March 29-31st: Prologue

XiaoQin and I flew on Jet Blue from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale, then to San Juan, where a 20 minute flight took us to St. Thomas. We arrived at 3:00pm, which was cutting it close to make it to the ferry, so spent the night at the Island View Guest House instead. Set on a hill side, it granted us a beautiful view of Charlotte Amalie and the surroundings.

From BVI 2012

The next day, we caught the first ferry and then taxi'd over to the Serendipity House, where we took a rest before getting picked up at 1:00pm by Tony, the owner of UBS Dive Center, where we tried out dive gear, which we would be renting.

From BVI 2012

Tony had a set back: his boat's twin engines had caught on fire a few nights before, melting bits of the hull along with it, so he wasn't going to be able to give us dive instruction as promised. He foisted us over to Paradise Watersports instead. Unfortunately, the attitude of the instructor didn't go over well with XiaoQin, so she bailed on the instruction.

From BVI 2012

We spent the next day swimming and relaxing on the beach instead, and Arturo Crespo and Cindy Zhou joined us.

Arturo had just spent 2 days at St. John's Virgin Islands National Park, and declared it to be excellent. "The BVI had better be spectacular to top that!" Arturo is well-traveled and a man for all seasons, but I felt surprisingly un-intimidated. My last visit to the British Virgin Islands had haunted me since, and I kept trying to make this trip happen. Having moor'd at Cinnamon Bay and spent a morning there, I deliberately started our charter in Tortola to avoid crossing borders so we could spend the most time in what I considered the fun parts of the virgin islands.
Next

Escape BVI 2012

From April 1st to April 8th, 2012, Arturo Crespo (first mate), Cindy Zhou (purser), Shauna Eggers (chef), John Feiler, Amy Platt and Steve Moran joined XiaoQin (admiral) and I (skipper) for a cruise around the British Virgin Islands upon the Horizon Charter Catamaran Escape, a Leopard 40.

This is the index for the trip, which will include a day by day report with embedded photos.

You can Download the GPS Tracks for Escape

BVI 2012

Trip Report

• Prologue: March 29-31st
  
• Day 1: April 1st: Nanny Cay Marina to The Bight
  
• Day 2: The Bight to Manchioneel Bay
  
• Day 3: The Wreck of the Rhone and Cistern Point
• Day 4: Manchioneel Bay to Leverick Bay
• Day 5: Leverick Bay to Deadman's Bay
• Day 6: Deadman's Bay to Kelly's Cove
• Day 7: Kelly's Cove to White Bay
• Day 8: White Bay to Nanny Cay Marina
• Epilogue: April 8th & 9th
  
• Conclusions and Thoughts

Review: Which Comes First - Cardio or Weights?

I was led to read Which Comes First: Cardio or Weights? by Scott Hess' comment on one my posts on Google+. Overall, this is a collection of columns from one of the Canadian Running magazines, but it's surprisingly diverse in its topics. Since the column was apparently in question and answer format, it's easy for even a casual reader and dive in and read just small chunks at a time. It's a sufficiently short book that I finished it in a 2 hour flight.

The opening question is indicative of the type of topics discussed. The answer, it turns out is that whether you start with Cardio or Weights depends heavily on what you want to achieve: your body can either improve the circulatory system or strength, but not both, so which one you start an exercise session with determines whether or not you build strength or aerobic fitness. This is a counter-intuitive result, and therefore worthy of attention.

Running is given extra attention, as is weight lifting. You'll get interesting answers as to whether you're lifting heavy enough weights, or whether your cardio workouts are intense enough. What's good about the book is when it steers into areas that I always wanted to know but never bothered to find good answers to because Google searches would only turn up advocate's results. For instance, I've long suspected that Yoga doesn't actually do anything good for your body compared to actually doing cardio or weight lifting, and this book confirms that with references to literature.

Where the book covers topics I had previously read about elsewhere, it doesn't contradict well known existing literature. For instance, it points out that your spouse is the biggest influence on your exercise habits. It also shows that if you want to stay young, "vigorous aerobic exercise makes your DNA look several decades younger than it is. And that's bad news for the sedentary groups." In recent years, it's been fashionable to dismiss exercise as useless for losing weight, but the reality has been that exercise is important for reasons more than losing weight:

Only the diet-plus-exercise group had significant improvements in insulin sensitivity, LDL chloresterol, and distolic blood pressure---crucial risk factors for heart disease and diabetes, but changes you can't measure by looking in the mirror or stepping on a scale... (Pg. 157)

In addition, the author takes on the typical prescriptions for exercise as being too little to even maintain your weight and not gain weight: "Managed to avoid significant weight gain throughout the study, and these women averaged a full hour of moderate exercise every day. Anything less was unusuccessful. That's a lot of execise---unless you compare it to the daily lives of our ancestors who didn't spend most of the day sitting at desks or in cars." (Pg. 160)

Overall, this is a good book, and given how short and easy to read it was, well worth your time. Recommended.

Sleep Apnea: The Noisy Killer

My previous post on Fitness had people asking me about Sleep Apnea.

Sleep Apnea occurs because our throats are a design compromise. In order for you to be able to speak well and articulate well, your throat should be as flexible as possible. However, in order for you to breath well, your throat should be as stiff as possible. Natural selection ended up with a compromise: your throat muscles hold your throat stiffly when you are awake, which means that the throat can be flexible enough so you can speak well. Unfortunately, when you're asleep, the muscles will relax, allowing the throat to collapse, which would cause an interruption of airflow. This is known as an apnea event if the interruption of airflow lasts longer than 5 seconds. A normal adult human would have less than 5 apnea events an hour. (In other words, if you have less than 4 events an hour, you don't have Sleep Apnea) Other than the throat collapsing, it's possible that your brain simply forgets to breath. That's called central sleep apnea, as opposed to obstructive sleep apnea.

The problem with being Asian is that Asians have smaller throats and smaller jaws. This leads to a higher probability that the muscles relaxing would cause a complete interruption of airflow. One doctor I spoke with told me that if you're Asian, it's not a question as to whether you'll have sleep apnea, it's a question as to when you'll get it. Women tend to have milder symptoms than men, and often don't develop serious symptoms until their 40s.

How do you know whether you're at risk? The big warning sign for me was my snoring. Snoring is basically your body pushing air through your throat in order to get air, vibrating the soft tissues and therefore making noise. My snoring was so loud that friends the next building over could hear my snoring when we were at Lucia. Otherwise, I was completely asymptomatic. Other people who've spoken to me about sleep apnea said they suffered the following symptoms:

• Hazy and dazy in the morning.
  
• Difficult to wake up or get up.
  
• Lack of energy, lethargic, difficult to stay alert.
  
• Grumpiness, especially in the morning.
  
• Unusually rapid aging
  

Note that I had none of those symptoms when I was diagnosed, something my doctor said was common among Asians, especially fit ones. That's why I was not diagnosed for so long. It took a full on sleep study to discover that I really had 50-60 apneas an hour. (By the way, if your spouse is a snorer, you're should track these symptoms) The standard therapy for obstructive sleep apnea is CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure). Essentially, you wear a mask that pumps air into your throat to keep it open all night. Modern machines have algorithms that back off the pressure when you breath out so you don't feel like you've been pumped up like a balloon in the morning. You might also opt for surgery, but it's not for the faint of heart: they essentially break your jaw, move it, and stitch it back together, leaving you sucking food through a straw for a bit. I checked with one of the renowned surgeons in the area and he looked at my chart and said, "You respond really well to CPAP, you should try it before considering surgery." Now, if I had been symptomatic before, I'd have been super motivated to use CPAP. The overweight, obese, symptomatic people I've spoken to love their CPAP from day one, because for them, it feels like the fog in their mind was cleared away. For me, it actually seemed to make my sleep worse, and I woke up often with blisters on my nose where the mask chafed against my face, so I ignored it for almost a year. My doctor, however, got very concerned and called in the help of a sleep psychologist, who persuaded me to be more active about using CPAP therapy like this:

"Sleep apnea is like boxing. If you take a couple of hits in the face, it's no big deal. You'll recover and won't even notice. However, if you keep taking hits every day, it's all going to add up and you'll become slurry in speech and be unable to think well. Think about Mohammad Ali when he got old. In addition, it increases your risk of stroke, heart disease, etc."

That struck home, because my father had a stroke for no apparent reason in his early 50s. Ok, after that I became very motivated to use my machine. My sleep psychologist also helped a bit with finding the proper mask. Unfortunately, all the sleep studies seem to be done on Caucasians, so there're very few masks that will properly fit an Asian face, and custom masks just aren't done. And yes, I use the machine even when cycle touring, because I actually do spend a significant amount of my life doing this (or did before I had a baby). Now, if you have kids and you were diagnosed with sleep apnea, then you might be able to correct your kids' facial structure as they are growing so they don't end up with sleep apnea. It turns out that you need to start fairly young (at 1.5 years when you first take them to see a dentist is when you have to start thinking about it). Apparently it's like having braces, but for your jaw instead of just your teeth. The process can increase the airway area so collapse doesn't completely stop airflow. Which means that if you suspect you have apnea and have kids (or plan on having them), you really want to get yourself checked out. So that's as much as I know about sleep apnea. If you want to know more, let me know and I'll try to answer questions. And by the way, sleep apnea is one of those pre-existing conditions that cause you not to be able to get health insurance in California. Since about 10% of middle aged men have sleep apnea, that's a lot of people who would need Obamacare or some sort of group health plan in order to be covered.

PSA: United is now a suitable airline for flying with bicycles

I used to fly United Airlines with my bike all the time. But in 2008, United and Lufthansa jointly raised bike carriage fees to $250 each way. What that meant for me was that I stopped flying United on my bike tours. I wrote a letter in 2009 to United that it cost them 4 $1000+ plane tickets to Japan to continue this policy, but to no avail.

Well, this year, United merged with Continental airlines, which means that they've revised their bike carriage policy to be fairer to cyclists. Bikes now count as one piece of baggage as long as they fit in under 50 pounds and under the linear inches rule.

I've flown United often with bicycles, and they were not the best, but far from the worst. They frequently also had the lowest fare, so I'm glad to have them back in the "good for bicyclist" column on the airline.

These frequent changes in baggage policy is one reason why Independent Cycle Touring doesn't list specific airlines that are bike friendly or not. That information properly belongs to the internet and my blog.

Kudos to Arturo Crespo for telling me about the United merger and the impact thereof.

Fitness: Optimal Experience

A few years ago, a friend of mine told me that she was really really out of shape. "I'm so out of shape that I get out of breath just going up one flight of stairs." Like many Asians in their mid-twenties, this person was skinny, looked great, and obviously didn't have any trouble partying all night. So I put it out of mind. After all, I remember being too busy in college holding down two jobs while carrying a full time class load to bother with exercise.

I recently thought about this, because perhaps for the first time in years, I haven't recently been in optimal condition. Now, I'm well past my physical peak, where in 2005, I did 2 back to back 100 mile days in Italy, and then went on to do 3 more strenuous days of cycling in the Swiss Alps. I think at least once in your life every person should experience at least one period of peak conditioning, just to understand how it feels.

It feels like being Superman. During that period, I could wake up and ride 100 miles or 10000' of climbing, eat like a king, sleep like a log, and wake up the next morning ready to do it all over again. Every piece of your body works well, and I don't recall being even a little bit sick. The only possible problem was that I'd occasionally feel a little cold because I had too little body fat. And One of my tour companions would complain, because I had a pace that was far faster from all the conditioning that I did. Of course, I was suffering from low bone density during that period, so I was even faster since even my bones weren't contributing as much to my body weight. I felt alert all the time, waking up in a great mood and raring to go. My mind was sharp and I never missed details, such as when navigating across Italy with a paper map in the rain sans GPS. The effect of aerobic exercise on your brain is well documented --- John Medina spends an entire chapter of Brain Rules on its effectiveness.

Since then, while I've lost quite a bit of fitness, I've actually gotten healthier. I've been forced to work out in the gym, and add calcium to my diet. The interesting bit is that the shoulder muscle cramps I used to get in my mid-twenties (when I wasn't nearly as fit) have practically disappeared.

I recently read The Longevity Project, where the authors pointed out that to gain an optimal lifespan, you quickly hit diminishing returns when exercising, so the best use of your time is to be a couch potato and exercise 20 minutes 3 days a week. I think they're ignoring the quality of life difference when you're fit, not prone to aches and pains, and deal with the challenges of the day without pain. If you're Asian, it's more important than you think to be fit, because Asians have a genetic disposition to have Sleep Apnea. My sleep apnea went undiagnosed for years because my circulatory system kept my blood O2 level well above 98% even as my apnea was triggered 50-60 times an hour! Without it, I would have lost a lot of brain cells to my apnea.

I'll end with this quote:
“If exercise could be packaged in pill form, it would immediately become the number one anti-aging medicine, as well as the world’s most prescribed pill.”

-Dr. Robert Butler, International Longevity Center at Manhattan’s Mt. Sinai Hospital

Review: Career Warfare

I was lamenting to someone about the lack of a book on how to be a good office politician for engineers. That friend said, "There is one. It's called Career Warfare." With that, I was off to the library to pick up the book.

I'm glad I read the book, though I don't think it's actually very usable for engineers. It's clear to me that the kind of people who make CEO might be born, not made. For instance, D'Alessandro has this story from when he was 6 years old:

One winter day, Tony decided to revolt against my tyranny. He said, "I don't want to play with you any more. I'm going to play over here." And in the revolt, he cleaved off four kids into his own little gang.
I was very upset about these defections. But within a few days, Tony's gang wanted back into my gang. They said it wasn't any fun playing with Tony because there weren't enough kids.
Did I welcome them back? Absolutely not. They were out of the gang for the rest of the school year. I was 6 years old, but I froze them out without mercy. I already knew that banishment or death was the only reasonable punishment for traitors.

Clearly, A'Alessandro did not need a mentor to teach him about office politics: he arrived at the office to do battle, and most engineers having to deal with as consummate a politician as he is would probably fail.

Nevertheless, the book can benefit many engineers. The section on what managers want from you and what to expect from your managers in a quid pro quo is priceless. For instance, what does loyalty mean between manager and employee? What kind of bosses should you avoid working for? When should you be a whistle blower?

The book's filled with fantastic anecdotes, and worth reading just for those alone. I therefore recommend this book. Just don't expect that you'll be capable of applying those stories with the same amount of ruthlessness to your job.

Reread: Brain Rules for Baby

It probably wouldn't surprise you if I told you that I read 90% of all the books I review for this book out of the library. Most books aren't worth reading more than once, and more importantly, if I bought every book I read, I'd be spending a ton of money. However, Brain Rules for Baby is an exception. I read this book last year as the first parenting book, and since then I've read a lot of parenting books, most of which aren't reviewed simply because I could not bring myself to finish them! Parenting books are in general badly written, have little or no scientific backing, and never say something in 5 words when 5,000 words would do. I have no idea why they're so badly written, but there you go. When I saw that the Kindle edition of the book was now $8.10, I remembered the book so fondly I went and bought it for my Kindle.

In short, if you are a busy parent to be or a parent of a kid zero to five, Brain Rules for Baby is the only parenting book that's worth your time! Heck, if you're considering being a parent, do yourself a favor and read this book so you'll know what to expect.

On the second re-read, I nodded and laughed at the stuff he was telling me that would happen that indeed happened. Yes, marriages get strained with the introduction of the little guy. Yes, expect your wife to throw up during the first trimester. Expect sleep deprivation. Human babies were never meant to be brought up by just one couple, so expect to get help and take as much of it as you can. Expect to be charmed by the little one's first smile (Medina calls it the "Megawatt smile.") Expect to have to work extra hard to overcome the social isolation that could set in inevitably if you don't pay attention. I'm very grateful that at least for us, we've been very lucky and have the opportunity to eliminate many of the usual stressors associated with having a child, but I shudder to think what the typical American family goes through.

In re-reading this book, I keep finding little nuggets of information. For instance, kids learn to lie at 3, and they tell a lie every 90 minutes by the time they're 4. I enjoy reading the segments about empathy and how to teach kids to read emotions. (I'm an incredibly un-empathetic person, so this is going to take serious work)

In any case, there are many parents I believe who should read this book, and every parent-to-be or parent-wanna-be should read this book. As usual, the people who most need to read this book won't, but hey, there's nothing YOU can do about that. Heck, even if you never want to be a parent you should read this book. It's just that good. Highly recommended I really should have named it the book of the year last year.

Review: The Best American Science Writing 2008

I checked out The Best American Science Writing 2008 from the library to see how science stories aged, after thoroughly enjoying the 2011 edition.

The prognosis is not good. I'm not sure how much of it is that Sylvia Nasar has poor taste in science stories, and how much of it is that 4 years is a lot of time in science. For one thing, the collection has several themes, the first of which is about doctors getting paid by big Pharma to push drugs. Maybe one article on this theme should make the cut, but 4?! That's ridiculous.

Another theme was genetic engineering and genes. One of them was about 23 and Me, which was young and new back when it came out. But now it feels like old hat. Though one reminder about how slowly technology actually progresses is that we still don't have $1,000 complete genome sequencing as a service.

Other stories seem more like human interest stories than true science stories, and I got bored enough to skip them. All in all, it truly could be that I lucked out and bought the best edition of the series when it was on sale. The 2008 one was a dud.

ASA Catamaran Certification

I signed up for the TradeWinds Catamaran sailing class last month. I had thought about learning how to sail Catamarans for a good long time, but the impetus to do so finally came when I finally organized a second BVI trip (upcoming), and could only find Catamarans to charter.

Normally, the class would take 2 days and be run for 4 certification candidates. However, this time, nobody signed up. Normally, Tradewinds would just cancel the class and ask students to come for the next month, but given that my BVI trip was upcoming at the end of the month, Matt at Tradewinds accomodated my need for certification by concentrating the 2-day class into a 1-day intensive training session. Since my crew needed training as well, Matt was happy to let Larry, Cindy, and Arturo tag along for the training so they too could learn the joy of sailing a Catamaran.

Catamarans sail, dock, and undock very differently from monohulls. In many circumstances, "different" usually means "worse", but I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that in this case, "different" means "better." Docking and undocking, for instance, is made a lot easier by having twin engines and twin propellers that essentially allow the boat to turn on a dime. The fact that the vessels are so long and wide means that you aren't likely to be able to dock in a slip, but because of the nature of the twin screws, docking and undocking become essentially a skipper/helms-driven affair, with the crew helping by essentially releasing or setting up lines as appropriate. There's no dashing about or coming off the beam of the boat to set lines forward and aft while the boat is in motion. As skipper, you have to nail the stern of the boat so crew can step off, but once that's done you can pivot the boat one way or another to get the boat aligned with the dock. If this sounds more demanding on the skipper's ability to stay calm and assess the wind and current correctly, you're right. But in many ways, it's also liberating as you no longer have to worry about crew jumping and landing wrong, slipping into the water, or other such antics. We spent plenty of time practicing in order to get this nailed down.

Once the boat is underway, sailing a Catamaran almost doesn't feel like "real" sailing, as you're missing the heeling sensation you get on a monhull. This is great: there's less scrambling, more relaxation, and appreciation of the views, and the prospect of taking a family with children out on the water suddenly seems doable. In particular, Dan Siefers' catamaran, "Caprice" has a self-setting jib, which meant that the crew could essentially watch as the skipper says, "Ready about", and "Hard a' Lee". That took a bit of getting used to. Jibing is surprisingly similar to a monohull.

And then there's the speed. We effortlessly sailed past monohulls carrying big sails without really even trying (I was being distracted trying to learn the material for the written exam).

Finally, when we got to the docks, I realized something: I wasn't fatigued! I had originally intended to spend the night at Tradewinds and then challenging the written test the next day, but decided that I had enough brain power left to challenge the written test right away, so I did that and emerged a certified 114 Catamaran sailor by the end of the day.

I would like to give a shout-out thanks to my crew, Larry, Cindy, and Arturo. Furthermore, Matt's willingness to help accomodate my need to get a catamaran certification by my trip deadline is commendable, and Dan was an excellent and patient instructor. Recommended. I should have gotten myself catamaran certified ages ago. (One thing I did learn today was that in the Mediterranean, the charter companies require that 2 members of the party have sailing certificates, not just one --- so if you've been thinking you could piggy back on my certification at some point, I'm afraid you're going to have to get one yourself as well or a Greek sail would be out of the question)

Review: Logitech C270 Webcam

We recently had to do a few video calls with people we were planning to exchange homes with. Rather than make do with the crappy 1.3MP camera that came on the Lenovo X201, I picked up a Logitech C270 at a Logitech scratch and dent sale.

I've had poor experiences with some Logitech webcams in the past, mainly from balky software that never seemed to install correctly. I was relieved to see that most of this has been resolved: the camera sits happily on top of the monitor, plugs into a USB port, and the logitech drivers seem to integrate nicely with Google chat and Skype.

The picture quality is great! By contrast, I could always tell when I was skyping with somebody who was only on an iPhone, or some other crappy laptop built-in webcam. The face follow feature seems to work, but I mostly turn it off because usually when we're skyping with another family, it's a multi-face affair. Perhaps if I was a Google Hangouts addict I would turn on the face follow feature.

Given the low price and the great picture quality, I'm pleased with it and can recommend it. Even voice seems to work well despite how far the camera is from my face when I talk.

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.