Christian Overtones in Narnia

When in the first volume he sacrifices himself in order to redeem Edmund, and in the last leads the talking animals to a beautiful afterworld, it's so easy to see Lewis ringing his Christian themes that you marvel at how you utterly missed them as a child. But miss them you most likely did, and for good reason.

Meghan O'Rourke might have missed them as a child, but I absolutely did not, steeped as I was in a mission school, The Anglo Chinese School, with its weekly preachings and daily devotionals. In fact, even as a child, the Christian allegories were so distracting that I found myself much preferring the Chronicles of Prydain by Llyold Alexander, with its Celtic myths and its sad sad stories of growing up, facing your responsibilities, and being true to yourself. The place in the books where Taran gives up magical wisdom, and later where he has to give up his true love strike a cord in me, even years later as an adult, while Narnia's Christian allegories are a pale shadow of the bible itself, which has far more interesting stories.

View of the beach from Highway 1 along the San Gregorio Coast

It was so unusually clear today. The views were gorgeous, and well worth the effort. Every so often we get these off-shore flows that sweep all traces of fog away from the coast, and when that happens, you need to take advantage of it! 

Tanya makes it to the coast.

Today, Tanya made it to the coast and back on a bicycle for the first time (and couldn't have picked a better day to do it!). Congratulations, Tanya! 

Free WiFi coming in Sunnyvale!

It's about time! Mountain View is getting it from Google, but Sunnyvale should definitely be right up there in terms of tech savvy Silicon Valley residents as well. The ads are a small price to pay for free access everywhere. I'm excited.

Cultural Controversy in "Memoirs of a Geisha"

Looks like the Japanese are mad that Chinese women play the lead characters (who are supposed to be Japanese) in the movie, and the Chinese are mad because the lead Chinese actress (Zhang Ziyi) is depicted as having sex with a Japanese man. It sounds funny to me too.

Of course, it does remind me that me and a few of my Chinese colleagues have been mistaken for each other by our non-Chinese colleagues/friends. I try not to be offended on the occasions when it happens (and some of the ones who make the mistakes do eventually become genuinely good friends), but it's still a little annoying.

In any case, when I was in Berkeley in the late 80s/early 90s more than one Japanese tourist came up to me and tried to speak Japanese to me. It was those encounters (as well as my general enjoyment of Japanese cartoons) that led me to eventually take Japanese classes and then get good enough at Japanese to get into lots of trouble.

British Walking Series: Coast to Coast Path

I bought this after perusing the original Wainwright book. It's fairly recent (2004), has color photos that made Lisa want to do the trip, and has lodging information, which was missing from Wainwright's book (and which wouldn't have been useful either, since his was written in 1974). The first 50 pages of this book pay for the cost of the book just by itself. There's a short biography of Alfred Wainright, which seems to prove Malcolm Gladwell's point that it takes an extremely unhappy person to do great works. There's multiple pre-laid-out itineraries set out by lodging type, pace, and recommendations for places where we might want to stay for more than a day.

While the original Wainwright book is worth getting because it's such an awesome book, this one is worth only getting if you're actually planning to do the trip soon. However, I suspect that this is the one that will prove more useful on the trail itself.

View from the top of the PG&E trail

It was such a clear day today that we easily saw all the way to San Francisco. 

First rain cape ride...

It's been raining a little bit recently, but I've been lucky to only see drizzle, so what I've been doing is keeping fenders on the bike and just riding in the rain (not a bad way to go, if you ask me). But today's rain started off a little harder than normal, and the forecast was for really bad weather. Nevertheless, by the time I got to work it had stopped.

With a raincape and fenders, rain riding is not bad at all, as long as there isn't a headwind. I'll happily ride in the rain, and I'll happily rind in windy conditions, but the combination sucks and is one of the few things that will make me drive to work voluntarily. Having a shower at work, of course, is essential, but I've found in the past also that it's actually warmer in winter when it rains than when it's sunny.

Richard Thompson Live

John Bayley talked me into buying Richard Thompson's latest album Front Parlor Balads, which I enjoyed quite a bit, so when I saw that he was playing in Saratoga I bought a ticket. (Lisa couldn't make it, and everyone else I spoke to said, "Richard Who?")

The concert was amazing, and he's an great performer (he did the entire thing with an acoustic guitar). He's playing again tomorrow, so if you've got tomorrow night free, there are still tickets available. I will definitely see him again, and the next time, I'll buy 2 tickets and drag a friend along.

The Coast to Coast Walk

Lisa & I are doing the coast to coast walk next year, and as part of my research I got a copy of the original book by Alfred Wainwright. And what a gorgeous book it is! You should own a copy even if you have no intention of doing the walk --- it is that pretty. The book is entirely hand-written, and the illustrations are done in ink by Wainwright himself. Wainwright hand-wraps and hand-justifies the entire book, and does it without the use of hyphens! (The book was written in the 1970s, before cheap wordprocessors but there were definitely electric typewriters that were very popular by then)

The text itself is written in an old-school style, assuming that the reader has already decided to do the route and does not need to be led by the hand or persuaded that this is a good idea.

Highly recommended.

Well, it's not too late to abandon the coast to coast idea and stay on in Patterdale. There is nothing ahead as good, admittedly --- the big fault of doing this walk in a west to east direction is that the best come first. Anyway, please yourself. Stay if you want to and I'll carry on alone, and no hard feelings. You'll think of something to tell the folks at home... Mind, you might find yourself thinking in the next few days about Shap and the limestone plateau beyond, and wondering what Swaledale is really like and whether the North York Moors are as attractive as people say. Yoou could have regrets. And (let's be clear about this) you can't expect to get your money back for the book if you prefer not to continue the walk... Coming with me? Good. I thought you would.

Fortune on Andrew Grove as a manager

But Kinnie and Carter had trained at the Grove school of management—Grove's MO as a leader has always been to depend on "helpful Cassandras" to make sure that he doesn't win an argument he ought to lose. The two were blunt. "Andy, you can't do this," Carter said. Abandoning CISC for RISC, they argued, would truncate one of the most profitable franchises in business history for ... what? Leveling the playing field for Intel's competition? When the discussion ended, Kinnie and Carter had achieved a feat of monumental difficulty. They'd won an argument with Andy Grove.

The smartest managers instinctively understand that to manage effectively they need to surround themselves not with "yes-men", but with people willing to question and honestly state the truth. People who habitually do so, however, are not people who are comfortable to be around, and it takes truly great men who can set aside their egoes and truly listen and value those people.

My favorite view of Mountain View.

 

Black Mountain Summit

Left to Right: Shyam, Me, Yajie. 

Black Mountain

At last, a clear view all the way to the Ocean from the top of Black Mountain! 

Yes, it was this cold in Tahoe.

Left to right: Mom, Dad, Me, Lisa. 

Another view of Lake Tahoe from Kings Beach

 

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.