Post-COVID home and office design

 Recently someone showed me a group photo from a Pokemon GoFest. My immediate reaction was visceral: this looks way too dangerous during COVID19 times --- too crowded, too many people in a small space, never mind that it was outdoors. Before this year, there was hope that with a vaccine and good public health measures we could return to post-COVID19 times, but now it's looking more and more like COVID19 will be endemic.

In the short-term regardless, remote-work has become the norm, but I think that architects and office designers are still behind the curve on designing for a post-pandemic world. I'll start with the home. Prior to the pandemic, great halls were the fashion for home design. In a post-pandemic world where work-from-home is the norm, the great hall is the biggest waste of space you can imagine. Consider:

• Tall ceilings amplifies noise and creates echo-y environments, meaning that the space cannot be used for more than one zoom call at a time
• The open space does not provide isolation, whether you're doing home work, writing code, or even writing a report.
• The big empty space  does not afford power sockets which are still necessary for power or large monitors, even if your wi-fi coverage was fast enough or you had a mesh router.
• Finally, any one cooking or eating in the great hall will disturb anyone who's trying to work.

It is far better in the post-COVID environment to have a lot of small enclosable spaces than to have one big space, and home designs in the past 10 years have not caught up to that reality, and many home buyers have fallen prey to fashion rather than the practicalities of working from home.

Going to the office, the situation is even worse. Office designs in the past 10-15 years have been constrained by the costs in high rent areas such as Silicon Valley and the need to pack as many people as possible in a work environment. All the space recommendations of Peopleware for knowledge workers (engineers, artists, etc) have been deprecated in favor of open-floor plans with no walls or doors. There is no way any high end creative technical talent will put up with that sort of environment in a COVID-endemic environment. So you get announcements like DropBox moving out of their offices in favor of pre-reserved collaborative spaces.

I think for very small teams (3-4 people) it's possible to do long term remote work. But if you have a true multi-disciplinary development, you'll soon outstrip the capabilities of Zoom. Even the best remote work environments cannot beat standing together in front of a white board for impromptu design discussions. And for the most collaborative creative teamwork (think video games, or storyboarding a Pixar movie), you will require in person work. Despite my best efforts I have to constantly push people to jump into zoom calls instead of slacking at each other in a slack channel: the bandwidth provided by even an imperfect Zoom call with a shared screen far outstrips most people's ability to express themselves in the written medium!

A big company like Google/Facebook/Dropbox will probably not miss the creativity hit from daily collaborative work (though I'd argue that they do, but just as described in Peopleware, there's no way to measure the business loss from creative ideas not being put into practice, they don't know what they're missing), but if you're a startup (or in a creative endeavor like Pixar or Naughty Dog), you cannot afford to lose this, and if you visit offices like Pixar's, you'll discover that they never adopted the mass open-space fashion of Silicon Valley. (Peopleware cites examples of "skunkworks" projects where the managers successfully placed their teams in non-traditional offices precisely to maximize team work --- the only reason any startup can perform a large company is that they have focus and team work in ways that big companies cannot do) I suspect that the more creative the work, and the more multi-disciplinary the work, the more likely it is that it will benefit from in-person collaboration and team work. Hence, you might want your accounting department to be entirely remote (nobody wants creative accounting), and payroll processing maintenance and programming could probably be done remotely, but putting together a movie, high quality video game, or solving new technical problems might benefit from in person collaboration.

Unlike pre-COVID days, however, you can no longer mandate that your talent walk in the office every day. You have to make them want to do so. A lot of this is building teams where people are eager to collaborate and see each other in person, but making the office a more desirable workspace than most people's homes (which are, as described above, not configured for decent individual creative work, let alone collaborative work) is a good first step.

Those recommendations from Peopleware include:

• At least 100 square feet of private work space per person, with a door you can close for privacy and/or noise isolation. (Sorry, head phones do not cut it!)
• Collaborative work environments that are well ventilated, preferably with windows
• A gradation of private to collaborative to public workspace

Ironically, the pre-built spaces that have these characteristics turn out to be single-family homes built in the 1950s, with low ceilings, individual rooms, and a shared living room work environment. They sometimes even have kitchens big enough for a team to make and eat a meal together. It probably isn't a surprise that many successful startups had houses as office space rather than an actual office building.

If I were to design an office for the future, I would create a hub and spoke design, with large teams divided into smaller teams, each with a collaboration area, and bigger collaboration areas for cross team communications, brain storming, or design. Instead of the monolithic cafetarias of the past, you would construct smaller dining areas that let teams dine together without putting huge numbers of people together to spread disease.

It's fashionable to denigrate offices in favor of remote work now, but I suspect that the future success stories will come out of in person collaboration for the spark and serendipity that cannot occur through scheduled zoom calls. It will take real courage (not the Apple kind) to build these workspaces of the future that cannot look anything like the sardine-packed workplaces of the past, but the ones who succeed will discover that it is well worth the effort, and the reduced cost of offices in the future will be but one component of that.

Additional Reading

Has the Pandemic transformed the Office Forever? (The author seems afraid to draw any conclusions in this article, but it does a good job discussing trends prior to the pandemic)

Welcome to the Post-Pandemic dream home

Review: Rockbros Cycling Shoe Toe Covers

 I'd lost my toe covers during various moves, so had to buy a pair of new ones. The Rockbros Toe Covers came up on an Amazon search, and I bought a pair. They're well designed, with an opening at the bottom that doesn't need to be cut for SPD cleats, and after 5 months of wear the advertised kevlar bottoms show no signs of wear. They're light and easily fit anywhere while touring or doing day rides. Well worth the extra weight.

Recommended.

Review: The Price of Peace - Money, Democracy, and the life of John Maynard Keynes

 I picked up The Price of Peace thinking it was a biography of Keynes, the economist and scholar, but I got something much better, which was a biography of the man's ideas and its evolution and adoption (and lack thereof) over time.

I've long held that macroeconomics and Keynes' approach is a lot more challenging to understand than microeconomics for the same reason that quantum mechanics is a lot of more challenging than Newtonian physics. Your daily life and routines, whether as a child, householder, or manager and CEO are constrained by budgets, income, and spending. Yet at the aggregate level, those are not the constraints involved --- governments can run deficits indefinitely (and frequently do), and policy is driven largely by the sentiments of the people involved.

The key insight that Keynes brings to the equation is the debunking of money and markets as being fundamental:

Money, moreover, was not a custom developed by local traders for convenience but a sophisticated tool of rulership that had emerged simultaneously with other developments of the state, including written language and standardized weights and measures. Smith and other thinkers had been led astray by confusing the development of coinage with the invention of money. Coinage, according to Keynes, was “just a piece of bold vanity…with no far-reaching importance”;42 money had existed in “representative” form much longer. Its real significance was as a “unit of account”—the demarcation of debt and “the legal discharge of obligations,”43 which governments had been maintaining in ledger books (Kindle Loc 3623)

 Keynes thus came to see economic history as a fundamentally political story—the tale of riches conquered and surrendered by political powers as empires rose and fell. Economics, by extension, could not be a bloodless scientific investigation into unshakable laws of nature but only a set of observations about trends in human political arrangements. Economics as a field of study had to adjust to the social behavior of human beings, which might very well change over time. (Kindle Loc 3644)

The Treatise, then, was an all-out assault on the intellectual foundations of laissez-faire. There was no such thing as a free market devoid of government interference. The very idea of capitalism required active state economic management—the regulation of money and debt. Keynes had also defined the aim of economic policy: to set the foundations of an exciting intellectual culture. (Kindle Loc 3668)

One of the big ideas I took away from this book is the history and context of Keynes. It's quite clear that if democracy does not deliver rising prosperity and better standards of living due to market gyrations and machinations (which is largely driven by government policy), then usually it's not markets that lose legitimacy (people live with markets every single day!) but democracy. The rise of dictators in the period between World War 1 and World War 2 was largely because of impoverishment and the loss of legitimacy of democratic governments to solve the economic problems of the masses, rather than an inherent cultural problem with people's attitudes. (The same Germans who fought for Hitler also built an amazing post-war economy)

I found myself highlighting huge swaths of the book:

 The General Theory is a dangerous book because it demonstrates the necessity of power. It is a liberating book because it reframed the central problem at the heart of modern economics as the alleviation of inequality, pivoting away from the demands of production and the incentives facing the rich and powerful that had occupied economists for centuries. It is a frustrating book because it is written in novel abstractions, argued in convoluted sentences and dense equations. And it is a work of genius because it proves a simple truth that, once offered, seems obvious: Prosperity is not hard-wired into human beings; it must be orchestrated and sustained by political leadership. (Kindle 4868)

The material abundance of the Gilded Age had sown doubts in Keynes about the supposed scarcity of resources, but it was the ravages of the Depression that made him certain the old order had it wrong. Clearly the trouble was not a shortage of production. Crops were rotting in the fields while children went hungry in the streets. Producers were not cutting back because they couldn’t afford to meet the high wage demands of workers; laborers were roaming from town to town, desperate for any work at all. As he wrote in the opening chapter, “It is not very plausible to assert that unemployment in the United States in 1932 was due either to labour obstinately refusing to accept a reduction of money-wages or to its obstinately demanding a real wage beyond what the productivity of the economic machine was capable of furnishing.” (Kindle Loc 4927)

Creating large amounts of savings at the top of society did not bring about higher levels of investment. The causal arrow pointed the other way: Creating large amounts of investment caused higher levels of savings. And so “the removal of very great disparities of wealth and income” would improve social harmony and economic functionality. (Kindle Loc 5138)

the market, he argued, was not a reliable statement of society’s preferences, and it could not invisibly guide a polity to salvation. The market simply failed to deliver a host of real social goods that the public enjoyed, particularly art. The things that make life meaningful—beauty, community, a vibrant and multifaceted culture—all required collective, coordinated action. “Our experience has demonstrated plainly that these things cannot be successfully carried on if they depend on the motive of profit and financial success. The exploitation and incidental destruction of the divine gift of the public entertainer by prostituting it to the purposes of financial gain is one of the worser crimes of present-day capitalism.”52 (Kindle Loc 5152)

The history is also pretty good, explaining to me why the English got universal healthcare while the USA didn't (largely because Keynes was involved), and noting the conflict between American interests in the war and British interests.  There's a great discussion of the feud between Keynes and Hayek (long overblown), and clearly the success of Hayek was because he was politically acceptable to the wealthy people who wanted to fight the rise of Keynesian policy and economics.

What surprised me most about the book was that Carter didn't end the book even after Keynes death, but went on to describe the post-war purges that affected the careers of many economists and the rise of neoliberalism brought about by Clinton and Obama and their economic advisors. (Rubin, Krugman, DeLong, et al all come in for a pretty good drubbing)

The book is relevant, and has great explanatory power, even as it largely shies away from a full description of the Keynesian concepts, does provide an excellent roadmap to the delegitimization of democracy we've seen in the past 2 decades. The lessons are pretty clear - either policy has to be developed that raises the standard of living for all Americans rather than the top 1%, or more of what happened in 2016/2020 will continue to happen. You need to read this book.

In 2008, Joseph Stiglitz calculated that if the $48 trillion global economy were simply divided among every one of its inhabitants, a family of four would receive $28,000, high enough to end poverty in every country, including the United States, with its relatively high cost of living.39 In 2018, with an $85.8 trillion economy and 7.5 billion people, the global economy produces $11,440 per person, more than $45,000 for a family of four. The economic problem of humanity is no longer a problem of production but of distribution—inequality. (Kindle Loc 9706)

The European Central Bank and the IMF, in cooperation with the government of German chancellor Angela Merkel, demanded that countries in crisis reduce their budget deficits through fiscal austerity, inducing devastating recessions in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and most famously Greece. The economic ruin brought about by that project—the destruction of local industry, soaring unemployment, stingier social safety nets—has energized neofascist political parties, which now threaten the political establishment in some countries and have been effectively absorbed into mainstream conservatism in others. From Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Italy’s Matteo Salvini to France’s Marine Le Pen to the United Kingdom’s Boris Johnson to America’s Donald Trump, this is an era of far-right demagoguery unseen since the 1930s. (Kindle Loc 9721) 

Why has Keynesianism proven to be so politically weak, even among ostensibly liberal political parties and nations? The Keynesian bargain of peace, equality, and prosperity ought to be irresistible in a democracy. It has instead been fleeting and fragile. Keynes believed that democracies slipped into tyranny when they were denied economic sustenance. Why, then, have so many democracies elected to deny themselves economic sustenance? 

Perhaps the type of social change he envisioned can be achieved only through the moral quagmire of revolution that he ardently hoped to avoid. Certainly the American experience does not inspire confidence. The greatest American victories for democracy and equality—the end of slavery in the nineteenth century and the defeat of fascism in the twentieth—came at the end of a gun. This is a dark time for democracy—a statement that would have been unthinkable to U.S. and European leaders only a few short years ago. It took decades of mismanagement and unlearning to manufacture this global crisis, and it cannot be undone with a few new laws or elections. (Kindle Loc 9728-9736)

Review: Neil Gaiman Library vol 1

 The library app which I use to checkout comic books pushed Neil Gaiman Library omnibus vol 1 at me, and since checking out is so easy, I checked it out and read it in a couple of evenings.

It turned out that Gaiman had collaborated with various artists to illustrate a few of his short stories, but I'd somehow missed them or read them so long ago that I was going into them fresh. A Study in Emerald is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that mixes the Holmes mythology with that of the Cthulhu mythos but to a limited success. Murder Mysteries, however is a fantastic piece of work, with the framing story and the internal story juxtaposed perfect, with art so nearly perfect as to be magic. How to Talk to Girls at Parties was also a mixed success, with the art providing a good complement to the story, and Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire is a 4th wall breaking story about writers and what they choose to write about, juxtaposed with a tribute to the old EC Comics stuff.

Taking together, all 4 stories deliver, and are well worth your time. I'll be checking out their successor from the library, since it's quite clear I've missed much more of Gaiman's comic books than I knew about, and the comic book story is clearly a good medium for him. Recommended.

Review: Spider-man: Miles Morales vol 1 & 2

 I was very impressed by the story in the PS4 game Miles Morales, so when Boen asked me to read a Spider-man book to him, I checked out Spider-man Miles Morales Vol 1 and Vol 2 from the library.  It's usually a truism that the book is better, but in this case it's clear that both the movie and the video game are much better than the books, which never tells a story in 1 panel when it can stretch it out into 20 panels.

What makes things worse is that the second volume ties into a cross-over story, which means that you get no resolution as to the greater story and the story immediately pivots into a new subplot (and one not even about Morales, but about his father) without notice. There's very little action, and by the middle of the second volume, Boen had gotten bored and not asked me to keep reading it to him (something which never happened when I read the original 1963 Spider-man stories to him and his brother!)

Switching to Bar Soap

 I'd been using Nivea 3-in-1 shampoo and body wash for myself and the kids through a series of Amazon deals, but then ran out in the middle of the summer. I felt a little guilty about the amount of plastic being thrown away, and read a few articles about the much reduced carbon footprints of bar soaps and decided to try them.

Dove is the default brand at both Costco and Amazon. Each bar lasts about a week, but the book Clean noted that Dove as a PH-neutral soap did not clean as effectively as real soap! So I tried the whole foods branded 360 Soap. The kids love the smell and my wife stole a bar, but the pine tar version left a nasty black residue in the bath tub. Each bar lasts a week as well, but is an awkward shape and doesn't really fit well in the bath.

I remembered using the Grant Petersen approved Grandpa's Pine Tar soap, which is more expensive per ounce than either of the above. The kids didn't love the smell, but after a week of use (each bar lasts two and a half weeks, so you would be willing to pay twice as much per ounce for this soap compared to the whole foods or Dove soap), all eczema was gone, and any residual itchiness they complained about on a regular basis is gone as well. I guess this is the one to get.

Review: Spider-man Miles Morales (PS4 Pro)

 I wasn't going to pick up Spider-man: Miles Morales until it had dropped in price, but all the reviews mentioned that it was a short game, which meant I might actually get a chance to finish it during my winter break. My biggest complaint about most video games is how they feel like a slog, or are too hard, or take too long so I never get to the finish, and I played the original Spider-man so much that I got the platinum trophy, so I decided that I should put my money where my mouth is and play it.

From a game play point of view, the game isn't much different than the prior Peter-Parker rendition. Miles Morales has several bio-electricity powers that Peter Parker doesn't have, and as a result, the game's more willing to throw lots of densely packed enemies at you, so you get a chance to use those powers (and you get punished if you don't). In exchange, you get a lot fewer gadgets.

The story is great: it's nothing like Into the Spider-Verse, since the previous Spider-man game had already killed off Morales' father. The game introduces a new Peter Parker model that looks a lot more like Paul Holland's character in the movies. The tension, angst, and family drama are every bit as good as any of Peter Parker's stories, though there isn't any romantic interest or tension in the story. The theme is appropriate, especially for a year when Black Lives Matter has been on every person's mind for at least a few months, but in no way does it feel like a cash grab or cheap.

Reflecting on this game as well as The Last of Us Part II, I've been very impressed that all the games that I've really enjoyed have come out of one Sony Studio or another --- forget the hardware, these games really do sell the system and keep me in the Playstation ecosystem for the long haul. Well worth your time, and a great substitute until the next great Spider-man movie comes out.

Highly recommended!

Review: Canon Image Class MF644Cdw

 The wife and kids have been asking for a color printer for a while, and at the same time my ancient brother scanner started dying, able to only scan one-side of a double-sided piece of paper. Thanks to black Friday, the Canon Image Class MF644Cdw was under $300, and would replace both. I also considered the bigger counter-part, but those came in close to 60+ pounds, and our printing volume was not expected to exceed what the MF644Cdw could do. At 50 pounds the MF644Cdw was close to what I could lift by myself.

Other people have waxed lyrical about the unboxing experience of an Apple product (I myself have never been impressed) but the Canon MF644Cdw's unboxing is an experience to behold! Basically, you unfold the flaps and pull on them and the entire box comes off. The engineers who did this have definitely achieved something.

As expected, the 50 pound weight is a pain, and once you're done you have to peel off various seals and stickers that exist to keep the device's various accouterments from flipping open while you lift and shift the thing. Once plugged in, you use the device's touch screen to connect it to WiFi, and then you have to login using a web browser to configure it to accept scans via SAMBA (which I sent to a OneDrive sync'd folder, so that any scans would automatically get shared and uploaded to the cloud), as well as manage defaults. You can also arrange for scans to be sent via e-mail,  but thanks to improved security, I couldn't set it up or get it to work with the TLS enabled gmail SMTP server. The web menu is unintuitive and painful to use, but it's a one-time setup, and once all the defaults are setup correctly you won't ever have to do it again.

Apple devices automatically recognize the printer over the wire via airplay, while Windows devices can get a dedicated driver installed via USB or CD-drive. As usual, the windows devices are more finicky to setup, but in exchange you get toner status data and other such features.

Scanning is fast and easy, as is copying and printing. About the most annoying feature of the printing is the noise --- the fan spins up, there's a whining sound, then it prints, and after that the fans and whining continue for quite some time after the print job is finished. It's not really noticeable during a zoom call (I sit right next to the printer), but I could imagine that if print jobs were frequent I'd be looking for a closet so I didn't have to hear it.

The paper tray is small, so definitely go for the next size up if your print loads are heavy. But as an all in one device it works and works well, very much like a full-size office device. Recommended.

Review: D&D Adventure Begins Cooperative Board Game

 So much of what I could do with Bowen was because he was a precocious reader, never being intimidated by board games that required reading or even RPGs that required multi-hundred page books to play. Boen is a different story, but so when the D&D Adventure Begins Board Game went on sale, I bought it hoping that it would work for Boen.

You have to set expectations for this correctly. First of all, it comes with no character creation rules, but several decks of cards. Not surprisingly, the decks of cards are basically flavor text, all with the same game mechanics. And then there are various bosses, also with mostly flavor text, and then the adventure deck, which actually are quite different from boss to boss, which gives each adventure scenario a different flavor.

The character levels only go up to level 2, which is just fine for a short board game. DM control passes from player to player, but requires that the DM be able to read, so when playing with Boen, Bowen and I traded DM roles. The combat encounters are fun, and death is at most temporary, with no one permanently kicked out of the game unless a TPK happens, which would require a lot of bad luck in combination with poor strategy. This is a far easier game than any of the adult D&D board games. 

By far the best thing about this board game are the role playing encounters. Some of them are really whimsical and fun and in keeping with a 5-year old's spirit. One of them asked all the players to do a silly dance and have the DM judge which one is silliest. Boen really got a kick out of this one!

We sat down to play one boss and after defeating it, the kids immediately asked to play another one. And would have proceeded to playing all 4 scenarios if I hadn't gotten bored. This one's a keeper. Recommended.

Review: Clean

 Clean was on the Smithsonian 20 best science books of the year, and it was written by a doctor who's a staff writer at The Atlantic, so I checked it out of the library. The book begins strongly, with the doctor proclaiming that he hadn't showered for years. Then he gets into the reason behind it, including a fun reading history of soap, as well as the sad lack of regulation behind personal care products:

European Union and Canada have been reviewing ingredients in personal care products for decades. More than 1,500 chemicals are banned or restricted from these products in the European Union, and some 800 are banned or restricted in Canada. California state lawmakers proposed a bill in 2019 that would ban the inclusion of lead, formaldehyde, mercury, asbestos, and many other potentially harmful compounds from personal care products, which, if enacted, would be the first legislation of its kind in the United States. As of this writing, the effort has not yet been successful. (kindle loc 1505)

But the detail isn't there. There's no discussion as to whether not showering or bathing will solve eczema, a common childhood ailment. No studies (double-blinded or not), just loads and loads of anecdotal evidence. We get lots of copy text about how little regulation there is for makeup and other health supplements (which you would know about if you'd even read one other non-fiction book about the topic), but the scientific evidence is sadly lacking. There is a note that Dove is a particularly ineffective soap, which is why it gets to be marketed as mild!

The book then branches out into various other aspects of the hygiene hypothesis and the rise of allergy and asthma:

 In wealthy countries around the world, people now spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors. Friends and family are not allowed to touch babies unless their hands have been scrubbed or coated in antibacterial gels. The indoor air is lacking in the wealth of bacterial particles that used to temper our immune systems. Our diet is hyperprocessed and cleaned and low in fresh fruits and vegetables—which are naturally loaded with bacteria. An average apple contains 100 million microbes. (kindle loc 1765)

But there's no real detail behind it. There's nothing about whether eating apple skin is good for you, no studies, and definitely no clinical recommendations. The entire book goes on like this, with forays into green space exposure and outdoor exercise vs indoor exercise: 

A number of studies have reported associations between green-space exposure and self-reported health, birth outcomes, and reduced morbidity. A 2018 meta-analysis found statistically significant associations between exposure to green spaces and reduced blood pressure, heart rate, cortisol levels, incidence of type 2 diabetes, and death from cardiovascular disease. Exercising outdoors may also have health benefits you don’t get at the gym. Much work has been done in this area by Diana Bowler and colleagues in the UK, who compared the effects of exercise in “natural” and “synthetic” environments and found that a walk or run outside “may convey greater health benefits than the same activity in a synthetic environment.” (kindle loc 2004)

At least this particular instance had great relevance to me and some literature citations, but the author provides no quantification of the results, and clearly the science here is difficult to do (how do you do a double-blind study of a topic like this one?). I came away with the book vaguely dissatisfied. I cannot sincerely recommend this book.

Review: The Last of Us Part 2

 Several years ago, I reviewed The Last of Us and compared it with eating your vegetables. Not having very much experience with video games, I didn't realize that the game was basically a 3D combat game, where each level could not be traversed without killing everything in it. Yet the story was haunting, as was the music, and of course the art direction and graphics made your jaw drop.

I'm a cheap skate, so I didn't buy The Last of Us Part 2 at launch, but rather, waited until it had dropped in price to $30, and then put in a Best Buy coupon to bring it down further.  I'd played all the PS3 and PS4 naughty dog games, so I thought I knew what to expect, and I really enjoyed the sensibility that Naughty Dog brought --- the games were more like movies than they were simple shooters, alternating between walking simulators, and the art direction and cinematography were second to none.

The opening of the game made my jaw drop once again. I'd played Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy, but The Last of Us Part II made me forget that I was playing a video game and not watching a live action movie more than one. While Xiaoqin had occasionally commented that some of the previous games I'd played looked like movies, none of them (not even Red Dead Redemption 2) came close when I was holding the controller. The game play is quite similar to the first game, but with my expectations set correctly by the first game, I no longer tried to get through levels without killing everything --- I knew now that you had to kill everything to get through, and that the game would actually do a reasonable job of replenishing your supplies, but if you stealth-killed a few enemies early on you had less pressure for the rest of each level.

The levels were huge. I was very pleasantly surprised towards the end that one of the levels was so large that I could go back to a previously cleared section to run away and pick up supplies to continue fighting and eventually cleared the level. That running away is an option was a good thing --- I'm not so good at video games that I can just play through them, and continually dying was not fun and broke the cinematic experience. I mostly played the game on normal, but had 2 encounters where I dropped the difficulty level to easy because the game was so atmospheric that playing in the dark hours of the morning I got more than a little bit spooked.

The scenery is good, but there's nothing as spectacular as what I saw in Uncharted 4 or even in the original Last of Us. Seattle, for instance, was frequently overcast, and I never got high enough to get a grand view, though certain sunsets were pretty.

Which leaves the pacing and story. Here be spoilers. So read no further if you wish to be surprised during the game.

2021 Book Reviews

Books of the year for 2021 have been selected.

Non-Fiction

• Justice - What's the Right Thing to Do?
• The End of Everything
• Post-Truth
• Clean
• The Price of Peace
• The Last Lion
• The Last Interview - Ray Bradbury
• Breath-taking
• The Hype Machine
• Gallileo and the Science Deniers
• The Pope of Physics
• Cosmos
• The Nordic Theory of Everything
• Exercised
• Extreme Medicine
• Peak - Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
• Range (re-read)
• Happy City
• Molecules
• Deaths of Despair and the Future of American Capitalism
• Fundamentals - Ten Keys to Reality
• Working Backwards
• The Sum of Us
• Beginners
• The Gardener and the Carpenter
• Journey to the Edge of Reason
• Deadliest Enemy
• Hiking Glacier National Park
• Premonition
• The Data Detective
• Messy
• Noise - A Flaw in Human Judgement
• The Wisdom of No Escape
• Anthro-Vision
• Press Reset
• Red Comet
• Numbers Don't Lie
• Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0
• Measure What Matters
• A Philosophy of Software Design
• Mindset - The Psychology of Success
• The Math of Life and Death
• Influenza
• Extreme Ownership

Fiction

• The Killing Moon
• The Shadowed Sun
• The Queen's Gambit
  
• The Hustler
• Klara and the Sun
• Project Hail Mary
• Use of Weapons

Audio Books

• The Half-Life of Marie Curie
• Bone Silence
• Radium Girls
• Lithium

Comics

• Poppy! And the Lost Lagoon
• Spider-man: Miles Morales Vol #1 and Vol #2
• Neil Gaiman Library Vol 1
• Ultimate Miles Morales #1 and #2
• Invincible Compendium #1
• Ultimate Spider-man Vol #1 and Vol #2
• Invincible Compendium #2
• Ultimate Spider-man 3,4,5
• Ultimate Spider-man 6-7
• March #1-3
• Gotham by Gaslight
• Ultimate Spider-man 8,9,10
• Invincible Compendium #3
• 3 Doctor Strange books

Installation Review: Swytch E-bike Conversion Kit (Tour edition)

 Last year, I saw the Swytch Ebike conversion kit on Kickstarter $780 + custom fees (around $30). The reasons to get this over say, a tour capable Calfee conversion were as follows:

• light weight - mid-drive e-bikes currently weigh over 40 pounds. The conversion kit promised to be 3kg (or 6.6 pounds) with an additional 3.3 pounds for the Tour battery pack, which would grant you a 100km range, more than sufficient for even the most rigorous western wheeler LDT ride.
• water-proofing - Calfee's conversion was not guaranteed to be waterproof, while the swytch was guaranteed to be waterproof

Little did I know the kit would take more than a year to arrive, between pandemic and the fact that few people ordered the 100km battery pack and 650B wheels (to fit the Cheviot) so we were among the last to receive our kit.

When the kit arrived, I took it out and scratched my head, because neither the battery pack or the wheel setup looked anything like the instructions on the Swytch website. Apparently, the Tour battery pack was an older model, but it wasn't too hard to figure out. I plugged in the battery overnight to charge. Then I figured out that I had to use scissors to cut the hub protectors and zip ties so that I could pull off the nuts and washers.

The worst thing about the Swytch kit is that the axle is designed for 10mm dropouts. My guess is that the target audience is someone who wants to convert a Walmart/Target bike-like object into an e-bike.  Standard bicycle quick release dropouts are 9mm. The net result was that I had to file off 0.5mm of material on 4 sides of the flat part of the axle. Before you ask, this was indeed sanctioned by Swytch. The process took the better part of 2 hours, using a rectangular file, checking frequently for fit. When done the axle fit snugly, and I attached the washers.

After that, the rest of the kit was comparatively easy: snap over the PAS sensor onto the crank, attach the sensor, and run cables up to the battery mount. Looking at the design, I would have mounted the battery on the bottle cage, but of course, many women's bikes have room for only one bottle cage, so it's probably all for the best to have a dedicated handlebar mount, which also serves to slow down most bikes' handling, which is what you want for an e-bike. The PAS sensor secure ring looked ugly, but it stayed on when jumping a curb, so I guess it's better than it looks.

The bar mount, however, is a mess. I had to cut the rubber spacers that came with the device to get it to mount, and the nut and allen head screw came with no way to secure the nut while turning the screw --- a better design would have been a captured nut in a shaped cavity --- again, this is the sign of a kickstarter project that didn't have a good mechanical engineer onboard. I eventually fixed this by getting out a pair of needle nose pliers, and holding it securely. For one of the screws I flipped the nut and bolt positions to get more leverage to tighten it down properly. I tried scheduling a support call to get through the above issues, but their Zoom technician never showed up at the appointed time, so it's a good thing I figured out how to do this without help.

Of course, the kickstand that came with the Rivendell couldn't handle the extra weight of the battery, so I ended up ordering a new double-leg kickstand and installing that as well.

How does it ride? Surprisingly well. The power provided is substantial (250W), and the relatively light weight of the entire kit didn't change the handling of the Cheviot much. The wire sticking out of the hub is unsightly, but it's supposed to bw waterproof, and the PAS sensor is surprisingly sensitive - even a little bit of pedaling will trigger it, which is important to making the e-assist feel responsive --- I would be comfortable starting this bike on the wrong gear on a steepish hill, which I didn't expect to.

My wife complained that having the weight on the front of the bike makes descents feel scarily fast. But of course, weight is weight, whether it's on the front, center or bottom of the bike is going to make descents fast. A lower center of gravity (like on mid-drive bikes) of course is much better than having a battery cantilevered on the handlebars, but that's going to take a purpose built design.

I would be comfortable recommending this kit to anyone using a bicycle for short commutes or around-town riding, where you could opt for the lighter battery (saving 3 pounds). For longer rides on a regular basis, a purpose built e-bike would be better, but now you're looking at more than twice the price and much higher weight! Note that if you don't want to wait a year and are willing to put up with almost twice the weight, you can get a similar kit from a USA for about $900 (without handlebar mount but with a throttle in addition to the PAS sensor).

Review: Post-Truth

 Mike Sojka recommended Post-Truth as a quick short read that explains the Trump era. It is indeed a quick read and covers many topics of interest to current events, tying them together in ways that I've never seen before.

The book was published in 2018, so it covers the events of the 2016 election, but predates the existence of COVID19. McIntyre points out that the era of news being supposed to be accurate is actually an anamoly:

for most of its history the news media has been partisan. Pamphlets were political. Newspapers had owners with business interests and other biases. Indeed, has this ever really changed? Yet we feel entitled to objectivity and are shocked when our news sources do not provide it. But have we been supporting this expectation of fact-based nonpartisan coverage with our dollars? Or really—before the election woke us up—even paid close attention to what was being lost? It is easy to blame technology and claim that “these days it is different.” But technology has always had a role in fake news. (Kindle Loc 1540)

 He points out that the blatant lies being told by the Republican side isn't about misinformation per se:

the goal of propaganda is to build allegiance.42 The point is not to communicate information but to get us to “pick a team.”43 To the extent that Trump is using some of the classic techniques of propaganda (stirring up emotions, denigrating critics, scapegoating, seeking division, and fabricating), Stanley warns that we may be headed down the path of authoritarian politics. The goal of propaganda is not to convince someone that you are right, but to demonstrate that you have authority over the truth itself. When a political leader is really powerful, he or she can defy reality. This may sound incredible, but it is not the first time we have heard echoes of this even within American politics. Remember when Karl Rove dismissed critics of the George W. Bush administration as part of the “reality-based community”? Rove then followed up with the memorable (and chilling) observation that “we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. (Kinde Loc. 1639)

McIntyre also traces the history of how the media fell into the trap set by the conservatives, by  giving equal time on the air to both sides as though there's any legitimacy to the anti-science movement (intelligent design, anti-vax, and now public health):

it serves the interest of those who are engaging in deception to succumb to the idea of false equivalence. When we say “a pox on all your houses” we are playing right into the hands of those who would have us believe that there is no such thing as truth. (Kindle loc 1693)

He even tracks back the post-truth era to the post-modernist attack on science in the form of science wars. Now, my personal belief is that the scientists won a resounding victory in the science wars after Alan Sokal definitively showed that post-modernist criticism is intellectual garbage, but the techniques used by the post-modernists were then quickly adopted by the right wing in its approach to confusing the public about "Intelligent Design" and then later on, the Anti-Vax movement.

Is there any hope of exiting the post-Truth era back to an environment in which truth is valued and there's a shared understanding of facts? McIntyre offers some hope:

The media stopped telling “both sides of the story” about vaccines and autism once there was a measles outbreak in fourteen states in 2015. All of a sudden, the facts of Wakefield’s fraud made better copy. One could almost see the TV hosts’ anxiety over their earlier complicity. Overnight, there were no more split-screen TV debates between experts and skeptics. False equivalence no longer seemed like such a good idea once people started getting hurt. (Kindle Loc 2436)

 empirical evidence suggests that the repetition of true facts does eventually have an effect. Recall here the research of David Redlawsk et al., which we briefly discussed in chapter 3.8 In the subtitle of their paper, they ask the pertinent question, “do motivated reasoners ever get it?” They acknowledge the work of Nyhan, Reifler, and others who have shown that those in the grips of partisan bias are strongly motivated to reject evidence that is dissonant with their beliefs, sometimes even leading to a “backfire effect.” But are there any limits to this?...although misinformed beliefs can be quite stubborn, it is possible to change partisans’ minds when one “hits them between the eyes” over and over with factually correct information.11 It may not be easy to convince people with inconvenient facts, but it is apparently possible. (Kindle Loc 2452-2465)

Unfortunately, as noted above, this book was written pre-COVID.  In the light of recent news reports about how COVID19 patients deny the existence of the coronovirus right until death, I'm not nearly as optimistic as McIntyre is. But at the very least, McIntyre points out that you cannot allow a lie to persist unchallenged, and that's something we need to do more of. It seems that Randall  Munroe was right after all:

Review: The End of Everything

 I picked up The End of Everything because it was on the Smithsonian list of top science books of the year. About 20 pages in I realized it wasn't about natural disasters, but the extrapolation of current known physics into the far future. A lot of what's in this book was covered already by Sean Caroll's lecture series on Time, but Katie Mack is such a great writer with transparent prose and a frequent wry turn of phrase that I kept on reading anyway.

It turns out that it was worth reading, because once she got past the "Big Crunch", the Big Rip"Heat Death", she got to Vacuum Decay, which became much more real than in the past because of the discovery of the Higgs Boson. I'd never seen that covered anywhere before, so the explanation was great and novel (to me).

The rest  of the book goes on to cover string theory, branes, and possible expanding and collapsing universes. The whole thing was so well written you could breeze through it in a couple of days. A good break from the heavy socio-political stuff that I'm reading otherwise. Recommended.

Review: Justice - What's the Right Thing to Do?

 After reading The Tyranny of Merit and discovering that it gave me so much to think about, I decided to see what else Sandel (a Harvard Professor) had written. It turned out that Justice is a spin-off from a class he taught at Harvard (by all accounts a very popular one), so I checked out the book.

I wasn't disappointed. Justice isn't actually a book about law or the legal system, but is actually a book about the philosophy of morals. He covers utilitarianism, libertarianism, Kantian philosophy, John Rawls, and then goes beyond them to discuss Aristotle and teleology, as well as a an exploration of why many people feel the way they do when it comes to issues such as gay marriage.

What I enjoyed about the book is that Sandel bends over backwards to treat each philosophy with respect, and works hard to represent that philosophy as well as he can. At no point does he set up any strawman arguments (I myself would find it hard to avoid being snarky about libertarianism, for instance), and when he points out the strengths and weaknesses of each moral philosophy. He then applies it to the real world with a discussion (for instance) about affirmative action, patriotism, conscription, etc drawing in lessons from court cases as well as how laws evolved and what the consequences are of adopting one approach vs another.

Justice is inescapably judgmental. Whether we’re arguing about financial bailouts or Purple Hearts, surrogate motherhood or same-sex marriage, affirmative action or military service, CEO pay or the right to use a golf cart, questions of justice are bound up with competing notions of honor and virtue, pride and recognition. Justice is not only about the right way to distribute things. It is also about the right way to value things. (pg. 261)

Sandel does a particularly good job with Immanuel Kant's philosophy of ethics and freedom, and explains why freedom and morality have to be tied together in a deep and fundamental way. I've read a ton of philosophy in the past but no one has explained it as insightfully as he did in this book. I'd also read about John Rawls and have a lot of sympathy with Rawl's approach to justice, but then Sandel does a turnaround and explain why both Rawls and Kant have a blind spot, which is that their philosophies are basically time-free, where each individual is an island with no connection to his past. You might think that's a feature and not a bug, but he points out, for instance as far as patriotism is concerned:

With belonging comes responsibility. You can’t really take pride in your country and its past if you’re unwilling to acknowledge any responsibility for carrying its story into the present, and discharging the moral burdens that may come with it. (pg. 235)

He points out the inherent contradiction when someone claims pride in being American but then turns around and says that reparations for slavery are pointless because no one owns a slave. Either you own your heritage (which means that you also have the responsibility to correct the wrongs of your ancestors) or you shouldn't pretend to value the past at all.

 All in all the book is great. Heck, I'd label it essential. Go get a copy and read it.

Review: The Shadowed Sun

 The Shadowed Sun is N. K. Jemisin's second book set in the world of The Killing Moon. Narratively,  it's a sequel, as the events take place after those of The Killing Moon, and certain characters reappear. However, you could read it independently as well, since all the information you need is retold, though I'm not sure why you would do that, as The Killing Moon is by far the stronger work.

The story revolves around Hanani (a poor choice of  name as it's very close to the dream goddess that's central to the culture, Hananja, so it's easy to confuse), who's an apprentice healer. She's one of the first batch of female priestesses in the church, though the themes of being a woman pioneer only appear (or become apparent) late in the novel.

The writing is clear and compelling as usual for Jemisin, but is also rife full of plot holes that make no sense to me. In particular, it's not clear what the end game of one of the set of villains really would be, and their actions make no sense. There's a post-facto rationalization of the primary religion's exclusion of women from its founding, which also makes no logical sense. Many parts of the background mythology and archaeology are thus ever resolved, leaving me unsatisfied upon reflection after finishing the book.

I still recommend the book, as it's a great read, but I wouldn't tell you that it's heads and shoulders over other fantasies, unlike her other novels.

Review: Poppy! And the Lost Lagooon

 Poppy! And the Lost Lagoon is a comic book that reads a bit like a Tintin pastiche. You encounter Poppy and Colt as they come back to New York from one of their previous adventures, encounter Ramses, speaks with a talking mummy head who then sends them off to another adventure revolving around a McGuffin, some misdirection, and various hijinks.

There's plenty of references to the past (and the Poppy's mysterious grandfather, Pappy) that gets gradually filled in as the story proceeds, and there's even a couple of pages of puzzles for you to figure out, but the puzzle is so badly designed (or the drawing of the key is so poorly matched) that I had a hard time deciphering it.

The art is decent, nothing special --- nothing like the bold lines and colors of a Tintin comic, for instance, and the intrigue just good enough to catch the attention of a 5 year old. (The book is marked for Grade 3-7, but I would consider it a bit on the childish side for my 3rd grader)

Overall, it wasn't a total waste of time (anything that can get Boen to pay attention is good), but a real Tintin comic would be much better.

Review: The Killing Moon

 After reading How Long 'til Black Future Month, I did some research and discovered that The Killing Moon was set in the same world that one of my preferred stories was in, so I checked it out from the library and downloaded it to my Kindle.

The novel fleshes out the world of the short story more, and depicts a world based on ancient Egypt, which I thought was great. In a self-interview at the back of the book, N.K. Jemisin explains why:

I don’t have a problem with medieval Europe. I have a problem with modern fantasy’s fetishization of medieval Europe; that’s different. So many fantasy writers and fans simplify the social structure of the period, monotonize the cultural interactions, treat conflicts as binaries instead of the complicated dynamic tapestry they actually were. They’re not doing medieval Europe, they’re doing Simplistic British Isles Fantasy Full of Lots of Guys with Swords And Not Much Else. Not all medieval European fantasy does this, of course—but enough does that frankly, they’ve turned me off the setting. I might tackle unsimplified medieval Europe myself someday… but honestly, I doubt it. I loved the challenge of writing the Dreamblood books, but I’ve learned that I prefer creating my own worlds to emulating reality. World-building from scratch is easier. (pg. 404)

Indeed, the world of the Nile (even though the book is explicitly set not on the planet Earth) where people talk about how many floods they've seen, is as alien as anything I've read, with priests providing euthanasia as part of their services, along with political intrigue, war, and hidden pasts that are revealed as part of the story in the book.

The characters are great, as is the plot, at many points with me expecting the story to end much differently from it did. If there's any weakness at all, it's that at the climatic point of the novel it felt as though the DM fudged the dice in favor of the players to prevent a TPK, but as a long time DM I'm not opposed to doing that when it fits the story, and in this case it does. The story is complete in and of itself, with no loose endings --- very welcome in this age where novel series have entire books where nothing happen and seem to promote "book series as a subscription based business" as though that's a good thing.

I immediately put a hold on the next book set in this world when I finished this. I'm so glad that my bouncing off one of N.K. Jemisin's other series was an anomaly and not the rule!

Review: The Half-Life of Marie Curie

 The Half-Life of Marie Curie is an Audible audio performance from a play. It revolves around Marie Curie and Hertha Ayron. The play is set in multiple scenes, each separated by time, but mostly set after Curie has won her two Nobel prizes. I disliked the early part of the play, where the focus is on Curie's affairs and so on and so forth. The later parts of the play are quite a bit better, but again, there's too little science and too much personal affairs.

The acting is excellent, backed with excellent special effects and fantastic accents. I learned a little bit about Marie Curie, but I'm not sure it was worth all the time spent listening to it. Maybe I should read a biography instead.