Review: The Longevity Project

The Longevity Project is a statistical study of the so-called "Termites", about 1500 high-potential Californians chosen by Professor Terman to follow over their lifetimes. The authors draw conclusions based on personality and life-events versus longevity.

Based on the data, they conclude several items of interest:

• Conscientious people live the longest. A lot of it is because conscientious types actually follow doctors' orders and take their pills when they're supposed to and so on.
  
• Social types actually don't live longer, because the benefits of having a stronger social network is offset by picking up bad habits like smoking and drinking. That means engineers and scientists actually live longer than the sales types.
  
• Mild worriers actually live longer than the happy types, because they'll be proactive about health problems rather than ignoring them.
  
• Starting school early is predictive of a shorter life, while skipping grades has no effect on longevity. They speculate that the loss of unstructured play time is really harmful.
  
• Parental divorce takes 5 years off your life. In fact, it's better that one of your parents died than that they got a divorce. The exception is that life at home is so bad that all the damage has already been done.
  
• Maintaining or increasing your activity levels through midlife is predictive of a longer life. The authors note that if a you spent 2 years over your life time exercising and gain 2 years of longevity, you only broke even from all the exercise. So the best deal is if you mostly became a couch potato and only exercised just enough to get maximum benefits.
  
• Being married gave you the longest life, but only if you didn't get a divorce. Divorce is so traumatic that it reduces your life span. Even getting remarried later doesn't help as much. For women, it's better to stay single than to get a divorce and then remarry.
  
• Being a top dog and high achiever causes you to live longer.
  
• Religion makes you live longer, but mostly because of the social connections and having an active social life, rather than the prayer and meditation.
  

All in all, this is pretty impressive. Unfortunately, the authors fail to point out many of the obvious flaws in the study:

1. The study pretty much consists of middle class, white Californians. That homogeneous sample means that if you're Asian, Black, or other ethnicity, the results might or might not apply.
   
2. The study shows correlation. The authors do a great job of trying to tease out the underlying cause, and in some cases, they're quite believable, for instance, with respect to religion. For other parts of the study, correlation does not mean causation and you'd have a really tough time figuring things out.
   
3. The study was a longitudinal study covering many decades. However, during that time, technology and social norms evolved. It could very well be that conclusions based on people who were born at the beginning of the 20th century would not apply to people who are born now, or who were born in the middle of the 20th century. For instance, do the conclusions about marriage apply to gay marriage? Are no-fault divorces as devastating to the spouses? This study couldn't answer such questions.
   
4. Is 1500 people enough of a sample to truly draw such conclusions? The authors don't actually go into sufficient technical detail about their statistical methods to make me feel comfortable with their conclusions.
   

I'm happy to recommend this book as food for thought, but take their conclusions with several tablespoons of salt: I'm fairly sure they're not as cut and dried as the authors claim they are.

Review: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

While I don't usually pick up anthologies, when the Kindle had The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 as a gold box deal for $1.99, I figured I'd be willing to take the risk.

I started the book and was blown away by how good it is. If you're a fan of science writing for the lay man, you should really stop reading and buy it now, even at the full price at $7.99.

The big draws to this book are the big names like Atul Gawande, Stephen Hawking and Oliver Sacks. But in my reading of all the essays there's no a single dud in the entire book. Gawande's Letting Go is easily worth the price of admission all by itself, and if it encourages you to have a discussion with your family about what should go into the Advanced Health Directive, you'll be glad you read the book/article.

Other articles cover the nature of invasive species into the Americas (Asian Carp is a huge problem, believe it or not). There's one on fermentation and the new food movement. Others cover brain imagery, cancer treatments, and the existence of organic molecules in the universe. There's one about the shooting of songbirds in Europe. There's of course, the famous article about Gay Albatrosses. The last article will probably make you never want to visit SeaWorld again.

Every article was entertaining, and none of them was a waste of time. I felt like I learned something from every article. This could easily be one of the best books I've read this year. While you could plausibly hunt down every article and read it for free on the internet, many of them are long form and benefit from reading on the Kindle or in paperback format rather than on the web.

Highly Recommended. Buy it now!

Review: The City & The City

Unlike the other two China Mieville novels reviewed here, Perdido Street Station and The Scar, The City and The City is not set in the world of Bas-Lag. Instead, it's set in a contemporary world, somewhere in Europe. The story is about Inspector Borlu, who's assigned to investigate the murder of a young woman found in a park.

While ostensibly a detective novel, the novel is really about two cities, named Beszel and Ul Quoma. What's special about the cities are that they're super-imposed upon each other. Now, coming from his previous novels, I would expect there to be some fantastical explanation behind the super-imposition, but instead, half the mystery is figuring out the details of the super-imposition and how the two cities work, as well as the forces behind Breach, a power that operates to stop people from taking advantage of the super-imposition.

OK, so far so weird, which is good: Mieville is great at coming up with weird situations and then explaining all the details behind them. He works through all the implications of his own rules, involving the special training the cities have to give to visiting tourists so they do not accidentally Breach.

But then, the mystery gets into earnest and we get drawn behind the scenes to what's going on, and everything breaks down. Why? First of all, there's no reveal behind the nature of the super-imposition. We don't find out the history behind the two cities and their special relationship, nor do we ever see how it came to be. Furthermore, when the reveal shows up behind the nature of Breach and its enforcement, I at least, don't see how this could actually be a stable set up. It's quite clear to me that one city would have dominated the other through the course of human history, and we would have just one city and no Breach at the end. Even the resolution of the mystery makes no sense: the gains as depicted by the plot in the milieu could not possibly provide motivation for the characters involved!

If this was a first novel by an unknown author I might have been willing to brush all these problems away and say: "Great effort. Look for more stuff by him." But this is Mieville, and I feel cheated, as though he worked through all the mechanical parts of his plot device and setting, but didn't think through the implications of how historical forces would have acted to demolish this extremely unstable setup. While you might argue that "it's fantasy", I feel that the rigorous nature of the rules he's imposed on the setting as well as the nature of a mystery novel dictates that such logical inconsistencies not be overlooked.

I don't see how I could recommend this novel to anyone other than a die-hard Mieville fan, and of course, if you're one, you would have read it already.

Review: Liars and Outliers

My opinions about security are well known. Yet once in a while someone will point me to something by Bruce Schneier and I will read it and it would actually seem reasonable. So when I saw he had a new book out I read the sample and found myself ordering Liars and Outliers.

The trick? It's not actually a book about security. It's more or less a book about the Prisoner's Dilemma. Not the game that's played as a two player game, but in all its glories, with respect to an individual to society, and corporations against society, as well as all the complexity inside those edge cases.

I don't know how Schneier is as an engineer, but as a writer, he's far more interesting than any security person I've actually had to interact with as a co-worker. After reading this book, a lot of it I'm sure is that as an author, he's more likely to be willing to concede that many security considerations are less important than what's necessary to keep society functioning smoothly. Security engineers, on the other hand, often have to justify their jobs, and so you'll never hear security engineers say something like: "You're already too secure!" (And yes, it comes up --- as Steve Yegge points out in his famous blog posts, if you dial security down to zero, you get the Playstation Network, which is still somewhat useful, whereas if you dial security up to infinity, nobody uses it, and it's useless)

What's more interesting is that he says things like:

There is considerable evidence, both observational and experimental, that the group dynamics of a hierarchical organizational structure, especially a corporate one, dampen moral considerations as well. There are many reasons for this, and it seems to increase as organizations grow in size. (Pg. 169)

and:

It's only a bit over the top to call corporations “immortal sociopaths,” as attorney and writer Joel Baken did. For corporations, the closest thing they have to morals is law. (Pg. 216)

What's interesting isn't just those quotes, it's that Schneier proceeds to explain why corporations, especially when they leave the startup stage, essentially turn evil and become sociopaths. What's really funny to me is that he uses Google frequently as an example of a non-evil corporation, especially the motto "Don't be evil", which was never actually a former corporate statement. Of course, the book went to press before the recent Google debacles became widely known. I'm not actually referring to the so-called privacy scandals, but to the fake pharmacy charges, where the federal government actually had a sting operation that showed that the policy that led to breaking the law went all the way to the top (including Larry Page), where not only did the executives knew they were breaking the law, they were explicitly told by the sting operators that they were breaking the law but approved and assisted anyway! It also explains why people who might otherwise be good human beings do regularly turn into sociopaths when employed by large corporations with lots of money. I gained a lot of sympathy for John T Reed's views as expressed in Succeeding as a result.

Schneier points out that 100% social conformance is not a good thing:

Increasing societal pressure isn't always worth it. It's not just the problem of diminishing returns discussed in Chapter 10. Looking back through history, the societies that enforce cooperation and conformance to the group norm, that ruthlessly clamp down and punish defectors, and that monitor every aspect of their citizens' lives are not societies we think of as free. (Pg. 245)

All in all, I read the book in just one night and found it fascinating and worth the time. Your views about society, cooperation, and how people behave (and misbehave) will change as a result of reading the book.

Recommended

Review: Reamde

Reamde is the first Neal Stephenson book I've read since Cryptonomicon. A lot of this is because he seems to have forsworn all use of editors, which have made his books huge and ungainly without making them better.

The Hardback edition of Reamde runs 1056 pages, which is enough to kill someone if it was dropped off a tall building. Fortunately, I obtained the Kindle edition. The story revolves around a virus that encrypts all of a user's data on his hard drive with strong encryption, ransomed by dropping gold in a virtual world called T'Rain. The book goes into all the gory details about an MMORPG designed to make gold farming easy and respectable, leading you to believe that there might be some sort of plot involving virtual worlds.

Soon enough, though, Stephenson drops in Russian mafia, jihadhists, MI6 spies, survivalists, Hungarian hackers, and Chinese women, in rapid succession and in higly improbable situations, leading the reader to sort out where the plot is going. The plot then gyrates off one improbable situation after another, leading the characters to diverge and then converge finally, all in one big battle with lots of bloods, guts, and loving description of military hardware.

We do get a happy ending, and everything's tied off nicely in a bow. But the ungainliness of the plot and the improbability all makes you wonder how if this was mainstream fiction, how anybody could consider science fiction or fantasy "speculative". Altered Carbon feels like hard-boiled realistic fiction compared to this stuff.

I spent about 10 days working through this book, and I'm not sure I got very much out of it. It's brain candy, and the feeling I got after reading this book is the feeling I'd get if I were to down an entire shipping container full of hostess twinkie. A lot of artificial ingredients that's ultimately not very nutritious or satisfying.

Not recommended.

Review: Logitech Wireless Keyboard K320

My 6 year old Kinesis keyboard started getting flakey: whenever I first started up my machine, it wouldn't be recognized 50% of the time, requiring me to unplug and plug in the USB plug. I considered replacing it with another Kinesis, since I liked the keyboard, but two things stopped me: first the cost ($300 is a lot of money for a keyboard), and secondly, my wife complained that my keyboard was quite noisy. Since I was using the Kinesis as a matter of preference, rather than because I was having trouble with repetitive stress injuries, I thought I would try something cheaper.

First, I bought a Logitech K250 at an incredibly cheap price ($10) from one of the daily deals site. I was disappointed with the keyboard feel: the keys feel squishy. My wife, however, liked it so she grabbed it for use with her laptop.

I briefly considered the Logitech K750, but the chiclet style keys had me terrified. I've never enjoyed chiclet style keyboards: I detest Apple laptop keyboards, for instance. The lack of travel on the keys never give me sufficient positive feedback, so I end up with far more typos than I normally have.

Finally, when the Logitech Outlet store had a special on the K320, I decided that I liked the look of it enough to try one for $20.

The box comes with a usb unifying adapter, which is tiny, and a 90 degree adapter in case your USB slot would be blocked by the unifying adapter. I'm disappointed that there are no cheap bluetooth keyboards that are made for anything other than an ipad, since that would work out best, but the nice thing about these proprietary dongles is that they work even when the PC isn't booted into the OS, for tweaking with the BIOS, etc.

The keyboard feel is excellent, a little reminiscent of the old IBM PC keyboards, with a full size travel and a decent stroke and positive and firm feedback. The negative is that the keyboard's wider than my old Kinesis, mostly because of the numeric keypad. It's also quite broad, with a bunch of buttons that I might never use. I used to dislike the Windows key on keyboards, but now that I have a multi-monitor setup, it's frequently useful for a few shortcuts.

All in all, I've retired my Kinesis for quite a few days now, and so far it seems quite serviceable. At the very least, it's not $300. Recommended.

Review: Grand Pursuit - The Story of Economic Genius

I'll admit it. I'm an economics junkie, and enjoy even reading books like Minsky's Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. So I was excited when Sylvia Nasar of "A Beautiful Mind" tackled the history of great economic minds in Grand Pursuit.

By far the biggest disappointment is that with only limited space and spanning this much time, Nasar could only grant superficial coverage of many of the ideas. I was even more annoyed when she insisted on wasting precious pages on boring genealogy details rather than the big ideas of the man.

That said, Nasar does a passable job of describing economic history. Her description of Karl Marx as a person who'd never bothered to learn English despite writing his book there, and who never even visited a single factory to do his work. Several not very well known economists are covered, including Alfred Marshall, Beatrice Webb, and Joan Robinson. Strangely enough, she never talks about Adam Smith except in passing.

By the time we get to the greats like Schumpeter, Keynes, Friedman, and Samuelson, the repeated mini-biographies are starting to wear thin. However, this is where the action starts, so I was quite perked up. I learned quite a bit more about Keynes that I didn't know before. Nasar also "gets" Keynes, though she doesn't quite take the pains to explain why Keynes' General Theory was widely misunderstood, even more so than say, Einstein's.

The war years are covered in great detail, though big breakthroughs (like Irving Fisher's realization of the relationship between interest rate, the business cycle, and inflation) don't quite get the headline attention they deserve: sometimes you feel as though Nasar is more interested in Keynes' bi-sexuality than in his ideas.

What does come across to me as brand new information is the section on Hayek. For instance, he and Keynes were friends and supported each other's work. Hayek is definitely not the libertarian that his later followers make him out to be, and Nasar delights in pointing that out, especially when Republicans tried to court him and get his approval.

Ultimately, while the book was worth reading for me, I wonder how many non-economics junkies will be able to keep their eyes open during the long diversions. Not really recommended.

Ethical Investing

When you talk about ethical investing, people naturally conflate it with socially responsible investing.

The thing is, nowadays, the financial industry is part of the problem. As Lawrence Lessig described in Republic, Lost, part of the reason carried interest, for instance, is taxed as capital gains instead of income is because of all the lobbying the financial industry did. And who can forget the financial industry's successful lobbying of the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which indirectly led to the financial crisis of 2008.

I'm a firm advocate of not having a financial adviser, but many people choose to use them. (I think it's pretty silly given how little time I actually devote to my finances) If you do choose to use one from the big white shoe firms like Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, or Fidelity, you're in turn contributing to their lobbying efforts and their continual attempts to undermine the "main street economy."

If you must use a financial adviser, I recommend Vanguard, which is a non-profit, or Wealthfront, which is a Silicon Valley startup that currently doesn't have the cash to do any lobbying.

Now, lots of people brag to me about how much hand-holding they get from their white shoe adviser. What's interesting to me is that they're all implying that the service I get from Vanguard must be sub-standard and do-it-yourself. They couldn't be further from the truth. I'll illustrate with an example: several years ago I took a foreign assignment in Munich. While I was there, another visitor from Mountain View showed up on assignment as well. I asked if he needed any help dealing with the banking system in Munich, and he said, "Oh no. Bank of America says they're affiliated with Deutsche Bank, and everything should go smoothly." 2 weeks later he was in the office panicking: he had 3 days to provide a security deposit to his prospective landlord to get his apartment, and nothing had happened. I told him to call Vanguard. Within 2 hours, all his problems were solved, and his security deposit was ready. Now, if this story was about me, you might say, "Sure. Piaw's a Flagship customer, so he gets special attention." But this was for someone who didn't qualify for Flagship. Nevertheless, Vanguard moved heaven and earth to solve his problems, getting his money wired overseas for no fee whatsoever.

Of course, there're still the folks who brag about their financial advisers sending them ice-cream. Given the price difference between what they're paying and what they could pay Vanguard instead (Vanguard's financial advise fee is $250/year, fixed) or even Wealthfront, I calculate that to be $10,000/gallon worth of ice cream. No wonder it tasted so good!

The financial industry is unlike any other industry on the planet: it's the only industry in which the less you pay, the more you get. If you don't already have effectively infinite money, it pays to pay attention to that little detail.

A post-IPO sale simulator

A few years ago, I wrote a long blog entry on how to appropriately diversify away from company stock. While the article addressed an employee working at a large, post public company, nearly every employee that works at a pre-IPO startup (such as the social media startups that have gone public recently or will be going public soon) has to consider what their diversification strategy is.

In general, how worried you should be depends on how much money you've made. If you were early enough at Google, LinkedIn, or Netflix, you're in the "filthy rich" category, and you really don't care when you sell or how it happens because unless the company you work for is a WebVan, you have way more money than you can spend. (Note that some times it's very difficult to tell, since Ariba was a viable company but that didn't stop its employees from making some very bad decisions --- An Engineer's Guide to Silicon Valley Startups actually had a few case studies of phenomenally poor decision making)

However, if you're on the edge of serious money (e.g., enough money to never have to work again --- which is far less money than most people assume), then figuring out when to sell is really important. You might think that as an insider for however many years, you ought to have better insight than the market. To some extent, you could be right: when I saw that Mpath/HearMe went public, I knew that the company was not profitable. But that didn't stop the dot com bubble from inflating the stock to well past $50/share before crashing. By the way, one reason to not aim for the moon as far as net-worth is concern is that as John T Reed points out in his book Succeeding, doing so distorts your risk-reward perspective and causes you to take un-needed risk, whereas a more prudent and safer strategy could have netted you more money sooner. Yes, I learnt that the hard way during the dot-com bubble.

I knew that Google was extremely profitable, but because its IPO auction process pissed-off Wall Street, the IPO started out vastly under-valued. Yet, when it came time to really sell Google stock, I found it to be one of the hardest decisions I'd ever made in my life. (One interesting thing about writing that blog post was that many Google employees mis-understood me and thought that I didn't sell any at $700 --- but I was happy to let them think that)

Wealthfront today has launched an IPO sale simulator. I was provided a pre-release version of it and played with it quite a bit, and it does a great job showing you all the different what-ifs scenarios and implications of different strategies for different companies. To simplify things, Wealthfront only has 4 different strategies: sell 10% each quarter for 10 quarters, sell 10% of remaining shares each quarter, sell 50% up front and 10% there after, and sell all after the lockup. My own strategy, which is: "sell something every year but let the price determine how much you sell" obviously can't be represented in any of the mechanical strategies.

One of the things the wealthfront blogpost covers is that if you wait for the second month of a quarter to sell, there's quite a bit less volatility. I think that doesn't quite work: of my 3 IPOs, Google and Pure had very tight trading windows which prevent employees from utilizing such strategies without special effort. In particular, it was possible for me to make far more money from Google stock when not being an employee because I was now free to trade!

Finally, the toughest part about post-IPO selling is that you don't know apriori whether your stock's going to do what Google did, or what DivX or Netflix did. And yes, I do own pre-IPO stock in Facebook, and I have a selling strategy in mind, but I'm not telling, at least not on this blog.

A Surprising Change in Google+ Engagement

In December, I wrote a piece about how Google+ engagement was surprisingly low, considering how many people followed me on Google+ versus Facebook and Quora.

Well, I went back to look at the month of January and wow, what a change a couple of months have made. Google+ is now right on top of my referrals at 262 visits, versus Facebook at 235. Quora is in 3rd place at 168, followed by linkedin. Of course, Google's organic search trumps everyone at 3000 visitors over the same period.

I have no idea what's caused the change, though there is one clue: new visitors from Google+ comprise a much smaller percentage of the referred volume than they do from Facebook and Quora. What this means is that most of my friends (a lot of Google affiliated people) have migrated over to Google Plus, probably from Google Reader, since Reader no longer has any social features.

I'm not sure what this means in the long haul: I suppose I could duplicate-post my current Delicious Feed onto Google Plus for a bit to see if engagements goes up even further, but my suspicion is that it will have zero impact.

Regardless, it's clear: with engagement going up over the last 2 months, I cannot ignore Google+, even though I would have much preferred Friendfeed to win, for instance.

Review: Buzz, The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine

The two most common drugs in use in the world are alcohol and caffeine. Buzz is a book that tries to explain how both substances work, how they affect your brain and body, and dispels some misconceptions as well as re-affirming some wisdom about what happens.

The book is short (which is a feature) and easily read in an afternoon. The section on alcohol is interesting, explaining in detail how potent a drug it is: fundamentally, the amount of alcohol consumed in even one drink is enough to push it around in your blood stream. It also explains why you get drunk less easily on a full stomach, as well as the complex effects alcohol has on your brain, most of which isn't actually any good. He also discusses the effects of red wine, along with other beneficial health benefits of regular red wine consumption, though again with the caveat that if you don't already drink, you shouldn't start drinking in order to get the health benefits. There's also an extensive analysis of why some people drink, and how natural variances in preferences lead to some people who strongly prefer alcohol and some people don't.

Caffeine to me is the more interesting of the two drugs in question. Unlike alcohol, it's not strongly related to any sociological problems, but can also be addicting, as many of my friends who've gotten used to its effects and then tried to withdraw cold-turkey can attest. What's amazing to me is how long the half life of caffeine is in the body. It's 6-7 hours in adults, and twice that long in infants and small children. What's also amazing is that there's huge variance in people, so for some people drinking coffee in the morning can lead to a sleepless night. There's also an explanation of how caffeine works in your body and a short history of caffeine doping in the world of sports. There's an interesting section on how caffeine affects PMS, as well as another section on the effects of caffeine on fetuses. Of more practical use, there's an explanation of what kind of tasks caffeine helps with, and what caffeine fails to do. The drug is in fact complex and interacts in a complicated way with human bodies. (An interesting section in the book explains why caffeine is found in so many different plants --- it is essentially a self-defense mechanism for the plant!)

All in all, the book's well worth your time. It's well written, though not brilliantly so. Recommended.

Trip Report: Hawaii

I just got back from a family trip to Hawaii (see photos).

I've always thought of Hawaii as the kind of place to visit after I'm too old and decrepit to do tough cycling, sailing, or hiking. In some ways I was right: having a kid is a lot like being old and decrepit, since you have to cater to its needs and can't do massively tough things. On the other hand, we had 6 adults to 1 kid, which meant that he didn't always have us outnumbered.

Family trips aren't as exciting as bike tours or other trips, so I'll abandon my usual day by day posts format and just summarize it all in one long blog post. PicasaWeb recently took away my ability to embed photos inside my blog, so unfortunately, that means I can't embed photos. Thank you for screwing me again, Google+!

Day 1: Arrived in Maui and settled in our beach apartment.
Day 2: Hana Drive. This was a really pretty drive, but the unfortunate part is that tropical islands grow back their trees really quickly, so a lot of the views are obstructed. There's a shortage of even hikes to get to good vantage points, and one of them quickly caused us to get bitten by mosquitoes. Kevin claims that Hana Drive isn't kid friendly. Well, we lucked out and have a pretty good kid who put up with being in a car for long periods of time. Bring food and water though, as places are expensive and the food not very good. The day was honestly a bit too rainy for us to enjoy the 7 sacred pools as a place to swim. Personally, if I had to do this again, I would drive the loop counter-clockwise rather than doing it clockwise. And yes, doing so would violate your rental contract, but seriously? The road is probably better than many streets in San Francisco, despite being unpaved. Recommended.
Day 3: Snorkeling. We tried 3 different snorkel sites, the best one being near the big resort in Kaanapali/Lahaina. One unfortunate thing about being a veteran traveler is that stuff that blows away other people leave you comparing with other experiences. Compared to my lifetime of admittedly very good snorkeling, Hawaii rates a 5 out of 10. The water is murky compared to the Caribbean, and the wildlife is great, but the water is also cool. Nevertheless, even mediocre snorkeling is nice compared to driving.
Day 4: Diving to Moralaki. It was originally going to be a two tank trip to Moralaki and then Turtle Town, but the incoming swells meant that we did both dives at Moralaki. I went with Maui Dive Shop, which is a competent and friendly operation, but ultimately, they could only salvage that much from the conditions, which was murky and relatively low visibility (30-40'). Recommended only if the conditions are clear. My family went to the Coral Gardens instead for snorkeling on a snorkeling-specific boat, and had a great time but didn't take any pictures worth posting.
Day 5: My dad and I took surfing lessons. Surfing is surprisingly fun, but lasts all of 10s each time on the board, so the work to fun ratio is incredibly high. After 2 hours I was exhausted. Then XiaoQin picked us up and we visited a few beaches, including Big Beach for the morning. In the afternoon, we went snorkeling near the Sheraton, which was the best so far, with green sea turtles.
Day 6: Flew to Kauai, and went to our beach house there.
Day 7: I had a scheduled dive trip, but it got canceled because of swells, cancelled all trips. So we rented snorkel gear and drove north to the North coast, which was supposed to get the swells instead, but was very calm (but still murky water). At Anini Beach, XiaoQin spotted a sea turtle and chased it and even got to touch his shell. (I think the turtle allowed her to do so) We then visited the famous lighthouse. On the way home, we spotted a sign for "Ahi", and I pulled over the side of the road to find a man selling Ahi Tuna out of a pickup truck. XiaoQin picked out an 8 pound fish, paid $20 for it, and we had amazingly fresh sashimi for the next two days. Life is full of little opportunities like this, which you have to spot and take action on. We kept looking for the guy the next few times we drove by the spot (he's apparently famous on the island) but never saw him again.
Day 8: Rain day. Didn't get to do much.
Day 9: We tried to go up the Waimea canyon, but got there only to find the fog so thick that nothing could be seen. Went back to Poipu and did some beach surfing. XiaoQin's dad found that one of the neighbors had a coconut tree with ripe coconuts that nobody was picking. So we picked a couple and ate them and found them to be good. Over the next few days, we'd grab 20+ coconuts off that tree.

We visited spouting horn and took a few pictures of the blowhole. It's very exciting if you've never seen one before, but also very touristy. A look around the garden across the street was also fine.
Day 10: We drove over to Haena at the end of the road to swim in the bay there. The snorkeling here was better than in Anini, about 6 out of 10. It was cool and we saw multiple turtles and had fun. The parking situation was hell, since it was the only nice part of the island today. On the way back we got some nice pictures over some farms. We also booked Napali Coast tours. Since the tour wouldn't take the baby, we split the group in to 6, and each group would take turns.
Day 11: We went up the Weimea Canyon and this time finally got to see stuff. It's a wild and beautiful tropical Canyon, worth a look, but is also one of the rainiest places on the planet, which means the trails are muddy as heck. A fog rolled in as we tried to walk it, so we had to call it a day as it was just not much fun. Nevertheless, worth a drive to visit, just start early in the day. Recommended.
Day 12: Napali Coast Tour. I should have brought my DSLR on this trip, as it was gorgeous. Wild rugged mountains, and you can see why the Napali coast trek is rugged. There's no less than 5-6 valleys in a short span of a few miles, no way to build roads without expensive tunneling, and just pretty. On the other hand, tropical hiking is not my idea of fun, and I could find no charter company willing to drop me off at the far end of the trail so it would only be a one way 11 mile hike, so I bagged it. The diving/snorkeling was pretty crappy, 3 out of 10. Heavy swells, and 10-20' visibility at best. But in these conditions, diving is better than snorkeling because once you're under water: no swells. And I did get to see several turtles sleeping. Recommended.
Day 13: My dad and I took surfing lessons again, to learn that the guy over at Maui taught us wrong so we had to unlearn our previous learnings and learn to do it right. What a pain. My dad got exhausted from all the swimming, coconut tree climbing, and snorkeling that he did, so after an hour and a half we bagged it.

XiaoQin and I went over to the east coast and checked out two beach cruisers and rode them on the bike path. The bike path is pretty, and there's only one bike shop worth renting from Kauai Cycle. Their beach cruisers sucked less than any other beach cruisers I'd ever tried, and so are well worth the premium. They also rent road bikes, mtbs, etc.
Day 14: I went with Seasports Divers and did my first Nitrox dives with them. Everybody else was doing Nitrox, so I did it so I wouldn't abandon early. One highlight was when Sabin the dive master looked at me and said, "You don't have enough insulation. 2 wetsuits for you!" I'm the fattest I've ever been in my life, so I took her words with a grain of salt, but sure enough, I felt a little chilly in the water, so it's a good thing I wore 2 suits. My first breath of Nitrox (32% O2) felt like a drink of coffee: you wake up right away. It feels really good. I'll consider getting Nitrox certification one of these daays. These last two dives were the best of the trip, at least a 7 out of 10 if not 8 out of 10. The water was relatively clear (since we dove away from the runoff), and we got to do a drift dive as our first dive. We saw sharks, turtles, octopus (my first!), and many endemic creatures. The rental gear was also first rate. I highly recommend going with Seasports divers if you find yourself in Kauai. They deserve all the kudos and while they're more expensive than everyone else, I think they're well worth the money, and I'm not the kind of person to use those words lightly.
Day 15: We packed, moved out of the house, and had a local Hawaiian place (Lua Lua), and then went to the airport and flew home.

Conclusions: Hawaii is OK. However, if you're a typical American with very little vacation, you typically have two choices if you want to go somewhere warm over winter: the Caribbean, or Hawaii. There's no question in my mind that the Caribbean, especially the Virgin Islands, wins. The water's clearer, warmer, and it's a lot less humid in the Caribbean. Now, the choices of activities vary very widely between the two places. Sailing is horrible in Hawaii: the distances between islands are great, and there's no real charter business to speak of. Surfing, on the other hand, is better on Hawaii than anywhere else in the world. The BVIs are pretty crappy for cycling, whereas Maui has the famous volcano. The reality, though, is that any cycling in the tropics pales to what you can get in California or in the Alps, so I can't imagine blowing good money on a cycling vacation in Hawaii. In retrospect, I was right to put off Hawaii in favor of other places (the BVI, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and even Cancun have way better diving). Even more impressively, all those places are cheaper than Hawaii! I very much doubt that I will return to Hawaii. For me, it's just not worth the time and money. Obviously, I couldn't have said this with authority without having visited Hawaii, so I don't regret this visit. I am, however, planning a trip to the BVIs in short order.

Review: Lady Lady I Did It

Lady Lady I Did It is one of Ed McBain's (Evan Hunter) 87th Precinct novels. I remember them fondly from my youth, so when Amazon recently ran a $0.99 cent deal on the Kindle editions I picked one up to see how they fare for me, 20 years later.

Police procedurals are great at documenting a moment in time. You read about a time when police departments depended mostly on cops walking the beat, questioning witnesses, and using type-writers instead of computers. You get exposed to the methods used and the serious amount of work required to follow up on a homicide. You get reminded of a time in the country when abortion was illegal, and doctors got put away for performing them. (The slight anachronism here was that the doctor was a woman, and I seem to recall female doctors being rare in that era)

The police are all men, and their family lives reflect the traditional 1950s families: single breadwinner household, and care-taker women. The large number of stereotypes in this novel would put you off if it was a modern novel, but set as it is in the 1950s, it paints the picture of an era gone by.

The mystery itself is not much of one, as the reveals happen very close to the exposure of the criminals in question. It wasn't hard for me to guess what the one big clue was, but overall the plot didn't make sense, as a personal vendetta wouldn't usually lead to a massive killing spree. Unlike later novels in this genre, there's no psychological profiling, and you never get a glimpse of the villain's thought processes.

All in all, a quick easy read, and something useful to remind us of how quickly technology and society has changed over the last 60 years. Mildly recommended.

Review: The Price of Civilization

I will admit that I approached The Price of Civilization with a lot of skepticism. As an economist, Sachs was famous for being extremely optimistic books such as The End of Poverty---years later, there's still plenty of poverty to go around, thank you very much, Profesor Sachs.

The book itself does admit the large number of problems America faces: corporate corruption of the political system, mass media devoted to selling, a lack of social cohesion leading to inability to agree on even basic life-and-death matters such as healthcare reform, and of course, a failing educational system. All this is covered very well in books such as Republic, Lost, or even Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal. All the evidence point in Sachs favor here, and if you're not a Fox-News conservative, there's enough data that might cause you to rethink your politics.

However, when it comes to prescription, Sachs is overly optimistic. I certainly don't think that the measures he proposes (such as trying to get poor children an education equal in quality to the kids of the rich) could possibly get passed in today's political climate. Not a chance. Zero. Sachs says he's optimistic mostly because of the Millenial generation, but I'm privy to mailing lists dominated by Millenial wealthy (or soon-to-be-wealthy), and I'm sorry, those guys are just as blinkered, over-privileged, and narrowly self-interested as the older wealthy types I've met in my life: the prevailing culture is very much IGMFU.

Ultimately, my thought is that while it's all nice and good that billionaires like Bill Gates are doing their best to eliminate malaria and all that, maybe the best thing they could actually do would be to counter-weight the Koch brothers. Otherwise, those saved from malaria could easily still find themselves stuck in a poor, unhappy world run by Fox News Conservatives.

My biggest problem with this book is that anyone who picks it up probably doesn't already need the persuasion. Unfortunately, there's zero chance that a Fox News Conservative will read the book, or even if he did, agree with any of the "liberal bias evidence." Check it out from the library if you're already evidence-minded, but I can't recommend paying more than $1 for it.

Review: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

It didn't take very long to realize Boomerang is a reprint of various Michael Lewis articles for Vanity Fair. This in itself is not unfortunate, as the articles are well written and a lot of fun to read.

The book starts with coverage of Greece's financial crisis, and the (by now) well-documented fact that the Greek have a revenue problem in that everyone cheats on taxes. Then he moves on to Iceland, which had turned itself into a financial center by effectively trading equity to each other at insanely high prices. Then he moves on to Ireland, where the housing bubble took off in a big way, but the government came in and guaranteed all the private sector loan, in a major case of major-bone-headedness, damning the Irish public to pay for the sins of the crazy people.

The book rounds off with an examination of the Germans and the Californians, each of whom have yet to dealt with their own crisis. At the end of reading all of these short articles in short order (this is a very short book, and easily read in one day), it's tough not to come to the conclusion that every country treats finances and financial responsibility very differently. Culture explains almost all of it, though it doesn't explain the bone-headed behavior of certain officials (and I don't mean the Californians exclusively) very well.

Unfortunately, the treatment of the financial topics is very shallow. For instance, there's no contrasting of the very different ways Iceland and Ireland chose to handle their crisis. In hind-sight, the very big differences have led to vastly different outcomes. Because Lewis doesn't actually have a framework or theory to hang it all together, the reader is left thinking that there's not a lot that can be done. He doesn't even interview people who think that the problem is soluble.

This is very easy vacation reading, but unfortunately, not very good for people who want a deeper understanding of the current arguments about what to do about the economy. For that, you might want to read The Big Short instead.

Review: The Kingdom of Gods

Last year, I reviewed The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and praised it as some of the most innovative fiction written. Then I reviewed the sequel, The Broken Kingdoms with faint praise, and opened up the Kingdom of Gods with trepidation: the trendline indicated that it was going to completely suck.

I was pleasantly surprised. The Kingdom of Gods shows us the Jemisin can innovate even when writing sequels. In the past, the story focused on the human or partly human characters. This time, we see the world from the point of view of one of the Godlings, in particular, one of my favorite characters from the first novel, Sieh, the oldest godling, whose domain is that of children and is the pantheon's Trickster's god. If you think that's difficult to pull off, you'd be right, but Jemisin pulls it off. Part of it is she cheats: very early on, Sieh loses his powers and effectively becomes a mortal for a large part of a novel, regaining his powers only on occasion.

Nevertheless, the plot is satisfying as we are presented with one mystery after another. Even better, even though my initial ideas were correct, Jemisin succeeded in making me question whether she was going to take things in that direction. The side plots and exposition of how being a god works in her world is exciting and fun, and we get to see the consequences of events in earlier novels in great detail. Nearly everything gets resolved in the end, though my copy of the book has a short story that also serves to tie up loose ends in the previous novel.

As with previous novels, this one is entirely self-contained and doesn't suffer from sequel-itis. You see references to prior novels and previous novels, but there's no need to read them at all if you don't want to, and this is a good enough novel that it'll have you on the edge of your seat once you start. It's a great novel and I have no hesitation about recommending it to anyone.

Review: Knocking on Heaven's Door

I didn't read the reviews of the book carefully before checking it out of the library, so I had my expectations completely mismanaged when I discovered that Knocking on Heaven's Door, unlike Warped Passages, isn't about string theory, but rather a introduction to science book, mixed in with a discussion of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). I had previously reviewed The Magic of Reality, and this science book is very different. While The Magic of Reality aims to give you beautiful illustrations along with the text, this is very much a non-fiction for adults book.

The introduction to science is interesting and non-technical, focusing mostly on the discovery process, as well as how Quantum Mechanics, for instance, doesn't obviate Relativity or Newtonian Mechanics, and how science doesn't work that way. She describes a fascinating conversation with the producer/director of "What the Bleep do We Know" and extracts a satisfying admission from him that the "science" in that movie was nothing but utter BS. She provides a good layman's description of the traditional conflicts between science and religion, and shows how it's hard to be a scientist and deeply devout if you're going to do any science.

The LHC portion of the book is fascinating, and includes a description of the history and how it got built. There's an indictment of the American government for being extremely short-sighted about science and cancelling the SSC, which would have probed even higher energy physics, resulting in all the scientists going to Europe to do their experiments. Given how gorgeous that area of Geneva/Switzerland is, I'm not sure people are all that disappointed.

Finally, there's a description of what experiments the LHC is expected to run and what results it's expected to produce in the short and long run.

I described Warped Passages as a tough read, but this book's much simpler, and can easily be understood by anyone with a decent high school education (which I'm given to understand is difficult to come by in the USA). I recommend the book for anyone who wants to understand why we spend so much money for "toys for physicists", and those who want to understand how the scientific process works.

Chariot CTS Cougar Followup: Palanquin Mode

I mentioned in my earlier review of the Chariot Cougar that it had 5 modes: stroller, bike trailer, jogger, skier, and hiking mode. Well, today we discovered a 6th mode: Palanquin Mode. The nicest thing about this mode is that you don't actually need to buy anything if you already have a jogger.

From Hawaii

All you need is to remove the front wheel on the jogger, station two people on the fork mount, another person on the rear handlebars, and now the Chariot Cougar doubles as a palanquin. Palanquin mode is very useful, enabling you to negotiate stairs, tree roots, steep climbs, and other obstacles normally considered impossible even for off-road capable trailers. In fact, if you retain the front wheel, you can convert back to a jogger right after the tough section, enabling you to remain on your way.

Bowen seemed to enjoy palanquin just fine, only complaining at the end after he got removed from the Cougar's safe mosquito mesh netting only to be immediately bitten by a mosquito.

If you're not an outdoors person, you'll probably be unlikely to be swayed by the existence of palanquin mode. However, if you've considered abandoning a hike because of tree roots and have a fair number of people with you, you might discover it to be a nice bonus "Easter egg" you didn't plan for.

Ride your road bike on unpaved roads

One of the sections in Independent Cycle Touring covers riding on unpaved surfaces with a road bike. Why would you do this when you can just buy a mountain bike? It turns out that there are several reasons.

1. I don't own a mountain bike.
   
2. Many dirt trails are on top of a mountain, and it's easier to climb the mountain on the road bike. The amount of dirt usually is so little that it's more efficient to go faster on pavement and then a little slower off road. For instance, the top of Montebello road is this way, with a short cut to Page Mill road which avoids taking Skyline Blvd, which is a pain on weekends and full of high speed traffic. (This video illustrates how to trigger the gate at the end of the section from Black Mountain summit by leaning your bike over the looped metal detectors as you approach the gate)
   
   
3. Riding dirt gives you bike handling skills that just riding on the road won't give you. For instance, here's Lance Armstrong during the 2003 Tour de France. The rider in front of him crashed but Armstrong who was behind him escaped crashing by riding off pavement into the field.
   
   
4. It's useful to be able to ride little dirt roads on top of passes, since they make what used to be "one way" roads into "through roads."
   
5. Unexpected hazards such as slippery leaves, sand, soil, and cow patties can get spilled onto paved roads. Eric House and I once rode down Page Mill road during a frosty spring day, and as we rounded a hairpin turn, we felt our bikes slide a bit as both tires on our bikes slipped on the frosty surface. Neither of us crashed, partly because we were going slower than usual, but also because both of us regularly rode our road bikes off road.
   

Review: Children of the Sky

Children of the Sky is the direct sequel to Vernor Vinge's Hugo Award winning A Fire Upon The Deep, which was easily the best novel that year. There was a prequel, A Deepness in the Sky which was also very well written, though not as deeply original as A Fire Upon The Deep.

It is not necessary to read A Fire Upon The Deep before picking up Children of the Sky, but given how good A Fire Upon The Deep was, I would strongly encourage reading that book first no matter what. It provides interesting background about the universe and the world, which might mystify or confuse readers who choose to start with Children of the Sky.

Children of the Sky picks up 10 years after the events of A Fire Upon The Deep, on the world where the protagonists and the survivors of the preceding catastrophe were stranded. What's great about starting here is that the world seems much more fleshed out than before. The big alien species that Vinge introduced in A Fire Upon The Deep was the Tines, dog-like creatures that are only intelligent when clustered close together in a pack, with neural connections being made via sound rather than electrically. What's great is that Vinge extrapolates from this alien biology to the rest of the world, and posits what happens when masses of that species lives too close together, as would happen in the warmer tropical regions of the world. This extrapolation and world building is extremely high quality, and every time you run across something that was newly introduced, you'll say to yourself, "of course! That's how it would work."

The big plot point here is that the cryogenically revived children of the Straumli disaster would not believe that the events of the previous books were real, and then start acting as though the protagonists were lying and making things up. Given the existence of Holocaust deniers in our world, history, and timeline, this is very believable, and drives tension and events throughout the book. We also see a recurring villain from the previous book revive and begin to pose a threat.

The story alternates between action/reaction (along with a great introduction to politics) and world building. Events are told from multiple points of view, but it's clear that Ravna from A Fire Upon The Deep is to main protagonist in this story. The characters are strongly developed, and everything is believable.

The weakest part of the novel comes at the climax and ending. We've seen the characters go through hell, and established that certain other characters were truly villains on a grand scale (kidnapping and murder is just the tip of the ice-berg). Yet our protagonists seem happy with the finishing status quo, not agitating for villains who obviously cannot be trusted to be dealt with, and even in some ways helping them undermine the future of their community. This seems unlikely, especially since one of the protagonists has been clearly labeled as a hothead. The ending is also clearly a setup for another sequel. While I would be glad to read more in this universe, this leaves the book hanging in many ways and leaves the reader with a bit of dissatisfaction.

Despite all this, this is an excellent novel, and I would not be surprised to see it win the Hugo award this year, and I would be happy to see it win one. Recommended