2023 Banff National Park: Plain of the Six Glaciers

 We got out of bed, packed and got out the door by 8:00am. Despite that early hour, the parking lots was already becoming full. I paid for parking, and we walked down to the Fairmont Hotel to buy an exorbitantly priced breakfast and coffee prior to starting the hike. The morning was cool and cloudy, and it drizzled a bit while we were eating breakfast. A group of travelers from Hawaii started talking to us and said that the Fairmont was so expensive that even Hawaiians considered it expensive and that they would never stay there if their train + lodging package didn't include it. They said that the Cheese Fondue dinner was good though!

The drizzle was over by the time we started walking. I had mentioned to Bowen about the two teahouses on this hike today, and promised him that we could eat Cheese Fondue if we made both teahouses. It's been many years since I did this hike and I remembered it wasn't hard, even while carrying a heavy equipment load. In fact, the lakeshore portion of this walk is considered one of the most scenic easy walks you can do. With the relatively calm wind and no rain, the lake was reflective and pretty. We made a leisurely pace --- the parking fee was $21 and we had all day --- in fact, the teahouse wouldn't even open until 9:00am so there's no incentive to travel fast. I also had an inkling that the weather would turn sunnier later.

Past the end of the lake the path followed a forested riverside, and then went up alongside moraines and other rocky terrain. Here, it started to rain, but not enough to get us to get out the rain pants. We kept going, with the trail getting sprinkle on but never getting really wet --- all the puddles were easy to step over, and the trailside waterfalls made for a refreshing soundtrack.

The views of the climb from the moraine was nothing short of amazing, and by the time we'd gotten to the teahouse we were very pleased with the walk and the scenery. Boen led the charge up and we arrived at the teahouse to be seated immediately, and when Xiaoqin and Bowen arrived we ordered a soup, snacks, and tea. Cash is required at the teahouse, and the prices are not cheap but it was a welcome break.

Past the teahouse we were above the treeline and the path became rocky though not unmanageable until you arrive within sight of the Abotts pass trail. From where we turned around and used the alternate route to the Agnes Teahouse. At this point the sun started to come out and the day turned sunny.

Rainjackets came off and we started eating the snacks we'd brought with us. The walk was uphill but since we were now below treeline it was mostly shaded, though once in a while you'd get a gorgeous panaromic view of Lake Louise and its unique color.

We eschewed climbing the Beehive as the kids were showing signs of weariness, and indeed they were very disappointed when they got to the Lake Agnes teahouse and there was a line out the door waiting to get seated --- there was just no point waiting that long to get seated.

Past the teahouse, the stairs brought us back down to a waterfall, followed by mirror lake from there it was a straight shot down. We saw people who were going up in this direction and to my mind it was a much tougher hike up as it was quite steep.

We arrived back at the lake in good shape and had a late lunch/early dinner at the Fairmont before returning to the hotel, though not before I stopped at the visitor's center to clarify what was needed to visit Lake Moraine. Since the only spots available to visit Lake Moraine were all in the afternoon/evening on the 27th, I gave up on the idea of doing a long hike (which the park ranger said would be too long to do for little kids anyway) and then also booked the Athabasca Glacier tour for that morning as well.

Having achieved all our plans I bought lip balm and insect repellent at the outdoor shop and proceeded to swim with the kids.

2023 Canadian Rockies - Transition to Lake Louise

 We woke up early --- today was the day we'd have to drive to Lake Louise, which was a 3 hour drive, but I'd also wanted to visit my cousin Connie, who'd had a baby during the pandemic which I haven't seen. We packed everything into the car and drove North, moving along empty roads that definitely reminded me of scenes from The Last of Us TV show. Around Calgary the speed limits increased but so did traffic, and we arrived at Canmore around noon. 

We ate brunch, took a photo to satisfy both her mom and my mom, and I had to do laundry, so we took a short walk near her house in between laundry starting and having to move clothes to the dryer and then hung out in their hammock-equipped backyard while waiting for the dryer. Sean had a dream job with Garmin, and apparently if you're a Garmin employee whenever you go to trade shows the equipment manufacturers shower you with free stuff, so he also had an extensive collection of bikes.

We drove on to Lake Lousie Inn, where we checked in, made use of the swimming pool (which Boen was looking forward to --- the Waterton Lakes hotel had no swimming pool) and had dinner. While having dinner I realized that we needed to rent hiking sticks and the outdoor store was almost at closing --- so I walked to the outdoor store and rented sticks for $9/day. I had noted upon arrival that the Lake Louise parking lot was marked full, but after dinner it probably wouldn't be full, so we went.

Lake Louise was much more crowded than I remembered, but the last time I was there was in 2010, and I had arrived for dawn photos in the fall so it was probably not comparable. The wind coming off the mountains was intense, and we knew we were scheduled to do the Plain of the Ten Glaciers hike the next day, so we took photos got a good sighting of the parking lot and the parking lot prices, and I told everyone that we'd have breakfast up here the next day so we could get a decent parking spot the next morning.

2023 Canadian Rockies & Whistler Index Page

 This year, I completely failed to acquire cheap plane tickets to Europe, plus Bowen complained about having to sit on a plane for 9 hours (first world problems), but Brad Silverberg suggested that I visit Whistler, explaining that there was lots of hiking, and of course, the famous downhill MTB park. I'd never tried downhill MTB, but I'd been enjoying riding my Roadini off road a lot so the idea of maybe getting good at downhill appealed to me. Xiaoqin was skeptical that an entire 2 weeks at Whistler would be a good idea, so I adjusted the plan to visit Waterton Lakes and Banff National Parks instead, since both were guaranteed crowd pleasers.

This is the index page for photos and trip report.

Photos

• Waterton Lakes and Banff National Parks
• Whistler

Trip Report

• Crandell Lake (Waterton Lakes)
• Goat Lake (Waterton Lakes)
• Bear's Hump (Waterton Lakes)
• Transit Day
• Valley of the Ten Peaks (Banff National Park)
• Helen Lake (Banff National Park)
• Athabasca Glacier & Lake Moraine (Jasper and Banff National Park)
• Whistler Day 1
• Whistler Day 2
• Whistler Day 3
• Whistler Rest Day
• Whistler Last Day
• Vancouver
• Tips for Canada

Equipment Reviews

• Deuter Speedlite 25
• Osprey Savu 5
• Bubblebum Carseat

2023 Waterton Lakes - Bear's Hump

 

In the morning Boen and I went out to get breakfast at the corner coffee shop and then headed down to the marina to buy tickets for the cruise. It was another beautiful weather day --- clearly the forecasters calling for rain weren't getting lucky.  Today was the first time the Crypt Lake hike was opened after mainteneance so there were a number of excited hikers buying the water shuttle ticket.

The cruise itself was non-landing, and went over the history of the 2017 fire, and international boundaries and the origin of the park, as well as the recent sighting of the first wolves migrating over from Glacier National Park. The boundary markers were shown, but we saw no wildlife sightings except deer on the lake shore in the village.

After the cruise was over we drove over to Bear's Hump, spotting a couple of pretty bedraggled goats on the along the way. In retrospect, doing the cruise first and the hike second was a mistake. The day had warmed up considerably and with the fire damage the entire trail was unshaded. Still, it was a short hike, but Xiaoqin was worn out from both the previous day's hike and had caught a virus so she turned around 20 minutes from the top.

Once the hike was over we headed back to the village for lunch at the hot dog place, which this time Boen was not enamored of. After lunch the others went back to the lodge to rest but I wanted more hiking so I went for a walk, following directions in the village for Cameron Falls. The falls were impressive and there was a breeze building making the walk quite pleasant.

When I got back to the rooms I suggested I drive everyone over to Cameron Falls, and then the Cameron Bay before visiting the Bison Paddock and then driving over to Cardston for dinner at the Cobblestone Manor. We took a few photos, and then drove over to the Bison Paddock and to my surprise we could see the Bison there even prior to entering the Bison Paddock loop. In fact, there must only have been one herd in the paddock as driving around the loop didn't grant us any more sightings.

The drive over to Cardston was uneventful though we arrived a little early and had to cool our heels until the Cobblestone Manor opened for dinner. The buffet dinner was decent --- the kids ain't sufficient desert to justify paying for the meal.  I'd last come here around 1995, and the food was fabulous but since then the place had been sold and the food wasn't nearly the delight it was. The new owner, having owned it for 20 years now wanted to sell it, and Bowen out of curiosity asked how much it was and we all blanched at the prices.

 

Review: Patient Zero

 Patient Zero is a disease by disease exposition of various common diseases, some preventable by vaccination, others now curable by drugs. Each entry has an entry about an index case, provides symptoms, and a brief explanation of what the disease is. Scattered throughout the book are sidebars, including entries about outbreaks that got politicized, or the history of vaccination.

Once in a while, you'll encounter a breath-taking statistic, like this entry about Tuberculosis:

Tuberculosis has killed more than a billion people in the last two hundred years. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it killed 20 percent of the human population. It currently infects about 2 billion people worldwide—fully a third of the world’s population. It newly infects about 10.4 million people per year and is continuing to kill 1.5 million people annually. (kindle loc 5055)

I read through the book, barely retaining anything (though many items overlaps with stuff I already knew --- though there's a section about Polio that calls into question that FDR had polio as opposed to another similar disease), but it's not really meant to be read cover to cover. This isn't really a book meant to be read in one go. You're supposed to dip in for one or two diseases, and then go away and come back to it.

Nevertheless, I learned a lot about diseases like rabies, which I don't recall getting details about previously.

Waterton Lakes Day 2: Goat Lake

 Thursday rolled around and I got an e-mail from the hiking transfer company. A few weeks before we arrived, Waterton Lakes saw an unusual amount of rain and a landslide/mudslide cut off Akamina Parkway, the access road to Cameron Lakes, which is the trailhead for the Cathrew Alderson trail, which is the trail I really wanted to do this time, having failed to do it the last two times I visited Waterton Lakes. Tamarack suggested that I do Bertha Lake or Goat Lake instead, and the kids picked Goat Lake just because of the name.

We pulled into the Red Rock Canyon parking lot early in the day, with not a lot of parked cars though some tour buses had already pulled in despite the early hours. It was nice and cool but sunny, with not a cloud in the sky --- in California there was no way it would rain but here the forecast still called for a 30% chance of thunder-showers.

The first 4km of the hike was relatively flat and easy, with barely any climbing or descent. I noted that the trail was open to bikes, so the smart thing to do would be to actually bike to the Goat Lake intersection lock/leave the bikes there and hike to the lake, whih is only 2.5km each way.

The climb started in earnest once you got off Snowshoe trail, and the climb was relentless and warm. Because the park was so recently burnt there wasn't a lot of shade, but the flip side of that was that we also had great views. Once past about the first km, we could see the waterfall coming off of goat lake, which seemed impossibly far away. Boen was doing great but Bowen and Xiaoqin were flagging, so Boen and I let them travel at theiMy  own place and walked on ahead.

I spotted the mountain goat high up above us, and pointed it out to Boen. It had either
come from the lake or was going to the lake, and as we encountered hikers coming down we pointed it out to them and they said they hadn't seen it! So at the very least Goat Lake lived up to its name.

My 2 water bottles were empty by the time we reached the stream from the lake, so I stopp




ed to filter water and refill them, and Bowen and Xiaoqin arrived soon after. They slaked their thirst and then we went on up the last 200m before we got to the Lake, where we found a quiet area and had lunch, a foot long sandwich I'd bought at the Subway.

After lunch, we circumnavigated the Lake. The views were gorgeous, with a meadow that opened up and into the mountains --- we were not quite above treeline, but you could clearly see the distant mountains. It would make for an idyllic campsite, and in fact, Parks Canada does issue backcountry permits for the area.

We descended the trail, this time with Bowen and Boen leading the way. Xiaoqin felt the descent in her knees so went a little slower. We got back down to the intersection, stopping for pictures every so often. We spotted lots of bikes at the intersection, some of them not even locked, so clearly others had the idea to do the smart thing.

The return to the car was straightforward, interrupted by cyclists over-taking us. The next day, one of the other hikers who recognized us told us that they saw a bear along the snowshoe intersection a little before we'd arrived. I'd hoped that we would make it back to the village by 4:00pm so we could take the evening boat tour, but that was not to be --- it was 5pm by the time we got to the car.

We had dinner at the grill. Given everyone's condition it was unlikely that anybody would want to do the crypt lake hike, which was even longer than what we'd just done, and had the problem that if you missed the return shuttle you were stuck with an extended hike back. I'd done the hike before with plenty of time, so didn't feel obliged to do it again --- I proposed that we do the Waterton Lake International Cruise the morning, and then do Bear's Hump after that, then have lunch and relax in the afternoon before visiting Cardston for dinner for our last full day in Waterton Lakes.

 

Canada 2023: Waterton Lakes National Park Day 1 - Crandell Lake, Linnet Lake, and Many Glacier

 This year flights to Europe was incredibly expensive --- I did spot a flight in January to Copenhagen for $750, but one day's hesitation cost me that flight and I was never able to find anything less than $1500. On top of that, Bowen complained that he didn't like sitting on a plane for that long. (Yes, my kids are spoiled and have first world problems) Brad Silverberg recommended visiting Whistler. I would have been happy to spend an entire 2 weeks in Whistler just on the basis of his recommendations but the rest of the family was skeptical that anyone could like mountain biking that much. We compromised. We'd visit Waterton Lakes and Banff National Park for a hiking vacation (the hiking would ensure my bones get sufficient weight bearing exercise), and then visit Whistler for 5 days, with 3 days of committed MTB for me and the kids. The savings from not having incredibly expensive flights would almost (but not nearly) offset the much more expensive accommodations and car rentals necessary in Canada that I wouldn't have to pay for in Europe, and the expensive lift tickets and bike park access would be offset by a decade of not skiing. I'd never been to a bike park before, and don't even own a dual suspension mountain bike, so there was no question of bringing our own bikes. We'd rent and learn.

The flight was uneventful, as was the drive to Waterton Lakes. The forecast for the next two weeks called for rain, so I'd packed raingear, and left most of the short sleeves at home. Indeed on the drive to Waterton Lakes, the windshield wipers were on for most of the drive. The rental car company had given me a Hyundai Avenue, which despite the marketing as a mid-sized car, was actually a tiny SUV with even less luggage space than a Toyota Corolla. I accepted it only because it had 4WD capability which I didn't anticipate needing. Fortunately, the kids are skinny and I could fit the fourth piece of luggage in between them.

Our first full day called for rain, so we decided to do the ranger-recommended Crandell Lake hike.

It was cloudy but we never felt anything more than a light sprinkle, and the hike felt refreshing ---- no mosquitoes, and we finished around 11:30pm, after encountering no more than about 4-5 parties on the trail. Xiaoqin was very worried when we were the first car in the parking lot that we might encounter bears without help, but by the time we arrived back at the parking lot the lot had more than a few cars.

There was still much time left in the afternoon, and I suggested we drive the Chief Mountain Highway, but the kids wanted lunch. I'd seen the ad for the Prince of Wales high tea, so we drove over to the hotel, where we were told that parking was $10. Well, the Bear's Hump parking lot was literally 200m down the hill so I dropped everyone else off and then hiked up --- the easiest $10 I ever saved.

The kids had a history of not eating that much, so we ordered 2 adult high teas and to our surprise the kids scarfed nearly everything savory down, leaving us with the desserts! We then tried to walk back to the car but made a mistake and ended up hiking around Linnet Lake instead, which was still quite pretty.

The rest of the park had been burnt by a huge fire in 2017, but the area near the Prince of Wales was spared by the valiant efforts of the firefighters. After that misadventure, we drove over to Many Glacier National Park, crossing the US border easily, and seeing a bear on the road!

This was Boen's first bear sighting and he was delighted. We went to the Many Glacier hotel, where I had seen many bighorn sheep sighting way back in 2010, but in the afternoon traffic in the summer, there was none to be had. Nevertheless it's a pretty place and well worth the visit, though the wind and rain put a damper on things.

After that we drove back to the US border with no incident (though many pretty spots to stop and and look). We finished dinner and spent some time walking along the lake.

Reread: The Mists of Avalon

 I don't remember when I first read The Mists of Avalon --- given the publication date it must have been in college or between high school and college. I was inspired to read it after watching the Great Courses series on King Arthur. 

The book is often called a feminist retelling of the King Arthur legend. All the point of view characters are women --- Igraine - Arthur's mother, Morgan Le Fay - Arthur's half-sister, Gwenhwyfar, his wife, Viviane (the lady of the lake), and Morgause, Arthur's aunt. The primary struggle of the book is between the old religion (the Celtic Druidic religion) and Christianity --- the Christians are portrayed as bigoted and evangelical, trying to convert everyone and refusing to acknowledge or recognize other religions (sounds familiar? I spent my 1-12 grades in a Methodist Mission school and definitely got way too much overdose of hellfire and damnation, along with the usual Christian tirades against D&D, Star Wars, and Zen Buddhism --- the Buddhists are the least offensive religion on the planet, hearing the Evangelicals rail against them was definitely a big turnoff).

All the elements in the legend are there, frequently with twists. For instance, Merlin, rather than being a single person, is portrayed as being a title for the Chief Druid. Lancelet's Celtic name was Galahad. Having the Lady of the Lake as a real life person (it's also a title), is unique and having her being the person (along with Taliesin --- the Merlin of England at the start of the novel) plotting to bind Arthur to the old religion drives the plot along without having it deviate too much from the familiar legends.

When I first read the book so many years ago, it was clear to me that Morgaine (Morgan Le Fay) was the heroine. On the second reading, however, I had to realize that she was a heroine with feet of clay --- frequently she wouldn't have the courage to follow through with what she wanted to do, and ran away from her responsibilities. Of course, not everything was her fault --- it was clear that Viviane was not the kind of person to explain to anyone else what she was plotting or why other people should do as they're told.

This book doesn't shy away from all the salacious details of the Arthur legend. All the scandal is there --- the incest between Morgaine and Arthur, and there's even a threesome between Arthur, Gwenhywfar, and Lancelet (Lancelot). I don't remember that at all, indicating that the first time I read the book that scene completely went over my head. I guess now I don't feel bad about reading non-age-appropriate stuff to my own kids.

The writing style is a big long winded, but each of the character's voices are unique and distinctive. Even the annoying characters like Gwnhwyfar are given sympathetic treatment in the end. If you've never read this book, you should. Highly recommended.

Review: Chip War

 I checked out Chip War from the library expecting to be underwhelmed, and to some extent I was --- I was already familiar with the Silicon Valley origin story (Shockley, Fairchild, Intel), but what was interesting to me was the happenings outside Silicon Valley, such as the story of what role Texas Instruments played,  not to mention how Korea, Japan, and Taiwan ended up dominating chip manufacturing. In particular, the Asian countries weren't shy about using government money and their country's banking systems to underwrite their entry into chip manufacturing:

In the early 1980s, Japanese firms invested 60 percent more than their U.S. rivals in production equipment, even though everyone in the industry faced the same cutthroat competition, with hardly anyone making much profit. Japanese chipmakers kept investing and producing, grabbing more and more market share. Because of this, five years after the 64K DRAM chip was introduced, Intel—the company that had pioneered DRAM chips a decade earlier—was left with only 1.7 percent of the global DRAM market, while Japanese competitors’ market share soared. (kindle loc 1314)

 I also enjoyed the section on why Intel fumbled its future in phone microprocessors:

Intel could sustain high prices because of the optimized design processes and advanced manufacturing that Grove had honed and bequeathed to his successors. The company’s leadership consistently prioritized the production of chips with the highest profit margin. This was a rational strategy—no one wants products with low profit margins—but it made it impossible to try anything new. A fixation on hitting short-term margin targets began to replace long-term technology leadership. The shift in power from engineers to managers accelerated this process. Otellini, Intel’s CEO from 2005 to 2013, admitted he turned down the contract to build iPhone chips because he worried about the financial implications. A fixation on profit margins seeped deep into the firm—its hiring decisions, its product road maps, and its R&D processes. The company’s leaders were simply more focused on engineering the company’s balance sheet than its transistors. “It had the technology, it had the people,” one former finance executive at Intel reminisced. “It just didn’t want to take the margin hit.” (kindle loc 2664)

By contrast, TSMC's founding chairman came back out of retirement when his successor took a conventional tack in a recession:

 Amid the financial crisis, Chang’s handpicked successor, Rick Tsai, had done what nearly every CEO did—lay off employees and cut costs. Chang wanted to do the opposite. Getting the company’s 40nm chipmaking back on track required investing in personnel and technology. Trying to win more smartphone business—especially that of Apple’s iPhone, which launched in 2007 and which initially bought its key chips from TSMC’s archrival, Samsung—required massive investment in chipmaking capacity. Chang saw Tsai’s cost cutting as defeatist. “There was very, very little investment,” Chang told journalists afterward. “I had always thought that the company was capable of more…. It didn’t happen. There was stagnation.” So Chang fired his successor and retook direct control of TSMC. The company’s stock price fell that day, as investors worried he’d launch a risky spending program with uncertain returns. Chang thought the real risk was accepting the status quo. He wasn’t about to let a financial crisis threaten TSMC in the race for industry leadership. He had a half-century-long track record at chipmaking, a reputation he’d honed since the mid-1950s. So at the depths of the crisis Chang rehired the workers the former CEO had laid off and doubled down on investment in new capacity and R&D. He announced several multibillion-dollar increases to capital spending in 2009 and 2010 despite the crisis. It was better “to have too much capacity than the other way around,” Chang declared. (kindle loc 2965)

I'm writing this in the midst of a bunch of Silicon Valley layoffs, and its quite clear that none of the existing crop of Silicon Valley CEOs have the aggressiveness coupled with the vision that the CEOs from Andy Grove's generation had. The author of the book attributes this to companies replacing engineering CEOs with MBA type CEOs.

I also enjoyed the story about ASML's EUV system. It's incredibly complex, and the machines cost $100 million per machine, with the next generation machines expecting to cost $300 million. ASML's a Netherlands company, but it's CEO too is also pretty aggressive:

The company had no choice but to rely on a single source for the key components of an EUV system. To manage this, ASML drilled down into its suppliers’ suppliers to understand the risks. ASML rewarded certain suppliers with investment, like the $1 billion it paid Zeiss in 2016 to fund that company’s R&D process. It held all of them, however, to exacting standards. “If you don’t behave, we’re going to buy you,” ASML’s CEO Peter Wennink told one supplier. It wasn’t a joke: ASML ended up buying several suppliers, including Cymer, after concluding it could better manage them itself. (kindle loc 3085)

The book indicts the various administrations between the end of the cold war and now for neglecting to preserve the USA's lead in semiconductors:

 “Unilateral action is increasingly ineffective in a world where the semiconductor industry is globalized,” the Obama administration’s semiconductor report declared. “Policy can, in principle, slow the diffusion of technology, but it cannot stop the spread.” Neither of these claims was backed by evidence; they were simply assumed to be true. However, “globalization” of chip fabrication hadn’t occurred; “Taiwanization” had. Technology hadn’t diffused. It was monopolized by a handful of irreplaceable companies. American tech policy was held hostage to banalities about globalization that were easily seen to be false...Many officials worried that China’s leverage over the world’s critical technology systems was growing. They also presumed China would use its position as the world’s key manufacturer of electronics to insert back doors and to spy more effectively, just as the U.S. had done for decades. Pentagon officials devising weapons of the future began to realize how reliant they’d be on semiconductors. Officials focused on telecom infrastructure, meanwhile, worried that U.S. allies were buying less telecom equipment from Europe and the U.S. and more from Chinese firms like ZTE and Huawei. (kindle loc 3973-3985)

So we now end up with the majority of advanced chip manufacturing in Taiwan across the strait from China. Someone once asked me if I really thought that the US would defend Taiwan in case of a war. This book makes a cogent argument:

Beijing knows that Taiwan’s defense strategy is to fight long enough for the U.S. and Japan to arrive and help. The island is so small relative to the cross-strait superpower that there’s no realistic option besides counting on friends. Imagine if Beijing were to use its navy to impose customs checks on a fraction of the ships sailing in and out of Taipei. How would the U.S. respond? A blockade is an act of war, but no one would want to shoot first. If the U.S. did nothing, the impact on Taiwan’s will to fight could be devastating. If China then demanded that TSMC restart chip fabrication for Huawei and other Chinese companies, or even to transfer critical personnel and know-how to the mainland, would Taiwan be able to say no? (kindle loc 4505)

Usually if a book has one new idea, it's worth reading. This book has multiple ideas that are new to me, and gave me the context to understand them. It even explains that the new fabs that are being built in Arizona are a generation behind what's in Taiwan, and so by the time they're finished they will already be two generations behind. It certainly sounds like the globalized supply chain is well on its way to another shock if China does indeed try to seize TSMC:

Looking at the role of semiconductors in the Russia-Ukraine War, Chinese government analysts have publicly argued that if tensions between the U.S. and China intensify, “we must seize TSMC.” (kindle loc 4583)

This book is worth reading if you want to understand current events. Recommended.

 

Reread: Fables #1-75

 You can pick up the first major story arc of Fables in two compendiums:

• Fables Compendium One
• Fables Compendium Two

I do not recommend reading past issue #75 of the original series, as I feel that Willingham jumped the shark after he resolved the adversary storyline, though the art by Mark Buckingham continued to improve with age.

My two kids are so different in tastes that it's hard to believe they are brothers. Bowen, for instance, doesn't like reading fiction. But Boen actually enjoys fantasy stories, so once I started reading Fables to him he was hooked. Since Fables is essentially the ultimate fairy tale crossover, by the time we got to the Vorpal sword I was digging up my copy of The Annotated Alice in order to read him the Jabberwocky poem.

I have to admit it, re-reading Fables was really enjoyable. The uncovering of Bigby Wolf's background, the big reveal of Gepetto as the adversary, and the fun use of Cinderella as a superspy was as much fun to re-read as the first time. You don't have to buy the books if you have access to Hoopla through a library, as they're always available as a download.

I stopped reading Fables to Boen at issue #75, and then went on to reading him one Neil Gaiman book after another. Maybe we'll get around to watching the Netflix version of Sandman at some point.

Review: Blue Lock 1-10

 Boen is a huge soccer fanatic, so I tried to find him a comic book that has soccer that he'll like. Blue Lock came up repeatedly as a good comic, so I picked it up for him.  He didn't want to read it though, so I ended up reading it.

The concept is a Hunger Games style selection game, in which a coach hired by the Japanese soccer federation promises to produce a winning striker. The idea is to start with 300 players and through a process of elimination ultimately produce a winner.

There's some social commentary about how the typical Japanese person is too communitarian and not egoistic enough, and the training/selection program is supposed to encourage egoism. The training is not very realistic, as there's nearly no downtime and any athlete training this hard and playing this many games is likely to become injured. But that's par for the course for these types of stories --- realism is not the point.

The story starts out with some very basic selection and setback stories, with each player focusing on his specialty and trying to evolve it against other players. The primary story is about player position and seeing into the future, and the games are rarely a full 11x11 soccer game. Slowly the comic series introduces character interaction and history, to give a bit more flavor rather than just soccer action.

I'm not sure I can consider this series a really good one. But maybe if Boen watches the anime it'll be something he'll enjoy.

Review: The End of the World is Just the Beginning

 I checked out The End of the World is Just the Beginning because someone referenced it as being a good book on the end of globalization. Halfway through the book I realized that the author assumed the end of globalization as his premise and then went on to roll out the implications of what had happened, and realized that if I treated the book as science fiction it would work a lot better.

Maybe that's a bit harsh, since the book actually has interesting details about where cobalt, lithium and other rare earth elements come from, and those statements might not be completely science fiction. The thesis behind Zeihan's work is that all developed (and many developing) countries that urbanize drastically reduce their population growth. As a result of this, demand will collapse and the US will also withdraw as the major peace-keeping power in the world, and therefore globalization will go in reverse.

None of these conclusions follow from each other, but Zeihan throws a lot of pithy quotes and facts hoping you'll ignore this lack of logic:

The Americans have never had a tradition of governing excellence* because for much of their history they didn’t really need a government. Managing foreign territories twice the size of the United States would have been, like, really hard. And the Americans are, like, really bad at government. (kindle loc 602)

 China in 2022 is the fastest-aging society in human history. In China the population growth story is over and has been over since China’s birth rate slipped below replacement levels in the 1990s. A full replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman. As of early-2022, China’s only partly released 2011–2020 census indicates China’s rate is at most 1.3, among the lowest of any people throughout human history...For countries as varied as China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Ukraine, Canada, Malaysia, Taiwan, Romania, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria, the question isn’t when these countries will age into demographic obsolescence. All will see their worker cadres pass into mass retirement in the 2020s. (kindle loc 882-889)

It's as though immigration can't happen! Germany recently reported that 23% of its population has immigrated to the country since 1950 or are the children of immigrants. And that's not even including Guest Worker programs or expats. Similarly, I expect countries like Spain, Portugal, and the USA to get immigration whether or not those countries even desire the entry of such immigrants.

This book was published right after the Russian war in Ukraine started, and there, we see no signs of US disengagement in world affairs. We even see stronger determination in the US to contain China, something I did not expect.

If you accept the book's premise is true, the rest of the book kinda makes sense. Zeihan analyzes all the natural resources within the control of each major power and points out that North and South America together have all the resources they need, while places like China, which are heavily dependent on imports and exports are kinda screwed. He makes statements asserting that China grew only by pouring lots of debt into its economy, but debt denominated in yuan can be eliminated at any time by government fiat (which the Chinese government wouldn't hesitate to do, given for instance, their recent behavior towards their own tech industry). More interesting is the demographic challenge:

China should have become a noncompetitive country in manufacturing in the late 2000s because it had exhausted its coastal labor pool. Instead the coast imported at least 300 million—likely as many as 400 million—workers from the interior.* That bought the Chinese economy another fifteen years, but at the cost of hardwiring, both within the coast and between the coast and the interior, massive inequality in income and levels of industrial development. It also makes the Chinese goal of a domestically oriented, consumption-driven, internationally insulated economy flatly impossible to reach. Little of the income from all those Chinese exports went to the workers (especially the workers from the interior), so little can be spent on consumption. China now has a rapidly aging coastal population that has limited consumption needs and—most important—hasn’t repopulated. That coastal population is stacked against a seething migrant class from the interior that lives in semi-illegal circumstances in hypercramped, near-slumlike conditions, working grueling hours, and that cannot repopulate. It is all located next to an emptied-out interior whose primary source of economic activity is state investments into an industrial plant that is of questionable economic usefulness, populated by a demographic that is too old to repopulate. This is all in a country where decades of the One Child Policy have encouraged selective-sex abortions en masse, so there simply are not enough women under forty to repopulate the country in the first place. (kindle loc 4674)

Again, the author didn't realize that he made contradictory statements. If the reason the population isn't growing is because of cramped, slum-like conditions, then reducing population would enable the remaining population to live a better life and grow! It's as though feedback loops can't happen in human environments and to human behavior. It's not a given that we live in a world where immiseration of humans living in the 3rd world is required to produce modern luxuries. A world where Chinese labor is as expensive as US labor would not be a bad thing for either the Chinese or the Americans!

There are other statements made by Zeihan that I'll let you judge for yourself whether or not to take seriously:

part of why American manufacturers feel cheated by globalization is because that was the plan. The core precept of the Order is that the United States would sacrifice economic dynamism in order to achieve security control. The American market was supposed to be sacrificed. The American worker was supposed to be sacrificed. American companies were supposed to be sacrificed. Thus anything that the United States still manufactures is a product set for which the American market, worker, and corporate structure are hypercompetitive. Furthermore, the deliberate sacrifice means that most American manufactured products are not for export, but instead for consumption within North America...by 2021, most manufacturing processes were already cheaper to operate in North America than in either Asia or Europe. That might shock, but it doesn’t take a deep dive to understand the conclusions. The North American system sports high labor variation, low energy costs, low transport costs to end consumers, nearly unlimited greenfield siting options, stable industrial input supplies, and high and stable capital supplies. Even better, the North American continent faces few security threats between its own shores and those of potential suppliers. On average, North American products face less than one-third the supply chain disruptions the Germans are likely to feel, and one-tenth that of the Asians. (kindle loc 5023-5054)

All in all, this is a great book to read if you want to feel good about living in or putting down roots in the USA. But I hesitate to consider it anything other than science fiction --- as I mentioned above, none of the conclusions he comes to necessarily follow from his premises.

Review: Sandman Act III

 The Sandman Act III covers the Orpheus Sandman Special, Brief Lives, and the Short Stories at World's End. Having recently read Stephen Fry's Mythos to my kids meant that all the greek mythology references are no longer lost to me. As usual, Gaiman's long story arc (Brief Lives) isn't as good as the shorter works in this work, though I find the Inn at World's End to be a notch below any of the previous sequence of short stories. But the production quality is nothing short of amazing, and I loved the lush sound of the series --- this is a series to listen to with both headphones in your ears and as little interruption as possible. 

The unfortunate thing is that I don't know whether Act IV is coming --- there are only two volumes of the entire series left --- The Kindly Ones and The Wake. I hope Amazon renews the series just so I can have the complete series in audio book format.

Re-read: The Killing Joke

 It's been a long time since I read any new Alan Moore, and I'd almost forgotten that he'd written a few Batman stories, the most canonical of which was The Killing Joke. Brian Bolland's art is distinctive for its clean lines and well-demarked detail, so the grim and gritty look is out of the question. Alan Moore uses this to show off how horrifying The Joker truly is, and how unlikely it is that a truly moral Batman could let him live.

The book's also well known for its depiction of the Joker's origin, which ties nicely into the actual story itself. I didn't like the resolution, but to my mind, there's no resolution I would find satisfying that wouldn't result in the Joker's execution, so maybe that's not surprising.

What's interesting about this Batman story is that the Batman is hardly a character here --- he's depicted as always being one step behind the Joker, and does no detecting whatsoever. He's purely there as a contrast to the Joker, and even then he's redundant compared with Commisioner Gordon.

The Killing Joke doesn't stand up to any of Alan Moore's more independent work. Nevertheless, it's a good story and worth the relatively short read.

Reread: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

 After The Graveyard Book, I found The Ocean at the End of the Lane in the Kindle Unlimted library, and started reading it to Boen. Neil Gaiman stated in his blog that he deliberately started the novel slow so that younger readers wouldn't end up reading a book meant for adults, but I'm the kind of person who ignores warning labels on books.

Reading two Gaiman books so close together tells me that Gaiman loves re-using the Hempstock name --- the name clearly means something to him, but the Hempstock in this novel has nothing to do with the Lizzie Hempstock in the Graveyard Book.

I've decided that Gaiman works best in the shorter genre, and in this case, the novel is short enough that much like Stardust, the book can shine in every phase. The terror of a 7 year old of his own father who's turned evil by a monster he brought back from the faerie land is palpable, and I will admit that the book has a tendency to keep Boen awake instead of lulling him to sleep as the story is paced just right, with enough scary and exciting things happenings while the more mundane, prosaic events in between those moments of terror grounds the story.

The book never actually reveals who the Hempstocks actually are, or the nature of the magic that is practiced in the world, but doesn't flinch away from the sacrifices that are made. The narrative touch is also great --- the narrator rather than a person telling about events as they happen, is an older adult remembering events as they happened to the 7 year old self, comes through with authenticity and demonstrates the craft that Gaiman has mastered over the years.

There are lots of little gems that make the book quotable as well:

“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters. And as for grown-ups . . .” She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, “I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” (pg. 155)

I'm glad that Boen made me read this book to him.

 

 

Review: Astro City - Ordinary Heroes

 I ran out of ways to buy cheap used copies of Astro City - Ordinary Heroes, so I was stuck paying full tilt in digital form, which is outrageous but the books have been so good that I can't really complain. The series opens up with a view of Jack-in-the-box, a gadget-based hero that was established early on in the series. We see the 3rd generation of the family, a kid who secretly wants to be a doctor, who was discouraged from joining his parent in the super-hero business. They investigate the death of their grandfather, and the story pivots quickly to the other side of the story, the nemesis who might have murdered the original Jack-in-the-box. This one is well told and well thought up. I was impressed.

The second arc concerns the lawyer also introduced early in the series --- 20 years later she has a successful practice but still can't satisfy the ghost of her mother, and faces pressure from her boyfriend to move out of shadow hill. Again, I enjoyed the story and the resolution which involved suddenly being drafted to being a lawyer to one of the mystic heroes in the universe.

The last two stories are also great --- one concerns a super-villain who's been stuck on a deserted island for years, and discovers that a come back wasn't exactly what he wanted, and another is a super-hero feline who aids the universe's version of cloak and dagger. The story is whimsical and great. All in all, this volume was definitely a lot of fun. I'm kinda miffed that the series is out of print, but my suspicion is that they're re-releasing the series slowly. Recommended!

Re-read: The Graveyard Book

 Boen asked for something scary for bedtime reading (yeah, I know, the kids wants to be scared), so I picked The Graveyard Book despite it not being scary because it at least had a scary name.

The Graveyard Book is Gaiman's riff on The Jungle Book, and it starts with Nobody Owens, a lone survivor of a grisly serial killer who murdered the rest of the family. He gets adopted by the local graveyard, and is brought up by a combination of ghosts and other night monsters. He's given freedom of the graveyard and brought up by a family of ghosts and eventually enters the world and confronts his family's killer.

The book is episodic in nature, so you can stop at every chapter and pick it up with no memory of the previous chapter (other than the over acing plot), which makes it work for bed time reading. The writing is transparent, and the situations somewhat interesting. Boen was definitely not scared by any of the events in the book, though he didn't pay enough attention to figure out who Nobody's guardian actually was.

The book is fun, but definitely not up to par with Gaiman's The Sandman. I have to say, though that's a high bar to meet, since other than Stardust, I'm not sure there's anything Gaiman's produced in prose form that holds a candle to his work in graphic novels.

Nevertheless, even mediocre Gaiman is not a boring read. Recommended.

Review: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

 When I went to college, the creative writing courses were so impacted that I had no chance of getting in after competing with the students who spent a lot more time writing than I did. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain promised to be my chance to read what happens in those classes. I will confess that I've bounced of George Saunders' books and short stories --- the genre he works in is no fun for me, but this book captivated me in a way I didn't expect.

The format of the book is that a short story by one of the Russian writers is presented. The first one is presented a page at a time, followed by analysis and detailed examination of how the writer accomplished his goals. There's a huge emphasis on how the story/author makes you feel.

Of all the questions an aspiring writer might ask herself, here’s the most urgent: What makes a reader keep reading? Or, actually: What makes my reader keep reading? (What is it that propels a reader through a swath of my prose?) (kindle loc 2756)

The book has lots of insights related to the writer's work, which are as insightful as the stories presented:

Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening. That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. (kindle loc 4847)

I will confess that I'd never consider reading Russian literature for fun. This book didn't change my mind, but gave me a glance at the kind of personality and thoughts behind someone who enjoys Russian literature (Saunders' enthusiasm for Chekhov and Tolstoy comes clearly through the page), and gave me a lot to think. about. The exercises in the appendix also look to be worth doing.

Recommended.

Review: Honor Guard and Reflections

 I got impatient with reading the books one at a time, so I bought Honor Guard and Reflections simultaneously and they arrived on the same day.

Honor Guard includes 3 stories about the Honor Guard. The first is about a superhero's retirement. While a decent story I didn't consider it great. The second story was about American Chibi, and I thought that the hero had a great origin story, but again, didn't bring the uniqueness that I'd come to expect from the series. The final story was a story told from a monster's point of view, and I thought that was great!

Reflections starts off with a story from the point of view of one of the Alien races that have tangled with the Furst Family (a knock-off of the fantastic four) in the past. It's a unique point of view that was great. The second major story is about Steeljack, one of the villains from an earlier story in the series. It depicts how hard it is to go straight in the universe of Astro City, and I thought it was great!

Even mediocre Astro City is worth reading, and these were great. I'm kinda sad that I can't find good used copies any more from the series, so I'l lhave to read the next few books in digital format.

Review: Osprey Savu 5

 My long beloved Matador Beast 28 is slowly dying, with a rip slowly working its way around the waist belt. My big problem with the Matador Beast was always that the side pockets were nearly worthless, at most storing a Zojirushi thermal flask that's not very big. The camel's back broke when the thermal flask started falling out of the backpack while riding.

 I decided to try the Savu 5 lumbar pack when Osprey started selling them at $35. It has 2 water bottle holders, and one big central pouch. Actually riding with it, it works for commutes or even road rides of 16 miles or longer. But if you actually load up with two water bottles and tackle steep climbs with it you quickly feel lower back pain, so it's actually not so good for actual mountain biking --- I'd stick with water bottle cages.

What it proved to be surprisingly great at though is the commute --- I can squeeze in a backpacking towel, a change of clothes, badge, keys, and a cap for commuting. The side pockets can hold my headphones and the phone proper can go into a handlebar bag to keep myself from texting and riding. It's also great for day hikes, since the water bottle holders firmly accept almost any type of water bottles and hold it firmly. It won't carry quite enough for a day long hike with the family (you'll inevitably need to carry other people's lunches and jackets if you're a dad), but for short 2-4 mile hikes you'll easily have enough water for the family and a few snacks.

It's also generally good for taking kids to birthday parties and stuff like that --- the main pouch has enough room for a kindle paperwhite, so you can entertain yourself.

I thought about returning it, but Boen decided that he likes it more than his camelbak, so I'll be keeping it.

Review: No Excuses - Existentialism and the Meaning of Life

 I picked up No Excuses during an audible sale. Usually I enjoy the Great Courses series, but this one was a dud. The lecturer basically went over what the various existentialist authors wrote (including some biography), but didn't actually cover why they were all grouped into a movement. Even during the last lecture he didn't explain why you would group together religious people and atheists/humanists in a single movement. I came away from the series no more enlightened about the movement than I did before listening to it.

Review: The Righteous Mind

 The Righteous Mind is divided into 3 parts. The first two are at the very least enlightening and gives you plenty to think about, and the last part unfortunately falls into the "bothsidesim" that has aged particularly badly since 2012, which was when the book is written.

The first part is pretty straightforward: humans aren't rational. Our rationality and reasoning abilities are frequently used for post-hoc analysis and self-justification as to why we did the things we were going to do anyway, whether it was reprehensible or moral behavior. This isn't particularly controversial, as anyone who has tried to get a kid to do the right thing will tell you --- the smarter the kid, the more reasons he will come up with as to why what he did was the right thing, irregardless of the actual rightness of the behavior. What's interesting is that what it takes to change people's minds isn't reason, but affection, admiration, and mutual respect:

When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges. But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants (that’s the social persuasion link in the social intuitionist model) or by good arguments given to it by the riders of those friendly elephants (that’s the reasoned persuasion link). (pg. 79)

The second part of the book is an exploration of humanity's good behavior. The author uses a phrase - we're 90% Chimp and 10% Bees. The idea here is that chimps don't normally cooperate with each other, and 90% of the time we behave like selfish primates. But then there are some triggers that get us to all bind together into a team or group or religion, and then humans are capable of cooperating to a high degree, like bees. There's a part of the book where Haidt explains the aggressive egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies:

It’s not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls “reverse dominance hierarchies” in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It’s uncannily similar to Marx’s dream of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”)34 The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by cooperation among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements. It’s a great example of how “innate” refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it’s a mistake to look at today’s hunter-gatherers and say, “See, that’s what human nature really looks like!” (pg. 199)

 His theory therefore is that the egalitarian instinct evolved relatively recently. I'm not so sure I buy that. In any case, Haidt points out how you can deliberately trigger the "hive switch" on humans:

Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared values and common identity.49 A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday.50 There’s nothing special about race. You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals, and mutual interdependencies. (pg. 277)

This explains, by the way, why corporate programs to increase diversity ironically also increases latent racism --- the training to make people aware of diversity ironically erodes the hive switch and therefore makes the company less cohesive. The reduction of cohesiveness not only makes the company less effective, it also creates a backlash because the people comprising of the company no longer view themselves as part of a whole. People who might otherwise have bought into the human hive now rail against wokeness instead.

Haidt points out then, that the role of religion isn't an accident. It binds communities together in ways that secular shared values do not:

It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders. For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosis was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes. Most of them failed within eight years, and there was no correlation between sacrifice and longevity.31 Why doesn’t sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.”32 But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense. In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation.33 (pg. 298)

This is an insightful and probably accurate view of society. You'll read this book nodding along to this part. The final part of the book (and really, the author couldn't help but insert it all over the book) is the note that liberals rely only on the caring portion of human morality, and ignore the other pillars (he calls them tastes) of society. This leads to the conclusion that liberals can't see what conservatives view as important, such as "traditional values" and the view of sacredness.

The problem with this criticism of liberalism is that it completely goes against the past few centuries of human history since the enlightenment in Europe! There was a time when human slavery was viewed as normal. In all traditional societies, women were frequently treated as property. Haidt mentions a time when he visited India and came back with a strong sense of what made Indian tradition strong and how he came away with respect for the traditional cultures and values of that society. He doesn't mention attending a funeral where widows were expected to burn themselves in the cremation pyre of their dead husbands. He doesn't mention the traditions of feet binding in Chinese society. Haidt protests against this by quoting Isaiah Berlin:

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrestled throughout his career with the problem of the world’s moral diversity and what to make of it. He firmly rejected moral relativism: I am not a relativist; I do not say “I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps”—each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false (pg. 367)

But in vain. We all know that fascism is wrong, but it's also very clear that in recent years, that's what the "moral right" has adopted. It seems that after reading this book, I've come to agree with the New Atheists --- that religion is a blight on humanity and if we are to survive we must kill it dead. It's very clear even from the evidence in the real world that the enlightenment-dominant societies are the ones thriving, and the fundamentalist Christian societies (whether it's the Muslim countries in the middle east or the red states in the USA) are the ones doing the most poorly in terms of lifespan, happiness, or even pure economic productivity. It might be that the liberal politicians need to find ways to attract those voters, but if they don't, it's clear to me that if Haidt's theory of group selection was true, the liberal tribes are going to outperform the conservatives by a lot!