide Mouth Trail Series

 Aurora gave me an insulated water bottle that was impressively handy during the Antigua trip. It was perfect, except that it didn't quite have sufficient capacity for a family of four. So when I saw a sale on the Hydroflask 32oz Lightweight Wide Mouth stainless steel bottle ($32 after shipping and taxes), I jumped on it. Amazon (linked above) has it for about $40, which is still not  bad deal.

I weighed it, and it comes in at 356g empty, which is 20g more than the advertised weight of 11.8oz. It stores just under 1 liter of water, and the handle is comfortable, though I usually make a point out of putting it in a backpack or in an outer pocket. I used it during the Spain trip, and on many day hikes, and it doesn't spills and is easy enough for the kids to use. It keeps cold water cold, which I like a lot, and the wide mouth means that during the summer months I can put ice in it easily.

I like it enough to recommend it.

Spain 2022: Girona to San Francisco

 We got up early, ate breakfast, packed everything into the car, and drove out past the garage and bollard before returning the keys back into the apartment. This time, everything went smoothly. The drive was easy, and even gassing up the car right next to the airport was straightforward and easy.

Once we returned the car, we discovered that we were early, standing in line waiting for Iberia/Level to open. Once they were done, we cleared security and had our last tapas lunch before clearing passport controls. At the duty free shop we bought chocolate that would be hard/expensive to buy in the US: kinder surprise (banned because of a choking hazard), ritter sport (hard to buy), and then bought sandwiches and other meals for the flight.

Returning to the US after the flight, we cleared customs and passport controls easily only to find ourselves stuck waiting for the car seats. Once out, ride share was easy to get at, and we easily got home. Not surprisingly, after the kids started school, we started getting COVID exposure notifications from their classmates, no doubt acquired by visiting destinations in much less vaccinated places than Spain. In retrospect we should have stayed for a week longer until the rest of the families had gotten their COVID bouts over and done with.

But the trip was excellent and I still think Spain would be a great retirement location. My wife asked why I didn't think of it earlier, and the only answer I can give was that my first few nights in Spain during the 2008 tour were so awful that it took persuasion from Brad Silverberg before I would change my mind. Spain is not a great location for the kind of bike touring I do, but would be a perfect home base, which explained why my 2008 visit was so different from my 2019 visit.

Review: Kindle Paperwhite Kids

 My 4 year old Kindle's battery was dying, meaning that I had to recharge the kindle every time I finished the book. I could probably get it to limp a long for longer, but you the latest Kindle Paperwhite Kids came down in price to $120.  The paperwhite kids comes with a cover (3 designs, one of which is just plain black so highly suitable for adults), no ads (a $20 value), and a 2 year damage warranty. Together with the 6.8" screen, night-adaptive lighting (yellow light rather than blue), and USB-C charging, that was enough to tip me over into getting one. After all, there's no reason an adult couldn't use the paperwhite kids as well.

The new screen is as sharp as I could ask for, and the extra screen size is great. The 8GB of storage is also a nice upgrade (though to be honest I was only starting to hit the 4GB limit on the old version). The device supports audible, but I couldn't be bothered to try it, and with 8GB there's not much point. The new device is also waterproof.

I read 3-4 books with my usual rate of book downloaded into the kindle before the device flashed a low battery (10%) warning. The claim is the new device has faster page turns and indeed it appears as though page turns happen faster, but that in itself wouldn't be worth the upgrade. Having USB-C and 6.8" screen is the major upgrade and if you can find the device on sale I think it's well worth the price. Recommended.