Review: Fintie Origami Cover for Kindle Paperwhite

Along with the paperwhite, we bought a Fintie Origami Cover for it. The official Amazon origami cover is only available for the Voyage and Oasis, but fortunately the free market has provided it to those who merely own the paperwhite.

The cover is surprisingly heavy, at 118g, which is much heavier than say, the 93g advertised weight of the Omotion cover, which is a non-origami cover.

The cover does fold nicely and becomes a reading stand, which I like a lot. You can orient it both horizontally and vertically, but since the paperwhite does not appear to have an accelerometer that lets it automatically detect when you're holding it in landscape or portrait mode, I do not expect to use it in landscape mode often.

The magnetic clasp is strong, and automatically turns on the the kindle when you open it. This is a convenient feature if you have an ad-free Kindle, but on a Kindle with ads you still have to swipe to unlock, which is an additional step. Given that you have to touch the screen all the time anyway, this additional swipe isn't a particular burden, but if it annoys my wife a lot I'll ask Amazon to turn it off.

All in all, a solid product with interesting features that may or may not get used often. I'm pleased with it, but will probably try the Omotion cover for our next Kindle. Recommended.

First Impressions: Kindle Paperwhite

Amazon finally offered a too-good-to-pass-up deal for the Kindle Paperwhite in late March, just before our trip to the BVI. For prime members, they discounted the paperwhite by $30, and then threw in a $35 trade in bonus for our old Kindle 3rd generation. That brought the effective price down to about $70, so we jumped on it.

The other Kindles were also on discount, but the main reason for opting for the Paperwhite was the Waterfi Waterproofing process, which can only be applied to the Paperwhite. I'm a sincere believer that everything with a touch screen should be waterproof, if only so that you can wash it with detergent and clean up the oily fingerprints that inevitably accumulate on the screen. The Kindle arrived too late for us to send it into Waterfi in time for the trip, but immediately after the trip I sent the device in for waterproofing and will report on it for a future process.

The device is significantly heavier than the basic Kindle at 203g. (The basic kindle is 166) Against that is that the basic kindle requires a separate cover to provide a lighted reading experience, while the paperwhite has lighting built in. The lighting is much more even than my old Kindle basic lighted cover, but you can definitely see some light banding at the bottom of the screen, which does not impact the reading experience.

During the trip, we got to compare the 1st generation Paperwhite, my old Kindle basic, and a second generation Paperwhite with this 3rd generation device. Of course, compared to the old basic Kindle there's no contest. Surprisingly, there's a significant improvement from the 1st generation paperwhite, with the newer 300dpi display and brighter backlight making for a better experience.

What I dislike about the paperwhite is that the touch screen latency is pretty high: compared to the buttons on my old basic kindle it feels like it takes an extra 30ms before the touch screen gets picked up and then the device turns the page. The table of contents screen also feels very cluttered compared to the simple, text based screens of the older Kindles. I'm not sure that the new entry screen is worth the change.

Other than that, I flipped between the old basic Kindle and the new Paperwhite during the trip. At one point my wife grabbed the Paperwhite to read The Three Body Problem and I went all the way back to the basic Kindle. While it was a downgrade, it wasn't so much of a downgrade that I wouldn't trade in the older device except that the buttons on it are getting to be rather sticky and occasionally turns two pages instead of one, which is very annoying.

Because of the button wearing out issue, I paid the paperwhite the best compliment possible: I opened up a chat window with Amazon and negotiated the purchase of yet another Paperwhite to replace my old basic Kindle at a higher price than we paid for this first one. Between the potential for waterproofing and the improved screen, I found myself willing to give up my beloved page turn buttons.

Recommended.

Review: Grit - The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Grit is about what it takes to succeed in what is considered a grueling situation. Angela Duckworth claims that Grit, for instance, determines who's more likely to survive a West Point college career than your SATs, measures of scholastic achievements, or even physical fitness scores. She measures Grit through subjective surveys, including measures like: "how likely are you to have a never give up attitude?"

There are a few problems with her claims, chiefest of which is that correlation is not causation. In particular, unless the studies and effects are large, her sample sizes would have to be huge to account for "grit" being a major factor. A cursory search of the literature indicates that, for instance in her study of which cadets make it through the Beast Barracks:

what happened is that 95 percent of all cadets make it through Beast Barracks, while 98 percent of the very "grittiest" candidates made it through.

That's just 3%. Further down the NPR article we discover that the correlation of success with Grit is 0.18, while the correlation between SAT scores and performance in college is 0.5! In other words, given the choice between being gritty and being smart, you should definitely choose to be smart!

It would be one thing if Duckworth acknowledge all these flaws in her book, but chapter after chapter of the book is about how important Grit is, while sweeping aside any issues. She even discusses how to train grit into children.

To her credit, she does acknowledge that you can't just have someone tell you "get good at piano and improve your grittiness." One of her points is that no one can impose your goals on you --- you should be the one choosing your instrument, or the task or skill you would like to improve. Any other approach (including the typical tiger mom approach) is likely to fail.

And ultimately, grittiness can backfire. In John T. Reed's book, Succeeding, he discusses his teenage goal of getting into West Point and graduating from it. He succeeds in doing so, only to discover that military life wasn't actually very good for an intelligent, driven person, and that his personality was far less suited for it than he had imagined. In that book, Reed points out that picking your environment to suit your personality and strengths is actually far more important than the other attributes that others allude to.

In short, I don't think Grit's a  worth while book, especially given its flaws and the author's unwillingness to point out the flaws in her research. Not recommended.

Review: The Three-Body Problem

I actually tried to read Cixin Liu's The Wandering Earth and thought it was garbage, so I wasn't going to bother with The Three-Body Problem. But Cynthia told me she thought it was good, so I thought that maybe my issues with the previous book was the translator. I decided to give it a try and check it out of the library.

Here's my problem with The Wandering Earth: it's science fiction as it was written in the 1940s. This might be great if you have zero scientific background, or no understanding of first year Physics or Chemistry, but for modern, scientifically literate audiences it's a major distraction and a major turn-off. Unfortunately, The Three-Body Problem also suffers from the same problems as The Wandering Earth.

The story is purportedly about the mysterious deaths of various high level Physicists. As the plot unravels, we get the real story. I won't spoil the true story, but suffice to say, the N-body problem plays a major part in it. Unfortunately, the science is implausible, and even the depiction of a VR game as depicted in the novel is a shambles. The characters are wooden, emotionally dead, and not developed. So let's see: the plot is dumb, the science is silly and unrealistic, and the characters suck. Wow, that's 3 for 3. I have to ask, "Cynthia, what were you on when you read this and liked it?"

This novel is as complete a waste a time as you can get. I'd like those hours of my life back, and I will not waste my time reading any more books by Cixin Liu. My guess is that the luminaries that have given this novel all the attention it doesn't deserve don't actually read enough good science fiction to know it if one good novel hit them in the head.

Review: Concussion

Concussion is the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu's first dissection of football players' brains and his naming of the disease of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). This seems obvious to us nowadays, but once upon a time, nobody thought of concussions as being a big deal.

What's clear from the story is that Omalu himself did seek out the fame of being the first to discover such a significant disease. (He specifically found his mentor, Cyril Wecht, because he also wanted to be a star coroner)

Since the NFL is a multi-billion dollar business, it wasn't going to let any old medical doctor attack their business. The rest of the story is that of the NFL's attempt to discredit Dr. Omalu and his collaborators, and the eventual vindication of Omalu.

The writing is clear and compelling, and the reading is easy. I enjoyed the story, though I feel no desire to watch the movie. Excellent airplane reading.

Review: The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman

The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, rather than a sequel, is a revision of an earlier, existing work, so if you've read the previous version of this book I doubt if you'll get very much out of this one.

If you're a fan of Dani Rodrik, you're probably well aware of the so-called Washington Consensus and its failure to lift most 3rd world countries out of poverty. In effect, the Washington Consensus invites 3rd world countries to borrow heavily in order to build infrastructure, set up "market reforms", and run a so-called capitalistic economy. John Perkins claims that most of his career was to be one of the optimistic economic forecasters who paints an excessively optimistic view of the growth of such economies in order to persuade leadership to borrow heavily.

Economic forecasters have a poor track record: it's fair to say that they basically get paid to say whatever it might be profitable to say. I'll never forget walking out of a corporate meeting where some over-optimistic PM would bring out power-point charts to convince the head honchos that China would be a meaningful revenue market for a US-based internet company. As a naive engineer I thought the numbers were fishy at best and mendacious at worst, but I figured since senior management bought into it I might be wrong. Now, would I have called that PM an Economic Hit Man? He did benefit his own career (and his promotion opportunities, as well as additional stock) by effectively lying through his teeth, but I'm not sure there was a conspiracy in China to induce Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Uber to dump huge amounts of capital into China. Greed and hubris need not get support from the Chinese government.

As a result, reading this book feels like reading the auto-biography of a self-important economic forecaster taking credit for producing results, and confessing that yes, he was unqualified to make those ridiculous forecasts, and that yes, he was recruited into doing so by some nefarious groups of government agencies and private contractors. The problem with all these claims is that he doesn't provide any evidence, and the Washington Consensus approach certainly didn't need the help of a vast conspiracy to keep pushing its agenda: greed and blind allegiance to capitalism would be sufficient to keep the momentum.

In any case, the book's entertaining, but I didn't learn very much from it (though I did learn more about various South American countries' political leadership). It's quite clear that attempts to lift most third world countries out of poverty via the Washington consensus have failed, while the Asian model has been more successful. But for better analysis you should probably look elsewhere than John Perkin's book.

Review: Playstation 4 Platinum Wireless Headset

I have a 5.1 surround system attached to the Playstation 4, but sometimes, it's just not practical to use it. When Amazon had a lightning sale on the Platinum Wireless Headset, I decided to give it a whirl.

The idea behind the headset is that a proprietary USB dongle plugs into the PS4, which than mixes the sound in such a way as to grant you virtual 7.1 surround sound using just the two speakers clamped to your ear. It sort of works. There's a toggle that lets you turn this on and off, and whenever I turned it on, the audio sounded just a bit more airy. But I'd be damned if I could pinpoint where the sound was coming from --- the sound stage was tiny.

Surprisingly, the USB dongle works on the PC as well, though only in stereo mode. The same applies to the PS3.

What got me to return the product, however, was that the headset does indeed clamp onto your head. After about half an hour, I wanted to take that off. Ultimately, the improvement in audio quality just didn't make up for the cost and discomfort. I switched back to using the Sennheiser PX100 instead at 1/5th the cost.

Review: Babylon's Ashes

Babylon's Ashes is the 6th "Expanse" novel. The previous novel, Nemesis Games, ended in a bad place, with the plot hanging in the middle of a cliff-hanger. This novel does not suffer from that problem. In fact, what's interesting about the book is that this would be a natural stopping point to stop reading the series.

The threads from all the previous plots are resolved, though not necessarily in a very satisfactory fashion. For instance, the motivation for the Earth attack in the previous book wasn't very sound in the first place, and that the people who would be motivated into supporting such an action would even raise an eyebrows in the relatively milder event of this novel seems unlikely. As such one of the major events in the novel, the betrayal of Marco Inaros' fleet captains, just felt out of character to me and never felt real.

Similarly, the ending of the book, with a pulling out of the hat of an interesting feature of the gate from the Solar system felt very much like a deus ex machina.

From the authors' perspectives, they probably felt like they fulfilled their initial promise to deliver the story of mankind's migration from the solar system. It's just not as convincing as I hoped it would be. I expect not to continue reading any Expanse novels beyond this point.

Review: Now - The Physics of Time

I'd previously audited Mysteries of Modern Physics - Time and found it interesting. Then I watched Arrival and it sparked a discussion about time with my wife. Then I saw Richard Muller's Tachyon Murder quora answer and that got me to check out Now - The Physics of Time.

I sort of expected it to cover the same material as Sean Carroll's lecture series, but this book has several advantages over Sean Carroll's lecture series, not least of which is that it's fairly recent (2015) and has more up to date information. Muller also has a completely different perspective than Carroll, and approaches things very differently from Carroll.

For instance, Carroll's lecture series spends a lot of time covering entropy, and basically comes to the conclusion that the arrow of time occurs because of entropy. Muller disagrees with this theory or approach. His primary objection is that this explanation doesn't provide any falsifiable ways of proving the theory. And of course, local entropy on Earth (powered by the sun as an energy source) doesn't always increase.

Muller makes 2 key points: the first is that the physics approach to describing the universe is necessarily incomplete, not just because we have incomplete knowledge, but also because of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. In a world where we can't even predict when the decay of an atom could occur, determinism seems out of the question and the existence of free will is a strong possibility. The implication is that this means that there's no perspective in which all moments of time are equal: the now is a special time because if you have free will you can then change what will happen in the future.

The second point is that space is constantly being created by the expansion of the universe. His conjecture is that time is also continuously being created by that very expansion. He provides several approaches to falsifying this theory, though sadly he doesn't state whether there are experiments that aim to falsify it in the future.

The book's journey is quite fun, and an interesting read. There are a few places where Muller gets repetitive (especially in the philosophical section where he discusses determinism vs free will), but overall, I particularly enjoyed his descriptions of the experiments that were used to confirm both relativity and quantum mechanics. These are particularly good ways to illustrate how science works and made for great reading.

Recommended.

Review: Medical School for Everyone: Grand Rounds Cases

I really enjoyed all the "Medical School for Everyone" series from the Great Courses, so I was happy to add Grand Rounds Cases to my collection. The same doctor is the primary lecturer for all these audio courses, so there's no concern for the listener that he may be paying for the same material multiple times: as far as I can tell, there is no overlap between all the audio books in the series. Each book/course covers a completely different set of cases.

When I read Algorithms to Live By, one of the interesting stories from the book was how simple mathematical algorithms (no machine learning magic needed!) did a better job of diagnosing patients than even the very experienced doctors who helped to come up with the diagnostic criteria. This set of audio courses is a good antidote to that sort of thinking: in particular, many of the cases covered challenge the doctor not because the diagnosis between differentials (the medical term for diseases/conditions that can match a particular set of symptoms) is difficult or ambiguous, but the extraction of the medical history from the patient required finesse, delicacy, and social skills. For instance, one patient was reluctant to admit to her history with alcohol, misdirecting the medical staff. The need to gain a patient's trust is what convinces me that even if AI was successful in distilling all medical knowledge, to properly substitute for a doctor would require the development of empathy and understanding. That seems to me a much harder job than merely providing an accurate diagnosis when given symptoms.

All of the cases are interesting. Not all of the patients survive, but all are worthy of the half hour or so the lecturer provides. You may or may not want to be a doctor, but by listening to these lectures and the descriptions of the doctor/patient interaction, you'll almost certainly be better equipped to talk to your doctor or be a better advocate for a loved one.

I am reminded of the day when we discussed a possible surgery for my father after he had a fall which turned out to cause bleeding in the brain. The neurosurgeon we discussed the case with looked at the CT scan and told us that the problem could resolve itself, or it could quickly need surgery. We opted to wait but my father deteriorated and we brought him into the hospital via the ED. Afterwards, the neurosurgeon told us he didn't realize that the CT scan was for a recent fall, and that he had given us advice on the basis that this was an old scan! Having listened to this lecture I now know that we should have been on the lookout for this sort of assumptions by a doctor, and summarized the medical history immediately on first contact with the doctor so he wouldn't be prejudiced by his assumptions. In this particular case the situation was rescued only because his primary care doctor looked at him that very afternoon and told us to rush him to the ED right away!

In any case, I think this course/audio book could very well save your life or the life of your loved one. It's well worth your time to listen to it, and if you can, get your spouse/significant other to audit it as well for the day when he/she might have to advocate on your behalf!

Highly recommended.

Review: Hanes Men's Ultimate X-Temp Lightweight Performance Boxer Brief

For the longest time, my go-to brand for travel underwear was Ex-Officio. The fabric is very breathable, dries quickly, and lightweight. You could bring 2 pairs on a bike tour and they would dry quickly enough that you never had any days where you would have to put on wet underwear. They weren't very durable, however: 30 days of wear and the elastic would stop being so tight, and eventually they'd look like they'd been worn by someone with twice my waist! Keep in mind that hand-washing the underwear on bike tours meant that I never put them in the laundry or dried them in a dryer, so I really babied these things!

I found a deal where I could get the Hanes Ultimate X-Temp briefs at a good price. To my surprised, they weighed even less than the Ex-Officio (by 30g each, they were 70g while the Ex-Officios were 100g!). They weren't as breathable as the Ex-Officios, but dried as quickly, and as a benefit, provided good support --- you could ride a bike wearing them and they wouldn't chafe. But the bees knees are that they're much cheaper than the Ex-Officios (1/3rd the price) and more durable! I'd been wearing them on a regular basis and sticking them into the laundry and dryer like any other pair of underwear and despite having put in 2 years into them they still show no signs of wear!

I paid the Hanes the best compliment I can give to any product recently: when my regular Costco-branded cotton underwear started wearing out, I bought new Hanes without waiting for a discount (to be fair, the discounts were rare!). Highly recommended. Don't bother with the Ex-Officios, heck, don't bother with the cheap Costcos either!

You know you're a nerd parent when....

• All the other kids start counting from one, and your kid's counting from zero, because that's how programming languages usually start indexing their arrays from.
• Your son asks mommy, "Mommy, I don't know how to tie knots. You better sign me up for a knot tying class."
• He says, "That kid can only count with his fingers. This other kid can count using his brain."
• He said to me after I demonstrated a piano piece to him: "How come you didn't practice and you can do this piece?"
• One day, he was struggling with Rush Hour. I made him go swimming to take his mind off his frustration. The next day he solved the puzzle. He said, "After swimming, while sleeping, I worked on the problem while dreaming."
• Instead of saying, "I need to memorize the song," your son says, "I need to download it to my brain."

Review: Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality

I enjoyed the previous Great Courses work by Robert Sapolsky that I audited, so I picked up Biology and Human Behavior. I feel like the subject had great promise, but Professor Sapolsky under-delivered.

For instance, early on in the lecture series, Sapolsky stated that the Blue Whale Axon has a neuron that's so long as to be about 30m long! Wow, what a cool fact. To me, that immediately brought out all sorts of questions:

• Why does it have to be a single cell?
• What were the evolutionary pressures that drove this? Does anything ever go wrong? Why isn't this considered "a single point of failure?"

But Sapolsky never brings it up again, and in fact, there's relatively little to indicate that this has any relevance to human behavior.

Another interesting factoid that came up later on: While studying a tribe of baboons in Africa, members of the tribe started raiding the local tourist safari in search of human discarded food. The members that did so were the least socially connected members of the troop and also the most violent. Then those members caught tuberculosis and died, which effectively meant that the rest of the tribe was now composed of much fewer males, all of which were socially well adjusted. The culture of the tribe completely changed, and new male members added to the tribe (this form of tribal member exchange is apparently the norm) would get acculturated to the new culture, which was matriarchal. The mechanism of assimilation wasn't through imitation and teaching, but through the females of the tribe bestowing favors only to well-behaved males. Sapolsky asserts that if a single such generation shift can lead to lasting cultural change, there's no excuse for genetic determinism when it comes to humans. I then waited for a follow-on example of such single-generational cultural change in humans... and it never came!

I feel like the entire course consists of lots of little places like this, with many missed opportunities to pursue interesting venues of thought but very little follow up. The material itself is interesting, but somehow I felt like I'd heard it all before in my various readings over the years. The examination of human behavior was also limited: Sapolsky focused almost entirely on violence. Near the end of the series he claims that this selection was because while most other problematic  behaviors were unmitigated problems (e.g., schizophrenia), violence could have potentially positive impact on genetic survival and reproductive fitness, and so was a fit subject of study. I immediately thought to myself, "So's bipolar disorder, and to me that would be a much more interesting subject of study!"

This is the first Great Courses series that I'm disappointed by. It was still worth a listen, but perhaps some of the other audio books would be more interesting to you.

Review: Lucifer Book 3

Lucifer Book 3 resolves the story of what happened in hell after Lucifer abandoned it. We get a glimpse of hell, as well as Lucifer's plan to survive his duel with the angel. At no point do you ever feel like Lucifer is in any danger. The graphic novel is more about how he's going to get there.

After that, we get a resolution of the story of Elaine Belloc's 'soul and the recovery thereof.

The entire story was pretty lackluster. I stopped reading book 4 and never got around to writing this review until I realized that my library book had come due.

In Memoriam: Sweesam Na 1942-2017

My father was born in Gerisek, Malaysia, a kampong (village). He was in a family of 7, and his own father died while he was very young. Stories from that period was that he was so poor he and his brothers shared a pair of shorts. When the older brother met the younger brother on the way home, he'd take off his shorts and give it to the younger sibling to wear to school.

Moving to Singapore in his 20s, he had 3 sons and went from being a laborer to a driver to running his own business. With that, he supported 3 sons. He didn't enjoy being in the US when we immigrated. But he still moved here after he retired to be with his grandkids.

The last few years have been challenging. He survived 2 strokes (both of which were caused by falls), but despite that learned to Snorkel at age 72, and just a few years ago was still carrying Bowen around in a baby carrier.


When I arrived at the house on Sunday, I heard my cousin's littlest baby crying, and so thought everything was going as usual. Then my mom told me that he's choking. My two cousins held him up while I grabbed his belly and heaved. I did so repeatedly and saw something on the floor but nothing more came out. We called 911, and when they arrived I had to lie down because I was exhausted.

They had to lever out the food and used an AED. By the time he hit the ER there'd been irreparable damage because of a heart attack. The ER doctor told us that our dad was dying, and that if it was his parent he would not go for heroic measures to keep him alive as he would never be able to breathe without a ventilator again.

We took him off the ventilator at noon on February 2/27/2017. He passed away at 4:10pm. He is survived by 1 brother, 2 sisters, his wife, 3 sons, 2 grandsons, and 1 grand daughter.

Review: Nemesis Games

Nemesis Games is the 5th book in the Expanse series. It's the first novel in the series that doesn't standalone. You could presumably read any of the previous novels without any of the preceding ones, but this novel would simply have not much impact (or even make much sense) without the context of the preceding novels. Furthermore, the novel doesn't even resolve the situations it sets up, ending on a cliff-hanger for the next novel!

Having said that, this is the first novel that I feels fulfills the promises the authors (yes, James Corey is a pen-name for two authors) made at the start of the series, which is that the Expanse is ultimately the story of humanity's expansion from the solar system to the rest of the galaxy.

The previous novels set the stage: a star gate has opened up to the rest of the galaxy, and the mad land-rush has begun. The barriers to humanity's expansions have fallen, and the alien menace that wiped out the civilization which created the star gate is nowhere to be seen.

With all that in place, of course, humanity will find a way to screw it up and make a mess of things. The crew of the Rocinante has about 6 months to wait for their ship to be repaired and restored, and so each of them (except Holden) outsource the repair job and head out to reconnect with their respective pasts. This is a welcome break, since we've never actually gotten actual character development with everyone other than Holden in previous novels, and the authors take their time to give us a detailed glimpse.

Of course, when all hell breaks loose the crew comes together, but only just in time to set up for the inevitable 6th book in the series.

As far as novels are concerned, it's the first novel in the series that I would consider recommended. Unfortunately, you pretty much have to read all the previous novels to make sense of it.

Review: Pediatrics Grand Rounds (Medical School for Everyone Series)

Parenting books are mostly extremely badly written. But Dr. Roy Benaroch is a real doctor (a practicing pediatrician) and I enjoyed the Emergency Medicine audio lectures so much that I thought this would be a hoot.

Nearly every lecture in this 24 lecture series made me wish I'd audited this series before I became a parent. It answers so many great questions that I'd had and does so in practical, case-study type format that treats each patient complaint as a mystery, some with serious implications and some without:

• How does sleep training work, and how quickly can you do it? (it's turns out the cry it out methods are faster than the alternatives)
• Why are vaccine schedules set the way they are? (turns out that this is driven by medical studies and periods of vulnerability)
• What serious birth defects do existing prenatal screens detect, and which types slip through? 
• Why is folic acid important?
• What's the best way to discipline your kid? How do you properly do a time-out? (It turns out consistency and immediacy is key --- if you can't impose the punishment immediately, it's better to ignore it than to mention it and not follow through)
• Cancer is the leading cause of deaths among children between 1 and 9, but leukemia is surprisingly treatable (80% survival rate).

One might think that listening to this series would cause you to become paranoid and hypochondriac, but in my case I just felt very grateful that all our visits to the hospitals and clinics have been relatively complication free.

This is not to say all the case studies in the series have happy endings. Some of them don't, and one of the episodes might be very distressing if you're sensitive. Dr. Benaroch is very careful in calling it out in case you want to just skip that episode, so I wouldn't let that deter you from listening to the series.

Unlike Emergency Medicine, I didn't manage to get any of the diagnosis correct on the case studies (except 1), so that meant the series taught me something new in every episode!

Highly recommended. And if you're a new parent, contains valuable information about how to interact with your physician and how to make the best use of your time.

Review: Your Best Brain - The Science of Brain Development

I'm a sucker for anything by John Medina, so when I saw that he actually had a Great Courses program called Your Best Brain, I picked it up hoping that it wouldn't be too much of a repeat from say, Brain Rules for Baby.

It turns out not to overlap with the book very much at all, which is great! The major thesis of the program is that your brain is a physical object, and therefore is subject to all the laws of physics and chemistry, along with the rules set by evolution. The net result is that a lot of the times, Medina explains something through the thought experiment of thinking about what man's ancient ancestors on the plains of the Serengeti had to face, and what problems the brain evolved to solve.

The coverage then starts from Neurons and Dendrites, and then moves on to the major areas of the brain. Each lecture ends with practical tips on how to optimize your brain. Most of them are no brainers, like: "get enough sleep! Just a few hours of sleep debt is enough to make you behave like you're drunk!"

Other interesting tips:

• If you need to learn something for a test, try to do the learning in an environment as similar to test conditions as possible.
• Memories work best via repetition, but not cramming. And all nighters (as you would expect from the above) are a no-no.
• Classic teenage rebellious behavior is a Western phenomenon. In most non-Western cultures, you do not get teenage rebellious behavior unless/until the kids in those cultures have been exposed to western media.
• Elizabeth Kuber-Ross's ideas about the stages of grief ("denial//anger/bargaining/depression/acceptance") is BS. For most humans, the response to grief is resilience.
• Get 150 minutes of aerobic activity a week to optimize brain function. Yes, that means Garmin's Vivoactive HR's "intensity minutes" approach is completely correct.

All in all, the course is great, and I can recommend it. Well worth the time.

Review: Lucifer Book 2

In the previous book, Lucifer managed to create an entire new multi-verse out of the current Cosmos. In Lucifer Book 2, the repercussions of it are brought forward as folks race towards the new multiverse to establish a foothold. In this book, Mike Carey reveals that yes, the DC Cosmology is entirely Judeo-Christian based, with the name of the universe's creator being Yahweh.

And this isn't the God of the New Testament, this is the God of the Old Testament. Jealous, petty, and probably appropriate for the age of Trump as president. Not only does he view Lucifer as the adversary, he views disobedience as reason to punish innocents as well as the guilty. We never do get to see Yahweh's face.

There are a few side stories in the book about the new world Lucifer's created, some of which are actually very well done (involving time differentials between the two cosmologies). Lucifer's still a sympathetic character, but it's also very clear that he's entirely self-centered, willing to sacrifice others to achieve his aims.

Comic books are fast, easy reads. This one was available easily on Hoopla. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered making a trip to the library to pick it up. I'm not in a hurry to keep reading on to the rest of the series, however.

Review: Cibola Burn

Cibola Burn is the 4th Expanse novel. In the third novel, James Holden manages to open up the star gate through which other systems can be accessed, and of course, true to American Frontier form, squatters from the outer asteroids immediately zoom through the gate in order to claim land and territory. An official UN science expedition arrives months later, and the squatters resent the presence of official authority enough to start a pre-emptive attack.

Of course, any human venture into a new frontier would result in massive chaos, huge amounts of selfishness, and eventually our protagonist Jim Holden is asked to show up and mediate between the two sides. Events escalate from there and he and his crew have to deal with the planet trying to kill them, the two sides trying to kill each other, and the mystery that's in Holden's head trying to get him to do what it wants him to do.

From the overall arc of the novel series perspective, the meta-plot and story is advancing at a glacier pace. The novel itself sets up tense situations, but shies away from actually resolving them in a realistic fashion --- the authors treat each scene like a cliff-hanger in which the crew of the Rocinante is expected to survive, thereby draining tension from the novel. There's relatively little character development, and the main villain is horribly unrealistic.

Not recommended.