Review: Spiderlight

 Spiderlight is Adrian Tchaikovsky's high fantasy novel. It's revolves around the small D&D dungeon party (complete with cleric, thief, paladin, ranger, and wizard) who attempts to rid the world of its current lord. The complication, for anyone who knows Tchaikovky's work, is that they need the help of a spider being to do it.

Most of the adventure is fun, with plot twists and unexpected (and expected) events turned on its head, including meeting people in inns, as well as an unexpectedly genre defying climax and conclusion that is a more than competent payoff for making it to the end of the book.

The characters are a bit cliche, and while they do develop a little bit, sometimes it feels as though they develop for purposes of the plot, rather than being organic.

Nevertheless, it's an easy short read that's worth your time. Recommended.

Putting together my Roadini

 After I broke my Ti frame in January, I decided that I should get a backup road bike. Anyone who's broken 2 titanium frames in around 12 years should probably have more than 1 road bike. Or at least, anyone who was completely unhappy about having to ride his mountain bike around for 2 months should have a backup.

I settled on the Rivendell Roadini. Other bicycles that were considered were either a Rock Lobster custom steel frame (and fork), or a R&E cycles Rainier. Both would have cost more, and while a A Homer Hilsen was available in May, I finally decided against that as well, not because of the cost, but because it used 135mm spacing and I only had 130mm wheels.  The Roadini had downtube shifters and I decided that I might as well take advantage of them.  I've had a long history of liking the way Grant Peterson's designs ride, and even though prices went up to $1300, considering the bike came with a headset, fork, and seatpost, I was happy to return to the Rivendell fold, after I'd sold my Heron Touring bike way back in 2008.

While waiting for the Roadinis to arrive, I built up or scavenged the parts:

• 26mm handlebar sitting around in the garage, probably from an older tandem or road bike
• Shimano DuraAce rear wheel (back before I built a new rear wheel with the white industries hub)
• Ksyrium front wheel which Roberto gave to me before he moved to Seattle
• Shimano Ultegra SL triple crank which came from the Strong bike after that bike was reincarnated as a 1x
• Wolf-Tooth 38t drop-stop narrow-wide chainring (and the 6mm bolts to convert to 1x)
• M5100 11-51 cassette
• M5100 rear derailleur
• Dia Compe 11s downtube shifter
• SRAM 900 carbon brake levers
• KMC 11s chain (2)
• Nitto Tallux stem 10cm
• Shimano PD-ES600 pedals
• Shimano BC-9000 brake cables
• Reused old derailleur cable and housing (downtube shifters require shorter lengths, so you can cut off the frayed ends of older cables and reuse them!)
• Ritchey WCS saddle
• Kalloy seatpost (came with the frame)
• Tektro 559 brakes (retrofitted with kool-stop salmon pads)
• DuraAce BB
• Continental GP5000 700x30mm tires (on front)
• Michelin Pro Endurance 700x28mm tires (on rear)
• Blue Lug Shifter Boss Cover

When the frames arrived, I had a call with Will from Rivendell, and after realizing that I was going to put a drop bar on the bike he decided that the 54cm would work better for me than the 57cm frame. I didn't object --- a look at the geometry diagrams indicated that the 54cm was indeed a better match for my Strong ti frame than the 57cm would be. I would have a lot of seat post showing, but it looked normal to my 1990s-trained eyes.

The frame, fork, and headset weighed 7.1 pounds straight from Rivendell bicycle works. The bike after having built up and hung with a bottle cage and a topeak mini morph pump  (but no water bottle) came to 23 pounds even. By contrast the Strong ti bike was 20 pounds. (The Ti frame with headset and BB is 1540g), so just the frame and fork easily accounts for the 3 pound difference between bikes!

The frame  came without a frame cable guide, so I had to walk down to the local bike shop in the middle of the build to get a guide. To my surprise I had to use 2 KMC boxes of chains (these were the ones with 118 links each) --- I had to extract 2 links from the second box and use 2 sets of quick links to stitch enough chain to wrap around the derailleur and the biggest sprocket. The extra long 45cm chainstay definitely meant that you needed all that chain.

Shimano's 11s Duraace chains do come with 126 links, but I'm boycotting Shimano chains for being directional, which I consider to be an unnecessary burden --- you do not need a chain that can be put together wrong. Rivendell does sell 11s 130 link chains from FSA, but you can easily find SRAM PC-1110 11s chains for about $10 each, so in the long run that's probably cheaper.

I adjusted the stem height and the saddle height, and took it for a ride. The bike rides really nice off pavement, but I spent the first ride on the bike adjusting the seat post as it kept tilting up. It wasn't until I got home and used a really long handled allen wrench that I could torque down the seatpost clamp to the point where it would survive a ride of any length without coming out of adjustment. I suspect that I have to get a Thomson elite seatpost in order to get good behavior out of the bike.

To my disappointment, I measured the 700x30 tires on the front with calipers, and they came out to 27mm wide. The 700x28mm tires on the back did measure around 28mm.

The bike has a long front center, so as a result, even though my saddle to handlebar distance is the same on both bikes, my knee is significantly behind the pedal spindle on the Rivendell as compared to the Strong frame. In practice, this is no big deal, but I'd have to ride hard and compare both bikes to figure out if there's any difference in physiological efficiency.

Steel bikes have a riding resonance that's very different from titanium bikes. I find that when I ride a steel bike, there's a "ring" that emanates from the steel tubes of the  bike in a way that the titanium frame doesn't. It's not a good thing or a bad thing, but if you prefer steel frames that's most likely one of the reasons. Regardless, when I took the Roadini over the dirt road from Montebello over to Page Mill road, there was a surefootedness that definitely wasn't there on the titanium Strong frame. It could be the longer wheelbase or the wider tires. The bike, however, doesn't seem to climb as nicely standing up for short steep efforts --- it prefers for me to sit and spin. This might have something to do with the extra long chainstays.

The Diacompe shifter downtube shifter is responsive. A little nudge and the bike shifts. I have to over-shift a bit when shifting to lower gears. Again, it's something to get used to, but I definitely like how fast the bike shifts. The downtube shifter was a deliberate attempt to make the bike lighter, and to some extent I succeeded. Of course, that means that you have to move your hands low when you shift. Not a big deal, but you will shift less often.

When climbing, the Roadini feels fine. The "ring" I mentioned earlier offsets the heavier bike. Off pavement, the stability of the frame makes even deepish gravel feels rideable. Standing up though, the longer chainstays definitely makes you feel like the rear wheel is further away than on a shorter chainstay. Because Grant switched from a 73.5 head tube angle to a 72 head tube angle and increased the fork rake to 50mm, he was able to get the same geometric trail as my Carl Strong frame with a 73.5 head tube angle and 43mm rake. But the result of that change was that I have no toe-clip overlap. At low speed, I'd have to mount a much bigger tire or turn the wheel more than 90 degrees to get my toes to touch. Not that the toe clip overlap on the Strong frame ever bothered me --- I'm a good enough bike handler that touching the toes of my tire was just no big deal. But the Roadini can handle much larger tires and tighter turns at low speed as a result.

When descending, the Roadini is actually slower than my Strong frame. The extra 5mm of extra BB height doesn't feel as nice, and of course, I'm still not used to the bike so I may not be descending at my full potential.  I would later measure the BB and discover that it was 13mm higher off the ground than on my Strong --- 8 of those mm of additional height came from the tires! There are people who'd swear up and down that it's not humanly possible to feel the difference in BB height but for me the difference is night and day. I would later swap over the wheels from my Strong frame and with a 10.75" BB height the Roadini rides much better, so the increased BB height does affect how the bike feels quite a bit. With 25mm tires, the Roadini rides very nicely, but isn't as plush.

Upon braking, I was prepared for the longer armed Tektro 559 brakes to feel squishier, but they do not. They feel great and no worse than my standard reach caliper on my Strong frame. Part of it could be because I sprung for the super-expensive BC-9000 brake cables. I'd bought those because they got me over the free shipping limit for getting an extra pair of Specialized RECON 1.0 shoes. They were a little finicky to install but fortunately my cable needs were such that I had plenty of spare cable to screw up on. After using the Roadini for awhile I did a back to back comparison against my Strong frame and realized that I needed to do the same thing for my Strong --- the brakes felt so much better!

The SRAM 900 brake levers were great! I was leery at first since the Campy Record carbon brake levers were what were on my triplet and single, and I was worried that I wouldn't like the SRAM 900s. Turned out they're very comfortable. Even the strangely shaped levers that look like they're biased the wrong way turn out to be great.

Over time, as I rode the bike more, I got to appreciate the plush quality of the ride as well as the way it handles. Frequently riding the bike feels like riding on a leaf spring --- the bike removes chatter from rough roads and unpaved roads --- I set PRs coming down Fremont Older. I can definitely see myself riding the Stevens Canyon MTB track with a set of 700x38mm knobbies.

Needless to say, buying the Roadini was a good decision. It's given me sufficient data about how to get similar handling and correct some of the deficiencies of past designs, while giving me insight as to what I really like about bike geometry. After a week of riding I discovered a chip in the paint on the head tube which I didn't know how it got there. It's another reminder that I'm just not kind to bicycles and all sorts of damage appears that I don't know about. I want the frame to be lighter, not need paint, and I would like the BB drop to be lower, especially for using big tires. The chainstay could stand to be about 1cm shorter. But I'm not sure I'd change anything else about the bike!

I frequently have to remind myself that I'm very spoiled. I've ridden/test ridden many bicycles, but had the luck to ride a Grant Petersen designed bike early on, and have essentially been riding a variant of one of his bikes for much of my adult life. If you've never ridden a Grant Petersen design you owe it to yourself to ride one. He's a legend for good reason. The Rivendell Roadini is sure to be sold out completely by the time you read this, but it's worth the wait!

Nelson Lakes Backpacking Trip

 I'd failed to take the kids camping this year. I actually had one organized the weekend before our Tour of the Alps, but I actually got sick a week before that and was on medication, and when the forecast called for rain I called it off since I didn't want to jeopardize a very expensive upcoming tour. So when Arturo suggested a High Sierra backpacking trip I signed up and so did Bowen and Boen. Boen, of course, is famous for changing his mind at random, so he eventually backed out, opting for a sleepover with a classmate instead. This actually would make my load lighter, so i didn't mind.

On Friday, we picked up Bowen from school, and immediately drove south towards Clovis. It was clear that traffic had resumed to pre-pandemic levels, and the carpool lane didn't help any. In Clovis, it was time to charge his car, and we had dinner at the Pieology next to the Tesla superchargers. We then drove to pick up the ranger permits, and found a campground near the road to camp for the night. The stars were pretty amazing.

The next morning, we drove the rest of the way to the trailhead, and repacked our gear --- we discovered that the 3 of us fit into the MSR Freelite, so Arturo could leave his tent behind. I decided to bring the hammock but not the sleeping accessories for it. This was a good thing because after the first mile it was quite clear that we had complete de-acclimated from altitude after our cycle tour, and would Bowen couldn't carry his sleeping bag and sleeping pad, so Arturo and I had to take those items out of his backpack and onto or into ours.

We had hoped to make it to the upper Nelson lakes, which by all accounts was quieter and had a better swimming platform, but it was clear that Bowen wasn't going to make it. After an hour and a half we made it to the burnt patch, which was ugly but thankfully short and surprisingly well shaded.

From the burnt area it wasn't a long walk to Nelson Lake, but Bowen was whining. Fortunately once you got to the lake it didn't take us long to find an established campground that looked ideal -- sheltered, somewhat shaded, with an obvious cooking area. We pitched the tent, setup the hammock in ideal conditions, and then moved equipment around.

After that, we hiked to Upper Nelson, which as Arturo promised featured a nice granite entry into the lake for swimming.

The lake was impressively warm! I got in and swim hard expecting to be cold like in all Sierra lakes, but halfway across the lake I realized that while my feet were cold my arms weren't! As an experiment I flipped on my back and did a deadman's float and realized that the water in the first few inches of the lake were much warmer! So if you did a breast stroke on your back you could lay back and enjoy yourself. I stayed more than 10 minutes in the lake.

After that, we hiked around the lake and walked back to the camp. Bowen loved campfires and Arturo and he got going on the campfire and gathering firewood while I got to relax and finish the rest of the book I was reading in the hammock.

The next morning was nothing short of stunning when I woke up, with a beautiful reflection in the morning in the lake and mist rising from the water. Even in the cold it was worth it to walk around and take pictures. I made a cup of coffee and enjoyed reading in the hammock again.

After that, we made breakfast, broke down all the equipment, packed it away, and said goodbye to the lake and hiked out.

The hike backdown took about half an hour less than the previous day, but the last bit back to the parking lot was all uphill, and the whining started. Clearly 2 nights at altitude wasn't enough to acclimate us. But we got back to the car and drove back home, eating lunch in a local park on the way. All in all it was pretty good.

2023 Book Reviews

Books of the year for 2023 were chosen!

Non-Fiction

• The Betrayal of Anne Frank
• The Cuckoo's Egg
• The Story of the Tour de France 2019
• What If? 2
• Existential Physics
• Growing Up Human
• Lone Traveler
• Acceptance - A Memoir
• Reality is not what it seems
• A Bike Ride - 12000 miles Around The World
• Slouching towards Utopia
• Let My People Go Surfing
• Freedom to Learn
• The Beginning of Infinity
• How to Raise an Adult
• Song of the Cell
• Superfreakonomics
• Politics is for Power
• What We Owe The Future
• Ultimate High
• The End of the World is Just the Beginning
• Chip War
• Patient Zero
• The New Education
• Scam me if you can
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb
• Scientist - EO Wilson
• Dark Sun
• Volt Rush
• The People's Hospital
• Delicious
• American Prometheus
• This Will Never Work
• The Science of Storytelling
• The Rare Metals War
• The Knowledge Gap
• Outlive
• Elon Musk
• Going Infinite
• Two Wheels Good
• How We Learn
• The Fourth Turning is Here

Fiction 

• Spiderlight
• Mythos
• Troy
• Fairy Tale
• The Peripheral
• Farewell My Lovely (reread)
• Eye of the Dragon
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
• Young Jane Young
• The Storied Life of A.J. Filkry
• A Half-Built Garden
• Dispel Illusion
• Deep Secret
• Ra
• The Steerswoman
• The Sword in the Stone
• The Phantom Tollbooth
• The Outskirter's Secrets
• The Lost Steersman
• The Language of Power
• The Righteous Mind
• The Graveyard Book
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane
• The Mists of Avalon
• Stardust
• Odd and the Frost Giants
• Anansi Boys
• Ender's Game
• The John Varley Reader
• Fire & Hemlock
• Yellowface
• The Way Home
• Babel
• House of Suns
• The Poppy War
• Elder Race

Comics/Graphic Novels

• The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt
• Chivalry
• Through Open Doors
• Astro-City: Shining Stars
• Astro-City: Victory
• Bea Wolf
• Witch Hat Atelier 1-10
• Astro-City: Private Lives
• Astro-City: Lovers Quarrel
• Astro-City: Honor Guard & Reflections
• Astro-City: Ordinary Heroes
• The Killing Joke
• Blue Lock 1-10
• Fables 1-75
• Logicomix
• Attack on Titan 1-8
• Heartstoppers Vol 1-4
• American Born Chinese

Video

• King Arthur - History and Legend
• Theory of Everything
• Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach

Audio Books

• The Big Questions of Philosophy
• No Excuses
• The Sandman Act III
• Great Courses Gilded Age and Progressive Era
• Books that Matter: The Prince
• The World of JRR Tolkein

Review: The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt

 I checked out The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt from the library because lots of people kept referencing her with respect to the current state of the GOP, but I bounced off every book she wrote. If I was looking for an understanding of why she was so great, I was sorely disappointed.

The book does a good job relating the events of Arendt's life, from growing up, to encountering Martin Heidegger and becoming is lover, to her escape from Nazi Germany, to her time in a concentration camp and her escape to Portugal and arrival to the USA and becoming famous.

The book doesn't explain why she's considered amongst the smartest philosophers of her age, nor does it clarify how she thought about herself as a philosopher or as a political theorist. There's a scene where she meets Einstein, for instance, but there's no followup on what Einstein thought of the encounter.

The art was OK. It's nothing great, nor is it so bad that I'd consider it unreadable. It's just meh.

Books of the Year 2022

 This year I read about 81 books, which is more than a book a week. When you read this many books, it gets actually pretty hard to choose which books are the best. In the non-fiction category, I really thought A A Brief History of Equality was the most important, in terms of introducing ideas that I'd never thought about, and questioning the existing social orders (for instance, the unquestioning idea that corporations should exclude labor from their controllers)  It's not a fun book to read, since many parts of history are depressing, but neither are many of the books that cover the state of the world today.   For fun, I really enjoyed Self-made Man, a courageous, gender-swapping story of a woman who succeeded in passing off as a man and the observations she made of male society.

Another great book was Crying in HMart. The story was great and the description of Korean culture entertaining. I read it at almost the same time as Himawari House, which is easily the best graphic novel I read this year. If you have to choose, Himawari House is the better novel. But the best thing about books is you never really have to choose between two great books. Read both!

When it comes to fiction, the best book I read all year was Exhalation. That's cheating since it's a re-read. I would say the best new book was Inhibitor Phase. Alastair Reynolds comes back to the revelation space universe and I love it.

Audio Books played a huge part of my year this year. Easily the best production was The Sandman. I am still in awe that Amazon managed to reproduce a comic book in audio format. I have yet to see the Netflix series, but for it'd have to be ridiculously good to top the graphic novel.

Other honorable mentions for the book of the year: Amusing Ourselves to Death, Dying of Whiteness, and Science Fiction as Philosophy all immediately come to mind as being well worth the time.

I had a great year of reading, and I hope you did too!

Review: The Perfect Predator

 The Perfect Predator is a memoir of the author's successful attempt to shepherd her husband through a horrifying encounter with a multi-resistant bacteria. What comes through in the book is that both the author and her husband are adventurous in ways that make you wonder how they survived this long:

The few mosquito bites on the back of my thigh had started out as minor irritations. Several weeks later they were infected masses the size of golf balls, then baseballs. I kept telling the doctor that whatever it was, it was eating me. I could feel it feeding, especially at night. Occasionally, it hit a nerve and my leg would jump like a marionette being manipulated by a sadistic puppeteer. At such times, I would slap at my bulging thigh and the thing would lie dormant for a little while. The doctor thought I was nuts at first, but when a one-inch pupae with three double rows of epidermal spines suddenly emerged while I was on the examining table, he was stunned. Turns out I had been afflicted with an infestation of Dermatobium hominis, a botfly that ingeniously captures mosquitoes and lay its eggs on their underbelly. When the mosquito bites its host, the newly hatched botfly larvae crawl into the wound, feed on their host’s flesh, and then pupate. Yum (Page 241)

I expected the encounter with multi-drug resistant bacteria to be in some exotic location, and in fact, the Thomas Patterson first ends up in the hospital in Egypt. There, his wife Steffanie discovers that there's a pseudo cyst that's been in his body for goodness knows how long that's finally caused gastronomic distress. He goes from bad to worse and is medically evacuated first to Frankfurt, and then back to San Diego.

There's never a definitive answer as to where he picked up the multi-drug resistant bacteria, but the suspicion was clearly raised that it was likely to be in the Egyptian clinic where he was first diagnosed. What follows is an exercise in understanding what it takes to gain access to these phage therapies. First, you'd have to be capable of reading and searching through research papers. Secondarily, you have to be well known enough (Strathdee is an epidemiologist and is well known to the UCSD hospital system) that when you send e-mail to researchers and various approval agencies for compassionate use of a previously untested drug, the response is quick and in the affirmative. Then you have to get lucky. There were several places in the narrative where Patterson was declining and the doctors had to make a decision as to whether to proceed with phage therapy or to stop it. The decision to stop would have been fatal.

Phage therapy is pretty cool stuff, but it's definitely not a panacea --- the author describes having multiple teams at work searching for viruses that could infect and defeat the drug resistant bacteria. 2 teams came up with two cocktails of 4 phages each, that were then IV'd into the patient's body in various places. But the bacteria eventually became resistant to both cocktails of phages, resulting in another search for more viruses that could do the job. What finally finished it off was a combination of another set of phages along with an antibiotic (in becoming resistant to the first batch of phages the bacteria had lost some of its protection from antibiotics). The recovery still took years. You don't walk out of a 9-month stay in the ICU without consequences, but the authors eventually went back to their risk-taking lifestyle.

The book highlights how bad the post-antibiotic era is going to be. You're probably not socially connected to one of the best medical research centers in the world and get this type of treatment:

A post-antibiotic era. That’s how some of the world’s top health officials, including former CDC director Tom Frieden, describe the global threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). By 2050, one person could die from a superbug infection every three seconds each year, making AMR a more immediate threat to humankind than climate change (page 304)

There are many lessons in this book --- first about how important it is to have someone advocating on your behalf when you're in dire straits in a medical system. Second, I thought that medically affiliated people would be inclined to take less risks in travel. Clearly I'm wrong! Lastly, antibiotic resistant is a big deal. The author admitted to bringing cipro while travelling, and at the end admits that she was contributing to being part of the problem. 

The book is compelling, if harrowing reading. Well worth your time.

Review: Limited Wish

 Limited Wish is the sequel to Mark Lawrence's One Word Kill, which I enjoyed but only remembered to read when it was put on sale. Like that novel, it's written in a breezy style, easy to digest, but doesn't tie up as nicely as the previous book. The book picks up a few months after the events of the original book, and immediately dives into more Time Travel paradoxes while picking apart the happy ending the first book finished with.

The teenage angst and 3-sided romance aside, I thought the author did a poor job of presenting time travel this time, with lots of gobbledy gook and mumbo jumbo and of course, the breaking and entering of a nuclear facility facilitated by an unlikely time traveler.

The best part of the book was the author's depiction of D&D games, but it's not enough to carry the novel. I didn't exactly want my time back but I certainly wished I hadn't spent $2 in Amazon credits on it.

Review: Arbitrary Lines

 Arbitrary Lines is M Nolan Gray's book about zoning. It begins with the story of Sim City and how it gave the impression that zoning is the be-all and end-all of city planning, and then goes on to explain how zoning was created (and then promoted) by Berkeley California in order to successfully exclude Chinese laundries and other undesirable from otherwise high class neighborhoods. The book has an entire appendix in order to explain of what zoning is, and how it differs about environmental protection laws (on which Gray has nothing to say), or historic preservations.

The book covers the evils of zoning. You've probably lived it --- too few houses being built, insufficient density, urban sprawl, and car dependence. If you haven't lived it, then you definitely should read this book because he covers it better than I could in a summary.

What's most interesting about the book is the section on Houston, which is apparently the only large unzoned city in the USA. It turned out that zoning was put to a referendum there, and voted down not once, but multiple times, each time with the poorer people voting against it, indicating that citizens in a democracy can tell when the rich people are trying to screw them. The adoption of zoning in other cities throughout the nation was only because they were never put to a vote.

Eventually, Houston got out of the cycle of having to have repeated referendums on the topic of zoning by allowing the rich areas that really wanted zoning to have their cake. A district that wanted to impose rules on building could do so with a supermajority vote and then from then on all the onerous restrictions they want to impose on themselves would have to be made known to any buyers of property in that district, and the city would actually enforce those restrictions by refusing to issue permits and fining those who violate those restrictions.

The rest of the book is about how to get out from the culture of zoning. Since it's popular amongst the rich voters who own houses (by restricting the number of houses you drive up property values), it would seem hopeless. Gray suggests things like tying funding to the removal of zoning ordinances. That would definitely get people's attention. I can imagine Cupertino's Asian population (famously non-political until schools are involved) actually voting if education funding was increased in exchange for getting rid of zoning. So things aren't impossible, you just have to bribe enough people to make it happen.

The entire book taught me a ton of stuff I didn't know about zoning, and is short and easy to read. It's well worth your time. Recommended.

Review: Shimano PD-ES600

 My Shimano M520s have been the mainstay of my cycling pedals for years and years. They have wrench flats, last pretty much forever (suviving multiple titanium frames in the case of my single road bike), and are double-sided, letting me just stomp and go. When contemplating building a steel bike as a backup road bike, however, I found the Shimano PD-ES600 on sale for about $60 shipped. They come with SH51 cleats, but for reference just a pair of SH56 cleats cost about $19! One of the reviews I read said that the shoe's wider platform meshed nicely with the lugs on a MTB shoe to give a firmer connection with the pedal, which was enough (along with the 100g weight savings and the improved pedal clearance --- something to consider when your favorite frame geometry has an 80mm BB drop) to tip me over to purchase a pair.

When they arrived, I had to get out my allen wrenches in order to install them, as the pedals do not have wrench flats. I didn't need to change the tension on the pedals as the default felt right for me. The pedals are single-sided, which means you can't just stomp and go, but the firm connection definitely feels nice! After a week of riding with them on and off pavement, I went out and ordered a second pair. I tried those on the triplet for one long ride and a couple of commutes taking the kids to school an bought a 3rd pair for the roadini.  Interestingly enough, the difference is much less with my stiff-soled SIDI dominator than with my Recon 1.0s, indicating that it makes the biggest difference when your soles aren't as stiff. The single-sidedness can be a problem for some, but what I discovered was that my feet naturally find the correct side about 75% of the time --- this is because the spindle is just stiff enough that if you step down on the other pedal the alternate side will be in the correct side to receive a cleat --- the people who don't step down in order to start a bike (which is the correct method) would probably have much more trouble. The other 25%, I can tell by feel that the pedal is flipped over, and it's not a problem to flip it over without looking at the pedal. Even on gravel/off-road riding it was not a big deal. The lack of wrench flats probably bothers me more than anything else. The improved pedal clearance might also make a difference though to be honest since West Alpine road is closed I haven't had a chance to test it in extreme conditions --- note that pedal strikes never actually bothered me much anyway.

I wouldn't have paid list price for these ($100), but at $60 included taxes and shipping, these are a good deal. I'll stick with M520s for the mountain bike, and if I were riding the tandem triplet with a new cyclist I'd probably still go for the M520s but my sons and I are so coordinated by now that we can feel when I need to stop pedaling to flip over the pedals as needed (which hasn't been often), and on the triplet the extra firm connection feels even more needed! I ended up getting these for all 3 of my road bikes. My brother tried them once on my single and decided he wanted a pair as well! Here's another indication of how effective it is --- once I had them on all my bikes, I stopped switching to the super-stiff SIDI shoes whenever I went on a road ride, preferring my touring shoes instead!

Recommended. If you've been riding M520s, these are the first pedals that felt like a real upgrade.

Review: An Immense World

 An Immense World is Ed Yong's book about various senses in the animal kingdom. It's a surprisingly long book, covering how various animals see, smell, and feel very differently than we do. I read a short passage in it aloud to Boen about how a particular wasp could sting a cockroach in two places, one in its body, and one in its brain, in order to turn the cockroach into a zombie. Boen responded hugely positively to this and went around telling his friends about it.

The book is at its best when it covers senses that humans can't possibly have, such as echolocation (the book does describe a blind person who developed echolocation as a child), remote touch via electric field, sonar, and magnetic field detection senses. The book thoroughly describes how scientists involve prove the existence of those senses by manipulating them, and also explains why magnetic field detection is so hard to work with --- the earth's magnetic field is so weak that even hypothesizing how an animal could detect it is hard!

I enjoyed the book and thought it was worth reading, not just for the part about senses, but also some of the ancillary details about how marine mammals evolved and came to be so big. Recommended.

Review: Sci-Phi Science Fiction as Philosophy

 I saw Sci-Phi: Science Fiction as Philosophy as one of the great courses offering on Kanopy, and tried one lecture and was blown away. The lecturer, David Kyle Johnson, took apart Inception, analyzed it, demonstrated in detail the pieces that were self-contradictory, and demonstrated his thesis in the movie, while using the movie to ask the question about how it's possible to have knowledge in the face of multiple competing theories. And he did it all in 30 minutes, some of which was spent explaining the plot of the movie!

The rest of the 24 lecture course covers everything from Pacifism, Women's Rights, Free-Will, and other topics, using many movies/TV shows you may have heard of or watched. To my surprise I'd actually seen a lot of those movies, and the ones I didn't Johnson explains enough of what you didn't watch that you can follow along his points. Johnson is a great lecturer, clear, perfectly paced, and great to listen to. His logic is easy to follow, and his conclusions (or in some cases, lack of conclusions) made a lot of sense to me. I enjoyed how much of different philosophers' ideas, books, or statements made it into even the most kitschy science fiction.

Definitely worth your time. Look at the list of movies he analyzes and if those movies appealed to you, this lecture series will as well.

Review: Amusing Ourselves to Death

 Ezra Klein kept mentioning Amusing Ourselves to Death, so I had to check it out from the library. The book is a criticism of the television-oriented culture we find ourselves in, and compares it unfavorably with the age of print/age of rationality. In some ways, it's got a rosy eyed view of the age of rationality/age of print, since that coincided with much of the population enslaved and unable to read.

One of the interesting statements the books make is that the telegraph was in many ways just as bad as twitter is today:

the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford’s phrase. The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography. (kindle loc 1299)

He laments the introduction of photography, since once that became widespread and it was possible to distribute newspapers with photographs that are printed, the photograph naturally became much more popular than the printed word. Television, of course, combines the worst of both worlds, with the instant imagery transmitted across the globe.

In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials. For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada....no matter how grave any fragment of news may appear (for example, on the day I write a Marine Corps general has declared that nuclear war between the United States and Russia is inevitable), it will shortly be followed by a series of commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news, in fact render it largely banal. This is a key element in the structure of a news program and all by itself refutes any claim that television news is designed as a serious form of public discourse....You would try to make celebrities of your newscasters. You would advertise the show, both in the press and on television itself. You would do “news briefs,” to serve as an inducement to viewers. You would have a weatherman as comic relief, and a sportscaster whose language is a touch uncouth (as a way of his relating to the beer-drinking common man). You would, in short, package the whole event as any producer might who is in the entertainment business. The result of all this is that Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world...television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. (kindle loc 1623, 1789-1839)

You'll find yourself nodding away at the statements above, since American society does seem incredibly superficial and obviously obsessed only with the beautiful people. I'm the kind of person who'd much rather read a book than watch a documentary or video, so of course I would agree with Neil Postman. I think his analogy that Huxley's "Brave New World" is much more relevant us than George Orwell's "1984" is correct:

 What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. (kindle loc 2566)

 Postman, however, doesen't have any answers or solutions for us. His luke-warm proposal is that we education children to be able to distinguish between truth and lies. But of course we're not very good at teaching children in schools! Furthermore, it's not clear to me that even education can have much impact. For instance, you can know that something is an optical illusion, but your eyes still see that illusion and think it's real. You can watch a movie knowing that it's entirely fictional, but that won't reduce the emotional impact of the movie. In that sense, you can come away from the book quite pessimistic.

Regardless, the book makes many great points and is well worth reading. It was written before twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media, and yet managed to predict that these technologies are ultimately detrimental to civil society and our politics. Any book that can predict the future that far in advance should be on your must-read shelf.

Review: Language Families of the World

 I've enjoyed most of John McWhorter's work, so when I saw that Niniane's Goodreads mentioned The Great Courses' Language Families of the World, I searched for it and discovered that my library gave me access through Kanopy.

Kanopy has no download option, and the entire thing was on video, so I watched/listened to it on my FireHD tablet. The audio course definitely walks you through every language family in the world, and corrects any misconceptions you might have about (for instance) the relationship between writing systems and spoken languages. For myself, I used to say that Chinese had no grammar, since there's none of the conjugation, agreement, and prefix/suffix clauses found in Indo-European languages, but McWhorter points out that the numerical classifiers are indeed a form of grammar!

The course focuses mostly on spoken language, and I enjoyed the world tour of various languages, but wished that he spent more time on the details on how linguists discovered the family relationships between languages, and disentangled the difference between languages exchanging words versus being evolved. I learned that there's a language that doesn't have words for numbers!

All this is presented with McWhorter's usual sense of humor and personal history. I enjoyed every minute, even if my retention isn't as good as I wanted it to be. Recommended.

Review: Shokz OpenMove

 Shokz OpenMove is a set of open ear bone conducting headphones. These leave your ears open so you can still hear traffic, etc., so you can use them while cycling or running on the roads and still retain aural situational awareness. I'd been intrigued by them, so when Prime day sported a sale for these at under $60 I gave them a try.

The sound quality is reasonable, but not nearly as good as a single-ear Jabra 65t.  I used them for a video call and enjoyed the experience. They're not very comfortable under a helmet --- the bone conduction parts press against your temple. Ultimately, that's what caused me to end up returning these. If these had been waterproof to the point where I could use them swimming I might not have, but the swimming versions of these are $150 and weren't on sale during prime day.

Review: 84 Charing Cross Road

 84 Charing Cross Road is a collection of letters between Helene Hanff and the staff of Marks and Company, from right after the second world war until approximately 1970. Hanff is looking for cheap second hand books, and starts off by asking for some clean copies. The response from the book sellers and the exchange spread out like ripples in a pond, drawing in not just the staff members but also their families.

The exchanges are at times funny, flirtatious, poignant and literate, sometimes all 3 in the same letter. You see the rise in the standard of living in the UK in the mid 50s, where suddenly they tell her not to send them food any more, as they can now buy whatever they need. You see the lack of healthcare in the USA, where Hanff can no longer visit England as she has to pay her dentist.

The book ends somewhat abruptly, and upon reflection, it's also about the need to seize the day and travel and visit your friends while they're still alive, instead of living with your books and your work. Hanff, for instance, was a writer, and could have worked from anywhere in the world, yet never prioritized visiting the people who kept sending her books she asked for.

It's also a reminder of the times when real people would be the ones who'd pick books off the shelf and ship them to you. I remember once calling a bookstore and having the bookseller pick up the phone and upon hearing my name say, "Oh, you're the one buying those books with such taste and verve!" Of course, shortly after that they were overtaken by Amazon.com and interactions like that would never happen today.

The book is short, and the audio performance is amazing, with different actors representing each letter writer. Well worth your time.

Review: The Rider

 I'll admit that I can only watch bicycle racing in tiny youtube clips. The long form videos bore me to tears, but I'll happily read about bike racing any time. The Rider is Tim Krabbe's novel about a fictional bike race, but the protagonist of the novel is also named Tim Krabbe!

The book describes all the grandeur and pettiness of a bike race. Whether to work together to defeat a rival, whether it's more important that a rival lose than that you win. It also beautifully brings together the thoughts of someone putting together hard physical exertion:

On a bike your consciousness is small. The harder you work, the smaller it gets. Every thought that arises is immediately and utterly true, every unexpected event is something you’d known all along but had only forgotten for a moment. A pounding riff from a song, a bit of long division that starts over and over, a magnified anger at someone, is enough to fill your thoughts. (kindle loc 404)

Lots of cycling history too, involving famous racers from the past, as well as relevant incidents that tie into the events of the single day race the novel describes.

The book's short but compelling. I found myself reading it in one shot one evening, and it would be a perfect airplane novel. Recommended. Strangely enough, I went in search of other novels by the same author and they're all out of print now in English!

Touring Review: Pixel 6

Throughout this year's tour, we used the Pixel 6 as a backup for photographs (especially when it was raining, since the Pixel 6 was waterproof and the Ricoh GR3 wasn't), payments, navigation in a pinch, booking hotels, phone calls, and general use. As a backup camera the Pixel 6 was superlative, and while I wish it was higher resolution and had a bigger sensor, I don't think any of the other smartphones would have done a better job.

For navigation, we discovered that Google Maps had many limitations, much of which was that it would suggest routes that might be doable on a mountain bike but not for a road bike, and definitely not for a triplet. Even worse, the battery drain would mean that Xiaoqin's phone would drain by the middle of the afternoon on a long day. We tried turning off WeChat, and turning off the 90MHz display, but those changes made marginal differences to the battery life. Once in a while we would have to top up the battery using a battery extender.

For payments my phone worked but Xiaoqin's didn't, probably having to do with the setup for credit cards on it. For booking, we discovered an interesting limitation --- our T-mobile connection would let us browse booking.com's app and select places to stay, but to finalize a booking required a WiFi connection. I found myself searching for WiFi in various places to complete a booking.

One big disadvantage of the Pixel 6 was completely unexpected: when I cracked my screen protector (but not the screen), the phone was so exotic in Italy that I never found a place that sold replacement screen protectors. I had a spare protector at home, but it just shows that the Pixel 6 doesn't have sufficient distribution to the point where you could expect to easily get support for the device in Europe. On the other hand, the phone calls always worked, and various times the $0.25 per minute T-mobile roaming phone call charge would save us 20 EUR in hotel stays, making the ROI on those calls well worth the price.

When in Feldkirch, we used the instant translation feature to have conversations with doctors, nurses and pharmacists. This is an amazing feature and well worth the price. I also never ran out of storage.

To my dismay, the phone does not support FAT32 or exFAT, and it could not read the SD card from either the Ricoh GR3 or the GoPro, which made it very difficult to use the phone as a photo processor. I would later read that the Nexus Media Explorer would be able to read it, but too late for this trip. I never had any trouble reading SDcards with Samsung phones, so this is a limitation unique to the Pixel 6. It seems that Google's ideological commitment against paying Microsoft royalties has led it to serve its customers badly, another illustration of how Google PMs must not use their own products. The GR3 had a wireless mode that worked well, but the GoPro didn't.

For myself, the phone battery was more than sufficient since I would depend on the Garmin for navigation most of the time. The few times I needed it I'd pull out the phone for isolated use, and it never failed me. All in all, I think the Pixel 6 is a reasonable phone to travel with, but for the various reasons outlined above, I suspect the Samsung phones are still a cut above for not having flaws and workarounds that you'd have to spend a ton of time researching. 

Review: Magicians - New Class

The Magicians: New Class is a comic book series set after the events of the novels. Despite Lev Grossman's name on the Amazon information page, the comic book series was written by Lilah Sturges, with excellent artist Plus Bak. The plot revolves around Brakebills College admitting 3 hedge magicians as 3rd years for the very first time in the college's history, and those 3 magicians are pulled into a private seminar course with 3 Brakebills college students.

There's a certain conceit about how college works which doesn't work for me --- the rivalry between the hedge magicians and the Brakebills regular doesn't ring true to me, but regardless, the writing is clearly targeted towards a monthly issue magazine --- each issue ends with a cliff-hanger, and we get plot twist after plot twist, as well as some references to characters/events from the novels.

Unfortunately, the comic book plot was written with the expectation of a continuing series, but apparently the series got cancelled after 5 books, so there are a lot of loose ends never tied up. The characters and the foreshadowing also don't work well, and there are no clues that you could possibly use to predict the plot twist. I can see why the series got cancelled after such a short time. The book is only recommended for die-hard fans of the Magicians, but even if you are one you might want to set your expectations low.

Review: Amazon Basics Medium Point and Shoot Case

 The worst part of the Ricoh GR3 is how fragile it is. I've had to send it in for a repair nearly every year. One of the damage was caused by my rough handling of the camera when it was in the Black Widow Holster after a hike. I decided then that I needed a more protective case for the camera during the trip. While cycling you don't need a case, since the camera is either in the jersey pocket or in the handlebar bag. But when hiking, it's no big deal to have to unzip a case to get out the camera, so I opted for the cheapest I could find, which is the Amazon Basics Medium Point and Shoot case.

The case fits the GR3 snugly, with an extra pocket for any additional accessories you might need (spare battery, etc) which I didn't use. It's a tight fit, but getting the camera out quickly was never a problem, and putting away the camera doesn't take extra care. I expect to break the zipper sooner or later, but at $10 a case I've already gotten good use out of it.

Modern travelers will probably never go to the trouble of carrying a separate point and shoot camera. I find it's worth it to get good captures of places like the alps, so I'd recommend going to the trouble of getting something like the GR3 and a protective case for hiking around.