Lake Tahoe from Kings Beach

Sad to see the season go.
I'll miss the crackling of the air,
The loss of all I know.
Cowboy Junkies 

Fantastic Voyage: The Science Behind Radical Life Extension, Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman

I heard Ray Kurzweil when he came to talk at Google. He did seem to be an incredible optimist, predicting a Vingian Singularity within the next couple of decades. My experience with such optimists is that they are invariably excessively optimistic—for instance, it’s 2005, and we have no space vessels capable of providing manned exploration of Jupiter or Saturn. We don’t have flying cars, nor do we have sentient computers.

With that, however, I nevertheless checked out Fantastic Voyage from the library in the hope that there would be substantial work already done on current medical technology to promise radical life extension.

The major thesis that Kurzweil & Grossman provide is correct—current medicine as practiced by drug companies and many doctors is focused entirely on emergency medicine, rather than on true health maintenance. We have drugs to rescue you when you get sick, and chemotherapy when you get cancer, but the current advice on diet and exercise is both contradictory and in many cases ineffectual. (For instance, Kurzweil and both my parents control their diabetes much more effectively by diet control and exercise rather than insulin or drugs)

Nonetheless, if you wanted to take Kurzweil/Grossman’s advice seriously, you’d have to watch your diet to a degree that most non-fanatics cannot. In addition, neither Kurzweil nor Grossman are serious athletes who’d consider a 60 mile bike ride merely an easy Saturday jaunt and a 200km ride a worthy goal, so their prescriptions absolutely will not work if you’re a serious cyclist/hiker/runner.

Their secondary thesis, that we’ll see nanorobots and a general understanding of human genetics and biology so thorough that we’ll be able to reverse aging and correct lots of currently incurable diseases, I don’t believe for more than a minute. Certainly, it’s tough enough debugging legacy code written by human beings. Trying to understand and debug code that evolved through evolution and understanding all the side-effects of messing about with our genes will take a multi-decade effort. I’d love to be wrong, but I expect that level of technology not to develop within my life-time, and destroying my enjoyment of food through a calorie restricted diet (which would eliminate my ability to enjoy cycling and long distance hiking) isn’t something that I would seriously consider.

Ultimately, I guess I don’t fear death --- I do fear the deterioration of my body and mind, or long term pain. (Scarlet will happily testify to my general wussiness when it comes to pain)

I have a personal program to combat each of the degenerative disease and aging processes. Terry and I have a problem with the word supplement because it suggests something that is optional and of secondary importance. We prefer to call them “nutritionals” instead. My view is that I am reprogramming my biochemistry in the same way that I reprogram the computers in my life …

…I take about 250 pills of nutritionals a day. Once a week I go to Whole Health New England, a complementary medicine health clinic run by Dr. Glenn Rothfeld, where I spend the day… At this clinic, I have a half-dozen intravenous therapies---basically nutritionals delivered directly into my bloodstream, thereby bypassing my GI tract. I also have acupuncture treatment from Dr. Rothfeld, a master acupuncturist who helped introduce this therarpy to this country 30 years ago.

I am in awe...

Watching the Chosen Collection, I come across a segment where Joss Whedon is talking to the other writers on the show...

Writer 1: "Then Joss told me that he was writing a musical. I asked him, so who's writing the music! He said, I'm doing it! My response: yes, we know you're going to write the lyrics, but who's going to write the music? He said, I am! I'm teaching myself to play to piano, and I'm going to write the music."

Writer 2: "So he shows up after his vacation and gives us the manuscript and a CD. We grabbed it, assigned roles to each other, and read through the script. Every time we hit a song, we'd push play on the CD. After it was over I wanted to go back to my office and burn the place down. This was what he did in his down-time!"

Most of us know that the best software engineers are more than 300 times more productive than the median software engineer (in any organization). But we don't frequently stop to think that this applies across all creative/technical professions! It just boggles my mind that someone could teach himself to play the piano (in his downtime) just to write a musical, and then compose music. I am in awe. Piano lessons for me were incredibly painful, and I can't imagine being able to pick it up like that.

Slate on Cycling in LA

So, for now I'll just enjoy my secret Los Angeles secretly, feeling my blood pressure fall as I sail past all the six-cylinder, leather-upholstered pressure cookers around me.

My experience is that social pressure to not be different plays a bigger part in discouraging cycling for transportation than laziness or even lack of cycling skill. It's nice to see Slate acknowledge that even in Los Angeles, cycling is viable and a good alternative to car driving.

View from Black Mountain

I couldn't help myself. With the temperatures at 73 degrees in November, I had to climb Black Mountain on the way to work. 27 miles, and about 2800' of climb. It was actually warmer on top of the mountain than at the bottom, and descending Page Mill road Monday morning at 9:30am is a delight --- there's almost no traffic whatsoever. 

Why I'm not rich and famous

Scott Adams has gotten at least 4 days of material out of his surgery to correct a deviated septum. When I got the identical surgery 3 years ago, I got 0 days of material out of it. Clearly, he is smarter, wittier, and funnier than I am. He's probably better looking too. He gets so much more out of life than I do. Though looking back at it, I'm not sure I wanted that much more out of a septoplasty than I did. Waking up in the middle of your surgery is an interesting experience, to say the least.

Piaw & Lisa attending a wedding dinner

Yes, that's the look of a man faced with impending doom... 

The perils of wearing Google stuff in public

Last year, while waiting to ride with John and Pamela Blayley, I wore a Google jersey (so I would be distinguishable) and waited at the corner of Canada Road and Woodside Road. There, some other cyclist recognized the jersey, rolled up to me, and said, "Can I borrow a million bucks?"

Then this summer, while Touring the French Alps, Mike Samuel and I wore almost nothing but Google jerseys, but only one person even bothered to comment on it, so I thought Google-mania was over.

Then this weekend I made the mistake of wearing a Google sweatshirt to Las Vegas (to attend a wedding). The guy at the Thrifty Rental Car counter spotted it (and asked me about it --- I was quick to say that I got the sweatshirt as a result of a favor I did for someone), and my orbitz negotiated rate went up immediately. (Not by a lot, or so much that I wanted to immediately shop for car rental prices, but enough to annoy me) I don't know whether it was just standard practice for them to bait and switch customers like this, or whether it was the guy behind the counter, but...

Tossing out my dress shoes...

After the wedding (ceremony & dinner) I had to attend last night, I tossed my dress shoes into the trash. I will never willingly subject myself to shoes that uncomfortable again. Either I'll buy comfortable dress shoes (do those exist? I'm convinced they don't --- or at least, not without spending gobs and gobs of money that I don't have), or I'll attend all functions in my sneakers/trail runners. If the torture my feet were subject to last night was at all similar to what women put up with with high heels, I'm surprised that there hasn't been a revolution/movement to toss all heels into the trash.

26" wheels versus 700c wheels

> Let me say that a 26 inch bike is not the slug you might think. Equipped
> with a decent stoker, you'll be passing club riders with margin to
> discuss the weekend's touring route.

I beg to differ. We switched from a steel 26" frame to an Al 700c
frame. The 700c wheels were more comfortable, faster (time up Old La
Honda road went from 40 minutes to 31 minutes!), and just plain
handled better on smooth pavement and unpaved bike trails in Europe as
well as the San Francisco area.

Bill McCready has an old post that explains why:

http://www.gtgtandems.com/tech/700-26.html

And I agree. If you have power to spare 26" wheels will still be
faster (John & Pamela Bayley were much faster than we were up the 20%
grade that was El Toyonal road in the Berkeley Hills on their steel
26" tandem bike with lumotec lights still on their bike), but if
you're looking to squeeze every bit of performance out of the bike and
have an exciting ride, 700c is the way to go. Bigger wheels = more
comfort over bumps = more speed! The only disadvantage is durability
of the 700c wheels, but as long as you have a good wheel builder or
learn to build wheels yourself that will be no problem whatsoever.
(Oh, and don't buy DT spokes:
http://www.peterwhitecycles.com/DTspokes.htm)

I think that any difference in selection of equipment between tandems
and singles is exaggerated. If you wouldn't be happy riding a 26"
single bike with slick tires, you're not going to be happy with a 26"
tandem either, given the same conditions. I never rode a single
aluminum bike until we bought our aluminum tandem, and after that I
bought a single aluminum road bike and found that the single aluminum
bike handled just fine, compared to the steel bikes I owned.

Are you happy now, Christine?

Christine's been complaining that I don't have titles in my blog posts. So now I've turned them on. No, I'm not going to go back and edit all previous posts. Not without a bribe, anyway.

Buffy: The Chosen Collection

To quote Larry Hosken circa 1993, "Who says money can't buy happiness?"

Buffy was what changed my mind about American TV. I'd grown up watching shows like Macross and Escaflowne. Shows with long story arcs that required you to remember characters from previous episodes, and that expected you to understand that people change because of events that happen to them. In other words, TV that required that you had an attention span, attention to detail, and a good memory. When I had to watch TV shows like Starsky & Hutch, or "CHiPs", I was extremely disappointed at how characters seemed to stay static from week to week.

Joss Wheldon makes use of every narrative trick in the book. And to top it off, just when you think that he's going to run out of ideas, he pulls another rabbit out of the hat and makes you rethink your assumptions. He's done episodes where for 30 minutes nobody says anything (just when you thought that what made Buffy great was the incredibly witty dialogue). He did an entire episode of Buffy as a musical, without breaking continuity, and while making the episode a keystone in the plot development. You can't watch Buffy with your brain turned off.

I've watched every episode of Buffy through Karl Pflegler's Buffy library from work, and the Santa Clara County Library, but when the entire collection came out I knew I had to buy it for myself.

Hwy 9, Skyline, and Black Road

40 miles, 3658feet (1115m). Fantastic weather. 3.5 hours (and there I was thinking this would have been a 2.5 hour ride). The extra miles (used to start this ride from Saratotga) and the headwind at the end made it harder than expected, but I'm definitely a big fan of Black road.

At the Lexington Reservoir, around 10:00am.

Tanya enjoys the view

Another view of Big Sur from Skyline Blvd, this time at 9:30am

.

View of the Golden Gate Bridge from Alcatraz

Not a great picture, but it clearly illustrates one of the best things about the Bay Area: 70 degree weather in the middle of November!

Questions from someone looking for an engineering job @ Google

How soon I can apply for other positions at Google if am rejected for a particular position?

There's no limitation. However, Google has a long institutional memory. If you did badly for reasons of cultural fit, it is unlikely that any subsequent application will be successful. If your first set of interviewers are credible, it will take an extremely strong referral notice from an employee who was a previous colleague to give you another chance.

What's the total interview duration in general?

45 minutes each, 5-8 interviewers (including phone interviews)

I am not a spontanious person in nature and hence chances are likely that I don't do good in interviews. But am really excellent on the job. What's your advice in my situation during interview?

Practice, practice, practice. Get a few friends to do mock interviews. Or try an alternate way of getting into google, through one of the many programming contests we sponsor, for instance.

What's the good reference you recommend to get the basics of computer science(I may not know all the fundamentals that I learn thro' my job).

Two classic textbooks:

• Introduction to Algorithms
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

If you can read both books and do the exercises easily, then you are probably qualified. (If you click through and read the reviews, you'll notice that the first SICP reviewer is Peter Norvig, a Google director)

The perils of having a blog

Someone's been spamming folks advertising for jobs at Google in my name, using my e-mail address. This is annoying as heck, and I hope I don't end up on too many spam lists as a result. The perils of having an on-line identity are certainly high now compared to when I first had a web-site back in 1993.

I could certainly take down the blog instead. What do you think?

Take that, Seattle-ites

Sorry, Scarlet, your misfortune is my good weather. We had crummy weather all winter last year (ok, crummy by California standards) --- even Bike to Work day in May got rained out. Now let us Californians have the weather we pay our state taxes for! :)

One things is for sure is that the pacnw is in for a much wetter winter compared to last year as it started raining there two weeks ago and don't see any let up in sight. It will take a very strong wave over the top of this ridge to be able to bring any change in the weather this far south.