June 14th: Zurich to Meiringen to Hotel Rosenlaui

 During the trip planning phase of the tour, I’d written to Hotel Rosenlaui to see if they had room, and when they replied in the affirmative for June 14th->June 16th, we’d bought plane tickets to match their availability. Getting up at 4:30am was no problem since Boen and I were both jet-lagged. The airport Hilton had made us park our tandem outside all night, but since it didn’t rain, all it took for us to exit was to eat our supermarket breakfast, checkout, unlock the bike and then ride 6 miles to the Zurich main train station it not being worth the effort/risk of taking the train with the tandem from the airport. I knew from experience that the train from Zurich to Luzern would leave from a surface track, obviating any need to negotiate lifts, escalators, or other obstacles to a happy train transfer. 

Arriving in Luzern, the transfer to the panoramic train to Meiringen was similarly easy, since it was early enough there were no conflicts for the bike car. On the train, we could see rain drops splash occcasionally on the panaromic roof and windows, but not in sufficient quantities to derail our plan to ride. 

Off boarding the train, we loaded up the panniers and immediately started out of town towards the highway onto the Grimsel/Sustens passes. There were light sprinkles on our faces and at the Lammi bus station (not renamed despite the permanent closure of my favorite sausage restaurant in Switzerland) we stopped to take off our helmets and replace those with cycling caps for the stiff climb ahead. Despite the light sprinkle, we did not need rain gear as even the effort of reaching the Rosenlaui intersection had warmed us up. Later on, Kristine would tell us that we should have given our panniers to the post bus for delivery to the Hotel and then ridden up the road with no load!

 

The climb starts out with a stiff 12-13% grade and then flattens out a bit at the Hotel Zwirgi, after which it manages to be a little gentler until the entry into Rosenlaui valley where the road suddenly flattens out and widens as you get a view of the Rosenlaui Glacier and the surrounding mountins which that day was obscured by rain clouds. 

We rolled into the hotel around 10:00am, just before they closed the breakfast buffet, and the staff hurriedly rushed us into the cafeteria for freshly brewed hot coffee, hot chocolate and invited us to partake of whatever was left of the buffet breakfast. We dug in, of course, the light supermarket breakfast long having vanished into the atmosphere with our efforts. 

As we ate, I spotted Andreas Kerhli, the former proprietor of the hotel, and rushed out to chat with him. He told me that the hotel was now managed by his son Jacob, and he had bought the Kalterbrunnen restaurant, the last landmark before entering Rosenlaui valley on the Grosse Scheidegg road. He told me he would still see me around as he does still help out at Rosenlaui, ahd Kalterbrunnen was only open on the weekends and holidays. 

With food in our bellies, the weather no longer looked so foreboding. Our rooms weren’t going to be ready anyway, so we left our panniers in the lobby after parking the tandem (after waxing the chain) in the special Rosenlaui bicycle storage cellar and collecting the bus pass from Jacob. We packed my Sea-to-Summit backpack with rain gear and a water bottle and proceeded to take the bus from Rosenlaui to Grosse Scheidegg. The bus driver advised that the hike to First might be closed because of the late snow, but that the next stop down, Schreckfeld was still open. The weather looked reasonable so I persuaded Boen to give it a try despite the cold. 

Hiking along the ridge, the weather started getting clearer and clearer, and we were granted occasional views of the peaks – the Eiger, the Monch, and the Jungfrau occasionally being visible as clouds came and went. Around us all was green and obviously wet, and Boen enjoyed being able to make snowballs and throw them at me. 

Arriving at Schreckfeld, I talked Boen into hiking down to Bort for the views rather than taking the cable car all the way. We saw lines of 70 minutes or more for the mountain gravity tricycle and at least 30 minutes for the First Flyer, a zip-line type attraction that required that the rider be more than 45kg, so it wasn’t an option for Bone anyway. The hike down to Bort was attractive but marred with encounters with people who can’t manage even a 3-wheeled vehicle down a mountain fire road. The place was full of Asian tourists, the kind of people who’ve been trained by theme parks to think that waiting 90 minutes or more for a 15 minute experience was more than acceptable and a good use of vacation time. A hiker or cyclist, by contrast has no waiting time once he gets off the train, bus, or cable car, and in a place like the Berner Oberland, the views start immediately and never end until you get to your destination.

 

Arriving at Bort, we took the cable car down to Grindelwald, where we bought ice cream. Sun came out and we enjoyed the warmth as we made our way from the cable car station to the bus station, where we hopped onto the bus to Hotel Rosenlaui. Boen didn't get to see much of the bus ride as he immediately fell asleep right away. He awoke as the bus pulled into Schwarzalp, where we would have to change to the bus to Rosenlaui.

At Rosenlaui, our room was ready and we moved in, showered, did laundry, stretched, and took a short walk before dinner. The hotel now has a policy against phones, tablets, and cameras in the public areas of the hotel, a policy I agree with, but means that the delicious food and amazing presentations can only be described in writing, a feat that my skills are not up to par with. 

I took another melatonin pill before turning in. 

June 12th-13th: San Francisco to Zurich

 Departing on June 12th from San Francisco, Boen and I arrived at the airport with our Co-Motion tandem split into two Trico-Ironcase bike boxes, an ebags roller luggage, and the ebags backpack carry on. At the checkin counter, despite my having weighed the boxes at home before, the scaled showed that we were one pound overweight. We unboxed that case and took out two tools: the S&S coupler tool and the BB adjustment tool onto our carryon. With that, we were at 51 pounds, which is within the 23kg limit for the bike counting as one piece of luggage according to United’s rules. That wasn’t the end of the snafu, however, as at the TSA checkpoint, the security agents declared that the BB tool was simply too big to allow in a carryon. It wasn’t worth the checked bag fee, so we let them confiscate it. The S&S coupler tool, fortunately was deemed small enough. 

Arriving in Zurich early around 10:50am after several delays, we made through passport controls and collected our bike boxes safely and made the 11:30am airport shuttle to the Zurich Airport Hilton, our new standby for flying with bikes ever since the Novotel Airport hotel charged us $400 to hold our bike boxes for 2 weeks! The checkin at the hotel and the bike assembly went well, but the bike wouldn’t hold the middle gears, which meant something was wrong.

 I knew better than to try to debug a problem like this while jet-lagged, so I asked a hotel employee for a good bike shop in the direction of Zurich, and then we pedaled off with one pannier for daily needs. Arriving at the bike shop it wasn’t open for 10 minutes since they closed for lunch. I tried in vain to debug the shifting problem, and when the shop opened they looked at it and immediately diagnosed it as a bent chainring! 

I asked if they had a replacement narrow-wide chainring. “Not in 130 BCD!” they declared, since it’s rare in Europe that anyone with a road bike would conceivably go 1x. Instead, they proceeded to get out a rubber mallet and a pair of pliers and bent the ring back in shape, something I wouldn’t even have the confidence to do even if I wasn’t jet-lagged. They took the opportunity to criticize the shifting setup, and then proceeded to remove the rear derailleur, readjust all the stop screws, and replace it and test all the shifting. I was impressed. I was even more grateful when I tried to pay them and they waved us off! 

I’d made an appointment at the Sprungli/Lindt Home of Chocolate tour for 3:30pm. It was only a 10 mile ride, but of course in my jet-lagged state everything took longer. Arriving half an hour early, we locked up our bike and marvelled at the huge chocolate fountain. Being told that because of the large number of visitors they weren’t going to let us in half an hour early despite the implications of the instructions on the ticket. When we got in, we found the display was well done, and the chocolate tasting section of the tour so good (and pretty much unlimited!) that the amount of chocolate a healthy 9-year-old can eat would more than pay for itself on the tour. There were exhibits and explanations about every part of the process, from the tree planting, harvesting, to processing, manufacturing, and the history of the process and of course, the advertising and marketing of Switzerland and its association with chocolate. 

After the tour, we rode back to the hotel, this time stopping at the Coop supermarket to buy dinner and breakfast. I counted on the jet-lag to get us up the next morning early enough to catch the first train to Meiringen, which meant that it was not worth paying for the hotel’s breakfast. The forecast for the next couple of days were abysmal, but forecasts have a tendency to be pessimistic. 

Agonizing about the decision to pay for a half-tax card, I decided in favor of it simply because it meant that Boen’s tickets would be free. I figured that if the forecast was as bad as it was slated to be during our stay at Rosenlaui, we would use the half tax card to travel to the Swiss Caves which I had never been and that involved 2 train trips and 2 bus transfers. 

I took a melatonin pill and went to bed at 8:30pm. Throughout the trip I would synchronize to Boen’s bed time. It’s generally easier to get a kid to adhere to an early bedtime if the parent also goes along with it. 
 

Reread: Aristoi

 Aristoi is Walter Jon Williams' science fiction novel about a world in which nanotechnology, biotechnology, virtual reality, and the science of human potential maximization has reached its apex. I remember reading it back when it was published in the 1990s, and re-reading it now shows how good science fiction hasn't aged at all.

For instance, the power postures described in the book foreshadowed Amy Cuddy's "power poses" (which were later shown to be of dubious value), and the elite Aristoi ruling class's sense of ego also foreshadowed the ways our political elites behave today.

What's also interesting is how the Aristoi cultivate their different personalities in controlled schizophrenia, something I haven't seen explored anywhere else.

The plot revolves around an unknown Aristoi cultivating a group of planets/star systems and seeding them with barbaric civilizations (essential medieval recreations, including horrific diseases). Then a member of the Aristoi class is murdered and suddenly a conspiracy is suspected. Our protagonist, an Aristoi himself takes it upon himself to investigate, and the exploration of a medieval recreation from the perspective of someone who considers civilized is interesting in itself, as well as the final unveiling of the perpetrators and eventual resolution of the story.

What's interesting to me is that the book doesn't tie all the loose ends up neatly, indicating that a sequel could have been planned but was probably never executed. The story stands along very well, however, and is an enjoyable read. Recommended.

Stories are Weapons

 Stories are Weapons is that most unusual book - a nonfiction piece by a science fiction author. The thesis of the book is that Americans have been subject to psychological warfare techniques and propaganda for so long that they've become gaslit to the point where most Americans cannot tell the difference between reality and fiction. Judging by the polls for the upcoming election I'd definitely agree with the thesis!

There’s a pervasive anxiety in the United States—and, sometimes, a hope—that people will imitate what they find in the stories they consume. It’s why policymakers argue that kids playing violent games could become school shooters. It’s also why right-wing pundits worry that teens reading about trans characters in young adult books might become trans themselves. In the United States, we treat fiction as politics—and vice versa. As a result, it’s difficult for us to build a public sphere where we can come to a consensus about what’s true rather than which story we like best. This conundrum leads us back to where we began: storytelling. (kindle loc 213)

 The book covers the history of the US military's conception of psychological warfare and a biography of Paul Linebarger, also known as the science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith:

Linebarger felt that one of the OWI’s greatest accomplishments was the establishment of Voice of America, a radio station aimed at bringing a US perspective to the world. The OWI took over Voice of America in 1942, and programmed everything from popular music to carefully crafted bits of truth. Voice of America could be read as a real-life analog of the cranching wire from the Cordwainer Smith story “Scanners Live in Vain.” Using their wire antennas to tune in, people deprived of information and entertainment could briefly experience the freedom that comes from both. Eventually, Linebarger hoped, the joy of cranching with Voice of America might lead to the reform of closed regimes like the People’s Republic of China. Throughout the Cold War and beyond, adversaries could hear American voices whispering in their ears, almost as if they were sending telepathic messages about why democracy is good for the world. (kindle loc 516)

Then there's a full-on narrative about the Cambridge Analytica approach at Facebook. Some might have dismissed those as being ineffective, but what's interesting was that Cambridge Analytica was explicit about ways to turn people into racists and antisemetes:

 What they found, after years of running the F-Scale Test, was that certain people do have a measurable disposition that primes them to follow strongman leaders with racist and antisemitic tendencies. The three researchers collaborated with philosopher Theodor Adorno, who had fled Nazi Germany, to publish a book in 1950 called The Authoritarian Personality. In it, they broke down the psyches of latent fascists. People with “authoritarian personalities” were often cynical about humanity: they believed the strong would always rule the weak and that force was the only way to resolve conflicts. Authoritarians also had deep ethnocentric feelings that led to hatred of all manner of people unlike themselves: Jews, immigrants, homosexuals, political adversaries. They had a strong mistrust of science, which they associated with too much rapid social change. The higher a person scored on the F-Scale, the more likely they would fall for fascist propaganda. And yet, as Frenkel-Brunswik and her colleagues discovered, people with authoritarian leanings often didn’t realize it. UC Berkeley intellectual historian Martin Jay, who has studied Adorno’s work, told me that the book’s “basic intuition” is that “people have surface beliefs but if you dig down they have psychological limitations that take them away from those beliefs. There are differences between conscious and unconscious motives—which explains why people would betray their ideals.” A person might see herself as kindhearted, but clever anti-immigrant propaganda would get her thinking that “those people” are criminals who should be forced into detention camps. When triggered by rapid social changes, those unconscious beliefs could erupt into full-blown genocidal movements. (kindle loc 1105)

 The rest of the book covers how this sort of mass paropaganda allow a small number of influencers can create the illusion of mass agreement just by retweeting a meme or concept that might also come from someone else in their networks.

While Annalee Newitz gave me a good feel for the research in her coming to her conclusions about the current state of American mass delusion, she doesn't give good answers as to how we can inoculate people against misinformation or concerted groups trying to influence the outcome of elections. For instance, she mentions libraries as being particularly good places for people to do deep thinking:

“If somebody is trying to come to terms with being a human, there is an instinct to hide, but there’s also an instinct to explore. And in the library those two don’t contradict each other. Hiding in the stacks is a form of discovery.” She said she’s not against social media, but doesn’t feel that it’s as conducive to sharing ideas as browsing in the stacks...As physical spaces, libraries are models of what Gordon called structured communication. Often they contain at least one special-use room where people can hold public meetings, author readings, or after-school study sessions. But the rest of the library defaults to silence. They are places where we come to be alone with our thoughts, to learn from what other people have said without anyone else yelling in our ears about it. We need that silence. It’s a space to make our own decisions, to evaluate what we as individuals actually think rather than what influencers and operatives tell us is right. (kindle loc 2832-2851)

As a book nerd and the kind of person who loves to read, I agree with her. The problem is that we've had libraries for the entire time, and it hasn't helped the population break through the mass propaganda being deployed by Fox News, TikTok, or any number of right wing hosts. Even if it did work it would take generations for people to learn that the misinformation is out there, and we don't have generations until the next election.

Nevertheless, you should read the book. In the mean time the best thing to do is to avoid getting your news from social media altogether.

 

Review: Humble Pi

 Humble Pi claims to be a book about math mistakes. It's actually not a book about mistaken math theorems or anything fundamental like that. It's a book about engineering misapplications of math. So the start of the book actually covered lots of material from Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach. It's probably not a surprise that a written explanation of the same material done by a top professor in visual format is not very interesting and therefore if that was all the book was I wouldn't label it with a recommended tag.

Fortunately, Matt Parker goes beyond the classics and go into various additional failures, including the common misconception that daylight savings time creates extra heart attacks. It turns out that an analysis at the week level data demonstrates that the weeks that include a changeover time didn't actually have more heart attacks, just that the heart attacks were brought forward into earlier in the week:

It seems the clocks going forward and depriving people of sleep did cause extra heart attacks, but only in people who would have had a heart attack at some point anyway. The heart attack merely happened sooner. And likewise, the clocks going back gave people a rest and bought them a few more days until their heart turned on them. This could be relevant information for a hospital planning its staffing around when the clocks go forward, but it does not mean daylight saving time is net dangerous. (kindle loc 2706)

Then there's a bridge that was built between Germany and Switzerland, both countries being very well known as civil engineering powerhouses. Well, even those countries can occasionally make a mistake:

The ocean is not a neat, flat surface; it’s constantly sloshing around. And that’s before you get to the Earth’s uneven gravitational field, which alters sea heights. So a country needs to make a decision on its sea level. The UK uses the average height of the water in the English Channel as measured from the town of Newlyn in Cornwall once an hour between 1915 and 1921. Germany uses the height of water in the North Sea, which forms the German coastline. Switzerland is landlocked but, ultimately, it derives its sea level from the Mediterranean. The problem arose because the German and Swiss definitions of “sea level” differed by 27 centimeters and, without compensating for the difference, the bridge would not match in the middle. But that was not the math mistake. The engineers realized there would be a sea-level discrepancy, calculated the exact difference of 27 centimeters and then . . . subtracted it from the wrong side. When the two halves of the 225-meter bridge met in the middle, the German side was 54 centimeters higher than the Swiss side. (kindle loc 2988)

The book is surprisingly fun and I enjoyed it. It was definitely worth reading!

 

Review: Material World

 Material World is a book about mining and extraction. As opposed to the "ethereal world" we live in, these are the materials that build the phones, run the fiber optic cables, and obviously the gas in the cars many people drive. The 6 materials mentioned in the title are sand (silica, glass, concrete), salt (including other forms of chlorides), iron (steel), copper, oil, and lithium.

The book points out that given our emphasis on moving bits and bytes, you might think that we've become less dependent on mining and extraction. You couldn't be more wrong:

In 2019, the latest year of data at the time of writing, we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950. Consider that for a moment. In a single year we extracted more resources than humankind did in the vast majority of its history—from the earliest days of mining to the industrial revolution, world wars and all. Nor was 2019 a one-off. In fact, you could have said precisely the same thing about every year since 2012. And far from diminishing, our appetite for raw materials continues to grow, up by 2.8 per cent in 2019, with not a single category of mineral extraction, from sand and metals to oil and coal, falling. (kindle loc 953)

The scale of the most recent growth is breath-taking. For instance:

 In the time it takes you to read this page, more than 120,000 wheelbarrows’ worth of concrete will have been poured in China. In the three years between 2018 and 2020, China poured more concrete than the U.S. had in its entire existence, from 1865, when it opened its first plant producing Portland cement—that variety patented by Joseph Aspdin—via the construction of the Hoover Dam, the U.S. highway system, Manhattan and everything else through to the present day. (kindle loc 1167)

 I enjoyed the virtual visits to mine (including the salt mines that I've actually visited) as well as the section on steel. Here again, China plays a commanding role:

Tellingly, the site where these German buildings were relocated—Shagang’s flagship location on the Yangtze, just north of Shanghai—is now the world’s single biggest steelworks. Its 13 blast furnaces (to put this number into context, the most in any steelworks in America currently is four) turn out more than double the entire steel output of ThyssenKrupp, one of the great names in the industry. China has produced more steel in the past decade than the United States has since the beginning of the twentieth century. China’s ascent to the pinnacle of steel production is much the same as its story elsewhere in the Material World: near-total dominance. Shagang’s site is a city of steel—a production facility of a size unlike anything previously constructed elsewhere in the world (kindle loc 2881)

 The exploration of lithium is probably the least developed in the book. Nevertheless, it still taught me stuff I didn't know:

while most other carmakers have opted for big hulking square battery packs in their cars, most of Tesla’s cars still run on a tray of thousands of tiny laptop batteries—many of them made here in Gigafactory Nevada’s “dry room.” It is so named because the air is kept free of the moisture that could damage the fragile chemical compounds on the electrodes. Workers wear head-to-toe hazmat suits to prevent any stray speck of dust or microscopic droplets that could cause a battery to malfunction. The more cells you are turning out, the more likely you are to produce some dud ones, and since one dud battery will at best diminish an electric car’s range and at worst cause it to spontaneously combust, consistency and reliability are phenomenally important. Panasonic is even prouder of its record of never having to issue any major battery recalls than it is of the sheer number of cells it churns out on a daily basis. The way this manifests itself here on the factory floor in Nevada is in an almost obsessional level of discipline and fastidiousness. Stand in the Panasonic end of the gigafactory and it feels a little like you have been teleported to a high-tech Japanese plant, or for that matter a semiconductor fab in Taiwan. But much as a Taiwanese fab could not function without the silicon in its wafers, the clean, sterile environment of the battery assembly line is simply a waypoint in the journey of lithium from under the ground and into your life. The strange thing is that at the very other side of the factory, in the Tesla end, where the Panasonic cells are assembled into the battery packs that will sit at the bottom of people’s cars, the vibe is very different: more chaotic and messy, with batteries and packs lying around all over the place. Since the two ends of the factory are run by separate companies with wildly different histories and philosophies, the defining feature of this enormous building is actually something you can’t see from the outside: a solid wall that runs through the middle of it, keeping the two companies hermetically detached. Robot trolleys pass across from Panasonic territory to Tesla territory carrying trays of batteries, but no humans are allowed to cross this internal border. (kindle loc 5652)

The scale of all this extraction, refining, and production is nothing short of breath taking and well worth your time to read this book. Recommended.

 

 

Review: 23 Things They Don't Tell you about Capitalism

23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism is an indictment of free-market economics, as practiced by the Chicago school of economics and the various right-wing think tanks.

He points out several things. For instance, the Asian countries that grew miraculously fast did so without economists in charge. They mainly had engineers, politicians, and even school teachers directing their economies. It wasn't that they were ignorant of economics, but that they weren't professional economists.

The economic bureaucrats that have been most successful are usually not economists. During their ‘miracle’ years, economic policies in Japan and (to a lesser extent) Korea were run by lawyers. In Taiwan and China, economic policies have been run by engineers. This demonstrates that economic success does not need people well trained in economics – especially if it is of the free-market kind. Indeed, during the last three decades, the increasing influence of free-market economics has resulted in poorer economic performances all over the world, as I have shown throughout this book – lower economic growth, greater economic instability, increased inequality and finally culminating in the disaster of the 2008 global financial crisis. Insofar as we need economics, we need different kinds of economics from free-market economics. (pg. 242)

By contrast, the countries ran by professional economists such as Chile, and many African countries that were directed by professionals at the World Bank, did extremely badly and in many cases even had negative growth! And those were all countries ran by the folks who were big believer in free market economics.

He points out that Scholes-Merton, who won the Nobel prize for economics, founded/were on the board of LTCM, which blew up. That by itself could be a fluke, but they went on to start two more capital management companies and all of them blew up. He notes that effectively the winners of the Nobel prize for Economics don't actually understand economics and therefore shouldn't be running economies.

He points out that shareholders in big public companies shouldn't be the primary stakeholders/decision makers in the company. That's because shareholders have the least commitment to the company, easily exiting their commitment by selling shares. By contrast, employees, suppliers and occasionally even customers have a much harder time looking for a new job or a replacement vendor. GM, for instance ran itself for short-term profits all the way into bankruptcy, which basically means that the so-called profit motive and shareholder capitalism doesn't work either.

Shareholders may be the owners of corporations but, as the most mobile of the ‘stakeholders’, they often care the least about the long-term future of the company (unless they are so big that they cannot really sell their shares without seriously disrupting the business). Consequently, shareholders, especially but not exclusively the smaller ones, prefer corporate strategies that maximize short-term profits, usually at the cost of long-term investments, and maximize the dividends from those profits, which even further weakens the long-term prospects of the company by reducing the amount of retained profit that can be used for re-investment. Running the company for the shareholders often reduces its long-term growth potential. (page 11)

The book is replete with examples of market failures (e.g. pollution, over-fishing) and at the end of it all you will probably find yourself nodding in agreement that free market capitalism (at least in the most zealous form advocated by the Chicago school of economics) is a total disaster and will continue to be a disaster. Getting it out of policy and practice will be great for humanity as a whole.

I've read a lot of economics over the years and this is one of the few that taught me a lot that I didn't know, for instance, that the Grameen bank could only succeed due to huge subsidies:

has been revealed that the Grameen Bank could initially charge reasonable interest rates only because of the (hushed-up) subsidies it was getting from the Bangladeshi government and international donors. If they are not subsidized, microfinance institutions have to charge interest rates of typically 40–50 per cent for their loans, with rates as high as 80–100 per cent in countries such as Mexico. When, in the late 1990s, it came under pressure to give up the subsidies, the Grameen Bank had to relaunch itself (in 2001) and start charging interest rates of 40–50 per cent.  (pg 164)

I can heartily recommend this book. You should get a copy and read it.

 

Review: AirStreamZ Wind Noise Reducer

 I read somewhere that wind noise at 15mph is sufficiently loud to damage your ears. I remembered that a company called Cat EarsCat Ears made wind noise reducers that attach to your helmet straps in front of your ears. I was skeptical that they work but buying things from Amazon means that you can return them.

I bought them and attached them to my helmet and immediately could hear the difference. The ride becomes eerily quiet and you can definitely hear others talking. Downhill it makes an even bigger difference. There's no longer this roar in your ears. Yes, they do make the helmet straps hotter, and will pick up sweat, but to my mind it's a worthy trade off.

I liked them so much I bought them for Boen and Xiaoqin as well. Highly recommended. I should have started using them ages ago!

Review: Not the End of the World

 Not the End of the World is subtitled How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. It is a data-driven approach to the problems of sustainability and environmentalism by Hannah Richie, a disciple of Hans Rosing. I love it. The book starts off by defining sustainability as providing the best environment for the current generation without making things worse for the next generation. She points out that being a pessimist about our crisis doesn't help, and that one major driver of solving our environmental problems is wealth:

In rich countries carbon emissions, energy use, deforestation, fertiliser use, overfishing, plastic pollution, air pollution and water pollution are all falling, while these countries continue to get richer.vii The idea that these countries were more sustainable when they were poorer is simply not true. (kindle loc 640)

Yes, she addresses the claims that the rich countries have less pollution because they outsource the pollution to poorer countries.  She points out that the USA is an outlier in terms of per capita carbon emissions:

Living standards in Sweden are just as good as they are in the US, if not higher. Yet the average Swede emits just one-quarter of the emissions of the average American, and half as much as the average German. And some middle-income countries – such as China and South Africa – have now overtaken many richer countries across Europe in per capita emissions. And this is not just because rich countries have exported their emissions elsewhere. Sweden and France, with lots of nuclear power and hydropower, have very low-carbon electricity grids. They don’t have the massive transport emissions of the US. Living well does not need to come at a high cost for the climate. (kindle loc 1328)

 One of the things I like about the book is that she doesn't take an all or nothing approach to environmentalism. For instance, she points out that switching from an SUV to a regular car gives you much more emissions savings than going from a regular car to no car.  Similarly, switching from Beef to Chicken also gives you a green emissions savings without having to go completely vegetarian.

The book is full of such examples, pointing out how close we are to a truly sustainable future, despite it looking like we have a long way to go. She also points out that being an effective environmentalist doesn't mean you have to do everything the "natural" way:

For years I’ve battled with this personal dilemma: being an effective environmentalist has often made me feel like a fraud. My take on ‘cooking’ looks like an environmental disaster. I always use the microwave. I try to cook as quickly as possible. It nearly always comes from a packet. My avocados are shipped over from Mexico, and my bananas are from Angola. My food is rarely produced locally. If it is, I don’t check the label enough to notice. Ask people what a ‘sustainable meal’ looks like, and they’d describe the opposite of my eating habits. An ‘environmentally friendly meal’ is one that’s sourced from the local market, produced on an organic farm without nasty chemicals, and brought home in a paper bag, not a plastic wrapper. Forget the processed junk: it’s meat and vegetables, as fresh as they come. We should set aside time to cook them properly, in the oven. But I know that my way of eating is low-carbon. Microwaves are the most efficient way to cook, local food is often no better than food shipped from continents away, organic food often has a higher carbon footprint, and packaging is a tiny fraction of a food’s environmental footprint while often lengthening its shelf life. (kindle loc 4637)

 She acknowledges that our intuition on what sustainability is means we have a severe PR problem in the environmental crisis.  It's also quite clear that limiting warming to 2 degrees C is a stretch, but that just means each 0.1 C matters more and we really need to do what we can. One thing that she and I agree vehemently is that individual action is insufficient to bring about lasting change:

The reality is that we will not fix our environmental problems through individual behaviour change alone. This became obvious during the coronavirus pandemic. The world spent most of 2020 at home, at a huge cost to the quality of life for millions of people. Our lives were stripped back to the bare minimum. There were hardly any cars on the roads or planes in the sky. Shopping malls and entertainment venues were shut. Economies across the world tanked. There was a dramatic and almost-universal change in how all of us lived. What happened to global CO2 emissions? They fell by around 5%. That’s a hard pill to swallow. We want to believe in ‘people power’ – that if we all just pull together and act a bit more responsibly then we’ll get there. Unfortunately, to make real and lasting progress we need large-scale systemic and technological change. We need to change political and economic incentives. (kindle loc 4663)

If you are tired of doom and gloom environmentalism and the degrowth movement, this book is for you. It's definitely well worth your time to read it.

 

Review: Maxforce Fleet Ant Bait Gel

 We had an ant problem and none of the cheap ant bait traps on Amazon worked. Xiaoqin did some research and found recommendations for Maxforce Fleet Ant Bait Gel. At $40/pop this stuff isn't cheap but neither is pest control so we ordered it and tried it.

The dispenser is a syringe. We would apply it to a post it note and then plant the post-it note along the ant paths. We did this in several places in the house, using 2 out of 4 syringes in the box over 5 days.

Within a week the ants were gone. Just like that! It's so nice when your problem can be solved by buying things. Recommended.

Re-Read: The Curse of Chalion

 I seem to be on a re-read kick recently, and The Curse of Chalion floated to the top of the list. Lois McMaster Bujold's take on fantasy creates a world in which the gods themselves might not be able to act except through a saint, someone who voluntarily gives their body over to a god/goddess in order to actually act on the world.

The setup through the character of Cazaril is great, where we start the story in the middle and only near the end of the book do we realize that his path down this sainthood was setup ages ago. There's a section where he negotiates (on behalf of his princess) for a political marriage. The groom's father, known as a wily negotiator, tries to bribe him with all sorts of personal property and real estate. Cazaril's reply: "I've got a tumor and I expect to die soon. What you're offering is for someone who's going to live for a long time." It's a poignant moment and Bujold follows it through to the logical implications.

The writing is transparent, the plot sound, and the many clues and reveals each worthy of the reader's time. It's thoroughly enjoyable and well worth (re)reading.

New Road Bike for Xiaoqin

 After riding the Roadini 50cm I built earlier this year, Xiaoqin decided that a road bike would be something she would enjoy.

I started down the path of acquiring another Roadini, but Rivendell wasn't going to have any until September, and used Roadinis were either too highly priced, or spec'd with weird components that don't reflect Bay Area cycling requirements (most bicycles are spec'd with too high a high gear and insufficiently low low gears, and many builds seem to be for big heavy guys rather than lightweight women).

The reality is that while the Rivendell ethic of having easily adjustable stems is ideal for building a bike for a growing kid, for an adult once the fitting is done, there's little need for adjustability. I wasn't willing to buy an off-the-shelf bike, however --- again, most of the frames aren't designed for Bay Area needs and Xiaoqin's been riding off pavement on the same paths I'd take my road bikes on. I also didn't want a bike with disc brakes, since I don't really know how to maintain them. Again, most stock production bikes don't come with gears sufficiently low enough to enable a beginner to enjoy climbing hills in the Bay Area. I consider a 40x50 low gear the bare minimum for riding Bay Area hills, and the standard 36x34 or even 34x34 drivetrain would pray for bankruptcy for many of the local rides, and that's even ignoring the fact that I enjoy riding my road bike off road.

The Ritchey Road Logic came immediately to mind. It's compatible with dual pivot calipers, comes with a carbon fork (but that's designed for the off pavement work a Bay Area cyclist would want), is made with steel with external routing for easy maintenance, and can clear 30mm tires. I was nervous about cutting the steer tube on the carbon fork, but a quick message to Terry Shaw pointed me to Wade Hall of Spokesman Cycles for a fitting, so I ordered the frame, parts, and arranged for a fitting.

Under Wade's directions, I built the frame up with wheels, derailleur, cranks, chain, and brakes but no cables attached. We then showed up at the fitting with a selection of saddles, handlebars, brake levers, and pedals for him to assess. "Oh, you have the S900 brake levers --- I'd ordered those for my own bike and mine will arrive today." He approved of my selection of the brake levers at least.

The fitting took about 3 hours and was involved, first starting with measuring the sit bones, then checking on the flexibility and various physiological components of the cyclist. Then the bike was put on the trainer with frame, fork, and headset installed but uncut, and with an adjustable stem. The process is iterative, with Wade first adjusting the fore-aft and the seat height, and then adjusting the stem, and then switching over the handlebars (the Beacon bars don't come narrower than 40cm, and he'd measured her shoulders at 36cm, so wanted 38cm bars for her), and then finally the seat, and then readjusting everything. At the end of the session Xiaoqin looked more comfortable and posturally correct than many cyclists who'd ridden road bikes for years. He installed footbeds for her and you could actually see her stance change immediately!

At this point, Wade cut the steer tube, installed the correct stem, spacers, handlebars and star nut. The recommended saddle was installed onto a seatpost, and the seatpost cut to save weight. The whole affair was not cheap but the most expensive way to spend money on bicycling is to buy a bike and not ride it. The entire build for the bike looked like this:

• Ritchey Road Logic (Rim Brake) 51cm
• Neugent EZMount TwoX Wheels
• Shimano CUES 11-50 cassette
• Shimano GRX 810-1 crankset, 170mm
• Shimano U8000 rear derailleur
• Tektro Medium Reach Calipers
• Salsa Guide  Seatpost 27.2mm (cut)
• Specialized Power Arc Pro Elaston Black 155 Saddle
• Specialized Hover Alloy Flare handlebars +15 rise, 38cm wide
• Specialized Comp Stem 17deg 9cm
• SRAM S900 brake levers
• Microshift SRAM 11s bar-end shifter
• Shimano BC-9000 brake cable set
• Shimano R9100 Optislick cables
• SRAM PC-1110 chain
• Michelin Power Cup Competition 700x28 tires, tube type
• Michelin Airstop tubes
• Cinelli Cork tape

Total weight came to 8400g with heavy pedals. On the bike she's fast on the flats (enough that I have a hard time catching or over-taking her), and the bike has low enough gears to climb 9% grades on her first serious ride on it. It's a great bike. We're both excited. Even just riding it around to test ride while building the bike I could feel how light it is.