4 Months of Modernist Cuisine

It's been a while since I last posted about Modernist Cuisine, which is still my go-to book for cooking at home. For me, at least, it's significantly transformed my food preferences as well as the amount of cooking I'd do at home. I've done Creme Brulee, 72-hour short ribs, pressure cooked chicken adobo, and used the pressure cooker and sous vide machine far more than I ever expected to. I've applied to pressure cooker to even some of my favorite recipes outside the book, such as beef rendang and Japanese curry, to good effect---the time it takes to make those dishes have been cut down dramatically and the food quality has improved.

As for the Sous Vide Supreme Demi, I found myself appreciating it more after borrowing a DorkFood setup from a friend of mine. First, it's useful to have a second sous vide machine because while you have a 72 hour short rib cooking for 3 days, you might want to cook other stuff. But second, the slow cooker variants are slow! With the Sous Vide Supreme Demi, I can dump water straight from the tap into the machine and expect the machine to come up to temperature within 30 minutes even if it was ice cold water. No such luck with the DorkFood. You could pour boiling water into the slow cooker and still have to wait for hours for the temperature to come up if you're making Creme Brulee because most of the energy goes into heating up the cold porcelain of the slow cooker! The time saved from using the purpose built device has already paid for itself. Not to mention that DorkFood is loud!

By far the best recipe is the 72 hour short ribs. Those are to die for. If you've not had them, you need to try them. They freeze well, so it's not unusual for me to cook $50 worth of short ribs to freeze them for later use. The most common use for the sous vide machine has to be for chicken. At 66C for 2 hours, you can cook up the best chicken most people have ever tasted at relatively short notice.

All in all, I've found myself using the oven less and the sous vide machine has become the second hardest working machine in my kitchen. (In case you're wondering, the hardest working machine is the rice cooker!) Recommended.

Review: Jabra Journey Bluetooth Car Speakerphone

I got used to the Scion's built-in Bluetooth integration with my phone, so I ended up buying a Jabra Journey Bluetooth Car Speakerphone. You expect these 3rd party after-market solutions to be much worse and kludgey than say a built-in OEM solution, but you'd be wrong. The Jabra outperforms the Scion's Bluetooth integration significantly.

The Scion, for instance, only pairs with one phone at a time. The Jabra will pair with two phones at once. That's really useful, since sometimes both of us get in the car at the same time, and the Scion would inevitably pair with the wrong phone while the Jabra never has that problem. (The passenger can always click the Bluetooth button on a call to call basis)

What's great about this unit is that I expected to have to constantly recharge it. It does turn out that the 45 day standby time is correct. We've had to recharge it a couple of times since we purchased the device, but it's never run out of juice. What's amazing is that the auto-on-off works. Just getting into the car and closing the door is enough to trigger the device to power on and connect to our phones.

Voice clarity is variable, and I suspect it has to do with the phones involved much more than the device. When the phone is streaming Google maps directions, for instance, we can always hear it loud and clear. But if the voice call is iffy or noisy, for instance, why would you expect the Bluetooth speakerphone to work better than the earpiece?

Since the Journey supports A2DP, streaming music or Google Maps directions works automatically and magically. It's very cool, and in this respect is way better than the Scion's integration, where you'd have to switch the audio channel manually to see it.

All in all, I've been very impressed by this piece of technology, and would highly recommend it.

Review: The School For Good And Evil

Sophie and Agatha live in the town of Galvadon, a story book town where once a year, the Schoolmaster kidnaps two children away to attend The School for Good and Evil. These children will then end up in fairy tales and be written about for posterity.

Sophie is blond, fair, and pretty, and seems (to herself) to be a shoo-in for the school for Good. Her friend Agatha, dresses in black, and lives next to the cemetery, but doesn't believe in either the school or the fairies, and has no desire to be kidnapped. When they end up being kidnapped and Agatha ends up at the school for Good and Sophie at the school for Evil, the plot revolves around Agatha trying to get both of them home and Sophie trying to swap places with Agatha while winning her prince.

The book plays up to all the story book cliches, where the school for Good has classes like "beautification", "talking to animals", etc., and the school for Evil teaches "Uglification" amongst others. The story is funny and entertaining, especially as Sophie demonstrates her twisted ideas about what it means to be good.

Unfortunately, the author writes himself into a corner and ends up with a disappointing ending that fails to take advantage of the milleu. The big reveals turn out to be not all that interesting, and the characters never end up being very fully developed. Ignoring the ending, however, it is a fun read and can be mildly recommended for airplane reading.

Review: The Temple of Gold

William Goldman, who wrote The Princess Bride, wrote The Temple of Gold as his debut novel. I'm a big fan of The Princess Bride, so when I saw they shared the same author and Amazon offered it for a low low price of $1.99, I jumped on the novel and bought it.

I shouldn't have. This is an awful, awful novel. The lead character is unlike-able, and does so many stupid things that at one point I just stopped reading because I just couldn't stand reading a novel about someone this stupid. This isn't even about him being an anti-hero, this is just stupidity. For instance, he recognizes when someone's really good for him in a relationship, but abandons the relationship anyway.

I eventually kept reading because I was stuck in a situation where I had nothing else to do, and kept hoping for a note of redemption in this novel. Unfortunately, there was none. Stay far far away from this book. I can hardly believe that the same person wrote The Princess Bride. Now I will hesitate to ever pick up another William Goldman novel again.

Review: The Ages of the Investor

The Ages of the Investor is the first book in William Bernstein's "investing for adults" series. It's unusual in that it provides an unconventional series of recommendations that I don't necessarily agree with, but makes good fodder for thought.

Bernstein looks at lifetime retiring savings as a human capital/financial capital trade-off model. In other words, when you're young, you have plenty of human capital in terms of future earnings growth, but very little in savings. When you're old, the reverse is true. He acknowledges that this view of things is simplistic, in that a young person can nevertheless fall ill, decide to have 12 kids, or do lots of other things to impair their future earnings growth, while his model of financial wealth includes all the risks involved in holding financial securities.

One of the earliest points of the book is that series risk is important. In other words, during your investing career, if you get to take advantage of low stock prices early on, it's a really big advantage, whereas if you get the penalty of a booming stock market in your early years, you don't get to buy stock at low prices, at which point any market crash can really nuke your savings. He points out, however, that if you get a lump sum and invest it all at once, you get to neutralize all series risk, and you avoid extreme outcomes and get to use the market average. This insight doesn't help much, Bernstein admits, because unless you get a big inheritance (or got rich from an IPO), there's no way to find this large lump sum.

Bernstein then examines folks at the beginning of their investing career. This part is not controversial. It's well known that young investors are unnecessarily conservative in their investments (mainly because it takes time to understand financial markets as well as how they react during a downturn), and should actually leverage themselves, as opposed to putting their money in a stock/bond mix. The problem is that most people don't want to use leverage, and even if they did, could quickly panic during a downturn. Bernstein recommends using a DFA-type portfolio instead to increase the risk that they take in their early years.

Then end game is where Bernstein's recommendations are controversial. His thought here is that once you've reached your "magic number", you should avoid taking further market risk. Well, the problem here is that there really is no avoiding market risk except by taking on inflation risk, and for any 30 year period, inflation risk is really high. He suggests a ladder of TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities), but doesn't point out that TIPS have really poor tax characteristics, and are also paying record low interest rates at this point. He also recommends purchasing an inflation adjusted annuity, but also points out that those have historically been very poor deals. He suggests value stocks, but again, those don't eliminate market risk.

Here's the thing, buying a ladder of government bonds during a period of unusually low interest rates is very likely to send you to the poor-house. Furthermore, once inflation returns, the interest generated from your portfolio would be insufficient to live on. This advice worked well for Robin & Dominguez, but they retired in the 1980s during record high interest rates. I'm not sure Bernstein is doing his readers a favor in 2013 by suggesting a similar route.

The only uncontroversial recommendation he makes here is to delay taking security as late as possible if you're in good health so as to get a great "annuity" from your social security income stream. Of course, if you're a die-hard libertarian I don't expect you to take that advice. Even worse, his examples don't note that those who have their assets in mostly taxable accounts actually have an advantage over those who have most of their assets in tax-sheltered accounts, which is the ability to control taxation through judicious use of when to take capital gains as well as substantial advantages to be found in using tax-loss harvesting. I'm not quite sure what to make of this omission.

All in all, the book makes a bunch of good points and gives you lots to think about, but I find Bernstein's recommendations here thin and not really very strong compared to the resources say, at The Retire Early Home Page. He doesn't even address those issues, or the very important question of how you would arrive at your magic number. While I think the book was worth the very quick read, I cannot give many of its recommendations my endorsement. Read and apply the advice at your own risk.

Review: Wheat Belly

My doctor actually recommended Wheat Belly, or I wouldn't have picked it up. Cure Your Child With Food, for instance, already mentions that gluten, the protein in wheat, is the source of many digestion problems. That book reported loads of success curing kids by eliminating wheat and anything white from their diets.

The Wheat Belly proceeds to blame almost all modern ills on wheat and wheat products. As in Cure Your Child With Food, he claims that wheat has been so genetically engineered or otherwise manipulated that the nutrition in it is not something that your body can absorb or deal with, leading to a bunch of diseases ranging from diabetes to acne (!!) to early balding in men. The book is replete with anecdotes from his practice where the patient is miraculously cured after eliminating wheat from his or her diet.

Unfortunately, things are not that simple. You see, Doctor Davis doesn't just recommend getting rid of wheat. He recommends eliminating all forms of whole grain and potatoes as well as the sugary fruits. Adopt his program wholesale and what do you get? The Atkins diet. If wheat was the all encompassing evil he claims it to be, then there shouldn't be any need to eliminate all the other foods, so this prescription basically undermines the entire first 2/3rds of the book!

Now, it could very well be that gluten sensitivity (not necessarily celiac disease) is far more prevalent than you might think, and that many people with irritable bowel syndrome could benefit by eliminating wheat. But if you're looking for proof that wheat is the culprit, then this book definitely does not provide it. That said, he does reference lots of interesting data, including Denise Minger's excellent debunking of the China Study. There's a lot of interesting information, though again, since he undermined himself in the last 2 chapters of the book I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to believe anything he says.

Not recommended.

Review: Pyle Waterproof MP3 Player with embedded headphones

I've been forced to swim a lot recently, and have come to the conclusion that lap swimming is the most boring sport in the universe. There's nothing to see, the scenery doesn't change, and you can't even hold a conversation while swimming like you can while you're cycling, running, or doing almost any land sport. I can't imagine doing it for any length of time long term.

After a while, I decided that it would be a good idea to find someway of listening to something while I'm doing my boring laps. If you're an iSheep, then the natural thing would be to pick up the Underwater iPod. These are basically iPod shuffles have been rebuilt with a waterproof resin internally and a waterproof coating externally, and then you can fit a pair of waterproof headphones to them, attach the whole shebang to your googles, and now you have an iPod that can play music underwater.

But I'm not an Apple fan, and $150 for a 2GB iPod shuffle is incredibly offensive to my senses. So I went looking and came up with the Pyle Waterproof MP3 player. At $40, it's more expensive than some other products, but it also had far better Amazon reviews. At 4GB of storage, it's got twice the storage of the Apple equivalents at one third the price, something very familiar to anyone who's familiar with how tech pricing works.

My first couple of swims were disappointing. The sound was muddy and unclear, and the headphone kept coming off. But I finally figured it out: the headphones come with 3 sets of ear pieces for underwater use, and what you need to do is to use the biggest ear piece that will fit in your ear canal. Once I got the right set (which surprisingly was the largest set), the sound was clear and lovely, and the ear pieces don't try to come off your ear. Now, if you do a particularly violent motion or if you knock your headphones with your strokes you still might get some leakage, but by and large the whole thing works and seriously, once I stop needing to nurse my back along I'm not going to swim more than a couple of times a week anyway.

In any case, my swims have gotten a lot less boring, and more than once I've found myself swimming an extra couple of laps to finish the song I've been listening to, so it's definitely changed lap swimming from "boring" to bearable. Recommended.

Review: The Story of The Human Body

The Story Of The Human Body is written by evolutionary biologist and Harvard Professor Daniel Lieberman. It's not just a boring history of how your various body parts evolved, but it's also an exploration about how mismatch diseases come about: diseases caused by the mismatch between your relatively old genes and the relatively unusual state of civilization today.

Midway through the book (page 173), there's a list of mismatch diseases that hold a few surprises even for me. For instance, apnea, ADHD, OCD, and chronic constipation are all considered to be mismatch diseases. I'm very familiar with Apnea, and I was surprised to find it on this list. The explanation is surprising: if you grew up on relatively soft processed or cooked food, you didn't have to chew very much or very hard, so your jaw ends up being a bit too small, which is one of the conditions that causes apnea. Lieberman suggests allowing kids to chew gum a lot as a way to help correct this deficiency, and I wonder if Singapore's ban on chewing gum could contribute to a rise in the number of children who end up with sleep apnea in the future as a result.

Which brings me to another interesting point about this book. Because mismatch diseases have long lead times and are caused by conditions in which the child grows up in, but the disease itself doesn't show up until in late adulthood, this book also doubles as a parenting manual of things that you as a parent should do, but might not have realized are important. For instance, he suggests letting kids run around in bare feet as much as possible to prevent future incidences of flat feet. This goes against the norms of civilized society, and parents should take note. Other little tit-bits from this book:

• Growing up in a hot environment will cause your child to develop more sweat glands. This may or may not be a good thing, depending on your point of view.
• Baby fat is not necessarily benign: even if the kid grows out of it, being fat at a young age causes your body to have more visceral fat cells, which can lead to being more easily fat as an adult.
• Myopia could be caused by spending too much time indoors, and insufficient variety of visual stimuli. Having a wide variety of visual stimulus is important for normal vision.
• If your kids get antibiotics, it might be necessary to follow up with a dose of probiotics to help the stomach flora return to normal.

If you don't have kids, there are lots of other fascinating topics that are relevant to you:

• Sitting is very bad for you.
• Human beings are basically the fattest primates around, but there are good reasons why.
• Why do men get prostate cancer?
• Why do you tend to get back pain as you age?

These questions all have lots of fun answers in Lieberman's book, plus a huge dose of evolutionary history which explains why if agriculture was such a hard life compared to being a hunter-gatherer, humans adopted it anyway.

Lieberman ties off the book with a bunch of policy suggestions as to how to prevent many of the mismatch diseases he describes. I have a very pessimistic outlook on those suggestions, as the long feedback cycle (40 years or so before diabetes begins to show up) ensures that much like global climate change, there's no real incentive for government to do anything about it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it incredibly informative. It's very likely to be the best book I've read all year. Highly recommended.

Review: Skating to where the puck was

Skating to Where the Puck Was is part of William Bernstein's series called "Investing for Adults". I did not consider the previous book I read in the series, Deep Risk, to be worth the trouble, but I have a different opinion of this book.

Bernstein points out that in many cases, by the time an asset class is widely accessible to the masses for investing, it has lost most of the attractive properties it used to have, therefore rendering the asset class much less interesting. The first example he uses is from David Swensen's Pioneering Portfolio Management: the Yale Model, with its reliance of alternative assets, including hedge funds and other such, returned outsized success until it became widely known and copies, at which point it stopped yielding those outsized returns.

Similarly, he points out that recently, an individual investor could make outsized gains in the housing market by buying up houses and renting them for profit, but doing so would have required that you make a full time job (or serious side job) out of it, not by merely investing in an REIT. Similarly, the Japanese stock market returned incredibly high yields when John Templeton bought into it very early. So early, in fact, that when he first bought shares in the market, they could not even be taken out of the country! By the time generalized Japanese stock funds became available, the return on those funds going forward was dismal. The result, Bernstein says, is that:

if your portfolio looks like the Yale Endowment's, then you're likely to find yourself chairless when the music stops. Diversifying is easy; doing so early is difficult.

The solution? Boring old asset allocation and staying in the market for the long haul. There a really is no Santa Claus, and no tooth fairy, unless you're the next John Templeton and have the courage to get in ahead of the crowd. (And even then, there's no guarantee that you're not the next Bill Miller instead)

The book repeats stuff you probably already know as an investing adult, but the stories inside are worth a quick read and the book is cheap. Recommended.

Review: 3M Command Strips

I never really was into hanging photos or artwork on the walls, even photos I took myself. It wasn't until recently that I figured out what. It turns out that nailing holes in the wall is a somewhat permanent act, and I didn't like the irrevocability of putting a photo up.

One of the helpful folks at Orchard Supply inadvertently pointed that out to me when I asked about buying hanging fixtures. Thinking that I rented an apartment, he told me about 3M Command Strips, which are essentially matching sets of Velcro backed by sticky tape. The clever thing about the Command Strips is that there's a tab on the back of the sticky tape which stretches the glue in the sticky tape so that the entire strip comes cleanly off the wall when done.

A few things are necessary to get these to work right. First, you should use them only as recommended for their weight ratings. Secondly, you need the surfaces to be clean. Lastly, you actually have to follow the directions. We've hung a mirror and 2 pictures with these trips, and I'm very happy with them. I haven't actually tested the removal, but judging from the Amazon reviews, that's not actually a problem.

Recommended.

Review: Cure Your Child With Food

Cure Your Child With Food is a book about nutrition and the impact nutrition has on children's health and growth. It's an interesting book in that it's organized with each chapter meant to be read independently, which leads to a lot of repetition.

For instance, my impression of the first half of the book is that she's a one-trick pony. She seemed to have only two solutions for the patients who come to her: get rid of the diary in the diet, and ditch the gluten. Get rid of the American "white diet". That's it.

The second half of the book, however, does demonstrate that she doesn't just prescribe one thing for all patients. For instance, one patient came to her with sleep problems and an otherwise healthy diet. Getting her onto 0.5mg of melatonin supplement an hour before bedtime meant she could sleep through the night. She explains why melatonin is a good solution and why it is not addictive. Another patient came to her from a vegetarian background with muscular development issues. Adding choline and fish oil to his diet resolved his issues. She does caution that sometime fish oil by itself isn't enough and that other forms of intervention are required. She diagnosed one case of a patient ingesting pesticide from fruit.

She presents interesting theories about why there's been a recent rise in gluten sensitivity (not the same as celiac disease): the amount of gluten in wheat that has been harvested has gone up, due to "improved breeding" and other interventions. She also explains why she recommends fish oil supplements over just adding more fish to the diet: the risk of mercury poisoning.

While the book is wordy and repetitive, I found it useful in thinking about children's nutrition. For instance, once you take your kid off infant formula, you should think about where his Omega-3 is going to come from. In our case, it was more palliative than anything else, but it's not quite a "one trick pony" book that the first half of the book presents itself to be. Recommended.

Advanced Reader Copies of my next book now available

It's called How to Interview A Financial Advisor. It's a short book, about 50 pages, and the first round of beta only has 20 copies available. Since it's currently in beta, it doesn't have a cover yet (I'm waiting for the cover to come in), and the PDF copy doesn't have an index. If you make comments about the book that lead to changes in the book, you'll get to be on the acknowledgements page.

The book is priced low $4.95, and I'm still trying to decide on the final pricing. As a perk, beta customers will also get cheap access to the printed copy when it is finally available.

Review: Aqua Sphere Kayenne Goggle

I've been suffering from some lower back pain due to lifting my toddler at a time when he was struggling. The pain's been bad enough that I've been banned from cycling or heavy lifting, and about the only sport I can indulge in is swimming.

I've been stealing my wife's cheap goggles for those swims, but they're a bit small for me (yes, I know, you're not surprised), and I felt the pressure in my eyes. They also weren't optically very clear, so I splurged and bought the Aqua Sphere Kayenne Googles.

I picked these because (1) they're cheap, and (2) the goggles themselves are wide enough that it looked like the cup around the goggles would be wide enough so that they would spread themselves out over a wide area around my eyes, relieving some of the pressure around my eyes while swimming. At $16 for the cheapest versions they're not super cheap, but they were indeed less pressure than the previous goggles.

They're also optically very clear! I swapped them with my wife one day in the pool and she liked it so much I bought her another pair that were identical to mine. Needless to say, for me to buy 2 of anything means I really like it alot. Recommended.

Review: Invisiblity

Invisibility is a young-adult novel by Andrea Creme and David Levithan. Levithan, you'll recall, is the author of Every Day, and the voice in this novel is very similar to that novel, despite being told alternatively from two perspectives, Stephen and Elizabeth.

The hook in the novel is that Stephen was cursed to be invisible from the day he was born. The novel details all the issues this brings. Stephen seems to have done a good job coping with life as it is, until one day, neighbors move in and Elizabeth is able to see him. We start with a quiet love story, set in New York and its environs, while Elizabeth and Stephen work through their budding romance.

Once Elizabeth discovers that she's the only person who can see Stephen, however, the action revs up and the novel goes into high gear. She quickly discovers why, and starts trying to figure out ways to solve Stephen's problem. At this point, Stephen quickly shifts from being the center of the story to becoming almost a by-stander.

What I like about the novel is that the characters are faced with no easy answers, and have to sacrifice in order to stay together. The authors also do not try to resolve the situation arbitrarily and let the rules they have in place run the climax and conclusion.

While this novel started slowly, towards the end I found myself captivated, flipping pages relentlessly to find out what happens next. That the novel doesn't cheat itself by trying to set up for a sequel (unlike Every Day) is another point in its favor.

Recommended.

Review: Six Earlier Days

Six Earlier Days is a short prequel to David Leviathan's novel, Every Day. It's a light fast read, but doesn't have the heft or development of the novel. It brings together 6 different days of A's life, some of which reveals a facet of his character, and two of which foreshadowing the events to come in the novel. I can only recommend this book if you read Every Day and wanted more.

Review: Deep Risk

William Bernstein has written a new series of short books titled "investing for adults". Deep Risk is one of the series. The book is short, and I wish Bernstein had simply cobbled all the books in the series together as one book rather than trying to sell each monograph separately.

The idea behind Deep Risk is that there are 4 major potential disasters (Bernstein refers to them as the Four Horsemen) that can derail your financial plan. These are: inflation, deflation, confiscation (taxes), and devastation (war). He then analyzes them in terms of how frequently they occur and how difficult it would be to insure against them.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that inflation is by far the most common potential problem for any portfolio. What's interesting about Bernstein's analysis is that he discovers that the traditional inflation protection, Gold bullion, isn't actually very good as an inflation hedge! Rather, stock portfolios tend to do far better as inflation protection even though in the aftermath of an inflation, the stocks could do badly. Bernstein dismisses the potential short term underperformance of stocks as shallow risk: in other words, if you had the fortitude to hang on, you'd recover your portfolio with no permanent loss of capital.

Deflation is much less likely, and Bernstein claims that it has only happened once in Japan since developed countries went off the gold standard. He dismisses Japan as a one off. I disagree, as the U.S. came close to adopting the very same policies that Europe did and could have gotten 10 years of deflation as well. It's also not clear to me that Europe hasn't been subject to the same deflationary problems. Bernstein claims that gold is actually a great deflation hedge, since a big depression triggers a flight to safety, which is what gold traditionally is.

Bernstein defines confiscation relatively loosely. For instance, an increase in tax rates could be defined as confiscation. It seems to me that you could solve the confiscation relatively easily, by moving to a very high tax state with already confiscatory taxes, at which point your risk of further confiscation is relatively low. To be fair, Bernstein does point out the exiting U.S. citizenship would cost you an exit tax, and even holding foreign assets is no protection from the tax man, should we ever get an administration that chooses to enforce such laws. The reality is, if you're a U.S. citizen intending to stay in the U.S., there's relatively little that you can do beyond the existing well-known tax-sheltered accounts and tax-managed funds.

Finally, the threat of war is real, but again, there's relatively little you can do unless you decide to become a survivalist and start building bunkers. In serious threats, what you'd have to do is to stockpile food, guns, and ammunition and build a private army. Historically, people who've done that don't tend to do all that well financially, and the existence of events such as the Waco Seige indicates that even building your own private army doesn't do very good if someone with a real army chose to take you out.

Ultimately, I found the entire book disappointing and lacking in useful action items. The truth is, as a financial observer I've found that far more people have devastated their portfolio by panicking during a crisis than by having their wealth confiscated by a government, war, or even inflation. So rather than writing a series of books called "investing for adults", Bernstein probably should have written a book about how to become an adult, as far as investing is concerned. Not recommended.

Review: The Sports Gene

The Sports Gene is not just a book about athletes. It's also a thorough debunking of books such as Talent is Overrated. If you were to want to debunk that book, you'd want to do this starting with athletes. Pretty much everyone knows intuitively that no on 5' 2" and shorter is going to play in the NBA. The disadvantages that accrue from being shorter than all the freaks of nature playing in the NBA would just be too much for any amount of practice to overcome.

The book starts with Tiger Woods, whose dedication to golf is pretty famous and well-documented. What Epstein points out, however, is that few accounts of Woods' success points out that even at 6 months, Woods was capable of standing on his father's palm while his dad walked around the house! That's innate talent that wasn't taught and can't be taught.

The book then goes on to cover short distance athletes, marathoners, skiers, sled dogs, and ties it all together. What's great is that in the course of covering the genetics of performance, he also discusses certain questions that have always bothered me. For instance, if living at altitude is so beneficial, why aren't the gold medalist sprinters and marathoners from Tibet and the Nepal Himalaya instead of being from Africa? It turns out that there's an optimum altitude for hemoglobin creation (5000-7000'), beyond which it's difficult to train hard. Furthermore, the sherpas and other high mountain people developed a different genetic pathway towards altitude acclimation rather than the metabolically expensive hemoglobin creation.

There's also a great discussion of Superbaby, how the success of a breed of alaskan Huskies proved that even motivation has a genetic component (they bred a breed of dogs that just wants to run when harnessed!).

The author also studied the Australian Olympic program, which specializes in identifying which sports an athlete is uniquely suited for, and then grooms that athlete for those sports. In those cases, it's quite clear that gold medalists with talent can achieve in 4,000 hours what others without talent cannot do with 10,000 hours.

Epstein succeeds in making his points, though obviously doesn't answer any questions about the intellectual analogues to the skills/abilities he discusses. Along the way, you'll learn a few things about genetics and what types of bodies it takes to succeed in the various sports. The average reader might be disappointed that he doesn't discuss what ethical implications they may be, and how quickly genetic engineering is likely going to take over the sporting events. The days of unaugmented athletes being able to perform at the world level might very well be numbered.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and can highly recommend it.

Review: Naked Statistics

Naked Statistics is a non-technical introduction to statistics. In terms of explaining the science of statistics to laymen, it does a passable but not stellar job. The basics are straightforward: nearly everyone should know the difference between mean and median (the book doesn't cover "mode"), and Wheelan does a fine job of explaining the difference.

Where the book starts to fall apart is on items such as the Central Limit Theorem and Regression analysis. Both topics are technical enough that you really should just get out a statistics or math textbook and work through examples yourself. The book separates out the technical details in an appendix to each chapter, but I found that treatment unsatisfactory. On the other hand, I'm also the kind of person who'd read a textbook if  I really wanted to review this material as preparation.

The book is sprinkled with lots of examples, some of which are fun, but doesn't into enough depth about the anecdotes to really get at the gist of the matter. The author says he was inspired by How to Lie With Statistics, but in my opinion anyone who wants to read this book should read the original instead.

Not recommended. Go read a textbook instead, or the original source of inspiration instead.

Review: Cold Days

Cold Days is the latest available novel in the Dresden Files series. Like the previous couple of books in the series, you are well advised not to read this novel until you've read at least the previous 3 books in the series.

The books at this point suffer from the travails of a D&D campaign that's gone past the sweet spot of the game system. The characters are now extremely powerful and the only way for the DM/author to challenge the players is to keep throwing bigger and bigger challenges and bigger and bigger bad-asses at them.

This is not a bad thing. But as an action series, there's precious little time for reflection on the part of Harry Dresden, and there's even less motivation for him to introspect. We do get a few notices here and there on the part of the temptations he's subject to as the new Winter Knight, but by and large he brushes them off as he spends much of his time going for survival, rather than flexing his powers.

I did enjoy a number of plot twists in the book, and the expanded awareness of his urban fantasy world is a lot of fun for long time readers of the series. If you're already a follower of the series, this is a great book, and worth your time. While it's not necessary to read the entire series, it'd be worth while to at least start from Changes. Recommended.

Review: Ghost Story

Ghost Story is book 13 of the Dresden Files. It is a direct sequel from Changes, and if you haven't read that book you'll not get very much out of this book, because it picks up directly where Changes start. Given that that's the case, I'm going to spoil this book if you insist on reading further on this review.

Dresden was murdered at the end of the last novel, and he wakes up as a ghost, 6 months later, at the start of this one and is charged with investigating his own murder. Unfortunately, there's a complete shortage of clues, and Dresden wanders from situation to situation, trying to resolve more urgent problems than that of his murder, which in fact, he deduced correctly fairly early on in the novel.

In many ways, fantasy is about wish-fulfillment. In some ways, this is Dresden's wish-fulfillment. He gets to see how crucial he was to the community, and how much things went wrong without him for 6 months. The mystery as such isn't much of one, but again, is more like an action movie. It does end up with a setup for the next book, so it's clear at this point that Jim Butcher has given up on standalone novels and is only writing for folks who'll read the entire series.

Only recommended if you're willing to slog through the entire series.