Spain 2022: April 10th San Francisco to Barcelona

 The ultra cheap flights from years past were gone, but I spotted an Iberia Airlines direct flight in the realm of $700 a person for Spring Break. Spring break is too short to bring the triplet, but it was sufficient for Bowen, Boen and Xiaoqin to get a feel for Barcelona and Girona. I also decided that since I didn't manage to make it to Cadaques last time to visit the Salvador Dali House Museum, I'd make up for it this time. The Costa Brava had impressed me the last time as well, so I'd show it to them as well.

Our flight was late by nearly two hours--I would later find out that this was par for the course for Iberia Airlines --- the airline company, LEVEL, serviced Iberia's San Francisco to Barcelona direct flight, and was famous online for a level of disorganization that led to frequent trip delays and vocal unhappy customers.

I'd discovered that booking.com now offered a taxi service, which for what my AirBnB host told me, was comparable to just showing up at the airport and booking a taxi, but the taxi driver would show up and greet us as we exited baggage claim! We cleared customs with astounding efficiency. To my surprise, our vaccination cards weren't even checked! Arriving at the AirBnB, we had been told that the host would greet us, but instead her cleaning crew was responsible for letting us in and giving us the keys. The cleaning person was an obvious immigrant, and she kindly let us know the wifi password, gave us the keys, and then left us to our own devices.

The kids were very excited about the balcony, but we were all very hungry, so we immediately absconded to buy some groceries for breakfast (I was pretty sure we would awake long before any grocery stores would open because of jet lag), and then walked over to La Tasqueta de Blai, and had what would turn out to be the best tapas of the entire trip!

Next to the restaurant was a gelato shop, that was similarly excellent. We walked back to the apartment, took showers, and took melatonin pills before going to bed, hoping that the jet-lag gods would grant us an exception.

Review: A Thousand Brains - A New Theory of Intelligence

 A Thousand Brains is Jeff Hawkins' book about the way the neocortex of the brain works, and the implication it has for building machine intelligences. The premise of his book is as follows:

• The neocortex is uniform in structure and function, and under a microscope, no parts of the neocortex looks any different from other parts
• We can abstract away the non-neocortex portion of the brain as being unimportant for the development of intelligence
• The brain is a prediction machine (he previously covered this in an earlier book, On Intelligence), and is constantly predicting what will come next and comparing its predictions with the actual sensory input
• The unit of cognitive function in the neocortex is the cortical column
• All cortical columns behave the same way by learning and building a model of its inputs, but differ in function mainly in what inputs it is wired to. For instance, a cortical column wired to the eyes will be trying to recognize and build models based on vision, while a cortical column wired to more abstract thinking as input will be operating on abstract concepts
• Learning is the process of building a model. The only way to build a model of a physical object is to move around and explore it from multiple perspective --- consider how we build a model of a building by walking through its rooms, and how when you see a novel object you'll turn it and look at it from different angles
• Along with the model, there are reference frames, which tell you about the relationship between pieces of the model. You have a model of your own body, and the reference frames tell you about the relationship between your various body parts like fingers, which is how you can recognize a mug in the dark by touch or just by holding it, even without other inputs
• Recognition of an object or where you are is done by a voting process, a multi-sensory associative schema where all the salient evidence from your senses is brought together and the models that most closely match that input triggers the recognition and the prediction.
• The model of the world or object is what knowledge is, not words, not data structures or labels. When you're asked a question about an object, your model of that object is what you use in order to answer those questions
• Consciousness is a portion of your neocortex wired up to examine its internal state, with the ability to playback and remember what has happened in the past.

Hawkins (perhaps arrogantly) claims that this is the overall framework theory of how intelligence works, and that while the details might have to be refined, this framework will prove to be true. (There's substantial controversy about this claim, so take it with a grain of salt)

There are a few implications of this:

The neocortex never stops learning models. Every shift of attention—whether you are looking at the dishes on the dining table, walking down the street, or noticing a logo on a coffee cup—is adding another item to a model of something. It is the same learning process if the models are ephemeral or long-lasting. (kindle loc 1566)

 In particular, Hawkins claims that today's neural network models do not hold reference frames, which are key to knowledge, and therefore cannot learn and build models:

Robot designers are accustomed to using reference frames. They use them to keep track of where a robot is in the world and to plan how it should move from one location to another. Most roboticists are not concerned about AGI, whereas most AI researchers are unaware of the importance of reference frames. Today, AI and robotics are largely separate fields of research, although the line is starting to blur. Once AI researchers understand the essential role of movement and reference frames for creating AGI, the separation between artificial intelligence and robotics will disappear completely...Today’s neural networks rely on ideas that Hinton developed in the 1980s. Recently, he has become critical of the field because deep learning networks lack any sense of location and, therefore, he argues, they can’t learn the structure of the world. In essence, this is the same criticism I am making, that AI needs reference frames. Hinton has proposed a solution to this problem that he calls “capsules.” Capsules promise dramatic improvements in neural networks, but so far they have not caught on in mainstream applications of AI. (kindle loc 1904-1909)

 The implications of this for human learning is also significant. For instance, a lot of child development specialists criticize schools for not being good for learning, mostly because childhood has been transformed from being largely spontaneous and exploratory into something where kids are effectively jailed in a building and supervised continuously:

 from when she was five years old, Lenore would walk out of her house and walk to school on her own. It was about 15 minutes away. When school ended, Lenore would leave and just wander around the neighborhood freely on her own. She’d play games with the other kids that the kids would spontaneously organize, they’d run around, and she would go home when she was hungry.

That was how all childhood was, essentially, in the world at that point with very few exceptions. Children played freely with other children without adult supervision for most of the time. This was crucial for them. By the time Lenore was the parent in the 1990s, that had ended. She was expected to walk her kids to school, wait and watch them go through the door — even when they got pretty old — and to be there waiting at the gate to collect them at the end of the day. By 2003, only 10 percent of any American children ever played outdoors. So it essentially ended.

Childhood became something that happened either behind closed doors under tight adult supervision. And it turns out there are loads of things in this enormous and unprecedented transformation in childhood that are important for attention. Let’s give you a real no shit, Sherlock one: exercise.

Kids who run around can pay attention much better. The evidence for this is overwhelming. One of the single best things you can do for kids who can’t pay attention is let them go and run around. We have stopped that, right? Even before Covid, we stopped that.

We imprisoned our children. In fact, the only place where our kids get to feel they’re roaming around at the moment is on Fortnite and on World of Warcraft. We can hardly be surprised that they’ve become so obsessed with them. There are lots of other changes. Children learn when they play freely what’s called intrinsic motivation. (Ezra Klein interview 2022 02 11, New York Times)

So Hawkin's advocacy of learning through movement for AI can be compared to free range parents' advocacy of freedom for children to explore.  I found that fascinating to think about.

The last part of the book describes the way religion, right-wing theory, and other institutions have been constructed to hack the neocortex and use that to spread false believes. He notes that that false believe memes have to have the following characteristics:

1. Cannot directly experience: False beliefs are almost always about things that we can’t directly experience. If we cannot observe something directly—if we can’t hear, touch, or see it ourselves—then we have to rely on what other people tell us. Who we listen to determines what we believe. 2. Ignore contrary evidence: To maintain a false belief, you have to dismiss evidence that contradicts it. Most false beliefs dictate behaviors and rationales for ignoring contrary evidence. 3. Viral spread: Viral false beliefs prescribe behaviors that encourage spreading the belief to other people. (kindle loc 2758)

He applies this to vaccine denial, climate change denial, and the flat earthers. The final part of the book is a plea to teach kids about false believes and innoculate our children about how such false beliefs are harmful. Looking at the state of the world, I definitely believe that he's on the right track.

In any case, the entire book is well worth reading, and very much worth your time. I devoured it in a few evenings and didn't regret any time spent reading it.

 

The Sandman: Act II

 After listening to The Sandman, I used one of my audible credits and downloaded The Sandman Act II. There are two long story arcs, Seasons of Mists and A Game of You, and a large number of standalone episodes. As with the original comics, the standalone episodes are far better than the long story arcs, where Gaiman has a tendency to write himself into a corner and then allow the plot to peter out.

The sound production is outstanding, even more so than in the first part. One of the most consistent improvements in the audio/visual arts over the past 20 years has been the steady improvements in the depiction of non-Western cultures in media. We've gone from incomprehensible pidgin Mandarin in Firefly to The Sandman, where a childbirth scene in a Hong Kong hospital is depicted in completely correct and unaccented Cantonese. Color me much impressed.

As with the previous audio production, the big benefit of the audio presentation (aside from the obvious ones --- for people who can't read comics or who are visually impaired) is that Gaiman has no choice but to draw your attention to important details. That makes it hard for you to miss details that might be skipped if you're the type of person to read just all the words of the page and just glance at the pictures.

I can assure you that I'll happily jump in and pay for a month of Audible when Act III shows up and will just use an audible credit to get a copy of it. That's how good this series was. Highly recommended.

Review: A Man Called Ove

 A Man Called Ove is a book about a grumpy old man. At the start of the novel you're given a poor impression of him, but as the book progresses, you get more back story about how he came to be the way he was, and he starts opening up to people in his life, including the immigrants who move in next door.

To some extent, the book plays into the stereotype of typical men:

Whatever the case, he had eaten in advance so he could afford to let her order whatever she wanted from the menu, while opting for the cheapest dish for himself. And at least if she asked him something he wouldn’t have his mouth full of food. To him it seemed like a good plan. (kindle loc 1646)

There's the constant obsession with cars:

 Three years later Sonja got a more modern wheelchair and Ove bought a hatchback, a Saab 900. Rune bought a Volvo 265 because Anita had started talking about having another child. Then Ove bought two more Saab 900s and after that his first Saab 9000. Rune bought a Volvo 265 and eventually a Volvo 745 station wagon. But no more children came. One evening Sonja came home and told Ove that Anita had been to the doctor. And a week later a Volvo 740 stood parked in Rune’s garage. The sedan model. Ove saw it when he washed his Saab. In the evening Rune found a half bottle of whiskey outside his door. They never spoke about it. (kindle loc 2949)

 As entertainment goes, the book is a little cliched, and grants everyone involved a happy ending, but once in a while there's a gem:

“Loving someone is like moving into a house,” Sonja used to say. “At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather for its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it’s cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.” (kindle loc 3639)

 The book is easy to read, with very short chapters, and I found it enjoyable light entertainment. Don't expect anything serious and you won't be disappointed.

Re-read: Exhalation

 When Ted Chiang's Exhalation came out on sale, I bought it. Re-reading the book, I found myself really enjoying The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, the title story, and The Truth of Fact, the story demonstrating how writing changes the way we think, and how an accurate lifelog would impact the way we think by forcing us to confront ourselves in truth, and not allowing our malleable memories to lie to ourselves about who we are.

It's a great book. If you haven't read it, you should. And if you read it a while back, you owe it to yourself to read it again.

Review: Amazon Unbound

 Amazon Unbound is Brad Stone's follow-on to The Everything Store. It starts off where the earlier book ended, with a focus on the development of Alexa/Echo, the introduction of AWS and its successful attack on the database market, and of course, Amazon Prime, and various other products. It also provides a deep look at the people who ran the logistics behind Amazon.

What I didn't realize was that Amazon spends way more than Google on R&D:

In 2017, Amazon spent $22.6 billion on R&D, compared to Alphabet ($16.6 billion), Intel ($13.1 billion), and Microsoft ($12.3 billion). The tax-savvy CEO likely understood that these significant R&D expenses for projects like the Go store and Alexa were not only helping to secure Amazon’s future but could generate tax credits or be written off, lowering Amazon’s overall tax bill (kindle loc 974)

This is astonishing, since Google prides itself on being a technology company, and has been able to attract (and retain) engineering talent, while Amazon has never been competitive, especially when you take into account its stingy benefits package and back-loaded stock compensation package.

What's more, the book revealed a major event in which Bezos decreed that managers should have no fewer than 6 direct reports. This resulted in many upper managers stealing groups from lower level managers, causing a cascading scramble down the chain and the departure of many managers who had few direct reports:

 “When most big companies go through this, they usually announce they are going to have layoffs,” he said. “You can stick around or get a severance. But Amazon to this day never announced how many people they were trying to get rid of, so it created a culture of fear, which they probably prefer.” The informal, musical chairs–style reorganization allowed Amazon to avoid the internal and external stigma of announcing layoffs. (Kindle loc 3817)

 Stone doesn't mention that by forcing people to depart voluntarily Amazon also doesn't have to pay severance packages. Even in the case where they famously raised wages to $15/hour, there was an ulterior motive:

Earnings in Amazon fulfillment centers varied by state, but some employees were making as little as $10.00 an hour, which was above the $7.25 federal minimum wage. The S-team weighed a number of proposals from operations chief Dave Clark, including incrementally raising wages to $12 or $13 an hour. Instead, Bezos opted for the most aggressive plan, raising the entry-level U.S. hourly rate across the board to $15. At the same time, he compensated for at least part of the additional expense by discarding supplemental sources of worker income, such as stock grants and collective bonuses that were awarded to employees based on the performance of their facility. The move was tactically brilliant. Amazon had surveyed its warehouse workers over the years and found a large majority were living paycheck to paycheck and would rather have the instant gratification of up-front pay than stock grants. By getting rid of the grants, Bezos not only helped to partially offset the pay increase but eliminated another incentive for unproductive or disgruntled low-level workers to stay at the company for more than a few years. (kindle loc 5164)

The book's at its best when it dives into Amazon's logistical push and stuff that while you know had to happen behind the scenes, isn't widely reported. It's at its worst when it discusses Blue Origin (which is unrelated to Amazon) or Jeff Bezos' affair and divorce (which is subject to a lot of attention). I found it enjoyable and a compelling read, with the boring stuff easily skipped one chapter at a time.

I think there are better books about Amazon (e.g., Working Backwards), but still found this one worth reading.

Review: Hades (PC)

 In 2019, some colleagues of mine were raving about Hades. Not being willing to pay full price, I waited for a sale, and when Epic Games offered it for $16.24 and stacked a $10 coupon to bring it down to $6.24, I decided to pay for it, since the Playstation version was unlikely to drop its pricing for Hades to that level for at least a few years.

Hades is touted as a rogue-like. Randomly generated dungeons, limited number of lives, and restricted saving to prevent save-scumming. You start out with one weapon type, and each time you go through the dungeon, you have the chance to grab power-ups that can be used to unlock weapon types, special abilities, and even add rooms to the dungeons that have a chance to aid you rather than hurt you. As you progress, you unlock conversations with various characters, eventually being able to stack special effects as favors from Gods, and tackling tougher and tougher levels until you manage to hit and beat the final boss.

I'm sure other people are better at the game: it took me 51 runs before I managed to beat the boss. As you play the game you learn which effects stack well with which other effects, and which choice of weapons (you're incentivized to change weapons through a mechanic that rewards you with more persistent reward bonuses) demand the selection of which abilities, and when to pick trade-offs like increased wealth vs better power-ups.

The reason this game drew me in while other rogue-likes didn't is the increasing impact of your power-ups over time. As you accumulate them, you make further progress, even if you're unskilled at controller movement and couldn't dodge an attack to save your life. This meant that I was more and more willing to do another run since I knew it wouldn't be wasted. Furthermore, the meta-game was deep enough that I started approaching it as a resource allocation problem.

The kids loved the story enough that they became more interested in Greek mythology as a result. So now they know the names of Poseidon, Hermes, Thanatos, Eurydice, Orpheus, and Demeter. Many people claim that video games have no educational value, but my guess is those people are also the same people who claimed that comic books have no value, yet I impressed my GP teacher first day at RJC by naming the president of the USA during WW2, something I learned by reading a Batman comic.

I did the game through 10 defeats of Hades, and I still found it fun enough to want to keep playing. That's rare! I hardly ever revisit games that I "finished".

The game was fun, and I hardly ever finish games, so that means I'll put a recommended tag on this.

Review: Black Ships Before Troy

 I read on some website that Black Ships Before Troy was a good retelling of The Iliad by Rosemary Sutcliff.  I checked it out of the library since the copy that was illustrated by Alan Lee was long out of print and it was listed as a children's book. My kids ignored it until they started playing Hades, whereupon they suddenly became interested in Achilles, Aphrodite, Zeus, and other members of the Greek mythology. They even started calling Black Ships Before Troy the Hades book.

The art was not up to the standard I expected from Alan Lee. The story is well written, if simplified, but the content of the Iliad was unabridged. That means it's all there, the adultery, the horrific violence, cruelty, and inexplicable behavior (some of which is attributed to the gods). I read a couple of chapters a day to the kids, sometimes wincing as I did so, but they took it all in with aplomb.

I have no patience for poetry, so am unlikely to ever read The Iliad. If you're like me, this is by far the most approachable version and it's uncensored. Enjoy!

Review: Who Gets In And Why - A Year Inside College Admissions

 Who Gets In And Why is a book about the perennial topic of interest amongst Asian parents - college admissions. It takes a pragmatic, market-oriented approach to college, and basically divides colleges into Buyers and Sellers.

Sellers are the brand name colleges that everybody knows the names of, with big endowments and no problem getting students who are accepted to enroll. What this means is that those colleges do not have to discount their tuitions, and even if you got in, the price tag might be higher than you expect from all the marketing you hear about "Need-Blind" admissions:

the euphoria of Wellesley’s acceptance was followed by the disappointment of its financial aid offer. Grace didn’t receive a dime. In my terms, Wellesley is a seller. Nearly half of the students who are accepted end up enrolling. It’s prestigious enough and desirable enough that four out of every ten undergraduates pay its $75,000 annual price tag. As a result, financial aid from its $2.1 billion endowment is based mostly on need. (kindle loc 3664)

Buyers, on the other hand, can't count on a high number of accepts attending, and don't have huge endowments:

 Compare, for example, two private universities in upstate New York. Colgate University, with a sticker price of $72,000 per year, accepts just over one-quarter of applicants and spends less than 1 percent of its financial aid on merit-based discounts. Colgate is a seller. But just up the road in Troy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, with a nearly identical sticker price, spends one-quarter of its institutional aid budget on merit-based aid. Yet both schools attract top-tier students with average ACT scores of 32...Buyer institutions don’t “craft” an incoming class the way sellers do. Buyers “make” their class by enticing students to apply, usually through an application process that is as simple as posting to Instagram. Then they enroll students by offering hefty discounts on their sticker price using what are euphemistically called merit scholarships. One of the schools at the fair, Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, hit their enrollment target of 640 incoming students in 2019 only by offering discounts that averaged around 70 percent. With that coupon, the typical freshman paid around $14,000 of Susquehanna’s advertised $48,000 sticker price for tuition. (kindle loc 840-849)

 Effectively, the entire college game in the USA is rigged in favor of the elite colleges. Of course, what that means is that the entire process is as opaque as possible, with some schools trying to become sellers by trying to reject more applicants. As a result, you get more students applying to more colleges, and that drives down admission rates:

Several urban universities, including New York University, Boston University, and the University of Southern California, also transformed themselves from locally focused commuter schools to international brands. This re-sorting is largely why today’s admissions process seems so intensely competitive and anxiety-ridden to parents who went to college in the 1980s. It’s not that there are so many more top-notch students applying to college; it’s that the top ones from Los Angeles and Chicago and Atlanta and Buffalo are now all applying to the same selective schools. And they’re applying to way more of them. (kindle loc 652)

 Selingo, of course, can't break out of his own American-centric and cultural blinders. For instance, he claims:

When the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans in 2019 about eight admissions criteria colleges should consider, grades and test scores topped the list, by far, well above athletic ability, race, or first-generation and legacy status. The reality is that by using only those two measures there are simply many more qualified applicants than there are spots at any selective school. Think about this: of the 26,000 domestic applicants for admission to the Class of 2019 at Harvard, 8,200 had perfect grade-point averages in high school, 3,500 had perfect SAT math scores, and 2,700 had perfect verbal scores. But Harvard had only about 1,700 spots to offer. (kindle loc 1379)

But of course, that's completely artificial: an examination of the way other countries' university system does admits, for instance, would indicate that the problem  is with the lack of nation-wide standardized testing that's rigorous. Few parents in China or India (or even Canada or Germany) would complain about their admissions process the way Americans complain about theirs. Their examination standards are high, and hardly anyone ever scores a perfect score on their exams. In fact, at the end of the book Selingo finally admits that the US system is inferior in both social equity and in the social goal of actually education all students who can contribute to society with the benefit of a college education:

In the United States, prestige in higher education is measured by how many students a university rejects. While the philosophy on Wall Street is that growth is good, within higher education the prevailing wisdom is that increased size comes at the expense of academic quality and reputation. But that philosophy isn’t shared across the globe. In Canada, for instance, the three most-prominent universities—the University of Toronto, McGill University, and the University of British Columbia—enroll nearly 150,000 undergraduates. That’s more students than the top twenty-five U.S. universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings combined. Even as the number of full-time undergraduates at U.S. colleges and universities has grown, enrollment at the nation’s most-selective and elite institutions has barely grown at all. There have been a few, modest exceptions. Stanford enlarged its freshman class in 2016 by about a hundred students. Yale expanded the class entering in 2017 by about two hundred students, the first expansion at Yale in forty years. They should expand the size of their incoming classes even more, and so too should the rest of the Ivy League and other top universities. (Kindle Loc 3993)

 There's a lot of detail in this book, some of which has also been leaked in recent years especially about legacy admits, the Asian penalty, and why athletic admissions are much more of a sure thing than regular applications:

For athletes, getting into a selective school is a matching game played with coaches rather than a lottery played with the admissions office. Athletes and coaches must first find each other and be a good match. Once that happens, the coach becomes the applicant’s guide and advocate, assisting him through the admissions process...Georgetown allocates about 158 slots out of 1,600 in its first-year class to coaches in twenty-two sports. Bucknell holds 170 slots out of about 970 seats in the class. The University of Virginia earmarks 180 slots out of 3,700 spaces in the class...At Amherst, another 60 to 90 admissions spots go to “coded” athletes with top academic qualifications, but who the report noted are “admitted at a much higher rate than the general admission rate” for nonathletes with similar qualifications. In all, that means Amherst dedicates somewhere around 157 admissions spots to athletes a year—when the total incoming class is only about 490 students. By making room for so many athletes, Amherst makes it so much harder for everyone else to get in. It rejects nearly 9,000 students from a pool of 10,000 applications. Like most elite colleges, Amherst is trying to become more racially and socioeconomically diverse. But its athletic teams are largely white and wealthy...no hook was stronger in assisting the prospect of an applicant than athletics. The study revealed that minority and legacy applicants got a thumb on the scale, while athletes received a whole fist. If the average applicant had a 40 percent chance of admission to one of the schools based solely on test scores and other variables, that student’s probability for getting in skyrocketed to 70 percent if he was an athlete. In other words, an athlete was about 30 percentage points more likely to be admitted than a nonathlete with the same academic record. (kindle loc 2377-2447)

And for those who're eyeing this approach, Selingo notes:

 The fastest growing high school sports for boys are fencing, volleyball, and lacrosse; for girls, it’s lacrosse, fencing, and rifle. (kindle loc 2437)

 All I can say is with this amount of insanity in the process, it's astonishing that US colleges still have the reputation they do, rather than becoming denigrated as the cesspool of corruption and outright bribery that they actually are.

In any case, the book was great and if you have kids who might attend college, it provides good tips and interesting insights.

Review: The Sandman Audible Audiobook

 I was skeptical of Amazon producing The Sandman as an audio book. Graphic novels are notoriously visual mediums if well written, and eliminating the visuals would be crippling, I thought. I expected a pale shadow of the original book, with much of the story abridged.

I was never so glad to be wrong. The soundscape presented is lush, and the story is completely unabridged, matching my memory of the graphic novels, and eliminating none of the kitschy DC Superhero references and cameos. The voice actors are great, and Gaiman himself serves as the narrator. The audio production was so good that I found myself saving episodes for the early hours of the morning so I could plug both earbuds in to get the full experience, rather than trying to listen to it in the car. Given that I treat most audio productions as multi-tasking fodder, this is high praise indeed.

The first act is a great deal, covering the first 20 issues of the graphic novels (the first 3 books as originally published as paperbacks). Gaiman wrote additional description of scenes that were provided as pure visuals. What's great is that unlike a comic book, where your eyes might slide over important details in the picture on first reading, Gaiman's additional descriptive narration ensures that you cannot miss details that he considered important.

I have friends who cannot read comics either because they're visually impaired, or because the skills required to read comic books is something you can't easily pick up as an adult for many. (It astonished me when people told me that they couldn't figure out which panel came next on a page) To those people, I can recommend The Sandman audible edition as an excellent production worthy of its runtime.

Highly recommended.

Review: The Comeback

 The Comeback is a biography of Greg LeMond, the only American to win the Tour de France (all subsequent American winners having been disqualified for doping). I was familiar with parts of the story, but found the book compelling in its centering of the story around the 1989 Tour, which was won by LeMond by 8 seconds, the closest margin in tour history.

The story covers both LeMond and Fignon, but covers LeMond's childhood and rise in American cycling in much more detail, and of course his hunting accident which nearly cost him his life and ended with a few pellets of shotgun shots in his heart. It's clear that so much of unenhanced performance cycling is reliant on genetics - while LeMond was a kid winning races, his father, despite only taking up cycling because of his son, also won races as a senior, keeping up with and placing high amongst men in his 20s while he was in his 30s.

The book described with attention and detail the tenseness in LeMond's first victory in 1986, when Hinault was favored to win:

That night the Tour director, Jacques Goddet, walked up to Greg and his family at the dinner table. He congratulated Greg and said how happy he was to see an American win the Tour. Then his eyes darkened. “Be careful,” he said. “There are many who do not want you to win.” Goddet told Greg he would do all he could to protect him; but he could do only so much. “Watch your bottles,” he said. “Watch everything.” (Kindle Loc 2544)

No story of LeMond's victories would be complete without describing the rise of EPO, which made the Peloton's speed faster and faster. Daniel de Vise, the author, claims that this accounts for LeMond having won his final two victories without having won a single stage in one case. Of course, maybe his getting shot full of shotgun shells might have more to do with it --- LeMond so genetically gifted that his VO2 Max was an astounding 93, while Lance Armstrong's was 79:

Still seeking a medical explanation for his maladies, Greg consulted with one doctor after another. Finally he saw a sports doctor who was well acquainted with the peloton. “Greg, there’s nothing wrong with you,” the doctor said, according to Greg. He gave Greg the name of a prominent European colleague, a name synonymous with doping. “You need to contact him,” the doctor explained, “because if you’re not on EPO, you don’t have a chance.” (kindle loc 4475)

Doping does affect race results --- people's bodies are affected by doping differently, so the winners would be different if doping was legalized. But the story of occasional professional cyclists who died in their prime (because racers were still learning how to dope safely) probably meant that some died who wouldn't have if doping was legal and had to be done in the open, subject to safety standards. Of course, that means that the sport would no longer be the same, and people wouldn't consider sporting winners to be heroes, but I've always considered that a dumb thing to do.

Regardless, the book was compelling reading and full of great stories. Recommended.

 

Review: Eternals by Neil Gaiman and John Romita

 After watching The Eternals, I decided to read Neil Gaiman's reboot of the original Jack Kirby comics. Lots of people worship Jack Kirby, but I could never get over his rendering of human beings (or in this case, humanoids). All his characters have a blocky look, and his women all look like the same person.

It's not surprising that Gaiman's plot is a lot more sophisticated than the Disney movie. He takes the Sprite character and takes him to its logical conclusion, and drives the entire story against the backdrop of the Eternals all having lost their memories. Some of it, of course, might have been Gaiman reprising Alan Moore's run on Miracleman (Gaiman would later go on to a final run of Miracleman), but at least it doesn't insult our intelligence.

The big nit I have is that the powers exhibited by The Eternals (with the exception of Sersi) is nowhere close to being interesting or unique. But that comes from the source material, not Gaiman.

Usually, the book is more interesting than the movie, but in this case, I'd say that the movie is quite a bit better than even Gaiman's interpretation of the source material.

Review: A Natural History of the Future

 A Natural History of The Future is an ecologist's view of the world, and it's the best introduction to ecological thinking that I've read. The idea that Rob Dunn has, is to introduce the reader to laws of the natural world (that are patterned after the laws in physics) that describe certainties about the biological/ecological world that enable us to predict what will happen over time.

The introduction is great, pointing out that the first research done into organism classification and thinking happened in Sweden. Sweden was unusual in that the diversity of life was actually very low, and the very human bias made the original ecologists focus on things that they cared about, like plants and animals, when much of the biomass of the planet actually exists in the form of insects and micro-organisms. The result was that when Terry Erwin visited the rainforest and collected specimens, he found 1200 new species living in just one type of tree. This blew people's mind, basically noting that the number of unclassified species far out-number the classified species on the planet.

The rest of the book covers these laws, such as the law of escape, which is that when an organism escapes its natural predators and parasites, it will multiply and thrive. He points out that humanity in the temperate zones effectively escaped their predators such as malaria, hook worms, and other parasites, and ominously notes that our warming of the global environment is expanding the range of those parasites and their agents (mosquitoes). The liberal in me notes that in the USA the first places to suffer the re-emergence of those agents are Texas and Florida.

There's the law of evolution, with the most prominent example being antibiotic resistance amongst microbes. Here, the prognosis for humanity isn't as bad as you might imagine. It turned out that the agricultural companies producing transgenic crops have a solution: plant the transgenic crops next to sacrificial non-transgenic crops. The pests and parasites that prey on the crop would preferentially feed on the non-transgenic crops, diluting the gene pool of any transgenic-resistant crops and preventing the rise of widespread transgenic resistance. Of course, capitalistic farmers would not heed those prescriptions and within a few generations those transgenic crop pastures would turn into hotbeds of transgenic resistance. 

All in all, the book is full of great concepts, new ideas, and a very good perspective that no matter what humanity does, we might well remove ourselves and our mammalian friends from the planet, but life on the planet will not be wiped out. He points out that there are already microbes that thrive in extremely hot, acidic, and salty conditions and cannot wait to take over the planet once humanity has made the atmosphere and ecosystem more friendly to them.

Very sobering and well worth your time. Recommended.

Review: When We Cease to Understand the World

When I was an undergraduate, I attended Kathy Yelick's "Denotational Semantics" graduate student seminar. There was a section discussion when people puzzled over the Y-combinator. On that day, I explained it as follows: when you want to write a recursive function, write it as though you had recursion as a native construct, and then at the end, wrap it with a Y. That's how you use it. (The lazy evaluation would expand on it as necessary when supplied with a concrete argument) One of the graduate students, not sure he understood what it meant, raised his hands and said, "Is that understanding sufficient to get us through the final exam?" Concrete manipulation vs intuitive understanding has always been a part of science and mathematics --- once you have a tool, it doesn't matter whether you understand how it was made as long as you know how to manipulate it. But of course, many people would disagree, and claim that if you don't understand how the tool works you don't know it. That's what this book is about.

When We Cease to Understand the World is a fictional account of various scientists and mathematicians: Karl Schwarzchild Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger. It also includes mentions of Albert Einstein. While the mathematical theories are real, the events are made up, though how much I did not do the research on.

The book covers not mostly the mathematics and the science (though there's some explication and exposition), but the idea of what it must be like making a discovery that did not make sense at that time. It's also a reflection of the scientific and mathematical enterprise:

it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. (pg. 187)

Of course, I vehemently disagree with the book's premise and conclusions. Being able to exploit a quantum property means you do understand it.  That's the way science and engineering works. Just because you cannot manipulate the technology without tools (i.e., have an intuition about a system) doesn't mean you don't understand it. This sort of approach to thinking, science and technology is why we continue to have science denialists, and lots of people suffering from Dunning-Krueger.

The book showed up on a lot of "best of the year" series, but I'm afraid I cannot condone it for its conclusions. Get your science from the non-fiction section of the library or bookstore please!

Review: The Science of Sci-Fi

 I came to The Science of Sci-Fi with high hopes. I'm a science geek and I enjoy science fiction, so putting them together sounds great. The first two episodes start off with a refresh on typical physics topics like relativity and gravity, so I thought it was a good start. But when the science fiction dissections happened I found them kinda obvious. You don't really need a "great courses" lecture series to go over what Erin MacDonald talked about. And she didn't cover really good science fiction.

I thought Physics of the Impossible was a much better read.

Review: This is your mind on plants

 This is your mind on plants is Michael Pollan's second book about his experiments with drugs. Two of the drugs, opium/opiates and mescaline aren't drugs I've ever used, and one of them, caffeine, is of course popular and easy to get, and even legal.

The first article about opium isn't actually very much about opium. It's about how he grew poppies, and then discovered that even the act of growing poppies is subject to legal problems. Fortunately, his publisher (Harper's) indemnified him against legal action, but most of this section of the book that I can remember is about how much trouble you can get simply by publishing an article about how to grow poppies, extract the seed pods, and then brew an opium-infused tea with it. The tea does give you a sense of satisfaction and elimination of pain, and apparently can be addictive.

The section on Caffeine is nothing you haven't heard about. Pollan makes a big deal out of quitting coffee, and then digresses into the history of caffeine, and attributing the rise of caffeinated drinks like coffee or tea as changing Western civilization. I can believe it, since the drink of choice before that was alcohol (not covered in the book), but I think he made way too much of a big deal out of it. I've quit coffee a few times and it was never a big deal. As an addictive substance it's pretty mild.

The last section is about mescaline/peyote, a cactus flower that's used in native American rituals. This drug sounds intriguing, as what it does is produce a hyper-awareness of yourself and your surroundings for up to 12 hours. I've had moments like at (during crucial interviews or other high intensity events), but I can imagine that if you don't regularly put yourself in those situations it would be a novelty.

I enjoyed the book. I found it much more readable than How to Change Your Mind, which I bounced right off of. 

Review: Self-Made Man

 I ran across Self-Made Man from an unusual answer on Quora where the author of the answer described Norah Vincent as a Lesbian who thought that men had it better, and then decided to become one for a year, and the experience taught her that men lived in such a harsh world that she had a nervous breakdown at the end of her research. With that kind of an intro I had to check the book out of the library and read it.

I really enjoyed the book because of the amount of dedication she put into it. She got professional teachers to teach her how to walk like a man, put on a disguise (like a reverse Clark Kent, when she put on her glasses, people believed that she was a man), and got a voice coach to teach her how to speak like one too. She lifted weights to the point where her shoulders were broad enough that she could pass as a man. She wrote that she was a tomboy growing up, but despite that when she visited a monastery and lived there even the monks thought her alter-ego (named Ned) was gay!

Ned went to places and met with people that I never did. S/he went to a bowling club that was made up of mostly blue-collar workers, made friends with them, and listened to their concerns and became their buddy. Despite being bad at bowling, her team put up with her and didn't get too upset when she flubbed game after game. But of course, being men, they had to give her tip after tip. At the end of her research with them she did tell them that she was a woman, and to her surprise, one of them started defending gay people after that. She attended strip clubs but found them boring, and even paid for a lap dance out of curiosity.

Her time at a monastery was interesting. The monks decided she was gay and thought she was falling in love with one of the other monks, and warned her off! I found that hilarious. When she revealed that she was a woman at the end of the stay, they were happy to forgive her, and she noted that for one of the monks, his attitude towards her didn't change at all! She wrote that he was the only person throughout her research he was the only one whose attitude didn't change with her gender.

Her last two research  projects were a sales job selling entertaining books and a men's retreat. It was very clear that at her interviews people wanted very different displays from men than from women. She stated that she was expected to exaggerate, brag about how good she was, etc. At the men's retreat, she realized how broken the men who attended such things were --- they couldn't talk about their feelings, and needed social support to be able to hug each other. After that, she had her nervous breakdown.

Overall, I thought the book was a sympathetic look at the life of men. From a young age we tell boys that they don't cry, and at some point we beat the vulnerability out of them. But what do you expect from a society that expects men to enlist in the selective service? But of course that makes men a mystery to many women, and it takes an unusual one to want to pierce that veil of gendered ignorance. I applaud Vincent and can recommend this book.

Review: The Order of Time

 I've read previous books by Carlo Rovelli, but didn't seek out The Order of Time, until I noticed that Bendict Cumberbatch, who somehow manages to get all these roles playing smart people. I enjoyed his voice in various movies I've seen him in, so I checked it out from the library.

The opening chapters of the book covers the usual stuff about time: entropy, the laws of thermodynamics (including a visit to Boltzmann's grave), as well as an introduction to relativity (which plays a very strict relationship to time). I love the metaphors and similes used throughout the book to describe physics, and Cumberbatch does such a good job enunciating and reading it, that I played the book back at 1.0 speed, rather than my preferred 1.3x. 

Right in the middle of the book he declares that time is an emergent property of increasing entropy, rather than key to the fundamental laws of physics. I'm not sure I buy that, but I lack any better ideas.

Regardless, I enjoyed the book, it's a short read, and the lyrical descriptions themselves are well worth listening to, regardless of whether you appreciate the actual material. Recommended.

Review: Evolution Gone Wrong

 Evolution Gone Wrong is the book about humanity's poorly designed bodies.  This is such a good genre of books, that I could read multiple books like this and not get tired of it. It's the perverse side of the usual self-congratulatory books about how well designed our bodies are.

The book covers diverse topics such as the shape of our jaw and why we have too many teeth for the size of our jaws (answer: the evolutionary path of teeth and jaws are different, and post-agricultural revolution jaws are smaller, since cooked food doesn't require as much chewing and jaw strengthening exercises so our jaws continued shrinking). It covers why humans choke on food (the larynx is lowered so the humans can speak to each other), and myopia:

Children who spend greater chunks of their day outside have a lesser risk of developing myopia than children who spend their days inside. It doesn’t matter how they spend their time outside. The outdoorsy kids in the studies spent as much total time on screens as the indoorsy kids. They didn’t have to be kicking a soccer ball or climbing a tree. Even if they were playing around on their phones, as long as they were doing it outside, they were less likely to become myopic. It is a shocking result given the total buy-in to the eye-strain hypothesis. (kindle loc 865)

What's interesting is the study on sleep, indicating that even Chimpanzies make the bed:

 They sampled 1,844 chimpanzee night beds (take a second to appreciate that large sample size) and discovered that chimps used the same type of tree to build a nest in 73.6% of cases. Interestingly, the preferred tree made up only 9.6% of the trees in the forest. In other words, the sleepy chimps were not grabbing branches at random and knocking out shoddy, makeshift beds. They were being selective about their mattress materials. The sleep researchers also analyzed the properties of the preferred trees. In the article they published in the journal PLOS ONE, they note that the most coveted type of tree was a species of ironwood that “was the stiffest and had the greatest bending strength” of all the options for bedding materials available to the chimps. So chimps go for mattresses with some give, but ones that are also stable and firm. (kindle loc 2380)

One interesting conclusion is that stiff beds don't actually do as well as medium beds for providing good sleep, which is counter intuitive. The author spends a half chapter pointing out that you can tell which parts of the bodies are maladapted for modern living by looking at medical schools. For instance, dentists don't go to medical school because the demand is so high that society puts dentists directly to dental school. The same goes for podiatrists.

 Any anatomical area that needs its own entire branch on the medical tree clearly troubles a great number of people, as we saw with all the problems covered in the first section of the book. (kindle loc 1714)

The final part of the book covers our reproductive dysfunction:

 Dogon women experience, on average, roughly 100 total menstrual cycles in their lifetimes (the mean in the study was 109 and the median was 94) and birth, on average, 8.6 children. Those numbers are strikingly different from what women experience who are not practicing natural fertility. Strassmann estimates, based on data from other researchers, that it is not unusual for modern American women to go through as many as 400 menstrual cycles in their lifetimes. (kindle loc 2568)

An interesting section covers why women menstruate at all. For one thing, the relationship between fetus and the woman's body isn't a completely friendly one:

 Horse and pig fetuses, for example, do not burrow very aggressively into the womb. The membranes surrounding the fetus are several layers of tissue removed from the maternal blood supply. There is still maternal–fetal conflict in those species, but not the same degree of conflict seen in species where the fetus digs in further. Dogs and cats are somewhere in the middle. Their fetal tissues start to invade the maternal tissues but are still distanced somewhat from the maternal blood vessels. In the most aggressive version of placentation, the fetus roots in, like a mole into dirt, and snuggles right up against the blood vessels of the mother. You can probably guess which type of fetuses humans ended up with. We got the uberaggressive model. And again, we see the comparative approach pay off in solving this riddle of why SD evolved. The animals that exhibit SD and menstruation are also the ones with the most invasive fetuses. Some scientists think SD evolved as a preemptive degree of protection against a hyperinvasive fetus. The logic goes that a woman gets ahead of the game and builds in some extra protection before the vampire-fetus arrives so that her unborn child does not completely suck her dry. After all, if you know a vampire is coming to your quaint, remote village, it makes sense to start beefing up the defenses of the village before the little bloodsucker gets there. Get the garlic planted, the stakes sharpened, and the mirrors shined in preparation. (kindle loc 2751)

 There's even a great section on why Asians are more prone to diabetes at the same body weight compared to European-Americans.

All in all, it's a fun book, written with humor, and keeps you engaged while reading. Recommended!

Review: How Democracies Die

 How Democracies Die was published in January 2018, two years before the January 6th, 2020 insurrection. I mention this because if you read this book, you're getting a rosy-eyed view of the prospect for American democracy, while a realistic view would note the events after January 6th, and realize that things are far worse than what this book describes.

The book has a major thesis, which is that the main guardrails of democracies isn't the constitution, the institutions, the rule of law, or the practice of elections. The main guardrails are social norms that cause political parties to respect the conventions of a democratic society to practice forbearance, not using every tool available to legally win, but respecting the spirit of elections.

Well, from 2016-2020, the USA elected a norm-breaking president. But the authors point out that even  before Trump, the Republicans have long been on a path to delegitimize the opposition, and are now at a point where any election they didn't win is declared to be fraudulent. If things continue down this path, the authors predict that there's a good chance that an authoritarian takeover of the American government is imminent. The authors point out previous instances in history (such as the events prior to the civil war) of breakdown in society, and point out that the compromises that gave Americans back a civil democracy were achieved by agreeing to deny civil rights to minorities and maintaining white supremacy as the policy for the country.

Is there any hope that American democracy can recover? The authors say yes:

A refounding of America’s major center-right party is a tall order, but there are historical precedents for such transformations—and under even more challenging circumstances. And where it has been successful, conservative party reform has catalyzed democracy’s rebirth. A particularly dramatic case is the democratization of West Germany after the Second World War. At the center of this achievement was an underappreciated development: the formation of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) out of the wreckage of a discredited conservative and right-wing tradition...The rebuilding of German conservatism, of course, followed a major catastrophe. The CDU had no choice but to reinvent itself. The question before Republicans today is whether such a reinvention can occur before we plunge into a deeper crisis. Can leaders muster the foresight and political courage to reorient what has become an increasingly dysfunctional political party before further damage is done, or will we need a catastrophe to inspire the change? (Kindle loc 3122-3148)

I don't know about you, but that slim hope is just grasping at straws. If it took defeat during a major war and having the country divided up by foreign powers to get the German right-wingers to become reasonable people I'm not hopeful for the future.

Well, the book's a downer, but you'd have to be blind and not paying attention if the events of the past few years haven't alarmed you. In that sense the book's well worth reading.