Review: Eucalan Delicate Wash

When Bicycle Touring, daily laundry is just something you have to do. Some people get around this by buying and using Wool Jerseys, which can be worn multiple days without stinking up, but that only makes the problem worse: wool dries slowly so when you do have to wash, your drying time is much increased. My preference has long been synthetics, which dry quickly if you wring them using a towel.

When traveling with a 6 year old who can’t be expected to do his own laundry, your laundry load doubles. This time, I decided to experiment with Eucalan, a “no-rinse” detergent originally designed for delicate stuff that has to be hand washed. The cost is considerably higher than say, carrying a bottle of Tide from home, but at $5 per bottle (or $6.70 from Amazon) from the local dye shop, the cost is negligible compared to the cost of plane tickets to Munich (The most direct competitor, Soak, costs a lot more)

I have to say that Eucalan works. Any parent of a 6 year old can tell you that the kid gets way dirtier faster than you can imagine. At the end of the day, whenever I washed, I’d notice that the drained water had so much dirt in it that it would stain the wash basin. I was skeptical that the detergent was working, and one of the problems is that you can’t easily calibrate how much you’re using, but the bottle survived the entire trip with just a tiny bit left at the end. The wash process is much simplified by not having to rinse, and the scent isn’t noticeable, at least, not in the amounts I used.

Needless to say, my next tour will include a bottle of Eucalan. Highly recommended.

Review: Dr Kao Travel Charger for Oral B Toothbrush

If you look at the bottom of your Braun electric toothbrush induction charger, you’ll see that it’s only set up for 110V only, rather than the 110/220v setup most other devices get. This is annoying. The current required by these toothbrushes for charging is so low and slow that there’s no reason why the charger couldn’t be driven by a USB power source.

Well, it turns out that a third party manufacturer has made precisely this charger. It takes a microusb input, and the other side is a standard USB A interface, which means you can carry a standard charger on a bike tour or sailing trip and charge it either from mains or from a power bank.

Having tried this on our tour, I have to say that it’s more than satisfactory. It doesn’t charge very quickly. For instance, if you used the toothbrush six times and then charged it overnight using the charger, it wouldn’t charge fully overnight, but close enough that the motor doesn’t slow down. Over a long trip, what you’ll discover is that you reach an equilibrium: the more drained the battery is, the faster it charges, but it’ll never reach a state of a full charge.

If you like using electric toothbrushes, this is a great travel accessory, and you should probably never carry the charger that comes in the box for the toothbrush when traveling. Recommended.

Review: Gerber Dime Mult iTools

I thought I’d lost my Leatherman Wave, and went looking for a lighter weight multitool that would do the same job.  Basically, I wanted wire-cutters and pliers in the same tool, while also incorporating a knife. The Gerber Dime costs about 12 dollars shipped from Amazon, and was light weight, which made it very appealing.

When it arrived, I immediately tried to cut a deraileur cable for it, which is the prime motivator for a pair of wire cutters on the tool. To my disappointment, it just wouldn’t cut the cable. Then I found and tried my older leatherman, and discovered that it couldn’t cut the cable either. This led to me abandoning the thought of bringing spare derailleur and brake cables, which I have done in the past, on reasoning that if I’m stuck going to a bike shop to borrow a pair of wire cutters, I might as well buy the cables then, rather than schlepping it around all over Europe.

The knife is surprisingly sharp and very useful for cutting bread and cheese and surprisingly enough fairly large fruits and coring apples, which sometimes Bowen would request I do for supermarket lunches. I used the pliers once to pull what might have been a thorn in a tire, and it does the job.

For the price and weight, the Dime fulfilled my expectations. What it doesn’t do,  my Leatherman Wave can’t do either, so I will switch to this for future tours. Recommended.

Review: The Fellowship of the Ring Unabridged Audio Book

After The Hobbit, the next step was to have Bowen listen to the Fellowship of the Ring. If The Hobbit was too intimidating to read, the Fellowship is even more so, with poems, song, and multiple characters. But Rob Inglis’s narration is awesome, his song performance more than passable, and his ability to capture Bowen’s attention proven,. I really enjoyed listening to the poems especailly, which were clearly  meant to be read aloud, not read silently, and too often skipped over by readers who are impatient to get on with the story, which I’m afraid is a category I fall into, so this is the first time I’ve actually gotten around to reading them.

By the end of the book, Bowen demanded the next book in the series, and if that’s not a recommendation, I don’t know what it is.

Review: Mugen Extend Battery for LG V20

The LG V20 has a user replaceable battery, which is great. But on tour, I wasn’t willing to carry a dedicated battery charger, nor was I willing to get up at midnight to swap the batteries over during charging. The solution was to get an extended battery, and after a while, I settled on the Mugen 9300 mAH battery, which has three times the capacity of the standard battery, and comes with a replacement backcover that’s NFC enabled.

The obvious penalty of the extended battery is that It adds significant bulk and weight to the phone. The not so obvious problem is that the phone, being heavier, will not be as robust against drops, and I cracked the screen a couple of times while experimenting with the storing the phone in the handlebar bag, which turned out not to be a good idea: your body provides required cushioning for the phone against road shock.

Nevertheless, with the extended battery, I never dropped the phone below about 15 percent during daily use, and that’s with the phone serving as a GPS logger for the camera, driving navigation for the Wahoo unit, and the occasional photo of a receipt where I didn’t care about photo quality, and Bowen using the device as an entertainment unit during dinner. Most of the days, I had more than half battery left.

Would I use the phone with the extended battery at home when not touring? No. But I can see this battery being very useful for sailing boat trips with limited charging, and the fact that I can replace the battery makes the phone lasts longer, though judging by the buase I’ve done to the phone, I’m pretty sure the phone won’t out last this battery.

Recommended. It’s a pity the rest of the world doesn’t consider user replaceable batteries a feature. The LG V20 reminds me that it’s neither a useless feature nor too expensive to do.

Longer Term Review: Wahoo Elemnt Bolt

Last year’s experience with the Wahoo Elemnt Bolt convinced me that Icould tour with just the Wahoo Bolt as a navigation unit. This was a mistake. The Wahoo Element Bolt does not itself handle navigation duties. You have to create a route before hand, either by using RideWithGPS on a phone, which is a horrible experience and prone to error, or using an app like Komoot, or depending on Google Maps bicycle routing, which may or may not work in certain countries like Italy.

This is not a problem 80 percent of the time, but the rest of the time it causes major grief. For instance, on our first day I made a route selection error by using Komoot’s “Road Bike” setting instead of “Touring Setting”, which put us on some very busy roads. Well, changing that required stopping, and rerunning Komoot, and then waiing ten minutes while the Elemnt App sync’d to the cloud to acquire the new route. This is unacceptable much of the time.

In Trentino, Komoot screwed up and directed us to the wrong place. It was hot and we were both in distress, so rather than wait for the stupid machine to sync, I resorted to giving Bowen my smart phone and having him navigate us to the hotel. In the mountains, I know the roads well enough that I would basically never get lost, but in big cities with dense road networks, it just doesn’t work. Komoot most of the time is pretty good at finding bike paths that I myself might not have found on a map, but its address accuracy is in question. Google has the opposite problem: it would find an address just fine, but it has a tendency to find “bike paths” where none exist, or where the connection is obviously a walking trail.

Now, the problem with using Google as the navigation device for the Wahoo is that Wahoo will not allow you to preload a route from Google! That means if the night before you found an ideal route, you can’t sync it to your Wahoo. You have to wait until the morning when you can leave the device on after designating the route in the app. Not only can Google’s routing change dramatically  between times of day, even worse, what you see in Google Maps is rarely what you see in the Wahoo Elemnt App, even though it’s “powered by Google.” This sort of inconsistency will drive you nuts, and I see no reason to put up with it when my Garmin units in the past have always been rock solid reliable and work even without an internet connection.

There are other functionality issues with the Bolt as well. For instance, unless you have the Elemnt app on your smartphone in the foreground when you power up the Wahoo, the device will not pair with your phone. All through the tour, not once did my Wahoo ever sync the ride with any of the services I’d designated the sync. Fortunately, the one service I care about, which is Strava, syncs only through my Garmin Vivoactive HR, which has stayed reliable over the entire trip.

Between the routing and navigation problems, and the lack of support for major safety acccessories such as the Varia Bike Radar, the next time I tour I will buy a Garmin bike navigation unit that’s smart enough to route without the internet being an issue. The Wahoo unit just doesn’t cut it for anyone exploring new territory. Not only is offline navigation a serious necessity when touring, the price you pay for peace of mind in case your phone breaks in the middle of nowhere is well worth the Garmin premium.

Review: Pearl Izumi Pro Aero Glove

I tried the Pearl Izumi Pro Aero Glove because my old gloves were falling apart. I'm a size medium, and these looked and feel nice on short (8-20) rides, so I thought I was going to keep them. But what I've discovered is that on long rides, the portion behind the fingers bunch up and cause small discomfort.

It's a pity Amazon doesn't sell Specialized BG gloves, and they're really hard to find. I'm trying out a pair of Giro Jags next (it pained me to buy them, because of the gun thing), because that's what the local shop had, and those feel very much like my beloved Specialized BG gloves.

Review: Autonomous

Autonomous is Annalee Newitz's novel about pharmacological pirates set in a world where reverse engineering drugs has been made illegal. It's had amazing blurbs from famous science fiction authors such as Neal Stephenson and William Gibson on the cover, and the author is an editor for Ars Technica, so she's familiar with technology.

The novel switches between two perspectives, one of Jack the Pharma pirate with a heart of gold, and the mercenary robot/human team that's been tasked with hunting her down after she pirated a drug that turns out to have addictive side-effects.

I think one of the biggest problems with science fiction in the modern era is that humans tend to anthropomorphize everything, including robots. As a result, the robot in the story, Paladin, works at human speeds instead of superhuman speeds, and isn't nearly as sharp as I would expect for an AI with human-level intelligence. (It's also quite unlikely that AI tech would stay at human-levels for any significant period of time, but that's another discussion for another time)

The core plot isn't really interestingly enough to drive the story, though along the way we get a really dystopian view of a society of capitalism run amuck, where humans indenture themselves to corporations or other humans so as to better compete with otherwise autonomous robots, which are required to serve an indenture period to pay off the cost of manufacture. Unfortunately, the morality and movement behind these movements are never explored, and would have been more interesting than the novel we got.

I'm afraid I can't really recommend Autonomous: the happy ending is forced, and some of the technology (i.e., the use of human brains inside robots to provide certain functions such as facial recognition) seems highly unlikely.

Review: Sidi SD15 MTB Shoes

The thing about cycling is that it's extremely fashion driven. The last time I bought cycling shoes, Velcro was still the thing. Then when I wanted a pair of shoes that would fit while wearing my waterproof socks for an upcoming tour (yes, I'm expecting rain, why did you ask?), I found that my ancient SIDI shoes (so old that I'd have to drill out the cleats if I wanted to install new ones, but screws and all sorts of things have already fallen out) would fit nicely, but not my newer Pearl Izumis.

Of course, SIDI no longer had the exact same shoes I bought years ago, so I had to settle for the SIDI SDS15s, which were the cheapest available, especially with the REI 20% off coupon. I didn't look very carefully at the shoe, since REI sold any color you wanted, as long as it was black. I did notice that it had some weird lacing system, but I figured as long as it wasn't shoe-laces, it'd be OK.

I was very surprised to discover that the buckling system was a ratchet that's driven by a circular screw-type latch. It took a bit to figure out, but I discovered that I liked it a lot: just like with laces, it was easy to fine tune the tightness and the fit, but unlike laces, it was impossible for any excess length to get caught up in the chainrings (the bane of all cyclists), and while the toe is still Velcro, it doesn't seem to do much.

I was impressed by how comfortable the shoe is to walk in. Now you don't buy cycling shoes to walk in, but when you're preparing to do a long tour with your 6-year old, it's quite likely that there'll be many times in the day when you're going to walk him around town, or maybe even carry him on your shoulders, so walking comfort is a much bigger consideration than it would be for my adult tours, where the expectations would be that I'd get on the bike and stay on the bike for many hours without  break. The shoes do have a higher stack height than my older Pearl Izumis or SIDIs, to I did have to raise my seat a bit to retain the same fit. But that's an easy adjustment.

The biggest issue with the shoes is that there's definitely lower performance compared to my older SIDIs or Pearl Izumis: the sole isn't as stiff. Again, this is the trade off for improved walkability. As touring shoes go, this is probably the precise amount of stiffness you want: stiff enough for cycling without generating hot spots, but not so stiff that you can't walk in them. I think I'd be a much more enthusiastic hiker during my tour in Japan if I'd been wearing these instead of my older SIDIs. For many of my tours which might have a hiking component, I'd ended up carrying separate walking shoes. From that point of view, these save the weight of a second pair of shoes.

It's general advice not to change equipment just before a tour, but I've already put quite a number of fairly intense hours on the shoes. They work. They're not the shoes you'd want to have for a fast century or an enthusiastic club ride, but for touring, I think they'll be perfect.

Review: The Great Influenza

I've really only had the 'flu a couple of times in my life, both times it's been one of those "knock you down and keep you in bed for 3 days" experience. But yet most people are fond of saying "it's only the 'flu". The Great Influenza describes the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919, and will change your mind as to how serious the 'flu could be.

During that time, the 'flu would kill as much as 10% of the entire population. That's not 10% of people who were infected, 10% of the entire population! Doctors and nurses died helping patients. Nurses would be kidnapped (they were harder to find than doctors). Much like SARS, that 'flu epidemic killed young adults faster than it killed older adults and children because of ARDS.

Whats great about this book is that back then, we didn't know what caused the 'flu, and researchers were led down the wrong path by thinking that it was a bacteria rather than a virus. The 'flu virus killed not just by itself, but through secondary infections, and in the case of ARDS by triggering the immune system into a "scorched earth" attack on the lungs, making it difficult to isolate what pathogen that caused it. John Barry provides the context on what created the medical infrastructure and system at the start of the century, and what the state of medicine was as well.

In addition, the political and military response hurt the public's perception of the pandemic as well: newspaper and posters repeatedly lied to the public about the seriousness of the situation, and the public was much less prepared than it could have been to face the onslaught. Even worse, military policy (this was near the end of World War 1) concentrated young men in large, overcrowded military camps in close quarters, creating ideal conditions for spreading 'flu. There's even evidence that the 'flu infected Woodrow Wilson during critical negotiations, and caused the problems in the treaty of Versailles that eventually led to World War 2.

The big question in my mind is: "Are we better prepared today for such an Influenza pandemic?" The answer appears to be "No."

Consider for a moment that prior to the emergence of H5N1, the U.S. government was spending more money on the West Nile virus than on influenza. While influenza was killing as many as 56,000 Americans a year, West Nile in its deadliest year killed 284. And West Nile will never be a major threat; it is not a disease that will ever explode through the human population. Yet it was receiving more research dollars than influenza. (Kindle Loc. 7432)

 much of the U.S. vaccine supply is manufactured outside the country; in a lethal pandemic, there is a question whether another government would allow its export before its own population was protected. (Kindle Loc. 7453)

To this day, we have neither an effective vaccine for the 'flu (though the author does point out that even a 10% protection  ineffective vaccine is still worth getting), nor do we have a cure. We would do better at the secondary infections, but our hospitals would be immediately overwhelmed:

Hospitals, like every other industry, have gotten more efficient by cutting costs, which means virtually no excess capacity—on a per capita basis the United States has far fewer hospital beds than a few decades ago. Indeed, during a routine influenza season, usage of respirators rises to nearly 100 percent; in a pandemic, most people who needed a mechanical respirator probably would not get one. (Kindle Loc. 7374)

All in all, this is a great book and well worth reading. Recommended.

First Impressions: Fairweather by Traveler 700x32mm tire

To say that I've been pleased and impressed by the Michelin Pro 700x28mm "Endurance" tires would be an understatement. Despite running them on the tandem/triplet for well over a year (including a 350mile bike tour last year), the tire refused the wear out. But an upcoming longer tour this year meant that I should swap in new tires.

The handwriting is on the wall, however: both kids aren't going to get any lighter, and running wider tires is the ideal solution for increasing load that the triplet is going to be expected to handle. Despite the recent fashion for running wider tires, I'm actually not an advocate of it for the simple reason that most single bikes are already designed with too high a bottom bracket: running a wider tire on those bikes makes the BB even higher, a recipe for making the bike less agile on descents and quick cornering. On a tandem/triplet, however, the bike handling isn't going to be affected much.

The big problem with tires wider than 700x28 is that high quality tires in that size are hard to find: most wider tires are designed for European-style "trekking bikes" and heavy dutch-style utility bicycles, not lightweight touring bikes. You can find the Compass-range of such tires north of $60. But it turns out a Japanese bike shop has a tire called Fairweather for Traveler that's made by the same factory (Panaracer) for a retail price of 30 pounds each.

When the tires arrived, I weighed them: surprisingly, the 700x32s come in at 275g each, 5g lighter than the Michelin Pro Race 28s! Mounting them on the rim, they do come out wider than the 28s, so that lighter weight isn't because I was mounting a narrower tire! There's a file pattern on them, which is mostly worthless, but it hasn't had any appreciable impact on handling so far. The wider tire does mean that the Raceblade Pro XL won't clear them, but for just this year's tandem tour I'm rotating the old front Michelin over to the rear anyway. The tread also has a divot that's obviously meant to be a wear indicator: when the divot's flush with the rest of the tire that means it's time to order a new one. In practice, I don't pay attention to wear indicators: I typically only replace tires when I'm about to go on tour, or when I can see the casing beneath the rubber.

One of my big problems in the past with wider tires is that the tandem would blow them off on a descent. The first couple of times it happened it was scary, but I've since figured out that nobody makes tires to mount on Mavic T519 rims any more, so tire/rim compatibility is a must, and the only way to find out is to try. I descended Page Mill road on the tandem with this tire on and had no issues, so I think I'm good to go.

First Impressions: Showers Pass Waterproof Socks

MassDrop was offering Showers Pass Waterproof Socks for a somewhat reasonable discount off the outrageous $36/pair price. While it doesn't tend to rain in California, it does rain in Europe during the summer, and we have a bike tour coming up, so I gave it a shot.

The socks themselves are fairly thick, though not as thick as the SmartWool socks that I've otherwise been using for rainy situations. They add significant width to my feet that aren't bothersome in my well-worn SIDI shoes, but do bother me in the relatively new Pearl Izumis. I've ordered a new pair of SIDIs in case it's a shoe design issue.

At first, the socks felt plasticky in an odd way. It's as though you're wearing socks with stiffeners built in. But after a while, the feeling went away and I found I could ride with the socks on and no issues. The socks are relatively heavy, at 100g per pair.

It's past the rainy season, so I didn't get a chance to try them in the rain. But I ran the shower and walked into the puddles the showers provided. While the outside clearly got wet, my feet never felt wet! I guess it'll take a real rainstorm to figure out whether the squish squish feeling is what I hated most about cycling in the rain, or whether it's the wet feet part that I hated. In any case, these are clearly suitable for touring: even if your shoes don't dry out overnight, wearing these will ensure your feet don't feel wet the next day, so they're probably worth the weight.

The biggest issue with this sock is that they're tough to dry. They definitely don't dry overnight, and you can't throw them into a dryer. My guess is that in some sort of mesh bag out on the back of the bike rack they'll definitely dry while on a bike tour. You'll definitely have to rig up some sort of drying mechanism on your backpack if you're using them on a backpacking trip.

All in all, I think they're worth a shot, but obviously for most day to day riding in California you won't need them. Recommended.

Review: 5 Centimeters Per Second

After the previous bout of extremely heavy going books, I needed a break. Amazon was selling 5 centimeters per second for $1, so I picked it up, not knowing that it was a Makoto Shinkai movie that was then adapted back into a graphic novel.

After the previous books I'd read, this felt like a whole novel about first world problems. The plot is that Takaki Tohno makes friend with a girl in elementary school. Their relationship develop, but one of them moves away. In a highly romantic scene, Tohno takes a series of long distance train to visit her before his family moves to a remote island in Japan accessible only by plane. That journey cements their relationship in his mind, and colors all his future relationships with women.

The novel comes with no deep insights, no quotable scenes, and way too many cliches about relationships. Maybe if you're a teenager living in a first world country the novel would be a reminder that you're not the only one out there who understands that pining away for a lost love is painful. (Not that there aren't enough pop songs covering that topic) I guess the moral of the story is that it's silly to do that. The novel does work better in a context of Asian culture, where much is made of that silent longing, and an antidote to that is needed.

The best thing about the novel is that it doesn't have a made-for-hollywood happy ending. If you read that as damning with faint praise, that just about sums it up for the comic.

Review: Educated - A Memoir

I read Educated - A Memoir with the way I rubber-necked a major car accident: with bated breath, a desire to look away, but never able to tear myself away from the page. The author, Tara Westover, grew up in a suboptimal environment. Her parents were Mormons, but of the paranoid, insane type, rather than the Stephen Covey type. Growing up, they were not allowed to go to school: her father considered all things government to be the manifestation of Satan, and their home schooling was limited to reading the bible.

Westover was taught to despise womanhood, and the word "whore" was bandied about for any woman who dressed even a little bit more provocatively than say, a member of the Taliban. She was continually abused by her father and one of her brothers, both violently and psychologically. She was never even taught to wash her hands or pay attention to personal hygiene, or go to the doctor, with herbal remedies being the method of choice.

Two days later a package arrived, express from Idaho. Inside were six bottles of tincture, two vials of essential oil, and a bag of white clay. I recognized the formulas—the oils and tinctures were to fortify the liver and kidneys, and the clay was a foot soak to draw toxins. There was a note from Mother: These herbs will flush the antibiotics from your system. Please use them for as long as you insist on taking the drugs. Love you. I leaned back into my pillow and fell asleep almost instantly, but before I did I laughed out loud. She hadn’t sent any remedies for the strep or the mono. Only for the penicillin. (Kindle Loc 3473)

The book does offer a glimpse of how resilient human beings can be. Despite this upbringing, all the kids survived, even the one who had multiple head injuries, few of which were seen in the hospital. Even more amazing, 2 of them schooled themselves enough to get ACT scores high enough for admissions to BYU, and Tara herself not only survived the environment, but thrived enough to go to Cambridge on a Gates Fellowship and was accepted into the PhD program.which included a visiting fellowship at Harvard.

Even after these achievements and convincing herself that she had self-worth outside of the crazy family she was born in, she had a tough time escaping that legacy: her family gas-lighted her enough to convince that she was crazy, and that all the childhood abuses she'd suffered were imagined.

Together with Hillbilly Elegy, these books have convinced me that there's no redeeming value in the racist, sexist ideology that so dominates the conservative republican party today.

I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward. (Kindle Loc. 2954)

This book comes recommended, but be warned that you'll need a strong stomach to finish it.

Review: Spring Chicken

Spring Chicken is Bill Gifford's book about life extension. Karl Pfleger recommended it on the ex-Googler's mailing list, and since it was easily available at the library via Kindle checkout, I gave it a try. It's a reasonably good book. Let me see if I can summarize what I learned in the book:

• Many of the popular life-extension schticks are basically big business scams. They try to push expensive therapies like Human Growth Hormone, which is suspect and may lead to increased probability of cancer.
• Aging is to some extent a cellular event. That means many things that you think might be good for you might not be. For instance, anti-oxidants might actually undo the effects of exercise, so over-supplementing on vitamins might be bad for you.
• Reservatrol got a lot of press but apparently its effects were mostly only seen in mice which were engineered for susceptibility to diabetes and obesity. Those results do not generalize to humans.
• Diet: you know this stuff: more fruits and vegetables, less meat, and less carbohydrates. The jury is still out on calorie restriction, though some results indicate that intermittent fasting is easier to stick to, which makes it much more likely to be usable.
• Exercise is a miracle pill. You probably already know this. It is the one guaranteed way to improve mental capacity and reduce or even reverse aging at the cellular level. :

One well-done study found that merely walking twenty minutes a day was enough to slow or reverse the decline in cognition of patients who had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s—something few drugs have been able to achieve. (Kindle Loc 3531)

• Telomeres supposedly indicate longevity, but a large study of more than 4,500 people found that, if you control for unhealthy behaviors like smoking and alcohol abuse, there is no link between shorter telomeres and mortality. (Kind Loc 1866)

All in all, a bunch of surprising results, and totally worth my time to read the relatively short book. We still haven't found any radical life extension technology yet, and it's not for the lack of trying. But we do know how to make the life that you do have more healthy and enjoyable, and that's a good thing! Recommended.

Review: Barking up the Wrong Tree

Barking Up The Wrong Tree has great marketing copy. The back of the cover and the book's description on Amazon talks about how all the usual advise you have about working hard and getting good greats and being nice is wrong, and how this book will have all the secrets that you need to become truly successful.

It doesn't take much statistics to peruse the book and realize that the author plays frequently upon the difference between what most people view as "success" and what he extremely outliers in success is. Basically, you or I might think that being a doctor, a pharmacist, or a top ten percentile software engineer's pretty good. Eric Barker instead tries to convince you that you should only settle for being right at the top, along with all the extreme situations that puts you into.

For instance, he uses Ted Williams as an example, noting that he was successful in many aspects of his life, not only having been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Fishing Hall of Fame. But then he reveals that his personal life was not quite so great, having had 3 divorces in addition to many acrimonious relationships with the team he managed.

Again, the study of extremely successful people is fraught with danger. In particular, there's surivorship bias, which the author does not discuss: many people might have tried the same approach and failed miserably, but the one guy who gains success through unusual luck or circumstance would get undue press. That doesn't mean people who try the same strategy in the future will have a similar degree of success.

The one piece of good advice I found in the book is the same advice you would have gotten from John T Reed's Succeeding, which is that it's a heck of a lot easier to change your environment than it is to change your personality, so you should find environments that play to your strengths rather than trying to change who you are.

All in all, a book that goes for the shallow approach to success. I recommend reading John T Reed's Succeeding instead.

First Impressions: Garmin Edge 25

My brother's wife Kim gave Bowen her 3 year old Vivoactive. It was in amazing condition. with almost perfect battery life, but it took all of 3 months for Bowen to destroy it. When asked, he didn't even know how he'd managed to crack the screen so hard that the waterproofing failed. I sadly came to the conclusion that if Bowen were to have a bike computer, it should have been one that stayed on his bike, and not on his wrist.

The Edge 25 on an eBay sale came down to $95. At that price, it would have been cheaper to have bought one and moved it from bike to bike rather than the old-style wired bike computers that I'd been buying and installing, and it would have been less hassle too.

The unit is very very cute, and simple to run. Unfortunately, it comes with a charging cradle instead of a micro-USB or mini-USB charging cable, meaning one more thing to carry (and lose) while touring. One feature that it had that I didn't expect was that it actually allows you to download routes to it for club rides! The usual instructions didn't work, but someone had figured out that if you converted a GPX/TCX file to a FIT file it would work. The UI is confusing, though, since you can start a course, but the unit wouldn't record a GPS track unless you also started the GPS recording manually. Of course, it wouldn't reroute if you got off-course, nor is it actually useful for touring.

The battery life is a claimed 8 hours, and we did a 7 hour ride on Saturday with no problems. The big difference between the Edge 25 and the cheaper Edge 20 is that the Edge 25 will pair with the Garmin speed and cadence sensors, which I have a nice collection of but unless you already own those you should probably go for the cheaper unit, since neither has a barometric altimeter, resulting in Bowen recording significantly more climbing than I did, despite the two of us being on the same bike. Though again, for a little kid, the cadence sensor might actually be useful in telling him when to shift.

Unlike the higher end units, the Edge 25 will not automatically resume a ride if you turn the unit off without saving. It will boot with no memory of previous rides and might even lose rides if you just turn the unit off without saving the ride.

The charging interface is strange, since if I plugged the device into a wall charger, it would power the device on (useful for pairing with a tablet and uploading tracks), but then there's no way to view the device's charge status to see if it's finished charging.

I'm of 2 minds about the unit. First of all, I'm well bought into the Garmin ecosystem, so it was unthinkable to even switch brands for my son's GPS. And this is the cheapest Garmin unit you can find, short of a used/refurbished Vivoactive, which would have the problem of being wrist mounted and getting killed by Bowen. On the other hand, it's a very limited device. On the other hand, by the time the battery dies, Bowen would probably have moved on, and an 8 hour ride is probably as much as you can expect a kid to ever do. But if you weren't already bought into the Garmin ecosystem I suspect that there are cheaper devices (though probably not nearly as polished) for your kid to play with. Now you might be tempted to buy a more expensive unit, such as the Wahoo or the Edge 520 Mapping Plus, but those come with their own problems, and batteries in these units should be treated as consumables, so there's probably no longevity when it comes to getting something that your kid will grow into anyway.

Ultimately, the unit is a good compromise, and I should probably have gotten one years ago when I first started installing computers on Bowen's bikes instead of buying a wired computer for every one of those things.

Review: Atomic City Girls

I read Atomic City Girls because of Amazon's recommendation algorithm, probably because I'd also read Hidden Figures. To my surprise, unlike the other book, it's a novel, not a non-fiction account. The story takes place in Oak Ridge, which unlike Los Alamos, hasn't really been documented as far as I can tell: other than a couple of stories in Richard Feynman's memoir, I don't remember much discussion about it.

The story revolves around June Walker, her roommate Cici, and a few other characters who arrive just as Oak Ridge is ramping up. Each chapter is headed by actual photos of Oak Ridge and the various posters reminding everyone to keep their lips sealed about what they were doing, even though in practice, most of the employees were apparently kept in the dark about the bomb they were building.

As novels go, the characters seem kinda wooden, more as vehicles to tell the story of Oak Ridge rather than people with their own volition. The romance between June Walker and her lover (a former assistant professor from Berkeley) seems awfully contrived, though the rampant nepotism of that era rings through. There's a side plot involving the civil rights movement, but not really enough is told of that facet to make it a major part of the story.

I kept reading hoping to suddenly find some non-fiction account that would reward my perseverance, but alas, none was found.

Review: The Nature Fix

I really wanted to like The Nature Fix. The entire book is about how getting out in nature cures all sorts of ills that are endemic in city dwellers, ranging from depression, ADHD, happiness, or even (in one chapter PTSD). Unfortunately, the book ends up reading a lot like a massive commercial for outfits like Outward Bound, which have always felt just as artificial as any of the corporate "team-building program" outfits I'd ever seen.

Most of the problem is that the author, Florence Williams isn't a scientist herself, but a journalist. That means her interviews of scientists in the book are shallow. There's barely any consideration about the size of the studies being done (most of the studies seem too small to draw any conclusion from, and the larger ones seem to be based around self-reporting!), or how to control for a Placebo effect.

This sort of thing hits the zenith when she visits Singapore, where the city state has recently built artificial trees. Yet she herself pointed out in earlier chapters that Singapore is one of the countries in the world that have massive rates of myopia, all traced to kids spending less time outside than in other countries in the world. This sort of easy gullibility permeates the entire book and undermines her thesis.

Perhaps the strongest part of the book is the section on ADHD:

“ADHD got its start 150 years ago when compulsory education got started,” said Stephen Hinshaw, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “In that sense, you could say it’s a social construct.” Not only will exploratory kids feel bored and inadequate in conventional schools, he said, the constrained setting actually makes their symptoms worse. (Kindle Loc 2999)

 If, as the research suggests, outdoor free play is so important to kids’ physical and mental health, you might expect to see evidence of illness during this seismic generational shift indoors. And in fact, that’s exactly what you see, although it’s impossible to draw a direct line to a particular cause. The stats are alarming: Preschoolers are the fastest-growing market for antidepressants in the United States. More than 10,000 American preschoolers are being medicated for ADHD. Teenagers today have five to eight times more clinically significant scores for anxiety and depression compared to young people born in the 1950s. Since 1999, the U.S. suicide rate has increased for nearly all groups, with the steepest rise—200 percent—among girls ten to fourteen years old. (Kindle Loc 3100)

But again, we don't see any evidence that increased outdoor time would reduce diagnosis or suicide rates. There's a lot of pontificating, so to speak, but precious little science, and next to no evidence.

I'm the last person in the world to advocate against spending time outside: if you ask me, I think  most Bay Area parents under-emphasize time spent outside and over-emphasize academics. But if you're going to approach the thesis English-major style, you're not going to do the outside movement any favors.

Review: The Modern Scholar: Tolkein and the West

I was climbing Kings Ridge Road with the Western Wheelers on the tandem the other day. Right at the top, the pastoral scenery was glorious, my son was singing and telling everyone how much fun this was. Racers on some sort of timed event were passing us, but every one of them gave us a thumbs up. I found myself saying, "This is why people have kids, because if you're lucky, you get one like this one."

Indeed, Bowen's letting me recapture a bit of my childhood. From listening to the Hobbit with him to now listening/watching pieces of The Lord of the Rings and playing D&D, I'm reliving the part of the past when I first discovered the fantasy world that Tolkein created. But it also comes filtered with an adult perspective: that these books are deeply and fundamentally conservative and nostalgic in a way that I don't always agree with.

When I saw The Modern Scholar: Tolkein and the West go on sale on Audible, I picked it up for its excellent reviews, since it might make a good companion for the novel. (And there's that bit of me that says that I should also teach my son to read more deeply than the surface plot and characters in the novel, and for that to happen I myself have to understand the book at a deeper level)

Professor Michael Drout comes across as extremely earnest and of course, a Tolkein enthusiast. He points out several things that immediately hit me:

• Tolkein is probably the most widely read poet in the past half century, since a lot of the book is in verse, and most books of poetry can't even come close to selling as well as his book.
• Tolkein comes from academia, and the techniques of academic textual analysis and philology are deep in the book, in ways that I never realized. The parts where the characters go into full on verse? The part where Sam Gamgee speaks poetry that he couldn't have known? That's in the grand tradition of the study of Western Literature, where scholar after scholar might have come across the text and modified it, or written in the margins, and inserted stuff that might be out of place just because he/she knew something and thought it appropriate. That's why the language in the book is the way it is, and the pieces of the text disjointedly so.
• There are repeated poems in the book, some of which show up in different versions, and it takes careful reading to discover why. The reader isn't meant to realize this, but this is used to evoke a sense in the reader of the change that has happened between the start and the finish. Prof. Drout mentions "The Road Goes Ever On and On" as being one that shows up 4 times, and the last 2 times is different from the first 2.
• The sense of loss in the novel, The Lord of the Rings isn't solely about nostalgia. It's also a reflection of Tolkein's work as a philologist. Apparently, Western Literature has lost many stories and tales which are only known about because of references to them from works that survived. That sense of loss that Tolkein felt professionally also led to the themes of loss and corruption in the novel.
• The last third of the Hobbit is a huge confusing mess, unlike the children's book it's intended to be. It's complicated enough that the multiple betrayals, negotiations and ultimate reconciliation can be viewed as the taking over of modern values over the ancient, honor-bound cultures that existed in Western Civilization before then.

There's much much more in the lecture series. Books covered individually are: The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, the Two Towers, the Return of the King, the Silmarillon, and Unfinished Tales. The lectures were so compelling that I found myself listening to the series from beginning to end, almost in a binge in just a week. It was entertaining, fun in a way I didn't expect to be, and now I feel better equipped to answer more questions from Bowen. In fact, I wonder if he'll find the analysis of The Hobbit interesting.

Highly recommended.