Review: Lovers Quarrel

 Lovers Quarrel is an Astro City story arc focused on Quarrel and Crackerjack. Earlier volumes have established Crackerjack as a blowhard, but Quarrel was in the honor guard, the equivalent of the Justice League. The overall story asks a question few comic books ever ask, with their unaging characters --- what do aging non-superpowered heroes do when they get old? We get Quarrel's origin story, along with the answer to that question.

I thought the story was good, but not as chock full of originality as I've come to expect from Astro City. That's because whenever the spotlight focuses on the super-powered characters, the series reads much more like a conventional comic book super hero story rather than the slice-of-life-in-an-alternate-world that it otherwise portrays. Nevertheless, with Astro City, the story never stays on a single character long enough to get sick of it, which means I'll keep reading future volumes.

Review: The Language of Power

 The Language of Power is the most recent novel in Rosemary Kirstein's series about a medieval society set in a science fiction world. If there's anything I can complain about the story it's that Kirstein seems to be parceling out her reveals in tiny steps. This part of the series starts unraveling the mysteries of who the wizards are, and what they represent --- we see references to a separation between the common people and the "krue" (an obvious language transition of "crew"). We see the existence of a technological society where the technologically enabled use the technology to hold positions of power in society.

Nevertheless, the holes in the story start to come apart. An obviously technological society relies on precision manufacturing, refinement of ore, and clean rooms to make computer chips. Without scale, those technologies are prohibitively expensive and resource intensive and impossible to hide without massive amounts of automation, which is hard to hide in even a medieval society.

Nonetheless, the writing is good, and maybe Kirstein will produce in the final two volumes of the work and a compelling narrative that makes her world believable to a skeptical me.

Rivendell Roadini 1000 mile review

 1000 miles should be enough to review a bicycle, even one as flexible and multi-use as the Rivendell Roadini. I started with it configured with 30mm tires, then decided I didn't like how tall they were and tried them with 25mm tires, and the bike rode great that way. I got fed up with the seatpost slipping and replaced the Kalloy with a Thomson Elite, which no longer slips, but had less of an offset. Then I put on Continental Terraspeed 40mm tires and treated it like a gravel bike, which is the mode it seems to be permanently settled on, so much so that I swapped out the PD-ES600 for the M520s since in gravel mode, I treat it pretty much like a 1990s mountain bike!

Here's the thing, with 700x38mm tires, I stop feeling like I need to drive to the trailhead, but then just ride the bike out my door to the trailhead. If there's 2000' of climbing, I ensure that I pump up the tire to about 44psi, and then when I get to the trailhead I get out my pressure gauge and let it down to about 28psi. If I'm not going that far, I pump it up to about 33psi and then ride it on and off road, taking the hit on the pavement and going slower than I would go with a modern mountain bike down gravel roads. The steel frame flexes like a leaf spring, and I'm no doubt voiding all the warranties associated with the bike, but I buy bicycles to ride them not to baby them.

In road mode, the bike rode as well as I expect a touring bike to ride --- it's a fun, fast, neutral ride. With the Terraspeed tires on it it's not nearly as fun --- you can definitely feel the knobs robbing 1-2mph of speed from you. On a descent, that's a good thing --- I doubt my collision with a deer would have had a good outcome if I'd been going 5mph faster. On a climb, 1-2mph from my already slow 6mph is 4mph. 30% of my speed is robbed from me by the tires, but it's still better than driving! On descents, I can't go as fast as on a bike with suspension forks on dirt, but the bike really behaves well --- far better than a mountain bike does --- there's a direct feedback and a feeling of grace you never get from a mountain bike which wants to just plow through all obstacles --- the Roadini expects and wants you to ride with finesse, picking good lines and going just a tad slower. I did mention that I collided with a deer on the Roadini and survived to ride home with no damage to the bike and only a sore lower leg for about 3 days --- the bike handles so well that while I was convinced I would crash I never did --- despite my vision bouncing up and down and sideways during the 1-2s the collision and immediate aftermath lasted.

Other cyclists who see me riding on a bike with downtube shifters and drop bars and sidepull caliper brakes always do a double-take when I'm off pavement. It's such an odd contraption that people assume (correctly) that I built the bike myself. On wet trails the tires sink in just a little bit before I get traction --- looking at the sidewalls it looks like the tires submerge to the point where the side knobs start to assist with the traction, so there's a little feeling of spinning the tires before everything digs in and you get traction. It's a slightly disconcerting feeling but you get used to it.

If I had to have only one bike to ride in my garage I'd pick the Roadini --- it's got the clearance to treat like a mountain bike, it handles fine with touring tires and light wheels, and short of doing expedition style touring there's nothing it can't do. The only change I'd make is to make the BB lower (maybe 80mm drop --- same as my Strong frame), and if I ever had another custom bike built that'll be exactly what I do. It gets rid of the toe clip overlap (which doesn't bother me but now that I know how to solve it without making a bike handle badly I think I like Grant Petersen's solution), and it doesn't have chainstays so long that i'll be difficult to pack the bike into a bike box when you need to fly with it to a touring destination. I think the Roadini is by far the most versatile bike in the Rivendell lineup (the A Home Hilsen has ultra-long chainstays and requires 135mm wheels --- which are stronger but would render the bike incompatible with my collection of 130mm axle wheels), and doesn't feel overbuilt for a lightweight 140 pound cyclist. Now that they're in stock, I can recommend them to anyone who can fit them.

Review: Astro City - Private Lives

 Private Lives returns to the formula that I love about Astro City --- instead of focusing on superheroes, the stories revolves around the side characters in their lives. The book opens with a delightful story about the executive assistant for Astro City's Dr. Strange analog, who juggles mundane tasks in between dealing with magical catastrophes. Another sequence of the book focuses its narrative on a victim of one of the super-villains in the world, and her super power turns out to be forgiveness. It's a stunning take on an all too frequent trope, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

You can't go wrong with any of the graphic novels in the Astro City line up, but I felt this was a particularly strong showing. Recommended.

Review: The Lost Steersman

 The Lost Steersman is the 3rd book in Rosemary Kirstein's fantasy series in a medieval world that's really a far future science fiction novel. This third book detours from the previous two in that it's not just an uncovering of the nature of the world the series is set in, but ventures into a first contact novel as well! The setup is well done, especially since it was set up in the first couple of books, and we get the interesting effect of what seems to be monsters (possibly controlled by the wizards in the world) turning out to  be an alien, sentient life form.

Once again, the protagonist seems too good to be true --- she's calm, curious, and able to think things true. But I'm quite forgiving of that --- in the old days of science fiction, the men in the novels were also too good to be true and I see nothing wrong with an author making a woman protagonist that way as well. I enjoyed this book and will be picking up the last novel in the series.

Review: Life is Strange - True Colors

 I kept intending to play Life is Strange: True Colors, but what tipped me over was seeing it at the library and checking it out. It took me 2 renewals to finish it, but it was a good story. Here's the thing about the Life is Strange series - it's not a video game so much as it is a short form TV show. Each episode is about 2 hours or so, and while you get a few choices here and there, the narrative is mostly linear --- you don't actually have any effect on major outcomes. The hallmarks of the series are the story, the characters, and the music.

What's exciting about this particular instantiation is that it features a female Asian protagonist. Even better, Alex Chen doesn't come from the depiction of the model minority background --- her family was broken up when she was young, and she's been through a series of orphanages and foster care with a history of fighting and anger. She starts the story having been through that phase of her life and arriving at the mountain town of Haven on invitation from her brother, whom she hasn't seen for years. The fresh start ends in tragedy and the story launches.

Unlike the original Life is Strange, True Colors eschews any real puzzles. Alex Chen does have a super power --- and I love it that her super power is empathy --- she can use it to understand how others are thinking and seeing the world, or relive moments trapped in objects. Each episode revolves around a single event, and as each episode proceeds she has chances to help other people or bypass them. It's not necessarily clear for each decision what the outcome will be, and in some ways I was surprised by the support or lack of support from various characters in the climax --- which is a good thing! The final episode was by far the weakest --- the ending is inevitable no matter what you choose, but that's to be expected.

Overall, the writing is good --- the characters ring true, and your choices are fun. It's not as good as the original Life is Strange game, but it's still worth your time.

Review: The Outskirter's Secret

 After reading The Steerswoman, I immediately bought The Outskirter's Secret to continue the story. The story proceeds slowly, with slow reveals necessitated by the pace of introducing the reader from the faux-medieval society of the first book to the second book's setting, which is the outskirts or the uncivilized parts of the world.

What I really appreciate is how logical the protagonist-scientist is, and how good she is at inferring theories from the provided facts. As a heroine, she's kinda improbable, since scholars were rarely master swordspersons, but the plot necessitated in one particular juncture that not only can she understand how somebody's swordfighting style was evolved, but to be able to also duplicate it to demonstrate and prove the theory to herself. I suspended my belief for that one and just accepted it.

When the final reveal happens I was just as surprised as if I'd never read the book before, even though I must have done so in the past. Nevertheless, it's a great reveal, and I was impressed by how everything came together --- the ecology, the clues, and the pace of the reveals. Needless to say, I'e bought the 3rd book in the series and will keep reading!

Review: The Phantom Tollbooth

 I got bored with reading The Sword in the Stone to Boen, so midway through I checked out The Phantom Tollbooth from the library and started reading it to him instead. I probably never actually read it as a kid, as my memories of it was watching a video in school.

The book is silly fun, full of wordplay and non-sequiturs. The plot, the logic of it is like a dream --- all the scenes are connected by the flimsiest of excuses or narratives, and one just leads to another. The protagonist never actually makes decisions or does anything, events  just happen to him one at a time. Having said that, the language is great, and the wordplay is fun. Boen seemed to enjoy it, though I will admit he too fell asleep to this one more than once.

Hey, when you pick books to read to kids at night, one thing that the book has to be is not boring for the adult reading it to the kid. For me, that means it has to be something that I like a lot or something that I've never read before. This one's decent.

Review: Witch Hat Atelier 1-10

 I picked up Witch Hat Atelier while browsing the kindle unlimited store. As usual, only issue #1 is available, hoping to entice you to buy the remainder of the series. In this particular, it worked --- I liked the series sufficiently to check out the remainder of it from the library.

The first thing you notice is that the art for the series is gorgeous. As with most manga, it's almost entirely in black and white, with only the covers of the book colored in. But the line detail, the intricacies are breath-taking. The writer/artist clearly has the chops to draw. Most manga in Japan is serialized in weekly/monthly magazines, so not only is Shirahama good, he's also fast, able to churn out a chapter a week.

The plot revolves around witches, magic users in the world Coco lives in. At the start of the series the protagonist, Coco, is told that they are born with the power to manipulate magic. However, Coco was given a primer as a child, and one day circumstances cause her to get out the pen and ink and trace the primer she saw, which has dire consequences. It turns out that witchers aren't born with any extra-ordinary power, but indeed create magic by drawing seals, patterns that correspond to a programming language and are activated when the circle around the seal is completed. What witches do to cast spells is to pre-draw the seals, leaving a circle open, and then close the circle when they wish to activate. The conceit of the series is that only special ink can create magic, and witches conceal their drawings from the mundanes in order to maintain the illusion that magic is innate, not learned.

The primer Coco was given turned out to be a tome of forbidden magic, and in her tracing she causes a tragedy. The usual action in these circumstances is to wipe Coco's memory, but instead the witch on location feels sorry for Coco and adopts her into his atelier, or school of magic. Coco is thus inducted into the world of magic along with her new fellow students.

As the series proceeds, we get introduced to the society of witches, the tests they take to certify progression, the world of shops, supplies, and the magic police that keeps everyone honest, as well as the ethics of magic. The world building piece of the story is probably the weakest part --- it strains disbelief that such a large organization wouldn't leak a simple secret as a matter of course. The evil-doers that gave Coco the primer of forbidden magic are also slowly introduced to the reader, and various subplots surrounding each of Coco's fellow students (all of whom are women for some reason) are introduced and partially resolved.

I enjoyed reading each book, mostly because of the art, and will keep picking up new installments as they appear. It's inevitable that a series this pretty will be turned into an animated TV show or movie, though I suspect without the outstanding art that sets it apart it's unlikely that the weak world-building would make a deep impression on modern audiences. 

Review: The Sword in the Stone

 I thought I'd read The Sword in the Stone before as a kid, so when Boen wanted bed time reading I started reading it to him.  It turns out I must have read an abridged version, because the book was nothing like what I remembered. Yes, there were a lot of amusing anachronisms, and lots of places where Wart got turned into animals. But all of these were actually kinda boring. As bed time reading is concerned, boring is not bad --- the book literally put Boen to sleep multiple times!

But there's no sense of continuity (I'd forgotten that TH White put King Arthur together with Robin Hood and his merry men), and the finale is kinda anti-climatic. You never get the sense that after all of Merlyn's lessons, Wart had become ready to be King.

Some books are best not re-read as adults, I guess.

Review: The Steerswoman

 After reading Ra, I remembered that another fantasy to science fiction series of novel started with The Steerswoman. I discovered that in between when I last read it and the present day, I'd forgotten all the details and to my delight nearly everything about the series is new. The author has recovered all the rights from her publisher and is now self-publishing, which means that by buying her books you are directly supporting the author. You should do so!

The pace of the story is slow --- there's a setup, and I think more modern writers would spend less time depicting the slow realization of the protagonist about how parabolas and orbital mechanics would work. But the world setup is intriguing and at the time the books were published having strong female protagonists were rare. I finished this first book and immediately bought the next book in the series.

I've noted that the series isn't complete, and Kirstein is still working on the last 2 books in the series --- she's old enough that not finishing is a risk, but if you're OK with that, this book will be a lot of fun for you!

Review: Bea Wolf

 I ran across a review of Bea Wolf somewhere on the internet, saw that it was easily available from the library, and checked it out. It disappointingly did not download to my Kindle Scribe, but I could read it on any of our Fire tablets.

I've never read Beowolf, so this retelling was completely fresh to me. The language is that of high epic, but the panels, art, and words are those of a modern day kids, with foam toys, candy, video games, and of course, teenagers. Grendel is rendered as a middle aged man who ages kids into teenage years or (gasp) into adulthood, definitely a fate worse than death.

I read the book at night, and the next morning immediately read 15 pages of it to Boen. That very evening, Boen finished the book by himself without asking me to read it aloud to him, and then asked if there were more books, which indicates that the book is kid-approved, readable, and enjoyable.

Recommended!

Review: Astro City - Victory

 Victory is a very different graphic novel from its predecessors. While previous Astro-City pieces focus on sideline characters in the universe rather than the superheroes, Victory is an actual superhero story --- in fact, it takes the form of the well-known hero crossover story, with the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman standins meeting and working together for the first time.

Well, not exactly, since unlike regular superhero comics, things happen a lot in between issues and the reader is left to infer the events in between. But even then, I didn't find it nearly as compelling as the previous stories.

The last part of the graphic novel is a visitor's guide to Astro City, showing what a travel brochure to the city of heroes in that universe is like. That was very well done and a lot of fun. Even bad Astro City is still one of the best comics around. Recommended!

Review: Superfreakonomics

 I guess I never read Superfreakonomics before because it had acquired a bad reputation for its attempt to minimize the impact of global warming. Written by the same folks who brought you Freakonomics, it's an attempt to impose economic analysis on a whole host of phenomenon. The style is easy to read and a lot of fun, with lots of little factoids like the following:

the schoolteacher corps began to experience a brain drain. In 1960, about 40 percent of female teachers scored in the top quintile of IQ and other aptitude tests, with only 8 percent in the bottom. Twenty years later, fewer than half as many were in the top quintile, with more than twice as many in the bottom. It hardly helped that teachers’ wages were falling significantly in relation to those of other jobs. “The quality of teachers has been declining for decades,” the chancellor of New York City’s public schools declared in 2000, “and no one wants to talk about it.” (pg. 62)

There's a well known section about doctors not washing their hands, and another interesting factoid that complemented the above, about the inverse of what happened to the school teachers:

 An excellent doctor is disproportionately likely to have attended a top-ranked medical school and served a residency at a prestigious hospital. More experience is also valuable: an extra ten years on the job yields the same benefit as having served a residency at a top hospital. And oh yes: you also want your ER doctor to be a woman. It may have been bad for America’s schoolchildren when so many smart women passed up teaching jobs to go to medical school, but it’s good to know that, in our analysis at least, such women are slightly better than their male counterparts at keeping people alive. (pg. 115)

The big one is the section about global warming and its dismissive attitude towards it. That hasn't aged well. What did age well is the geoengineering solutions such as throwing sulfur into the stratosphere to reduce solar heating. That's been explored by science fiction novels in recent years, but not in convincing fashion. For instance, nobody has explored the impact of doing that on solar panel efficiency, and one thing that this book didn't forecast was how quickly the prices of solar panels and wind turbines dropped. So the book comes across as superficial and glibe.

The book was a lot of fun to read, but I guess non-fiction of this sort doesn't age well.

Review: Astro City - Shining Stars

 Astro City - Shining Stars explores various themes. I especially loved its exploration of Samaritan with one of his arch-enemies. One thing to note is that this series doesn't explore super heroes in a direct, straight on fashion. You never see any of their past encounters directly narrated --- it's all inferred by references and asides. Brilliantly done.  The exploration of other lesser known heroes in the universe Busiek has created are also very good, though I wasn't a big fan of the time-traveling tales of Silver Agent.

One nice thing about having missed the return of Astro-City for many years is that I get to spend my time catching up on at least 10 volumes of their work. This is a great series and well worth reading.

Review: Song of the Cell

 I read Song of the Cell hoping for more from the same author of The Emperor of All Maladies. The book was written during the pandemic, and it shows. The book hops from place to place, from the history of cells to an explanation of gestation, as well as an exploration of stem cells as well as immunology.

Taken on its own terms, the book is quite good as far as an introduction goes, and its theme that most modern medicine is actually cell engineering, from producing insulin to antibiotics to vaccination. Maybe I've just read too many immunology books during the pandemic, but the rest of the book doesn't seem to be as thorough or introduce too many new insights.

I wouldn't say the book was bad or a waste of time, but maybe there's been a flurry of books about immune systems and their interaction with viruses and so forth in recent years, so this book isn't as outstanding as it would be without that context. In addition, the fact that the book goes back and forth in time throughout its various parts doesn't do it any favors. It always feels like just as you're getting into cutting edge research, the book pulls you back in the past again!

Review: Astro City - Through Open Doors

 It was many years ago when I first picked up Astro City, but for a while they stopped publishing collections, so I put it out of my mind. Then at a library sale I found Through Open Doors and realized that Astro City was back!

The best thing about Astro City is when they focus on the non-superhero humans who have to live in a world where gods can effectively battle it out and destroy lives. In this collection, the story I found most effective is the one where a woman applies for a job at a call center and ends up working at the dispatch center for the superhero team honor guard. It's an awesome story and well worth reading.

I guess that means I'm just going to be picking up the rest of the series! Recommended.

Review: Amazon Kindle Scribe

 Eva was telling me that she really liked her Remarkable tablet. The price for that one was $400, but I saw that Amazon had a competitor, the Kindle Scribe. The thing about Amazon is that they have a great trade-in program, so I traded-in an ancient Kindle for $5 credit and a 20% off coupon in anticipation of an Amazon sale.

Sure enough, 2 weeks after I got my credit, the Kindle Scribe 64GB Essentials bundle went on sale for $326. Together with the trade-in, the entire bill of goods came out to $285 after tax. The bundle comes with a leather folio cover and an OEM charger.

When the scribe arrived, I was delighted to discover that it also came with the premium pen and a bundle of replacement tips for the pen. I'm not terribly impressed by the folio cover: it attaches to the kindle purely with magnets instead of a physical snap-fit, which means that it's possible to push the kindle out of the case with finger pressure or mishandling.  Nevertheless, the folding feature makes it possible to read the book easily by tilting the screen with respect to the horizontal, perfect for breakfast.

Typically, I wait to live with a product for a while before reviewing it, but within a couple of days of using the Kindle Scribe I knew I was going to keep it. I never owned the previous large size Kindle DX, but a large screen kindle is so nice that I was going to keep it even without the note-taking feature. First, it makes each kindle page turn correspond (at my preferred font size) to a page in a typical book. That's awesome! Secondly, the book is perfect for Japanese Manga. Kindle Unlimited had several volumes of Attack on Titan, and it's so great to be able to read manga directly without zooming in. The only way this would be better for comics was if the Scribe had color e-ink.

Third, the Kindle Scribe is appreciably faster on download and page turns! I didn't think it would make a big different but it does. As such, when I'm at home, I find myself using it instead of my paperwhite.

The note-taking feature works. I can create notes and write them and it syncs to the cloud. The kids use it more than I do! The writing works as well as paper does, but there are not advanced features --- no handwriting recognition, OCR, shape correction. If I was an artist or mathematician this would be great for note-taking, but alas, I probably won't use this feature much.

The other bad thing about this is that the Scribe is not waterproof. And it being so thin, it feels a bit fragile --- I'm not sure I would travel with it, even though traveling is precisely when I would want to have it around for note-taking. It certainly wouldn't fit well in a saddlebag on a bike tour, and on a sailing trip you would worry about water.

Nevertheless, at the price I paid, the entire package is a good value and it could be that over time, it might save a lot of paper the kids might otherwise waste!

Review: Ra

 Ra is a novel which dramatically changes its nature 3/4 of the way through the book. Since I don't really wish to spoil the book, I'll write about the surface details and the writing, and hope that intrigues you enough to read the book.

The protagonists of the book are a pair of sisters, Natalie and Laura Fenro, who live in a world in which magic was discovered in 1972. This magic is reproducible and repeatable, to the point where the pioneers in the field could write equations, make computations, and by the time the novel starts, there are even ISO standards for magic circles. The two women are traumatized by an event in their childhood, wherein they watched a space shuttle launch turn into a disaster, whereupon their mom says goodbye to them, and goes on to perform magic which is beyond the state of the art at the time, yet fail to rescue the shuttle and its crew.

Both daughters proceed in their own fashions to pursue magic in order to solve the mystery of what they saw that day, and we are drawn into a plot to understand the nature of magic in their world. When the reveal comes, the author isn't hesitant to point out all the issues with the existence of magic, and the explanation is both audacious and challenging. Ideas practically ooze out of the book in every new chapter, which makes the book fun in a way that I haven't seen since Charlie Stross's short story Palimpsest or his novel Glasshouse.

It's clear that the novelist (who goes under the pseudonym qnmt) is a computer scientist/software engineer --- the thinking behind each of the ideas is solid, but the characters are all rather one dimensional. But the ideas are cool, the action is cool, and the concepts will blow your mind. Well worth the time to read (and the $4 kindle price --- since the book is self published, you won't find it in the library).

If you don't want to take the risk, try reading the short story Lena by the same author. It's free and gives you an idea of what kind of fiction qntm writes.

Recommended.

Here's a quote from the book to intrigue you:

Another fun fact: in 1978, a long but startlingly elegant theorem by Shilmani proved that the language of magic had a name. That is, that the language of magic contained within itself a name for the language of magic. The proof was not constructive; it was only in 1980 that Shilmani went on to prove that the name of the language of magic was, in fact, the empty string.  (pg. 293)

Review: Deep Secret

 Deep Secret is Diana Wynne Jones' multiverse novel. The narrator, Rupert Venables is a Magid, a wizard who oversees multiple worlds but is based on Earth. His mentor dies and as junior Magid, it's his job to find a new junior Magid. Strangely enough, he's given a list of people who're all on Earth, rather than any of the other worlds he oversees. The explanation in universe is that because Earth is so non-magical, the strongest magical users come from there.

This is all tied in with another empire in a different world that's collapsing, and the way Rupert chooses to interview all his potentials is to gather them all in a science fiction convention. Along the way, his neighbor, and one of the potential's relatives get involved. The whole thing then becomes a send up of science fiction convention fans, the trite panelist answers about writing, and Rupert being in over his head.

None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, and the romance between two of the characters doesn't even make sense --- they're just told that they're going to be married, while the inner narration by each individual character doesn't say anything.

I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm just not a fan of Diana Wynne Jones. I couldn't get into anything she wrote other than The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

Review: Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach

 I checked out Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach from the library on a lark, started watching the first episode and was immediately hooked. The series is a bunch of civil engineering case studies, with a view to understanding the various phases of engineering a structure and looking at where each phase can fail, with dire consequences.

What is so great about this video series is that Professor Stephen Ressler builds small, simplified models of the structures he's talking about and then directly demonstrates the failure modes. This makes everything visual and impactful, resulting in a directly intuitive approach to understanding the mechanism of failure without having to do math or go into esoteric analysis.

This would be wasted if the disasters he chose to cover were not meaningful or interesting, but he's picked excellent case studies. Even better, in some of these cases, such as the Tacoma Narrows bridge, everything you learned in school about it was probably wrong, and he carefully debunks the incorrect explanation and shows you what happened.

By far the most impressive disasters depicted in the series are the recent ones such as the Florida International University pedestrian bridge. That's because while you can tell yourself that in the old days we didn't have adequate tools, models or experience building these types of structures, there's no such excuse for more recent structures, and you learn that anything new you do (such as a new method of construction) comes with significant risks. The cost over-runs resulting in mistakes run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and there's frequently loss of life involved as well.

I love the section that get into management. For instance, the Challenger Disaster is frequently touted as an example where engineers disagree with management, and management just refused to listen. Professor Ressler points out that everyone in the chain of command was trained as an engineer as well! I enjoyed every lecture and now understand why cantilever bridges were common in the 1930s-1960s but were not as frequently used in recent years --- it turns out that they were easier to analyze with limited computational power, and with modern computer systems we're able to make more highly optimized structures because we have the compute power available.

I highly recommend this series. If you're an engineer, or work managing engineers, this series contains important material for you. Well worth the time!

Review: How to Raise an Adult

 How to Raise an Adult is a book about over-parenting. It's written by Julie Lythcott-Haims, who was Stanford's freshman dean, who has first hand experience of what over-parented young adults look like in the most selective school in the national (Stanford accepts 5% of applicants).

The first part of the book deals with the consequences of over-parenting, including excessive specialization on sports, piano/violin (it's always piano and violin!), academic stress, and how everything that's not associated with college application is under-valued or dismissed as unimportant. There's not much controversial about this.

The second part of the book proposes a ton of personal actions you can take as a parent, including taking care of yourself so you aren't so stressed all the time, emphasizing smaller, lesser known schools that might provide a better education, and just letting your kids have a childhood. This part is a lot like telling you to meditate like a Buddhist so you can handle corporate stress better. It might help you in the short run, but in the long run it's probably unsustainable. That's because ultimately, the top tier University still ends up admitting all those piano players and stress-tolerant kids who end up being the kind of people who don't know how to operate a laundry machine.

The final part of the book finally addresses the social issues and how maybe if enough parents got together and agreed not to become tiger parents we wouldn't end up with such dysfunctional situations. Collective action is the only way to solve these problems, but again, I'm not sure there's much incentive there either.

Ultimately, the situation this book (and other books like it) describes reminds me of the situation I was in when I was a TA at school --- the kids who most needed the lectures were the least likely to show up, while the kids who would have done all the reading, homework and exercises even without the lectures were the ones diligently showing up. I don't think this book will be read by any of the tiger moms I've met, nor do I think Universities or Employers are really going to punish the kids produced by that system.

Review: A half-Built Garden

 A Half-Built Garden is science fiction, but in the rarest sub-genre, political science fiction. It's also a first contact story. It's also an optimistic vision of the future, where the world (or at least, the United States) is governed not by political entities or by corporations with lots of money, but by watershed communities that govern by AI-assisted consensus, where the social network has been organized to help communities make decisions and achieve consensus rather than to stir up fear and sell advertising.

The first contact is with two alien species which have already achieved unity and symbiosis, and by luck, the protagonist (Judy Wallach-Stevens) and her wife (Carol) show up with their baby when the first contact happens. Luck, because it turns out that the alien species expects people to bring children to negotiations as a form of mutual hostage taking.

What follows gets incredibly political as the governments and corporations want to get involved as well, and of course, the corporations do the evil thing and try to sabotage the social networks the watersheds use for consensus making. How our protagonist and her society achieve their goals and avoid getting gaslit by the corporations involved forms a large part of the story.

This is not a great novel --- some of the plot gets resolved through deus ex machinas. When the other factions on the aliens' side gets involved, we never get a great understanding of how their society works. It seems a bit too pat that there's great biosophere compatibility between all the species involved. Free-market enthusiasts will likely complain about the book being too "woke," with obsessions about pronouns and the author introducing yet more pronouns for various nuances of corporate presentations.

Nevertheless, it's an unusual read and chock full of ideas. That makes it very much worth your time. And yes, that it's an optimistic view of the future doesn't hurt it at all. Recommended.

Review: Pixel Buds Pro

 My 3 year old Jabra Elite 65t active were finally getting to the point where I would run out of battery during a normal workday. I thought for sure that I would be able to get a pair of Jabra Elite 7s, but then came along a set of Pixel Superfan coupons that netted $100 off the Pixel Buds Pro and so I tried them.

The Pixel Buds Pro in the case are about 10g heavier than the Jabra Elite 65t. The fast pair feature works great. Open the case and push the button on the back and pairing mode goes in. A pixel phone will automatically pick it up, though all other devices require you to visit the bluetooth menu. The touch controls mostly work, though are a bit finicky. I've had a few times when it would interpret a "volume up" swipe as a touch instead and vice versa, and once in a while a single touch would be turned into a double tap. Those times are in convenient but on the other hand it's super nice to be able to control volume, transparency mode, etc. while riding!

Sound quality is on par with the Jabra Elite 65t, and the transparency and noise cancellation modes both work. Both modes will cause degraded battery life, however, and battery life is the single best reason to get the Pixel Buds Pro. Google rates these for 11 hours with noise cancellation off, and I have yet to drain them on a full day's worth of work calls. Even better, the buds work with either ear or both years, which means if you're in the habit of using just one bud and it runs low or out of battery you can switch to the other one, effectively doubling the 11 hour battery life! Obviously, that's not going to work for noise cancellation on a plane, but for day to day work use that's exactly the right behavior.

The other feature that I found myself surprisingly enamored with is wireless charging. You plonk them down on the same Pixel Stand 2 that you use for fast charging a Pixel phone and it starts charging. It doesn't charge fast, but it's convenient and easy to use, and I never find myself surprised that the case is drained.

To my surprise, multi-point works! I've paired it with both a work Chromebook and a Fire tablet, and media, etc. work seamlessly between those devices and the Pixel 6. I've tried multi-point on other headsets and have invariably been disappointed. These are the first that haven't been disappointing. There's a slight increase in latency when pairing after multi-point was enabled but nothing that bothers me.

I don't think these are worth $199, but for the $100 price they're definitely a worthy upgrade. Recommended.

Review: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

 Of course I went on a Gabrielle Zevin binge, despite not really liking Young Jane Young. The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry reminds me a lot of A Man Called Ove. You've got a single man, an ornery widowed owner of a bookstore on a fictional island on the East Coast of Massachusetts, mean to everyone (even the cute publisher sales rep who visits a couple of times a year to go over his selection of books to stock), and one day an abandoned child mysteriously appears in his bookstore overnight with a mournful note attached. The mother appears washed up dead on shore a couple of days later, but Fikry decides for some unknown reason to adopt the child and raise her (Maya) as his own.

Of course, the child changes him from being an unlikeable person to becoming the life of the town. He finds love, and the rest of the plot unfolds --- we get answers as to why Maya's mother killed herself. There's a tear-jerker ending that feels like it was written for a made-for-tv movie --- the plot is that predictable. Even the romance seems both unlikely and moves characters together for the sake of the kind of story the author wants to tell.

Having said that, it's the little touches in this book that make it different from other made for tv movie plot books --- Fikry writes little cards on books that explain why he recommends a certain book, and those feel authentic.

I'll admit this: no way would I have read this book or continued past the first few pages if not for how good Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was. It in no way can hold a candle up to those books. The prose is transparent and easy to read, but I can see why the folks who made the movie out of the book did put their heart into it (Rotten Tomatoes of 38%). When I started this review I had put a recommended label on it but by the time I finished I had to take it out.

Review: Dispel Illusion

 Dispel Illusion showed up as part of the Kindle Unlimited Library, so I picked it up, despite my misgivings about book 2, Limited Wish. In fact, it seems that my assessment of the second book was accurate, as in Dispel Illusion, Mark Lawrence pretty much ignores book 2, and resets the plot so that only book 1 matters!

This dramatically improves the logical flow of the story, and now everything that happens makes sense, including the D&D game that's part of the story-within-a-story. At this point, all the time paradoxes that are about to happen, and Nick's previous encounters with a future version of himself now align. Now, it aligns with a pretty cheap trick, but at least it didn't leave me feeling that I'd wasted my money.

This isn't the greatest book in the world, but Lawrence's prose style here is readable and the juxtapositions make sense. A reasonable airplane novel, though it'd have to be a pretty short airplane ride if that was the only book you had.

Review: The Beginning of Infinity

 My wife bought a copy of The Beginning of Infinity, so it popped right onto my kindle and I just read it as a matter of course. I started the book expecting something about physics, but it turned out to be a philosophy book! Let me see if I can summarize it. Basically, the central thesis of the book is that there is no observation/empirical evidence without a theory. The world is full of so much data and evidence that unless you have an underlying theory to explain it, you won't even know what to look for.

But what is a theory? The idea then is that a theory is an explanation of the underlying mechanism for the observations you see. That explanation is what enables prediction, which is what allows an experiment to be made that allows you to have more confidence in your explanation, or which proves that your explanation is wrong. From this, David Deutsch generalizes his philosophy to encompass governments, culture, the arts, and the approach to the future.

Using knowledge to cause automated physical transformations is, in itself, not unique to humans. It is the basic method by which all organisms keep themselves alive: every cell is a chemical factory. The difference between humans and other species is in what kind of knowledge they can use (explanatory instead of rule-of-thumb) and in how they create it (conjecture and criticism of ideas, rather than the variation and selection of genes). It is precisely those two differences that explain why every other organism can function only in a certain range of environments that are hospitable to it, while humans transform inhospitable environments like the biosphere into support systems for themselves. And, while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow.  (pg. 58)

What's great about human beings, then, is that we're universal explainers and constructors, able to comprehend and construct theories  about the universe we find ourselves in. He then draws attention to the length of human history, and wonders why it took so long for humans to construct modern society and achieve the enlightenment. He points to memes as an explanation --- human society constructs and propagates memes, and long lived memes (i.e., religion) constructs a static society where new ideas or improvements on existing ideas are viewed with excessive suspicion, and so despite certain societies being particularly enlightened, such enlightened societies are short-lived:

long-lived religions typically cause fear of specific supernatural entities, but they do not cause general fearfulness or gullibility, because that would both harm the holders in general and make them more susceptible to rival memes. So the evolutionary pressure is for the psychological damage to be confined to a relatively narrow area of the recipients’ thinking, but to be deeply entrenched, so that the recipients find themselves facing a large emotional cost if they subsequently consider deviating from the meme’s prescribed behaviours. (pg. 384)

In fact, his claim is that the current modern Western society is the only reason-based society that has survived more than a few generations, and even then, we don't do a good job propagating it:

 Despite modern talk of encouraging critical thinking, it remains the case that teaching by rote and inculcating standard patterns of behaviour through psychological pressure are integral parts of education, even though they are now wholly or partly renounced in explicit theory. Moreover, in regard to academic knowledge, it is still taken for granted, in practice, that the main purpose of education is to transmit a standard curriculum faithfully...we live in a society in which people can spend their days conscientiously using laser technology to count cells in blood samples, and their evenings sitting cross-legged and chanting to draw supernatural energy out of the Earth. (pg. 393)

 Deutsch then points out that there has never been an age of humanity where we didn't have new problems, urgent problems, or impending doom heading down our way. His take on it is that we have to be optimistic and try to use reason to find technological solutions to our problems --- this includes climate change, etc., rather than trying to turn the clock back. Deutsch has the most persuasive case for cautious optimism that I've ever seen about the climate crisis --- he points out that until the solution was implemented, very few people had any idea how the food crisis would have been solved, and yet today we have an abundance of food. I'm reminded of the time when someone at a startup said to his team, "At a startup you have to plan for success, because if you plan for failure, you're going to fail! That means that when you build a solution you have to plan for scaling it up."

In any case, the book presented a good idea, took it to its natural conclusions, doesn't mince words or hold back from criticism. There's a self-indulgent place in the book where Deutsch writes historical fiction about Socrates and his students, but you can skip that section with no loss of fidelity to the ideas in the book. Well worth your time reading!

Review: Neugent Cycling A422TwoX wheels

The thing with ball bearing wheels is that I learned that I can't be bothered to overhaul them myself. While it's possible to do the overhaul --- I'm actually decent at disassembly, I discovered that the amount of faff involved in adjusting bearing preload was such a pain that I avoided doing it and always end up paying someone to do it. That costs about $60/year.

Neugent Cycling's A422TwoX wheels on a black friday special cost $350. That's about 6 years of bearing overhauls on a set of wheels that's lighter than I could build myself (at a claimed weight of 1400g). Even more importantly, I can't buy the parts to make them --- the idea behind the rear wheel is that it uses 16 spokes on the drive side, with only 8 spokes on the non-drive side to equalize the tension between both sides. This makes a lot of sense --- one reason I had to over-tension my Primato Syntesi wheels was because the non-drive side would come loose over time!  Even better, Neugent claims that the drive side has washers so the high tension wouldn't cause the rim to break. You can do the same when you build a pair of wheels but then you'll have to make allowance for the required extra length when calculating spoke length. Just buying parts for a new set of wheels cost more than what John Neugent was charging, so I bought a pair.

Let's get the negatives out of the way first. The front wheel had a rattle that indicates a loose spoke nipple that's in the rim. I'd have to take the rim strip out to shake it out. It makes an annoying noise at low speed when the centrifugal force wouldn't keep the nipple from knocking around in the hollow section of the rim. Secondly, I noticed that tires were much harder to mount on the rims than I expected. Neugtent pointed me at his article for mounting tough tires. It turns out that he made his rims tubeless compatible and now even those of us who have zero intention of going tubeless have to pay the price by having difficult to mount tires! Having said that once I used this system (installing the valve stem part last!) I could get the tire mounted without massive pain. Finally, after a few rides I had to true the rear wheel --- the tension still isn't high enough but with the assurance of having washers inside the rim I just basically added tension. With time the wheel should settle out.

Now for the good news. The wheels are light! The first time I bunny hopped the wheel I felt like I'd gained an extra inch! Now I'm used to the wheel but they still feel light. I'm not any faster than with my older wheels with more spokes, but that was never the point. Light wheels are just more fun. The other interesting things is that the rims are wider, so my 700x25 GP5000 tires actually measure 28mm on the rear wheel! On the front wheel, my 28mm GP5000s measure 28mm, so the rear rim must be wider than the front. That means that you can size your tires one size down from what you'd normally run and get reduced weight.

I was going to wait longer to write a full review after abusing the wheels a bit, but after my recent ride in the snow I realized that I've abused these wheels far more than most people will do so in their lifetime. I wouldn't recommend them for the novice with no ability to true wheels up, but for any one else these wheels are cheaper than anything you can build yourself, and come with everything you would want --- spare spokes and nipples, etc. And for the price they can't be beat!

Review: Free to Learn

 Free to Learn is Peter Gray's indictment of the modern industrial style school. It starts with a personal story about his child rebelling against school and comparing it with imprisonment. After that, he went and found Sudbury Valley School, where the school is run democratically, not by adults, but by the kids voting on what they want to do. There are no formal classes, no formal sporting activities, and the staff of the school is there as resources for the children in that school.

I'm naturally sympathetic to this approach. While I did well in formal schooling, over time, particularly my last few years in high school, I discovered that for many things, I would read about them myself and learn on my own, and it was far more effective for me to do so than attending a high school physics class where the teacher herself didn't actually understand the concepts and couldn't communicate them properly. (And before you think that my high school was a crap high school, it was billed by the Wall Street Journal as the Gateway to the Ivy Leagues) My uncle (one of the first in the family to attend college) would tell my mom that reading comics were bad for me, but of course on the first day of my GP class, I would turn out to be the only kid who knew who FDR was, something I learned from a Frank Miller Batman comic.

Gray points out that in the hunter-gather society, most learning is not driven by parents or adults, but by the children themselves. I'm not sympathetic to that argument --- just because it was something that humans evolved to do, doesn't mean that it's not maladaptive to modern society. What is compelling to me are the stories (granted, anecdotes isn't data) of children who did badly in traditional schools moving to the Sudbury system and successfully educating themselves. Even more compelling was that those same kids who did badly in traditional schools would do well in colleges like Columbia college.

The book covers other important aspects of the school. For instance, mixing the ages of the kids naturally does several things: first, it allows the younger kids to do more sophisticated play, developing their language arts and math skills faster. The teaches the older kids empathy, and as we all know, to teach a subject properly requires a better understanding of it than mere regurgitation of the material on the exam requires. The staff at the school notes that in recent years kids have been learning to read and do math earlier and earlier because of the desire to play video games. Gray points out that given a chance to do free play outdoors, however, kids actually choose to do so rather than being immersed in a video game!

Another fascinating topic Gray notes is that the lack of a formal sports program means that all sporting play outdoors are informal. Mixed ages means that the children themselves modulate play so that younger kids can participate, and that the older kids actually deliberately handicap themselves in order to make the game challenging for themselves. The rules are negotiated informally, but more importantly, the kids learn to compromise because everyone has to be happy with the rules or the game will not continue. In fact, it turns out that in many games, kids spend as much time negotiating as they do playing, which sounds inefficient but is actually better preparation for the modern white collar workplace than adult-regulated formal games!

Finally, no book like this one is sufficient without talking about the free range parenting movement, the homeschooling movement, and the unschooling movement. Gray is actually optimistic that eventually the system will learn that the current structure schooling system is failing our kids and change. I'm actually quite doubtful, since many kids go through the current system and turn out fine, and change requires courage which the bureaucracy is designed to thwart.

Regardless, for the ideas, arguments, and approaches that could work, I think regardless of whether you're sympathetic to Peter Gray's ideas, you will not find this book a waste of your time. It's very much worth reading! If nothing else, using the approach in this book might give your kids an advantage over the traditional tiger parented kids. After all, those people who participate in competitive parenting will never consider letting their kids play to learn, no matter how many studies show that the latter approach is far more effective for real world learning.

Review: Young Jane Young

 After reading the brilliant Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I went back to read other Zevin books. Young Jane Young was published in 2017, after Trump won the 2016 election. The lead character is effectively Monica Lewinski, a young intern who has an affair with a married congressman, rather than the president, derailing her career and aspirations. Unlike the real Monica Lewinski, this version chose to move away, change her name, and become an event planner.

The writing style is still transparent, easy to read, and full of fun gimmicks like a section in the book that's written like a choose your own adventure book but with all the options the character didn't choose crossed out. It's an easy book to read, but the deep flaw in the book is that none of the characters are sympathetic.

The lead protagonist, of course, is someone you want to shake and say, "Stop making life destroying decisions!" She ignores good advice from her parents, never chooses the right path when she make a wrong choice, and full of self-pity. Her mom isn't terribly sympathetic either. Surprisingly, Jane's daughter Ruby also comes across as unsympathetic and full of hubris. That this didn't stop me from reading the book is a testament to Zevin's skill as a writer.

At the end of the novel Zevin makes a statement that she wrote the book as a testament to how women politicians have to put up with stuff men never have to. That's a fair testament to say, Clinton vs Trump. But on the other hand, maybe someone who makes awfully bad life choices shouldn't expect life to come easy, and history is full of men who started out from a much worse position than the life of privilege Zevin's protagonist had, so I'm not sure Zevin quite makes her point.

I find it good to read books written earlier from authors I admire and enjoy --- it really shows how much she developed between the two books. I wouldn't say that Young Jane Young is a book I'd avoid, but I'd definitely say it didn't feel nearly as great a book as her latest novel.

Review: Primato Syntesi Hubs

 You can get a pair of Primato Syntesi 32h road hubs (any color you want as long as they're black) for $100 on Amazon. On a sale, I managed to get them for just under $90 shipped. Compared to the high end Shimano Hubs (which no longer are being sold), these are slightly heavier, but a heck of a lot cheaper. They also come with sealed bearings, which means that unlike the Shimanos you will not end up spending more than the cost of the hubs in bearing over hauls in just 2 years.

The front hub weighs 132g, while the rear hub weighs 295g. The front QR weighs 51, and the rear QR comes in at 55g. The rear is therefore about 45g heavier than the White Industries T11, the standard for rear hubs with sealed bearings, while the front is about 40g heavier than the equivalent white industries. But a pair of the White Industries T11 hubs will cost you north of $500!

Compared to my 7700 dura ace hubs, the rear wheel built from this hub will be a lot weaker --- wR is 16.1 vs the 21.1 on the 7700 dura ace hub. Compared to the White T11, it's also weaker, since that comes in at a wR of 18. On the other hand, you can swap out the free hub body on the Syntesi for about $50, switching to XDR if you need a 10-52 drive train.

I chose to build up with sapim laser spokes and a23 OC rear rim and a23 front. The front builds up easily, but the rear required a bit of tweaking to get everything down. I eventually gave in and tensioned past the recommended Velocity recommended spoke tension to get everything nice and tight, probably sacrificing rim longevity for wheels that stay true for longer.

The wheels ride nice, and are much quieter than the White Industries hubs, though nowhere as silent or near silent as the Shimano. I use them in the rain, and on the Roadini with TerraSpeed 40mm tires and beat them up with mountain bike trails. People watch me ride slowly down those trails and exclaim in surprise that I ride those trails with a road bike and sidepull caliper brakes.

To be honest, the Roadini rides much better than any mountain bike I've ridden, and the brakes never gave me trouble in mostly dry conditions. In any case, I'm not limited by the wheels that resulted and will happily recommend these hubs for all-round use if you're not a weight weenie. They're kinda hard to find in 36h configuration compared to the T11s, but otherwise I'm perfectly satisfied with them.

Review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow showed up on many "Books of the Year" lists. I checked it out of the library with suspicion, since books that show up in literary lists are usually pretentious, difficult to read, and full of characters you don't care about. To my delight, Gabrielle Zevin defies such expectations. Her prose is transparent, her characters real, and more important, the world she builds is so close to the world we live in and her voice so authentic that it overcomes my resistance to reading mainstream fiction.

The story revolves around Sadie Green and Sam Masur, who met when both were friends as children but had a falling out, only to reclaim their friendship when both are at college (at MIT and Harvard) respectively. The two had bonded over video games as children, and in reclaiming that bond, decide to partner and make one. The name of the first game, Ichigo, ironically, was the codename of Pikmin Bloom back when I was at Niantic. 

I loved the characters of Sam and Sadie. Both are half Asians. (Zevin makes it super realistic that both managed to get into top schools by having both of them explicitly not have Asian names) Sam has the attitude of many highly intellectual folks:

Sam was a complete teetotaler. He never drank, didn’t even like taking aspirin. The only drugs he’d ever taken were whatever painkillers he’d been given in the hospital, and he hadn’t liked the way they had clouded his ability to think. The body part that worked consistently well for Sam was his brain, and he was not going to compromise it. Because of this experience, Sam often suffered through pain that probably should have and could have been somewhat ameliorated. (Page 96)

He over-intellectualizes everything, and has the timidity and lack of social courage you may have observed in many such folks. Yet despite such stereotypes, Zevin paints a complete picture of his traumas, his stoic nature, and his willingness to push on. I love the way Zevin does so --- not only does she provide the usual narratives and internal dialogue, she also includes interviews with Polygon or Kotaku as appropriate --- the world she creates feels lived in.

Similarly, Sadie Green, for all her virtues, has a semi-neurotic nature who regularly makes up stories of betrayals from her closest friends, and resents the perception of other people for whom her friends can't take responsibility for or correct. After all the events in the novel, the two friends get together and reminiscence:

“There must be some other versions of us that don’t make games.” “What do they do instead?” “They’re friends. They have a life!” Sadie said. Sam nodded. “Oh, right. I’ve heard of those. They’re those things where you sleep regular hours and you don’t spend every waking moment tormented by some imaginary world.” (pg. 392)

I won't spoil the novel for you --- it ends with the characters overcoming their foibles, but the path it takes there is what matters. Like real life, the journey is the reward. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book with its hyper-real setting, and the author can't fake this one --- she truly does enjoy computer games.

The book isn't without flaws, but they're minor. There's a reference in an early section of the book about burning out video cards while writing a game --- I've been in the industry for a long time, and that's never actually happened. You can see it as an attempt by the author to depict technical work and going over-board.

Reading the blurbs for the book, it's clear that the authors go overboard to avoid mentioning that the book is about video games. Bah. It's as though games is not a legitimate venue for creativity --- ignore such things. The novel revolves around video game designers and programmers --- it's about time they got a novel, and I'm very happy it's a good one. Reading this book with my highest recommendation.

Review: Scooby-Doo Betrayal at Mystery Mansion

 There was a sale on Amazon for Scooby Doo in Betrayal at Mystery Mansion for $13. My first edition copy of Betrayal at The House on the Hill had long suffered water damage, and at this price I couldn't pass it up since it was more than 50% off the price of the bigger, adult-oriented game.

Just like the original, your cast of characters go exploring the haunted house. The themes allow you to explore inside or outside the house, and the instructions are a bit vague, but we got through the game, including rolling the haunts and the betrayal scenarios. I half expected the game to go unused after one game, but the kids love it and have been demanding to play it the entire winter break. Note that they've never so much as watched a single episode of Scooby Doo or any of the movies, so it's not because of the theming.

The gameboard is smaller compared to the full sized game, and in the 6 games we've played the monster has won only once. There are only 24 scenarios, but with a reconfigurable gameboard that's unique every session the kids will keep asking for more until they get bored.

Recommended.

Review: Let My People Go Surfing

 I was intrigued by the Chouinard's family decision to roll all their holdings in Patagonia into a company that's dedicated to preserving the environment. Not only did they do so, they did so in such a way that the company is free to participate in political causes, which is one of the highest leverage activity anyone who wants to change the world can do.

I picked up Let My People Go Surfing to get an idea of the man behind Patagonia. I enjoyed the opening stories about how he ended up making climbing equipment and selling it in a low volume business before setting up a company. I thought it very sad that he got out of making climbing equipment (after pioneering non-destructive climbing tools) because he was getting sued by people who were not using the equipment properly or using it for purposes that were unintended. The pivot into full time clothing manufacturing seems wrong to me, though obviously from a business point of view it absolutely makes sense --- there will always be more people wearing Patagonia down jacket to go to the mall than people wearing the same jacket while backcountry camping --- Chouinard admits as much.

I loved the philosophy Chouinard espouses --- in many ways Patagonia is the anti-Apple. While Apple would build computers with soldered RAM, glued-in batteries, and work as hard as possible to make its computers and phones non-repairable, Patagonia would encourage its customers not to buy new jackets but to repair it and hang on to it for longer. I love it. In fact, Chouinard goes out of his way to indict manufacturers who void warranties on products where customers dare to attempt repair. Of course, given the difference between the market caps of Apple and Patagonia Chouinard is probably tilting at windmills, but the environmentalist in me appreciates his attempt.

Much of the book covers the approach to clothing and how Patagonia operates. After reading this book I now understand why the Patagonia Messenger Bag is so awful. It's quite clear that Chouinard doesn't ride a bike seriously, nor does he employ someone who rides a lot. As a result there are all sorts of decisions (such as the bag not just being water-leaky, but designed in such a way that rain is directed into the laptop compartment!) that Patagonia probably would never do on their mountaineering or backpacking equipment. (Not having ever owned a Patagonia waterproof piece of clothing, I'm can't say that in confidence --- it may be that Patagonia waterproof jackets are just as leaky as their bicycle messenger bags)

The rest of the book is pretty good, with interesting material on organic farming methods and how much that can help as far as carbon sequestration is concerned. Chouinard is indeed quite pessimistic about how the human race will handle the climate crisis, but that's not news to you --- I'm pessimistic as well:

The difficulty of convincing people to act is evident from walking through Patagonia’s own parking lots and offices. SUVs are studded all over the lot, and people are wearing jeans and shirts made from nonsustainable fibers grown with toxic chemicals. Even here, where everyone knows how bad all this stuff is, environmental values are a hard sell. One hopes that the kids coming out of our child-care center will do better. (kindle loc 3249)

I loved the section of the book about how he dealt with the protestors who were picketing Patagonia for donating to planned parenthood:

 Despite receiving thousands of letters from people saying they would never again buy our products, we coordinated a unified response from all the targeted companies—every one much larger than Patagonia. When we were threatened by the CAC with groups picketing our stores, we relied on a strategy called Pledge-a-Picket. We said that we would reward every picketer who showed up at one of our stores by donating ten dollars to Planned Parenthood in his or her name. They chose to stay away, and the boycott collapsed. We were described in the New York Times as “courageous,” and we then received thousands of letters from Planned Parenthood supporters. (kindle loc 3389)

Clearly unlike many businessmen who claim to be principled environmentalists Mr. Chouinard clearly can walk the walk as well as talking the talk. I learned a surprising amount from this book, and most of it wasn't corporate propaganda or self-congratulatory entrepreneur memoir-speak. It's worth reading! 

Review: Slouching towards Utopia

 Slouching Towards Utopia is Brad DeLong's economic history of the world from 1870 to the present day. Brad DeLong not only worked as an economic advisor during the Clinton administration, he's also a professor at UC Berkeley and an avid read of science fiction, giving him a perspective that most other academics do not have.

What makes this period different for DeLong is that this is the period where technology and material improvement from human ingenuity finally outpaced the increase in population:

Before 1870, over and over again, technology lost its race with human fecundity, with the speed at which we reproduce. Greater numbers, coupled with resource scarcity and a slow pace of technological innovation, produced a situation in which most people, most of the time, could not be confident that in a year they and their family members would have enough to eat and a roof over their heads.13 Before 1870, those able to attain such comforts had to do so by taking from others, rather than by finding ways to make more for everyone (especially because those specializing in producing, rather than taking, thereby become very soft and attractive targets to the specializers in taking). (kindle loc 162)

All the grand characters in the sweep of this period are covered, from Herbert Hoover to Franklin Roosevelt to the Keynes, Adam Smith, Marx, Hayek, Von Mises, and one I didn't know about before, Karl Polanyi. DeLong loves wrestling with ideas, and does a great job representing each of their ideas well with repeated quotes, themes, and he accurately portrays the clash of ideas that affect our lives to this day.

There are many places where DeLong speculate (as only a science fiction reader could) about how things could have different outcomes in history:

When I first started writing this book, I felt, as many others did, that 1929–1933 was a uniquely vulnerable time, and planned to devote considerable space to explaining why. But in 2008, we skated to the edge of another Great Depression (which we’ll explore in more detail in Chapter 17), which made it painfully clear that the years 1929–1933 were not so uniquely vulnerable after all. Rather, we had been remarkably lucky before 1929, and we had been remarkably lucky after 1929...Why did the Great Depression not push the United States to the right, into reaction, or protofascism, or fascism, as it did in so many other countries, but instead to the left? My guess is that it was sheer luck—Herbert Hoover and the Republicans were in power when the Great Depression started, and they were thrown out of office in 1932. That Franklin Roosevelt was center-left rather than center-right, that the length of the Great Depression meant that institutions were shaped by it in a durable sense, and that the United States was the world’s rising superpower, and the only major power not crippled to some degree by World War II—all these factors made a huge difference. After World War II, the United States had the power and the will to shape the world outside the Iron Curtain. It did so. And that meant much of the world was to be reshaped in a New Deal rather than a reactionary or fascist mode. (kindle loc 3062-3300)

 He points out (very rightly) how the libertarian right is so fond of fascism:

At the start of the 1980s, libertarian darling Friedrich von Hayek wrote a letter to Margaret Thatcher suggesting that the British hew more closely to the methods of fascistic Augusto Pinochet, whose 1973 Cold War coup overthrowing and murdering President Salvador Allende Hayek had greatly applauded as rescuing Chile from the road to serfdom. We catch his urged sympathies in her politely worded reply. Thatcher wrote, “Some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable.… We shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time.”17 All of these—save Thatcher—at least flirted with a temporary and tactical alliance with and allegiance to fascism, and some of them did much, much more: believing that representative democracy could not summon the strength to resist really-existing socialism, and believing that that disastrous threat to civilization called for desperate measures and alliances in response. (kindle loc 3996)

 The entire book is great reading, with a lot of history, and he's as critical of Obama as he is of Hoover for his handling of the Great Recession, making multiple good points and quoting Obama's words to demonstrate it.

My biggest criticism of the book is that the kindle edition shows signs of bad editing, with places where you get repeated paragraphs, or even chapters where very similar words were used.

I think the books about Keynes and Roosevelt I linked to above are much better reading for context and understanding, but DeLong's book is still worth your time. Recommended.

Review: 2 USB current measuring devices

 When you buy a charger or power bank, it usually brags about how much power it supplies. But how do you verify that it actually provides that power? The answer is that you have to use a device that measures current through the wire. Pierre Morrels suggested the Eversame tester, while Nelson Minar suggested  the mcdodo cable. To be honest, the mcdodo cable looked way easier to use, but I bought both to try. Indeed, the mcdodo cable has a very nice display to tell you how much power you're drawing from the cable. The eversame is bulkier and harder to use. I tried them both on the Pixel Stand 2. The geek in me loves the more detailed output from the Eversame --- it displays both voltage and current, and I get a kick out of seeing the Pixel Stand 2 draw 19V and 1.5 amps when the phone's battery is nearly empty for a full 21W of power to the phone (minus a 7W penalty for supplying power wirelessly), and then dropping down to 9.5V and 0.7amps past 50% charge, and then finally all the way down to 5V.

What got me to return the mcdodo cable, however, was that I noticed that the Pixel Stand would occasionally stop charging for no reason with this cable. There might be something in the cable that interferes with the power negotiating process. After a while, it would flip back to normal and display 18, 27, or 21W depending on the mood of the Pixel Stand 2.

The Eversame also provides a way to store the capacity of the current passing through so you can test how far gone your battery bank is. That's a useful function, so worth the higher price and bulk. I'm keeping it.

Review: A Bike Ride - 12000 miles around the world

 I enjoyed my read of Lone Traveler so much that I looked for Anne Mustoe's first book, A Bike Ride - 12,000 miles around the world.  It wasn't available from the library or on kindle format so I bought it on eBay used. The book arrived and I read it while on vacation.

Written in a clear, transparent style that reflected her experience as a Principal of a private school (she calls her self former head mistress), the book is a single narrative comprising of her notes while traveling. Being an English writer from before the current spate of travel books by women, the book is unusual in that in doesn't depict a woman running away from an abusive relationship, trying to find herself, or recovering from some prior trauma. It also doesn't depict an incompetent person trying to execute a trip in way over her head. Mustoe is competent, preparing for her trip with meticulous research (even to the point of scheduling vaccinations at various points during her journey), with not a single shred of self-pity in sight.

There's even a great section in the book where she describes how she deals with sexual propositions while on the trip, and an encounter in a 3rd world country where a group of school children started chasing her on their bicycles. By and large she follows famous routes (like Alexandra's conquering army), and she's slept in situations that would cause many distress (e.g., on a table in a room filled with cockroaches), yet at no point does she claim pathos or pity.

Her tastes in food really reflect her culture. For instance, she rode all through India enjoying the cuisine, but would arrive in Thailand and hate the food! (She really didn't like rice or rice noodles) She loved Malaysia, a former British colony, and didn't enjoy mountains but didn't mind deserts.

I really enjoyed the book. Recommended.

Review: Eye of the Dragon

 I enjoyed Fairy Tale enough to check out Eye of the Dragon from the library and read it.  This is how Stephen King does fantasy --- there's very little world building --- he assumes a medieval generic fantay setting, and just dives into the (rather simplistic) plot and characters. The narrator frequently breaks the fourth wall, addressing the reader directly, and the voice of the narrator is awesome --- this is what Stephen King is great at --- the tone is conversational, transparent, and a very easy read --- he never makes the reader work.

The plot and world is where things don't quite work. The magic in the universe is never defined, explained, or has limits drawn around it, so the ending doesn't feel fair. Secondly, there's a lot of detail the plot depends on that feels quite artificial and contrived. You just have to accept it. To his credit, King's narrator is so convincing and personable that you will by default accept it while reading, only later realizing that the plot is kinda fishy.

It's enjoyable and light reading, but don't expect anything that bears repeated reading.

Review: Fire TV Cube 3rd Gen

 Of all my Alex-enabled devices the Fire TV Cube is the one that consistently gets the most used. It was a bit slow, however, and never supported Zoom, so when the 3rd Gen Fire TV cube came up and Amazon offered a 25% trade-in offer, I bought it.

This thing is fast! It comes up faster, and downloads faster. And Amazon's PMs as usual did a fantastic job --- on setup it just carried over all the settings from the previous version and everything worked as expected. What I didn't like was that it didn't also download all the previous apps --- those had to be downloaded separately. Fortunately, it's fast so I didn't have to wait long --- I guess that meant it was still a good product decision.

What's not so nice was that the remote wasn't the Pro remote.  I ended up buying one separately so that when the kids hid the remote I could still find it.

All the existing features of the Fire TV Cube are there --- just faster. It automatically turns on the speakers for music, and does all sorts of other nice things. There's a pass through HDMI port, but I haven't bothered trying it since it's not recommended for the PS5. I haven't tried the Zoom feature yet. I'll try it soon.

All in all, it's a worthy upgrade. I have no idea why the competition hasn't caught on yet. I guess as usual, Amazon gets under-estimated!

Re-read: Farewell My Lovely

 There's nothing quite like Raymond Chandler. I picked up Farewell My Lovely and the prose just sucked me in and before I knew it I'd read the whole thing in a couple of evenings. Sure, the time and place are dated, and perhaps Chandler didn't like women or at least enjoys making them villains, but his prose makes everything so enjoyable that time just flies by. Recommended.

Review: Reality is not what is seems

 Reality Is Not What It Seems is Carlo Rovelli's quantum loop gravity for the layman. Rovelli writes really good prose, and he covers the history of physics all the way from the ancient Greeks to Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr. The descriptions are vivid and easy reading, and the launch into quantum loop gravity stalls a bit as he tries to avoid math, but then he carries right along into the reasons why Quantum Loop gravity is important and what the implication is for the existence of time and why it appears the way it is in general relativity.

The idea is that at the quantum level you have events linked together in a topology, which relates events to each other. Time, then, is an emergent property of a lot of quantum events at the aggregate level. He then points out that if quantum loop gravity shows that space has a minimum size, then a lot of the singularities in existing theories go away.

Finally, what I love about the book is its defense of science and the scientific method:

The answers given by science, then, are not reliable because they are definitive. They are reliable because they are not definitive. They are reliable because they are the best available today. And they are the best we have because we don’t consider them to be definitive, but see them as open to improvement. It’s the awareness of our ignorance that gives science its reliability. And it is reliability that we need, not certainty. We don’t have absolute certainty, and never will have it unless we accept blind belief. The most credible answers are the ones given by science, because science is the search for the most credible answers available, not for answers pretending to certainty....science and religion frequently find themselves on a collision course. Not because science pretends to know ultimate answers, but precisely for the opposite reason: because the scientific spirit distrusts whoever claims to be the one having ultimate answers or privileged access to Truth. This distrust is found to be disturbing in some religious quarters. It is not science that is disturbed by religion: there are certain religions that are disturbed by scientific thinking. To accept the substantial uncertainty of our knowledge is to accept living immersed in ignorance, and therefore in mystery. To live with questions to which we do not know the answers. Perhaps we don’t know them yet or, who knows, we never will. (kindle loc 2772-2782)

Short, eloquent, and easy to read. There's nothing about this book not to recommend.

Review: Silca Synergetic Wet Lube

 There all sorts of web-sites that go crazy about chain lubrication, and if you believe the experts, the only way to lubricate your chain is to strip the chain of oil and then bathe it in hot wax. I'm not quite interested in that kind of extra work, so I don't do that. I go for web lubricants and sometimes neglect the lubrication until the chain starts to squeak.

Some of those web-sites will recommend the Silca Synergetic Wet Lube as the best lube for someone who can't be bothered to wax. The claims are hyperbole, as I've discovered the hard way that the lube like all other lubes attracts dirt and gets gunky. What caught my eye, however, was the dispensing bottle. When the lube first came out, the bottle came with a needle dispenser. This lets you get the lube exactly where you want it, especially if you're not lubricating the chain, but pivot points on other bicycle components. Having a needle dispenser also means that you aren't wasting lube --- it's easy to get exactly one drop of oil per link.

Alas, all good things come to an end and if you buy the lube from Amazon at this point it comes with a standard applicator which is much harder to control. Fortunately, I kept an old dispenser and poured the oil over to the new one. (I should have just moved the cap over) So I expect that if I break or lose the dispenser I'm going to hunt around for a new lube.

Does the lube make the chain last longer? Beats me. My switch to 11-speed is relatively recent so I've yet to wear out a chain. And chains are so cheap anyway it's probably not worth spending $20 worth of lube for a $20 chain.

If you can find the old dispenser, get it. Otherwise, I'm not sure this is worth the steep price.

Review: Acceptance - A Memoir

 Acceptance is Emi Nietfeld's memoir about her childhood and tertiary education years, topped with her successful career at Google and Facebook as well as a bestselling author. A childhood where her father decided to become a woman, her mother being described as a "hoarder" (you quickly discover what it means and it's not a good thing), followed by spells of institutions mixed in with forster care but then success at getting a full scholarship as a boarding school.

Many parts of the books are dramatized --- there's a definitely vibe that comes from being a person who's successfully marketed herself to Harvard and other Ivy League schools. For instance, she mentions that she wrote her college applications while sleeping in her car. When you get to that section you realized that she did it only for a couple of days before her pro bono famous college counselor told her to get to a shelter to get evidence for it so she could write a statement of extenuating circumstances. (I had no idea that that was a thing!)

That's not to detract from Nietfeld's achievements --- she did win national writing competitions (including the Horatio Algier award --- which she successfully turns into a skewering of the kind of person who sponsors those kind of awards). It's also a statement about how important a prestigious university like Harvard is --- she claimed to be the kind of student who got Bs and A-s in an institution where due to rampant grade inflation, it would have been an equivalent to be a C elsewhere, but the aura of Harvard was such that she managed to get a $130K/year job offer from Harvard, which she turned into a $200K offer by getting a second offer from Yahoo, where she had interned and been compared to then-CEO Marissa Mayer.

Nietfeld also describes her rape with unflinching detail. It took place in Budapest where she stayed at a hostel where there were only 2 men, a red flag which she hadn't been taught to avoid. It happened to her in between her high school and starting college, which led to her taking a gap year, which incidentally also made some of her sponsors from the Horatio Algier writing competition withdraw their support!

Her description of Harvard reminded me of the time when I went to graduate school and everyone else had an NSF fellowship but I had no idea what one was:

Harvard’s hands-off approach might have been ideal if I wanted to “explore” and “find myself.” But after everything, I mainly wanted to explore lucrative careers and find myself incredibly wealthy. Given my lack of parental guidance and ignorance of elite social norms, the freedom that Harvard offered didn’t feel like freedom at all. Instead it felt like another way other people knew the rules and I was in the dark. (kindle loc 4167)

Right at the end of the book Nietfeld got access to her childhood records and realized that much of what she thought was her fault turned out to be just how the system worked:

I  saw in the records that from my very first therapy appointment after my parents’ divorce, discussions of my mom’s diagnosis and potential treatment took up as much space as my own. Professionals knew she was sick, but they didn’t hesitate to medicate me rather than her. When I found my descriptions of our living situation, I wondered why no one had investigated. A decade after Ingrid first showed up at our front door, she told me she was glad I hadn’t let her inside. She knew Child Protective Services would’ve taken me away: “It would have made a bad situation worse.” One downside of a broken child welfare system is that no one wants to use it. While some families, largely those of color, have their kids taken away because they’re poor, other families who need interventions, like mine, do not get them. Much later, Annette told me she’d filed at least one maltreatment report. They told her there was nothing they could do since I wasn’t in immediate danger. As far as she could tell, no action was taken. (kindle loc 5010)

All in all, I found the book compelling reading.  It's probably going to be used as a defense of how the current systems work, since clearly it's possible for someone to work herself out of the horrible situation she found herself in. But obviously that's survivorship bias. There were probably many kids like Nietfeld who didn't get her successful outcome and we'll never know their story.

Recommended, but you'll need a strong stomach to get through many sections of it.

Review: Lone Traveller - One Woman, Two Wheels and the World

 I picked up Lone Traveller at the library donations box for $1. When I picked it up I had no idea who Anne Mustoe was, but the first chapter had such a fresh attitude that I brought it home and read it in 2 days.

The book is not a linear travelogue, and so jumps around in time and trips. Mustoe starts off the book modestly, explaining that she always wondered why Devla Murphy chose to set off across Europe in the middle of winter rather than waiting until Spring so she could have good weather. Of course, by the middle of the book you're traversing the great Australian outback with her followed by stories of her traversing the silk road, and then you realize this is one tough cookie!

The big difference between British women writing about their travels and American women writing about their travels is the complete lack of incompetence in the British. They don't go for the self-pitying, I'm in such a mess that I need to do something crazy and totally incompetent in order to make up for a poor childhood, bad ex-husband, or some unsatisfactory relationship with a parent. Even when she is being harassed by the Chinese police and put on a bus and warned that bicycle touring in China was illegal, she would simply accept it, take the bus ride, and then after other adventures of a non-cycling nature, she would just get on her bike to keep going.

Mustoe travels in a much different style than I do. While I wouldn't feel comfortable cycling without knowing how to fix a flat, she flat out asserts that in most places you can find some mechanic who can fix your flats for you for pennies, a small sum for you but enough to make a living for them, and that there's no point learning how to fix a flat! That drives Mustoe to make certain decisions that I wouldn't have made --- for instance, she buys heavy bikes with heavy duty tires to minimize flat tires, and so travels slower while taking more time to do her trips (she quit her job to do her first big round the world trip and apparently her books made her famous enough and sold well enough that she never went back to work). As a result, while I look for mountains and views and try to stay high and cool, she goes for the flattish deserts and historical routes like the Silk route. Her knowledge of history is impeccable, and she clearly does a lot more studying of the history of the land she travels through than I do.

A surprising amount of the travel in the book is her putting her bicycle on buses, boats, and so on to get around obstacles or to get to the start (or finish) of a ride. Like myself, she eschews reservations, doesn't like camping, but carries a tent anyway. In many cases, she starts by asking if she can pitch a tent outside somebody's home and by the time evening rolls around she's invited into the home to stay for a night.

As a former principal of a school, she deals with potential predators with verve. She says she's perfected the icy stare and confident manner with which to scare of would-be harassers. Her stories in this regards are great. I think many people who are put off from traveling solo would do well to read her book. Recommended!