Review: Ultimate Spider-Man 8, 9, 10

 Bowen kept asking for more Spiderman, so I checked out Cats & Kings, Ultimate Six, and Hollywood from the library to read to him. I'm astonished by how repetitive these books are. Doctor Octopus, for instance, escapes from confinement no less than 3-4 times (I lost count), and kills lots of people doing so. Nick Fury comes across as a total idiot for not putting a final end to the entire madness after the second time. Worse, the villain's masterplan seem idiotic and unlikely to achieve their goals --- it's one thing for the good guys to be dumb (after all, Spider-man is a teenager), but it's another for adult villains who're supposedly geniuses to make bone-headed mistakes and plans that have nothing to do with their motivations.

My respect for Brian Michael Bendis dropped dramatically after these 3 books, and even Boen seemed to get bored and uninterested and didn't ask for more after volume 10. Not recommended.

Review: Source Wxp 3L Storm Valve Hydration Reservoir

 Ever since the 2019 trip to Bavaria, I've been jealous of Boen's hydration reservoir, mostly because of its cap. The cap means that when I take off the hydration pack and drop it on the floor, nothing gets dirty. The easy fill slide-off closure was also very appealing. I noticed that Source had 3L hydration bladders available, so I bought one.

To my surprise, the adult bladder is actually better. First of all, it has both a slide-off closure and a cap, and I found myself using to cap so I didn't have to remove the bladder from the backpack. The click-off and click-on valve also made removing the bladder a cinch. The cap is also improved --- the internal drink-valve is a water bottle style nozzle, which mean that you didn't have to twist it or bite it in order to get water --- you could pull it open with your teeth and if there was sufficient water pressure in the bladder water would come out siphon-fashion. You do have to watch out because if you don't close the nozzle when done, it will continuously leak your water away. But this also means that if you need to, you can produce a stream of water by squeezing the backpack.

My cheapness meant that I held off on this upgrade for far too long. Should have done it as soon as I started mountain biking and having to carry a backpack. Recommended.

Review: Peak - Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

 To say that Anders Ericsson, the author of Peak, is a legend would be an understatement. Over the years, his name has come up in various books I've read, from Talent is Overrated to Moonwalking with Einstein. I'm glad he finally decided to tell stories about his research rather than have someone else tell it for him, even though the examples he used, like the one about Laszlo and Klara Polgar raising three sisters who all became chess grandmasters have been widely told about and used.

True to his research, Ericsson is vehement that deliberate practice is what separates the good from the great. In fact, he notes that the better and best students sleep much more because they work so hard at their practice that they become worn out:

The best and the better students averaged around five hours more of sleep per week than the good students, mostly by taking more time for afternoon naps. All of the students in the study—the good students, the better, and the best—spent about the same amount of time each week on leisure activities, but the best students were much better at estimating how much time they spent on leisure, which indicates that they made more of an effort to plan their time. Good planning can help you avoid many of the things that might lead you to spend less time on practice than you wanted. (Pg. 170)

He notes that music and sports are where all the research is done, because the objective criteria via competitions and selection are stable and not as subject to chance. We know this isn't true, since Producing Excellence kicks off with a story indicating that politics and rigged competition in those fields is the norm. (Though my suspicion is that to win a rigged competition you still have to be good enough for it to be plausible)  Ericsson notes that even if it was true that talent played an important part, believing in deliberate practice was better for you since it would encourage you to work hard.

Ericsson trots out study after study about the effect deliberate practice has on your brain, from taxi cab drivers in London to musicians to poly-lingual kids. One interesting note is that those brain changes are most obvious in people who've studied or started their practice as kids. One exception is mathematicians and scientists who start out much older than their peers in other fields, and so frequently are inspired by great teachers rather than their parents.

The true contribution that this book provides is the notion of providing opportunities for deliberate practice during the work day --- giving employees and team members leeway during presentations to deliberately work on one aspect or another of their presentation skills and then providing immediate feedback. That's a great idea. Another great idea is the discussion of physics education at UBC, where a professor and his team showed that a skill-based approach to teaching as opposed to the traditional lecture system worked much better at teaching physics (and is applicable to other fields such as computer science and math). Those two chapters are probably worth the price of the book alone. What's interesting about that approach to teaching that Ericsson doesn't mention is that the students in those classes think they learn less with this approach!

All in all, deliberate practice is uncomfortable and should leave you feeling drained. One of the big implications is that if you want to deliberately incorporate a culture that values it in a company, you cannot value face-time over effectiveness --- if your employees need to take naps in the afternoon that means they're pushing themselves to the limit. Unfortunately, much as that article about students thinking they learned less with active learning, I suspect managers will think that employees are working less!

Regardless, the book provides much food for thought and many interesting stories. Well worth your time.

Review: Gotham by Gaslight

 The reveal in the animated version of Gotham by Gaslight was impressive, so I checked out the book from the library. With art by Mike Mignola and P. Craig Russell, I expected a lot. I was actually disappointed by the writing and the setting --- it's a short read but it doesn't bring anything to Batman mythos, nor does it explore the character in interesting ways. One of the rare examples where the movie is actually better than the book. Hard pass.

Review: Extreme Medicine

 Extreme Medicine is a book about how exploration transformed medicine and vice-versa, and starts off with the discussion of Robert F Scott's death in Antarctica and tying it to the survival of Anna Bagenholm, one of the first people who'd survived due to deep cold conditions. The author, Kevin Fong is an MD and I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the book, but upon reflection realized that Robert F Scott had nothing to do with Bagenholm's survival!

The same sequence would happen all through the book in the early chapters, detailing burn victims, and then you hit smack-dab into the section on the ICU, which has a discussion of the original SARS epidemic and but has zero content about  how the various devices in the ICU works and also noted that the SARS epidemic was won by public health, not by heroic interventions in the ICU. Sure, the ICU saved lives, but as the recent SARS-Cov2 virus showed, no amount of ICU intervention will prevent large numbers of death if your public health infrastructure has fallen down.

Hence, you get a great discussion of the invention of ventilators, only to realize (and to his credit Fong acknowledges that) the polio epidemics was only ended by vaccines.

Only the final few chapters have anything to do with exploration --- the one on traveling to Mars and NASA's repeated attempt at artificial gravity does actually seem like inventions designed to facilitate exploration, as well as the solar flare protection plans. But boy, that's 1 chapter in a book that otherwise never ties its content to its title.

Fong is a good presenter (apparently he's  TV personality in the UK), and writes well. The prose is reasonably interesting, but I'd recommend several other medical-related books over this one.

Review: March Trilogy

 March: Trilogy is the story of the Civil Rights  movement as told by the late John Lewis. I've already read about much of this in Master of the Senate, but this graphic novel (broken into 3 books for no apparent reason) provides details that only an insider can.

The first big detail was how much training, preparation and selection went into selecting the civil rights protesters. This was not a mob of angry volunteers, but people seriously inculcated in the art of non-violent demonstration, and prepared to put their bodies and lives on the line. The SNCC would actively tell people not to join if they couldn't discipline themselves into not fighting back.

What I didn't know also was the separation of the SNCC (John Lewis's organization) from the SCLC, which was associated with Martin Luther King. The two groups did coordinate actions, but did not always see eye to eye on when to demonstrate. Finally, the description of Malcolm X and what he saw his role in the movement was interesting, though again, the book did not dwell on it or discuss its implications.

I would not have found this book without the help of the Black Lives Matter movement, but having found it, thought it was a great way to tell the story. The art is well done (all in black and white), and many scenes bring home the horror and violence of the segregationists of that period. I've often wondered if the non-violent movements for both India and the Civil Rights movement only succeeded because they weren't up against a truly implacable enemy like the Nazis, but reading this book reminded me that there's no difference between the segregationists, the Nazis, and the modern Republican party.

Recommended.

Review: Ultimate Spider-Man Vol 6 + 7

 Ultimate Spider-Man 6 recounts the story of Venom, but I didn't like it compared to the original story, where the venom suit was originally a symbiote alien parasite. In this version, the suit is actually a leftover from Eddie Brock and Peter Parker's parents, and it seemed so strange that they would spend so much effort developing something and then not actually leave any notes about how dangerous it was.

Ultimate Spider-Man 7 is much better. It depicts Spider-Man's first encounter with the X-men, and does several sleights of hand that gives you the fun of the traditional super-hero encounter (the good guys always have to fight each other) without actually devolving into that cliché, which I enjoyed. Even better, the book ends with an entire issue where we get to listen to Aunt May's side of the Spider-Man story, depicting her sympathetically and explaining her quick adoption of Gwen Stacy. This volume redeemed the mess that was the Venom story.

Both kids love me reading Spider-man to them, and eagerly wait for my hoopla quota to be reset every month so we can check out more Spider-man.

Review: Exercised

 Exercised is an evolutionary biologist's view of the modern invention of exercise. It turns out that Dan Lieberman was the person whose paper inspired the book, Born to Run, which described a tribe of Tarahumara runners in Mexico who run barefoot. But when Lieberman actually visits that tribe, when he interviews everyone, he discovered that most people would say that they didn't race, and definitely did not exercise. When he finally found a racer, he asked the racer about training, and the racer looked nonplused and had to have the concept of training explained to him. It turned out that the Tarahumara race was actually a social ritual, involving kicking a ball, following it, and then kicking it again. The race involved 2 teams, and the team that lapped another team won, so races could go on all night. Lieberman speculates later on in the book that this sport probably evolved out of the need to track animals over long distances while doing persistence hunting.

Lieberman delves into many myths about exercise. The big one (which is the subtitle of the book) is that we were never born to exercise. The hunter-gather tribes live on such an edge of caloric sufficiency that humans who unnecessarily expended energy would have to give up reproduction or other important activities of life, so instead, the human body (and brain!) evolved to do everything as efficiently as possible while expending as little energy as possible. In fact, the average hunter gatherer walks about 20,000 steps a day, which while a lot compared to modern Westernized societies, is only about 10 miles. From this insight, many other aspects of modern ailments and attitudes towards exercise can be deduced. For instance, one reason walking doesn't really result in weight loss is that walking is so efficient that you'd have to well exceed the minimum typically prescribed by health authorities --- you pretty much have to run (an hour or so) or walk tremendous amounts to achieve weight loss.

From this, Lieberman goes on to attack other myths, such as the one about "sitting is the new smoking." It turns out that traditional hunter-gathers do sit a lot. But it's rarely more than 15 minutes at a stretch, and obviously, they're still getting lots of walking in. It's not the sitting that's bad, it's that the time spent sitting in front of a TV or computer monitor is time that isn't spent exercising. Lieberman then explains why exercise is so good for you --- it creates inflammation and then the body hyper-compensates, basically overdoing the repair and eliminating the damaged caused by the exercise and then some. What's important here is that the lack of activity actually induces a mild form of inflammation, which is repaired during recovery from exercise. Because humans evolved in a state where exercise was required to survive, the recovery system never evolved to activate outside of exercise, which is why exercise is so important.

Similarly, Lieberman dismisses the paleo-fitness regime. He points out that the traditional hunter gatherer male is 5'5" and 115 pounds, and that modern gym rats with access to weight machines and dumb-bells and access to all the food they want, have exceeded the strength of most hunter gatherers (not to mention weight!). The metabolic requirements of excess muscle would never have been tolerated in a state of caloric scarcity. He does point out that traditional human society do participate in rituals that look a bit like training: dancing and sports, some of which last long enough to evoke endorphin high and other experiences that athletes have experienced,.

The exploration of aging is also excellent. Lieberman points out that hunter gatherers do live to the traditional 4 score and 10 years, but also have much reduced morbidity compared to modern Westerners. The advances in medicine mostly means that people who might otherwise have died earlier, live about as long as hunter gatherers, but in a state of requiring constant medical support in the form of medicine, surgery, and therapy. He points out that even people who never exercise (e.g., Donald Trump) frequently do live long lives --- it's just that they might have to be on medication, and obviously they're not performing optimally, mentally or physically.

The book is well written and I read it compellingly for not just the health nuggets and advice, but also for the stories about the research on the topic. After I finished I wanted to go back and start it again, and wish I'd waited for the ebook version from the library so I could have highlighted the important passages. Highly recommended.

Review Fire HD8+

 My Fire HD10 died for no apparent reason, and upon contacting Amazon, it was long out of warranty. The customer service rep offered me a 15% off coupon, but I noted that there was a Trade-In Offer that gave me 20%. The customer rep told me that the two offers stacked, so I took them up on it. After the trade in, that netted me the Fire HD8+ for under $75 after tax.

There were 2 main reasons for going with the smaller display. The first was that the smaller device was lighter. The second was that the expensive version of the device (the HD8+) had 3GB of RAM. It also comes with wireless charging, but I've never been bothered by the need to plug my device in so I didn't consider that a useful feature. Going from 2GB to 3GB have favorably improved my impressions of Android on the phone, so I thought it might be similar for the tablet.

I bought an official used Fire HD8+ case, which folds nicely both horizontally and vertically, though much more vertically than anyone has a right to expect. In practice, the device doesn't seem to be fast, but then one day I compared it with an older Fire HD10 and it was indeed faster. It still chugs a little when switching apps, which is a surprise since my phones never had the issue once they had more than 2GB of RAM, and the Fire HD8+ with its 800p display should be much less demanding than most phones.

It's lighter, and no less good for reading comic books than the bigger device (I've been reading the various Spider-Man comics on it to my kids --- they would sit on the top of a double decker bed while looking down at my screen while I was reading the book to them, and it's a major testament to their eyes that they had no issue making out pictures, etc). I watched a couple of movies on it at night in bed, and the lighter weight reduced fatigue and made it possible to watch an entire movie at once.

Recommended.

Review: The Nordic Theory of Everything - In Search of a Better Life

 The Nordic Theory of Everything is Anu Partanen's personal journal of her transition to the USA from Finland. It's a good example of how I can agree with everything in a book but still find it wanting, mostly because Partanen approaches everything from a logical explanatory fashion that would work if everyone operated on rational, timeless ethics, but didn't study history.

If you haven't been living under a rock (or maybe if you're just one of those Americans without a passport), you know that most of Western Europe (and especially the Scandinavian countries) have living standards that exceed that of the United States. These include 5-6 weeks of paid vacation, a national healthcare system that means no medical bankruptcies, free college, paid parental leave (for both parents!), gun control laws that means your kids don't get shot at school, great public transit systems, excellent schools, and a generally less financially stressed out life. Partanen takes it upon herself to explain the principles and logic behind those policies, and how they benefit the citizens at large of those countries, while costing less than the American way of doing things.

I agree with all of her logic and explanations, and thoroughly understands why she would miss all the best parts of Finnish society while being thoroughly stressed out by the craziness that Americans accept. But she does all this without explaining why the US is the way it is: a history of racism. Many American counties shutdown their public swimming pools rather than desegregate. Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Warren county chose to shutdown public schools rather than desegregate. When a people are so concerned with "the others" getting what they've been getting that they would rather their kids lose public schooling, no amount of rational pontificating is going to persuade them that giving everyone healthcare is a good idea.

When Obamacare was rolled out, liberals expected that states would expand Medicaid to help their uninsured citizens. But many states (you can guess which easily by looking at any chart of red vs blue states) chose not to expand Medicaid and decided to leave their poorest citizens (colored or white) uninsured instead.  Kansas, for instance had attempted to pass Medicaid expansion several times but failed.

Without an understanding of the history, you end up with a book like Partanen's. Completely correct, logical, and agreeable, but without explanatory power. If you don't know anything about European social democratic systems, the book's great. But if you already do, this book won't do anything for you. Read Democracy in Chains instead.

Review: Ultimate Spider-Man 3, 4, 5

The kids have been making me read Ultimate Spider-Man to them, at least a chapter/issue every night, sometimes two. Since these are all easily checked out from Hoopla, I've been indulging them, having never read them. After being impressed by the first two volumes of the series, the next 3 have not been nearly so impressive.

For instance, I was very impressed by Peter Parker revealing his secret  identity to Mary Jane, but in his relationship with Aunt May, he reverts back to form, continuing lying to her and getting himself into trouble. The green goblin story arc so had none of the stakes that came in the original story, not just because nobody dies, but also because Mary Jane hadn't been established enough that even if she had been killed or injured, it wouldn't have had the impact Gwen Stacy's loss had in the original series.

Speaking of Gwen Stacy, I liked her in the reboot, but by putting two women immediately into Peter Parker's life, we actually lose empathy with him --- he's no longer the date-less nerd/geek we saw in the original series. The injection of other superheroes and Nick Fury into the series also feels premature. Nevertheless, the series stays true to the principle that whenever Spider-Man's life gets better, Peter Parker's life gets worse. There's also one humorous story in the fifth collection which sees Peter Parker being unable to change into Spider-Man while in school, which I thought was great but was completely lost on my little kids.

I can't say these were the best comics reading I've had in years, but I thought they were OK.

Reread: Cosmos

 I checked out Cosmos from the library in the hopes of reading it to Bowen. To say that the book and the TV series was influential in my life and shaping my thoughts as an adolescent is an under-statement. The book's telling of the story of Hypatia, for instance, has haunted my thoughts and understanding of the price scientists and truth-seekers have paid for their unswerving allegiance of the truth.  Sad to say, Bowen got bored after I read him the story of how you could use sticks to measure the size of the Earth, but I found myself getting sucked in the book again.

It's a truism that science moves on, and one would expect that books written decades ago are obsolete today, but to my surprise, Carl Sagan picked such a good job picking topics and materials that are timeless and resistant to obsolescence that the book still reads well. Perhaps the only fault I might even consider picking on is the Drake's equation, where today we know that most stars close to the center of the galaxy are likely to have been sterilized constantly by the presence of supernovas nearby and wouldn't be able to harbor life, but doing the math even reducing those numbers by a third doesn't really make a huge difference in the end result.

But what comes through even more is how poetic the book is, and how much the book is a paean to the scientific endeavor and the sense of wonder it brings:

We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. Think of the Sun’s heat on your upturned face on a cloudless summer’s day; think how dangerous it is to gaze at the Sun directly. From 150 million kilometers away, we recognize its power. What would we feel on its seething self-luminous surface, or immersed in its heart of nuclear fire? The Sun warms us and feeds us and permits us to see. It fecundated the Earth. It is powerful beyond human experience. Birds greet the sunrise with an audible ecstasy. Even some one-celled organisms know to swim to the light. Our ancestors worshiped the Sun,* and they were far from foolish. And yet the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to revere the Sun and stars? Hidden within every astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the researcher himself is unaware of its presence, lies a kernel of awe. (Kindle loc 4021)

Even the final chapters, written near the end of the cold war about the threat of nuclear extinction, still reads relevantly today: 

The chief danger of adopting a credible pose of irrationality is that to succeed in the pretense you have to be very good. After a while, you get used to it. It becomes pretense no longer. (Kindle loc 5400)

 If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies? From an extraterrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces: to preserve the lives and well-being of the citizens of the planet. Should we not then be willing to explore vigorously, in every nation, major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental redesign of economic, political, social and religious institutions? (kindle loc 5452)

In today's post-truth society, the ethos of science and scientists is under attack more than ever.  But Sagan still reminds us that science is the framework that lifted civilization out of the dark ages, and that of the essential properties that have made it far different from the philosophy that came before:

it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. (Kindle loc 5516)

 In the final chapter, you can hear the pleading in Sagan's voice, begging scientists not to abandon public discourse, for fear that the story of Hypatia would become a common-place one. And today, we need it more than ever before. For me anyway, this is a much needed reminder after reading the biography of Enrico Fermi.

Recommended

Review: Invincible Compendium 2

 Invincible Compendium 2 carries on from the first book, and you can see Kirkman having settled into a rhythm - have one threat in the background while the hero is dealing with another, and keep them coming fast and furious.

Superhero comics tend to escalate - after you've saved the world, you need to save the galaxy. After you've dealt with super-powered aliens, you have to deal with an army of them. This together with the problem that punching problems is of limited use in the real world, superheroes also tend towards taking over the world if they want to break out of the doom loop of capturing supervillains, putting them in jail, and then having them escape again only to do their dastardly deeds.

To his credit, Kirkman's book deals with all these issues. And it does so well in the context of the story -- Mark gets a younger brother who's half-alien, and hence doesn't have the same perspective as a human, and naturally asks wouldn't he have saved more lives if he'd killed the super-villains, given their penchant for escaping prisons and coming back to hurt more people. Similarly, by the middle of the book, he's questioning how much good he's actually doing by just repeating the super-hero loop, especially when one of the villains succeed in blowing up a city, and proving that the result was beneficial in the long run.

Kirkman isn't the first to deal with these issue. Alan Moore classically does this in Miracleman, still the best re-constructionist telling of the superhero story in history: the ultimate conclusion of the Superman history has to be Superman taking control of the world. It can't end any other way satisfactorily. A similar theme shows up in Warren Ellis's The Authority series, which also features the hyper-violence in Kirkman's work. To be honest Miracleman is a much better told story, tightly paced, and with much better science fiction (e.g., Miracleman's powers are explained, while Invincibles powers just rely on you knowing the superhero tropes). But Kirkman does do coupled superhero stories in ways that I thought were uniquely his own, so I still think his stuff is well worth the read.

Review: The Pope of Physics - Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age

 I picked up The Pope of Physics as an audio book when it was on sale.  One of the classic interview question types during technical interview is the Fermi estimation problem. But other than that, I realized I didn't know very much about Fermi, so a biography would be well worth reading.

This biography of Fermi turned out to be educational in more ways than just learning about his contribution to physics and how Fermions were named after him. Not only did it cover the rise of physics from being a backwater of intellectual progress (there were more professorships of Math in Italy than there were professors of Physics) to the forefront of war, it also covered the way the rise of fascism in Italy was ignored by high social ranking families who thought they were immune. Fermi's wife, Laura Capon was Jewish, and her father was a (retired) admiral in the Italian Navy and a war hero. Because they thought they were protected, they were complacent about the semitism that was on the rise in Italy at the time. By the time Fermi realized he had to flee, it was almost too late --- he eventually used the Nobel prize ceremony (he won one in 1938) as an excuse for him and his family to visit Stockholm and London and then ran away to the United States. The lesson I take from this is that if you're not a Nobel prize winning physicist and the country you live in is about to turn fascist (and you're not a member of the ruling party), you absolutely cannot wait until the last minute to take precautions and plan to escape.

One would think that after that intrusion of politics into Fermi's personal life would make him more of a political activist, but Fermi truly was a physicists' physicist, happy to make statements about how physicists don't have any special insight about how atomic bombs should or should not be used. In fact, when the hydrogen bomb was initially proposed by Teller, Fermi voted against pursuing it because he and others spotted flaws in the proposed implementation. When a revised implementation plan was proposed, he was so taken by the technical implications that he happily joined in against the effort!

All in all, the book does a great job in providing the context behind an amazing thinker (including many examples of how he was at the same time a theoretical physicist, an experimental physicist, and a teacher --- all of which he did well), as well as a good idea of what it took for him to do this --- his children grew up estranged from him, as he spent more time with his students and experiments than with his children.

Well worth the time. Recommended.

Review: Optix 55 AntiFog

 I asked my optometrist what he did to keep his glasses from fogging up when he had a mask on. He told me to buy the Optix 55 AntiFog. "It's the best I've tried, though not perfect." "Is it better than baby shampoo that scuba divers use?" "Better by far!"

My first impression was disappointment. My glasses didn't fog up white, but instead was smeared all across like a worn out windshield wiper on a car used in rain. I was about to write a scathing review when I read that you had to leave it on longer before wiping it.

That did the trick. It's still possible to overload the anti-fog, by riding through fog, but for normal breathing out of a mask, the glasses never fogged up again. Well worth the money. Recommended.

Review: Yubico FIDO Security NFC

 For years, every time I turned on MFA on my Google accounts, within weeks, I'd be turning it off because of some issue with authentication, or needing to use my account on a device while traveling. The gold standard, of course, was a security key, but those are expensive, and I was doubtful as to whether or not they'd do any good. You'd need at least 2, so you always had one as a backup.

Over the Christmas holidays, there was a deal that got me 2 Yubico NFC keys for $26 shipped, which was a fantastic deal. These are the right kinds, because while traveling you're most likely to need the USB-A, and if you're bringing a laptop with only USB-C ports, you can also bring a USB-C to USB-A dongle, while the reverse dongle isn't easy to get.

My first impression registering the key with Google accounts was fine. With Facebook, if you already have MFA setup, you can't replace it with the key, which is annoying as heck. I was extremely disappointed when I discovered that all banks I used didn't allow the use of the key, and of my brokerage accounts, only Vanguard allowed the registration of the key. As always, Vanguard has the best IT of all the financial institutions, and if you care about security, they're the only people who deserve your business. Even then, to my surprise when I tried to logon to Vanguard with my phone's web browser (Chrome or Edge, it doesn't matter), the browser fell back to insecure SMS instead of using the NFC security key feature, so I'm not sure how much security this even buys you!

Having 2 keys mean you can have one tied to your key ring, and another in your wallet, or give one to your wife when traveling. The device seems robust, and if only Amazon allowed you to force the use of it, my kids would be prevented from buying themselves presents. For a low security person like me (not a target of state actors), this device is overkill, but it's been 2 months since I got one and I haven't wanted to turn it off yet, so it's not horribly inconvenient (yet! During COVID19 I'm not traveling!). I wouldn't recommend this at full price, and adoption amongst the majors (Amazon and Facebook in addition to most banks) is so abysmal I'm not sure what this gets you. I wouldn't recommend it for most people --- it's lack of use for the most important stuff (banks! money!) seems to indicate that you're better off using a regular MFA app (I recommend Microsoft Authenticator) than trying to use this fiddly crap.

Review: Galileo and the Science Deniers

 The story of Galileo was the story that turned me permanently off Christianity (I went to a mission school, and my parents were kinda surprised that all 3 kids rejected the religion being foisted upon us daily). I thought I knew it well, but Galileo and the Science Deniers goes one further. Far from the story of Galileo's scientific achievements (which are many), it's also a celebration of the man as a true renaissance person, who achieved as much in the arts, while doing the best he could with the hand he dealt.

The section of the book that goes over the legal fight leading up to his permanent house arrest is a bit of a slog, going into detail the politics and the details of the legal briefs, as well as the personalities and political machinations involved. What does come through is that the brand of science denial that existed in Galileo's time is alive and well, and the same people who can't wait to get the latest gadget are perfectly comfortable denying evolution or denying climate change.

What got me to leave off the recommended tag on this book is that the legalistic section was far too boring (and provided little illumination), and the author doesn't provide any solutions for debunking the science deniers.

Review: Ultimate Spider-man Vol 1 & 2

 Ultimate Spider-Man is a retelling of the Peter Parker story in an alternate universe, updated to the 2000s.  The drawings are different, and the origin story gets drawn out into multiple issues instead of having everything compressed into one issue. I enjoyed some of the differences: for instance, Peter Parker instead of inventing the web-fluid, adapts it from a formula left by his father. The origin of Spider-man, Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus are all tied together into one coherent plot-line, instead of being different.

Peter Parker instead of being a goody-two-shoes all the time, behaves a little bit more like a teenager, with signs of rebellion, and occasional anger at his care-takers. There's a great reference to the uniquely dysfunctional American legal and health care system, where Peter Parker blocks a punch by Flash Thompson, breaks Thompson's hand because of his new found strength, and Ben and May Parker gets sued for hospital bills and Peter is left protesting against his guardians for defending himself instead of letting himself get beaten-up and bullied. I particularly enjoyed Peter Parker revealing himself as Spider-man to Mary Jane at the end of Vol 2, which eliminates all the stupid angsty stories of personal conflicts between the couple, preventing you from wanting to shake Peter and say, "You idiot, just tell her!"

Both Bowen and Boen enjoy the books enough to ask for more. That makes the series recommended.

Review: The Hype Machine

 I read The Hype Machine hoping to find some answers about social media and how it was used to destroy democracy. I did learn a few things, some of which you probably already knew, about the lies spreading and being more easily clicked on and read and believed than the truth:

Abnormal trading volume rose by 37 percent over the three days following the publication of real news articles and 50 percent more following the publication of fake news articles relative to real news articles. In other words, investors reacted to fake news even more strongly than to real news. The reactions were more pronounced for smaller firms and for firms with a greater percentage of retail (as opposed to institutional) investors. Fake articles were clicked on and read more often than real articles, and trading volume increased with the number of clicks and times an article was read. (Kindle loc 685)

I learned the technical term for measuring the effectiveness of a social ad, "lift", which basically measures the influence and ad has for changing your actions. This is more subtle than you might think, since for instance, an ad that's shown to you that confirms your biases and reminds you to buy something you would have bought anyway doesn't contribute to lift.

What the book does not provided are easy answers. At no point does the author Aral come to a conclusion as to whether the Russians succeeded in throwing the 2016 election to Trump. He does not that the amount of lift a campaign of that size, if targeted properly at the right voters in the right places, would decide the election:

“the proportion of misinformation was twice that of the content from experts and the candidates themselves.” When they calculated whether a state had more or less Russian fake news, they found that 12 of 16 swing states were above the average. They concluded that Russian fake news was “surprisingly concentrated in swing states, even considering the amount of political conversation occurring in the state.” Although more than 135 million votes were cast in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, six swing states (New Hampshire, Minnesota, Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) were decided by margins of less than 2 percent, and 77,744 votes in three swing states (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania) effectively decided the election. (kindle loc 778)

He notes that a society that can converge onto the truth is wise, and clearly we do not live in such a society:

They called societies that did so “wise.” They found that a society’s network has one simple and complete characterization of wisdom—one requirement for being able to arrive at the truth. And that is that it does not have, in modern vernacular, “influencers.” As Golub and Jackson wrote, “Disproportionate popularity is the sole obstacle to wisdom….Having agents who are prominent, causes learning to fail, since their influence on the limiting beliefs is excessive.” Societies without wisdom lack “balance,” meaning some groups have disproportionately more influence than others and may not pay sufficient attention to the rest of the world. Sound familiar? This is the world we live in, where Barack Obama and Donald Trump have 110 million and 67 million Twitter followers, respectively. Where Kanye West has 30 million followers and follows 300 people. (Kindle loc 4496)

Basically, societies where a few influencers lead and a bunch of followers follow without thinking for themselves will lead to a polarized society where truth loses value and arguments are meaningless because nobody changes their minds. Unfortunately, like many researchers and media people, Aral commits the mistake of "bothsidesism" when clearly one side has gone mad while the other still has some grip on reality. 

Another interesting phenomenon is how protest movements in recent years appear to gain viral momentum only to disperse with no impact on policy or lasting change:

Zeynep Tufekci’s book Twitter and Tear Gas provides a comprehensive deep dive into how social media has changed social movements. Her thesis, backed by stacks of research, suggests that protest movements enabled by technology rise rapidly but often sputter at their zenith. At the precise moment they make headway and capture the world’s attention, they experience what Tufekci calls “tactical freeze”—an inability to adjust tactics, negotiate demands, and push for tangible policy changes. What causes tactical freeze? The rapid mobilization that the Hype Machine enables is typically accompanied by leaderless, ad hoc decision making and a shallow organization that develops without much early planning. (Kindle Loc 4769)

This is in contrast to the social movements that brought lasting change in the past, which erupted into protests only after years of organizing, training, and discussing how to bring about that change. So social media has corrupted even basic functions such as the ability to organize and protest and bring about change.

he very technology that enables protests can be co-opted by the governments they oppose. In 2019, for example, the Chinese government used disinformation on social media to disrupt the Hong Kong protests and to change the domestic and international perception of the protesters by exaggerating the harm caused to bystanders. The Chinese government is suspected of hiring as many as 2 million people to insert propaganda into social media; the political scientist and statistician Gary King and his colleagues at Harvard estimated that they fabricate and post about 448 million social media comments a year toward this end. In Russia, Putin’s allies simply took over VK and squashed protesters’ online presence. As the stories of modern protests make clear, the Hype Machine enables social mobilization but in a fragile way. (Kindle loc 4779)

Is there any hope? Aral suggests that breaking up Facebook, for instance, isn't as useful as forcing Facebook to allow competitors to reach into its network and integrate with it. This would generate true competition. In this case I think Aral commits the usual media mistake of ignoring the fact that by forcing Facebook to spinoff Instagram and WhatsApp and then implementing the forced integration API at arms length (and allowing competitors to access that same integration) would immediately also provide competition where there was none.

All in all, I think the book is worth your time --- but be careful of Aral's conclusions. I don't know if his intentions are pure (he certainly spends many words in his book promoting himself and his relationship with Facebook which enabled him to perform experiments on Facebook users at scale and collect data), but he seems altogether too protective of Facebook's monopoly for me to take anything he says at face value.

 

 

 

Review: Breath-taking

 Breath-taking seems to be a very topical book - a book about lungs and respiratory diseases, of which COVID19 is one. The book, however, seems like a mish-mash reprints of columns published in a magazine, rather than a coherent and cogent exploration of our lungs.

It starts, for instance, with a brief discussion of mindful breathing, but doesn't actually go into the clinical studies or scientific evidence. Then it jumps into a discussion of the history of our understanding of lungs, some of which is actually enlightening, such as the exploration of cells that generate surfactants that enable us to breathe.

We get an exploration of the history of lung transplants (the success rate is improved but the long term survival rates are abysmal - only 6-7 years), and the challenges they face, and then a pivot into the politics and ethics of transplant recipients' prioritization. There's a brief chapter on smoking (I was very surprised by the statement that 13% of Americans still smoke, as I would have thought the rates were much lower now --- then did a double check and discovered that 35% of Germans between 18-25 smoke, a much higher proportion than I would have thought, so my social circle is simply not representative).

There's a section on asthma, on asbestos (the book mentions that we still import asbestos from Russia, since a court overturned the asbestos ban, but no deeper dive into what we're still using it for, and why the overturn occur'd).

I really wanted to like the book, and I did learn stuff from it, but found that I couldn't really overcome all of its faults to give it a recommended rating.