Review: Witch Hat Atelier 1-10

 I picked up Witch Hat Atelier while browsing the kindle unlimited store. As usual, only issue #1 is available, hoping to entice you to buy the remainder of the series. In this particular, it worked --- I liked the series sufficiently to check out the remainder of it from the library.

The first thing you notice is that the art for the series is gorgeous. As with most manga, it's almost entirely in black and white, with only the covers of the book colored in. But the line detail, the intricacies are breath-taking. The writer/artist clearly has the chops to draw. Most manga in Japan is serialized in weekly/monthly magazines, so not only is Shirahama good, he's also fast, able to churn out a chapter a week.

The plot revolves around witches, magic users in the world Coco lives in. At the start of the series the protagonist, Coco, is told that they are born with the power to manipulate magic. However, Coco was given a primer as a child, and one day circumstances cause her to get out the pen and ink and trace the primer she saw, which has dire consequences. It turns out that witchers aren't born with any extra-ordinary power, but indeed create magic by drawing seals, patterns that correspond to a programming language and are activated when the circle around the seal is completed. What witches do to cast spells is to pre-draw the seals, leaving a circle open, and then close the circle when they wish to activate. The conceit of the series is that only special ink can create magic, and witches conceal their drawings from the mundanes in order to maintain the illusion that magic is innate, not learned.

The primer Coco was given turned out to be a tome of forbidden magic, and in her tracing she causes a tragedy. The usual action in these circumstances is to wipe Coco's memory, but instead the witch on location feels sorry for Coco and adopts her into his atelier, or school of magic. Coco is thus inducted into the world of magic along with her new fellow students.

As the series proceeds, we get introduced to the society of witches, the tests they take to certify progression, the world of shops, supplies, and the magic police that keeps everyone honest, as well as the ethics of magic. The world building piece of the story is probably the weakest part --- it strains disbelief that such a large organization wouldn't leak a simple secret as a matter of course. The evil-doers that gave Coco the primer of forbidden magic are also slowly introduced to the reader, and various subplots surrounding each of Coco's fellow students (all of whom are women for some reason) are introduced and partially resolved.

I enjoyed reading each book, mostly because of the art, and will keep picking up new installments as they appear. It's inevitable that a series this pretty will be turned into an animated TV show or movie, though I suspect without the outstanding art that sets it apart it's unlikely that the weak world-building would make a deep impression on modern audiences. 

Review: The Sword in the Stone

 I thought I'd read The Sword in the Stone before as a kid, so when Boen wanted bed time reading I started reading it to him.  It turns out I must have read an abridged version, because the book was nothing like what I remembered. Yes, there were a lot of amusing anachronisms, and lots of places where Wart got turned into animals. But all of these were actually kinda boring. As bed time reading is concerned, boring is not bad --- the book literally put Boen to sleep multiple times!

But there's no sense of continuity (I'd forgotten that TH White put King Arthur together with Robin Hood and his merry men), and the finale is kinda anti-climatic. You never get the sense that after all of Merlyn's lessons, Wart had become ready to be King.

Some books are best not re-read as adults, I guess.

Review: The Steerswoman

 After reading Ra, I remembered that another fantasy to science fiction series of novel started with The Steerswoman. I discovered that in between when I last read it and the present day, I'd forgotten all the details and to my delight nearly everything about the series is new. The author has recovered all the rights from her publisher and is now self-publishing, which means that by buying her books you are directly supporting the author. You should do so!

The pace of the story is slow --- there's a setup, and I think more modern writers would spend less time depicting the slow realization of the protagonist about how parabolas and orbital mechanics would work. But the world setup is intriguing and at the time the books were published having strong female protagonists were rare. I finished this first book and immediately bought the next book in the series.

I've noted that the series isn't complete, and Kirstein is still working on the last 2 books in the series --- she's old enough that not finishing is a risk, but if you're OK with that, this book will be a lot of fun for you!

Review: Bea Wolf

 I ran across a review of Bea Wolf somewhere on the internet, saw that it was easily available from the library, and checked it out. It disappointingly did not download to my Kindle Scribe, but I could read it on any of our Fire tablets.

I've never read Beowolf, so this retelling was completely fresh to me. The language is that of high epic, but the panels, art, and words are those of a modern day kids, with foam toys, candy, video games, and of course, teenagers. Grendel is rendered as a middle aged man who ages kids into teenage years or (gasp) into adulthood, definitely a fate worse than death.

I read the book at night, and the next morning immediately read 15 pages of it to Boen. That very evening, Boen finished the book by himself without asking me to read it aloud to him, and then asked if there were more books, which indicates that the book is kid-approved, readable, and enjoyable.

Recommended!

Review: Astro City - Victory

 Victory is a very different graphic novel from its predecessors. While previous Astro-City pieces focus on sideline characters in the universe rather than the superheroes, Victory is an actual superhero story --- in fact, it takes the form of the well-known hero crossover story, with the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman standins meeting and working together for the first time.

Well, not exactly, since unlike regular superhero comics, things happen a lot in between issues and the reader is left to infer the events in between. But even then, I didn't find it nearly as compelling as the previous stories.

The last part of the graphic novel is a visitor's guide to Astro City, showing what a travel brochure to the city of heroes in that universe is like. That was very well done and a lot of fun. Even bad Astro City is still one of the best comics around. Recommended!

Review: Superfreakonomics

 I guess I never read Superfreakonomics before because it had acquired a bad reputation for its attempt to minimize the impact of global warming. Written by the same folks who brought you Freakonomics, it's an attempt to impose economic analysis on a whole host of phenomenon. The style is easy to read and a lot of fun, with lots of little factoids like the following:

the schoolteacher corps began to experience a brain drain. In 1960, about 40 percent of female teachers scored in the top quintile of IQ and other aptitude tests, with only 8 percent in the bottom. Twenty years later, fewer than half as many were in the top quintile, with more than twice as many in the bottom. It hardly helped that teachers’ wages were falling significantly in relation to those of other jobs. “The quality of teachers has been declining for decades,” the chancellor of New York City’s public schools declared in 2000, “and no one wants to talk about it.” (pg. 62)

There's a well known section about doctors not washing their hands, and another interesting factoid that complemented the above, about the inverse of what happened to the school teachers:

 An excellent doctor is disproportionately likely to have attended a top-ranked medical school and served a residency at a prestigious hospital. More experience is also valuable: an extra ten years on the job yields the same benefit as having served a residency at a top hospital. And oh yes: you also want your ER doctor to be a woman. It may have been bad for America’s schoolchildren when so many smart women passed up teaching jobs to go to medical school, but it’s good to know that, in our analysis at least, such women are slightly better than their male counterparts at keeping people alive. (pg. 115)

The big one is the section about global warming and its dismissive attitude towards it. That hasn't aged well. What did age well is the geoengineering solutions such as throwing sulfur into the stratosphere to reduce solar heating. That's been explored by science fiction novels in recent years, but not in convincing fashion. For instance, nobody has explored the impact of doing that on solar panel efficiency, and one thing that this book didn't forecast was how quickly the prices of solar panels and wind turbines dropped. So the book comes across as superficial and glibe.

The book was a lot of fun to read, but I guess non-fiction of this sort doesn't age well.

Review: Astro City - Shining Stars

 Astro City - Shining Stars explores various themes. I especially loved its exploration of Samaritan with one of his arch-enemies. One thing to note is that this series doesn't explore super heroes in a direct, straight on fashion. You never see any of their past encounters directly narrated --- it's all inferred by references and asides. Brilliantly done.  The exploration of other lesser known heroes in the universe Busiek has created are also very good, though I wasn't a big fan of the time-traveling tales of Silver Agent.

One nice thing about having missed the return of Astro-City for many years is that I get to spend my time catching up on at least 10 volumes of their work. This is a great series and well worth reading.

Review: Song of the Cell

 I read Song of the Cell hoping for more from the same author of The Emperor of All Maladies. The book was written during the pandemic, and it shows. The book hops from place to place, from the history of cells to an explanation of gestation, as well as an exploration of stem cells as well as immunology.

Taken on its own terms, the book is quite good as far as an introduction goes, and its theme that most modern medicine is actually cell engineering, from producing insulin to antibiotics to vaccination. Maybe I've just read too many immunology books during the pandemic, but the rest of the book doesn't seem to be as thorough or introduce too many new insights.

I wouldn't say the book was bad or a waste of time, but maybe there's been a flurry of books about immune systems and their interaction with viruses and so forth in recent years, so this book isn't as outstanding as it would be without that context. In addition, the fact that the book goes back and forth in time throughout its various parts doesn't do it any favors. It always feels like just as you're getting into cutting edge research, the book pulls you back in the past again!

Review: Astro City - Through Open Doors

 It was many years ago when I first picked up Astro City, but for a while they stopped publishing collections, so I put it out of my mind. Then at a library sale I found Through Open Doors and realized that Astro City was back!

The best thing about Astro City is when they focus on the non-superhero humans who have to live in a world where gods can effectively battle it out and destroy lives. In this collection, the story I found most effective is the one where a woman applies for a job at a call center and ends up working at the dispatch center for the superhero team honor guard. It's an awesome story and well worth reading.

I guess that means I'm just going to be picking up the rest of the series! Recommended.

Review: Amazon Kindle Scribe

 Eva was telling me that she really liked her Remarkable tablet. The price for that one was $400, but I saw that Amazon had a competitor, the Kindle Scribe. The thing about Amazon is that they have a great trade-in program, so I traded-in an ancient Kindle for $5 credit and a 20% off coupon in anticipation of an Amazon sale.

Sure enough, 2 weeks after I got my credit, the Kindle Scribe 64GB Essentials bundle went on sale for $326. Together with the trade-in, the entire bill of goods came out to $285 after tax. The bundle comes with a leather folio cover and an OEM charger.

When the scribe arrived, I was delighted to discover that it also came with the premium pen and a bundle of replacement tips for the pen. I'm not terribly impressed by the folio cover: it attaches to the kindle purely with magnets instead of a physical snap-fit, which means that it's possible to push the kindle out of the case with finger pressure or mishandling.  Nevertheless, the folding feature makes it possible to read the book easily by tilting the screen with respect to the horizontal, perfect for breakfast.

Typically, I wait to live with a product for a while before reviewing it, but within a couple of days of using the Kindle Scribe I knew I was going to keep it. I never owned the previous large size Kindle DX, but a large screen kindle is so nice that I was going to keep it even without the note-taking feature. First, it makes each kindle page turn correspond (at my preferred font size) to a page in a typical book. That's awesome! Secondly, the book is perfect for Japanese Manga. Kindle Unlimited had several volumes of Attack on Titan, and it's so great to be able to read manga directly without zooming in. The only way this would be better for comics was if the Scribe had color e-ink.

Third, the Kindle Scribe is appreciably faster on download and page turns! I didn't think it would make a big different but it does. As such, when I'm at home, I find myself using it instead of my paperwhite.

The note-taking feature works. I can create notes and write them and it syncs to the cloud. The kids use it more than I do! The writing works as well as paper does, but there are not advanced features --- no handwriting recognition, OCR, shape correction. If I was an artist or mathematician this would be great for note-taking, but alas, I probably won't use this feature much.

The other bad thing about this is that the Scribe is not waterproof. And it being so thin, it feels a bit fragile --- I'm not sure I would travel with it, even though traveling is precisely when I would want to have it around for note-taking. It certainly wouldn't fit well in a saddlebag on a bike tour, and on a sailing trip you would worry about water.

Nevertheless, at the price I paid, the entire package is a good value and it could be that over time, it might save a lot of paper the kids might otherwise waste!

Review: Ra

 Ra is a novel which dramatically changes its nature 3/4 of the way through the book. Since I don't really wish to spoil the book, I'll write about the surface details and the writing, and hope that intrigues you enough to read the book.

The protagonists of the book are a pair of sisters, Natalie and Laura Fenro, who live in a world in which magic was discovered in 1972. This magic is reproducible and repeatable, to the point where the pioneers in the field could write equations, make computations, and by the time the novel starts, there are even ISO standards for magic circles. The two women are traumatized by an event in their childhood, wherein they watched a space shuttle launch turn into a disaster, whereupon their mom says goodbye to them, and goes on to perform magic which is beyond the state of the art at the time, yet fail to rescue the shuttle and its crew.

Both daughters proceed in their own fashions to pursue magic in order to solve the mystery of what they saw that day, and we are drawn into a plot to understand the nature of magic in their world. When the reveal comes, the author isn't hesitant to point out all the issues with the existence of magic, and the explanation is both audacious and challenging. Ideas practically ooze out of the book in every new chapter, which makes the book fun in a way that I haven't seen since Charlie Stross's short story Palimpsest or his novel Glasshouse.

It's clear that the novelist (who goes under the pseudonym qnmt) is a computer scientist/software engineer --- the thinking behind each of the ideas is solid, but the characters are all rather one dimensional. But the ideas are cool, the action is cool, and the concepts will blow your mind. Well worth the time to read (and the $4 kindle price --- since the book is self published, you won't find it in the library).

If you don't want to take the risk, try reading the short story Lena by the same author. It's free and gives you an idea of what kind of fiction qntm writes.

Recommended.

Here's a quote from the book to intrigue you:

Another fun fact: in 1978, a long but startlingly elegant theorem by Shilmani proved that the language of magic had a name. That is, that the language of magic contained within itself a name for the language of magic. The proof was not constructive; it was only in 1980 that Shilmani went on to prove that the name of the language of magic was, in fact, the empty string.  (pg. 293)

Review: Deep Secret

 Deep Secret is Diana Wynne Jones' multiverse novel. The narrator, Rupert Venables is a Magid, a wizard who oversees multiple worlds but is based on Earth. His mentor dies and as junior Magid, it's his job to find a new junior Magid. Strangely enough, he's given a list of people who're all on Earth, rather than any of the other worlds he oversees. The explanation in universe is that because Earth is so non-magical, the strongest magical users come from there.

This is all tied in with another empire in a different world that's collapsing, and the way Rupert chooses to interview all his potentials is to gather them all in a science fiction convention. Along the way, his neighbor, and one of the potential's relatives get involved. The whole thing then becomes a send up of science fiction convention fans, the trite panelist answers about writing, and Rupert being in over his head.

None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, and the romance between two of the characters doesn't even make sense --- they're just told that they're going to be married, while the inner narration by each individual character doesn't say anything.

I'm coming to the conclusion that I'm just not a fan of Diana Wynne Jones. I couldn't get into anything she wrote other than The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

Review: Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach

 I checked out Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach from the library on a lark, started watching the first episode and was immediately hooked. The series is a bunch of civil engineering case studies, with a view to understanding the various phases of engineering a structure and looking at where each phase can fail, with dire consequences.

What is so great about this video series is that Professor Stephen Ressler builds small, simplified models of the structures he's talking about and then directly demonstrates the failure modes. This makes everything visual and impactful, resulting in a directly intuitive approach to understanding the mechanism of failure without having to do math or go into esoteric analysis.

This would be wasted if the disasters he chose to cover were not meaningful or interesting, but he's picked excellent case studies. Even better, in some of these cases, such as the Tacoma Narrows bridge, everything you learned in school about it was probably wrong, and he carefully debunks the incorrect explanation and shows you what happened.

By far the most impressive disasters depicted in the series are the recent ones such as the Florida International University pedestrian bridge. That's because while you can tell yourself that in the old days we didn't have adequate tools, models or experience building these types of structures, there's no such excuse for more recent structures, and you learn that anything new you do (such as a new method of construction) comes with significant risks. The cost over-runs resulting in mistakes run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and there's frequently loss of life involved as well.

I love the section that get into management. For instance, the Challenger Disaster is frequently touted as an example where engineers disagree with management, and management just refused to listen. Professor Ressler points out that everyone in the chain of command was trained as an engineer as well! I enjoyed every lecture and now understand why cantilever bridges were common in the 1930s-1960s but were not as frequently used in recent years --- it turns out that they were easier to analyze with limited computational power, and with modern computer systems we're able to make more highly optimized structures because we have the compute power available.

I highly recommend this series. If you're an engineer, or work managing engineers, this series contains important material for you. Well worth the time!

Review: How to Raise an Adult

 How to Raise an Adult is a book about over-parenting. It's written by Julie Lythcott-Haims, who was Stanford's freshman dean, who has first hand experience of what over-parented young adults look like in the most selective school in the national (Stanford accepts 5% of applicants).

The first part of the book deals with the consequences of over-parenting, including excessive specialization on sports, piano/violin (it's always piano and violin!), academic stress, and how everything that's not associated with college application is under-valued or dismissed as unimportant. There's not much controversial about this.

The second part of the book proposes a ton of personal actions you can take as a parent, including taking care of yourself so you aren't so stressed all the time, emphasizing smaller, lesser known schools that might provide a better education, and just letting your kids have a childhood. This part is a lot like telling you to meditate like a Buddhist so you can handle corporate stress better. It might help you in the short run, but in the long run it's probably unsustainable. That's because ultimately, the top tier University still ends up admitting all those piano players and stress-tolerant kids who end up being the kind of people who don't know how to operate a laundry machine.

The final part of the book finally addresses the social issues and how maybe if enough parents got together and agreed not to become tiger parents we wouldn't end up with such dysfunctional situations. Collective action is the only way to solve these problems, but again, I'm not sure there's much incentive there either.

Ultimately, the situation this book (and other books like it) describes reminds me of the situation I was in when I was a TA at school --- the kids who most needed the lectures were the least likely to show up, while the kids who would have done all the reading, homework and exercises even without the lectures were the ones diligently showing up. I don't think this book will be read by any of the tiger moms I've met, nor do I think Universities or Employers are really going to punish the kids produced by that system.

Review: A half-Built Garden

 A Half-Built Garden is science fiction, but in the rarest sub-genre, political science fiction. It's also a first contact story. It's also an optimistic vision of the future, where the world (or at least, the United States) is governed not by political entities or by corporations with lots of money, but by watershed communities that govern by AI-assisted consensus, where the social network has been organized to help communities make decisions and achieve consensus rather than to stir up fear and sell advertising.

The first contact is with two alien species which have already achieved unity and symbiosis, and by luck, the protagonist (Judy Wallach-Stevens) and her wife (Carol) show up with their baby when the first contact happens. Luck, because it turns out that the alien species expects people to bring children to negotiations as a form of mutual hostage taking.

What follows gets incredibly political as the governments and corporations want to get involved as well, and of course, the corporations do the evil thing and try to sabotage the social networks the watersheds use for consensus making. How our protagonist and her society achieve their goals and avoid getting gaslit by the corporations involved forms a large part of the story.

This is not a great novel --- some of the plot gets resolved through deus ex machinas. When the other factions on the aliens' side gets involved, we never get a great understanding of how their society works. It seems a bit too pat that there's great biosophere compatibility between all the species involved. Free-market enthusiasts will likely complain about the book being too "woke," with obsessions about pronouns and the author introducing yet more pronouns for various nuances of corporate presentations.

Nevertheless, it's an unusual read and chock full of ideas. That makes it very much worth your time. And yes, that it's an optimistic view of the future doesn't hurt it at all. Recommended.

Review: Pixel Buds Pro

 My 3 year old Jabra Elite 65t active were finally getting to the point where I would run out of battery during a normal workday. I thought for sure that I would be able to get a pair of Jabra Elite 7s, but then came along a set of Pixel Superfan coupons that netted $100 off the Pixel Buds Pro and so I tried them.

The Pixel Buds Pro in the case are about 10g heavier than the Jabra Elite 65t. The fast pair feature works great. Open the case and push the button on the back and pairing mode goes in. A pixel phone will automatically pick it up, though all other devices require you to visit the bluetooth menu. The touch controls mostly work, though are a bit finicky. I've had a few times when it would interpret a "volume up" swipe as a touch instead and vice versa, and once in a while a single touch would be turned into a double tap. Those times are in convenient but on the other hand it's super nice to be able to control volume, transparency mode, etc. while riding!

Sound quality is on par with the Jabra Elite 65t, and the transparency and noise cancellation modes both work. Both modes will cause degraded battery life, however, and battery life is the single best reason to get the Pixel Buds Pro. Google rates these for 11 hours with noise cancellation off, and I have yet to drain them on a full day's worth of work calls. Even better, the buds work with either ear or both years, which means if you're in the habit of using just one bud and it runs low or out of battery you can switch to the other one, effectively doubling the 11 hour battery life! Obviously, that's not going to work for noise cancellation on a plane, but for day to day work use that's exactly the right behavior.

The other feature that I found myself surprisingly enamored with is wireless charging. You plonk them down on the same Pixel Stand 2 that you use for fast charging a Pixel phone and it starts charging. It doesn't charge fast, but it's convenient and easy to use, and I never find myself surprised that the case is drained.

To my surprise, multi-point works! I've paired it with both a work Chromebook and a Fire tablet, and media, etc. work seamlessly between those devices and the Pixel 6. I've tried multi-point on other headsets and have invariably been disappointed. These are the first that haven't been disappointing. There's a slight increase in latency when pairing after multi-point was enabled but nothing that bothers me.

I don't think these are worth $199, but for the $100 price they're definitely a worthy upgrade. Recommended.

Review: The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry

 Of course I went on a Gabrielle Zevin binge, despite not really liking Young Jane Young. The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry reminds me a lot of A Man Called Ove. You've got a single man, an ornery widowed owner of a bookstore on a fictional island on the East Coast of Massachusetts, mean to everyone (even the cute publisher sales rep who visits a couple of times a year to go over his selection of books to stock), and one day an abandoned child mysteriously appears in his bookstore overnight with a mournful note attached. The mother appears washed up dead on shore a couple of days later, but Fikry decides for some unknown reason to adopt the child and raise her (Maya) as his own.

Of course, the child changes him from being an unlikeable person to becoming the life of the town. He finds love, and the rest of the plot unfolds --- we get answers as to why Maya's mother killed herself. There's a tear-jerker ending that feels like it was written for a made-for-tv movie --- the plot is that predictable. Even the romance seems both unlikely and moves characters together for the sake of the kind of story the author wants to tell.

Having said that, it's the little touches in this book that make it different from other made for tv movie plot books --- Fikry writes little cards on books that explain why he recommends a certain book, and those feel authentic.

I'll admit this: no way would I have read this book or continued past the first few pages if not for how good Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was. It in no way can hold a candle up to those books. The prose is transparent and easy to read, but I can see why the folks who made the movie out of the book did put their heart into it (Rotten Tomatoes of 38%). When I started this review I had put a recommended label on it but by the time I finished I had to take it out.

Review: Dispel Illusion

 Dispel Illusion showed up as part of the Kindle Unlimited Library, so I picked it up, despite my misgivings about book 2, Limited Wish. In fact, it seems that my assessment of the second book was accurate, as in Dispel Illusion, Mark Lawrence pretty much ignores book 2, and resets the plot so that only book 1 matters!

This dramatically improves the logical flow of the story, and now everything that happens makes sense, including the D&D game that's part of the story-within-a-story. At this point, all the time paradoxes that are about to happen, and Nick's previous encounters with a future version of himself now align. Now, it aligns with a pretty cheap trick, but at least it didn't leave me feeling that I'd wasted my money.

This isn't the greatest book in the world, but Lawrence's prose style here is readable and the juxtapositions make sense. A reasonable airplane novel, though it'd have to be a pretty short airplane ride if that was the only book you had.

Review: The Beginning of Infinity

 My wife bought a copy of The Beginning of Infinity, so it popped right onto my kindle and I just read it as a matter of course. I started the book expecting something about physics, but it turned out to be a philosophy book! Let me see if I can summarize it. Basically, the central thesis of the book is that there is no observation/empirical evidence without a theory. The world is full of so much data and evidence that unless you have an underlying theory to explain it, you won't even know what to look for.

But what is a theory? The idea then is that a theory is an explanation of the underlying mechanism for the observations you see. That explanation is what enables prediction, which is what allows an experiment to be made that allows you to have more confidence in your explanation, or which proves that your explanation is wrong. From this, David Deutsch generalizes his philosophy to encompass governments, culture, the arts, and the approach to the future.

Using knowledge to cause automated physical transformations is, in itself, not unique to humans. It is the basic method by which all organisms keep themselves alive: every cell is a chemical factory. The difference between humans and other species is in what kind of knowledge they can use (explanatory instead of rule-of-thumb) and in how they create it (conjecture and criticism of ideas, rather than the variation and selection of genes). It is precisely those two differences that explain why every other organism can function only in a certain range of environments that are hospitable to it, while humans transform inhospitable environments like the biosphere into support systems for themselves. And, while every other organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything that the laws of nature allow.  (pg. 58)

What's great about human beings, then, is that we're universal explainers and constructors, able to comprehend and construct theories  about the universe we find ourselves in. He then draws attention to the length of human history, and wonders why it took so long for humans to construct modern society and achieve the enlightenment. He points to memes as an explanation --- human society constructs and propagates memes, and long lived memes (i.e., religion) constructs a static society where new ideas or improvements on existing ideas are viewed with excessive suspicion, and so despite certain societies being particularly enlightened, such enlightened societies are short-lived:

long-lived religions typically cause fear of specific supernatural entities, but they do not cause general fearfulness or gullibility, because that would both harm the holders in general and make them more susceptible to rival memes. So the evolutionary pressure is for the psychological damage to be confined to a relatively narrow area of the recipients’ thinking, but to be deeply entrenched, so that the recipients find themselves facing a large emotional cost if they subsequently consider deviating from the meme’s prescribed behaviours. (pg. 384)

In fact, his claim is that the current modern Western society is the only reason-based society that has survived more than a few generations, and even then, we don't do a good job propagating it:

 Despite modern talk of encouraging critical thinking, it remains the case that teaching by rote and inculcating standard patterns of behaviour through psychological pressure are integral parts of education, even though they are now wholly or partly renounced in explicit theory. Moreover, in regard to academic knowledge, it is still taken for granted, in practice, that the main purpose of education is to transmit a standard curriculum faithfully...we live in a society in which people can spend their days conscientiously using laser technology to count cells in blood samples, and their evenings sitting cross-legged and chanting to draw supernatural energy out of the Earth. (pg. 393)

 Deutsch then points out that there has never been an age of humanity where we didn't have new problems, urgent problems, or impending doom heading down our way. His take on it is that we have to be optimistic and try to use reason to find technological solutions to our problems --- this includes climate change, etc., rather than trying to turn the clock back. Deutsch has the most persuasive case for cautious optimism that I've ever seen about the climate crisis --- he points out that until the solution was implemented, very few people had any idea how the food crisis would have been solved, and yet today we have an abundance of food. I'm reminded of the time when someone at a startup said to his team, "At a startup you have to plan for success, because if you plan for failure, you're going to fail! That means that when you build a solution you have to plan for scaling it up."

In any case, the book presented a good idea, took it to its natural conclusions, doesn't mince words or hold back from criticism. There's a self-indulgent place in the book where Deutsch writes historical fiction about Socrates and his students, but you can skip that section with no loss of fidelity to the ideas in the book. Well worth your time reading!

Review: Neugent Cycling A422TwoX wheels

The thing with ball bearing wheels is that I learned that I can't be bothered to overhaul them myself. While it's possible to do the overhaul --- I'm actually decent at disassembly, I discovered that the amount of faff involved in adjusting bearing preload was such a pain that I avoided doing it and always end up paying someone to do it. That costs about $60/year.

Neugent Cycling's A422TwoX wheels on a black friday special cost $350. That's about 6 years of bearing overhauls on a set of wheels that's lighter than I could build myself (at a claimed weight of 1400g). Even more importantly, I can't buy the parts to make them --- the idea behind the rear wheel is that it uses 16 spokes on the drive side, with only 8 spokes on the non-drive side to equalize the tension between both sides. This makes a lot of sense --- one reason I had to over-tension my Primato Syntesi wheels was because the non-drive side would come loose over time!  Even better, Neugent claims that the drive side has washers so the high tension wouldn't cause the rim to break. You can do the same when you build a pair of wheels but then you'll have to make allowance for the required extra length when calculating spoke length. Just buying parts for a new set of wheels cost more than what John Neugent was charging, so I bought a pair.

Let's get the negatives out of the way first. The front wheel had a rattle that indicates a loose spoke nipple that's in the rim. I'd have to take the rim strip out to shake it out. It makes an annoying noise at low speed when the centrifugal force wouldn't keep the nipple from knocking around in the hollow section of the rim. Secondly, I noticed that tires were much harder to mount on the rims than I expected. Neugtent pointed me at his article for mounting tough tires. It turns out that he made his rims tubeless compatible and now even those of us who have zero intention of going tubeless have to pay the price by having difficult to mount tires! Having said that once I used this system (installing the valve stem part last!) I could get the tire mounted without massive pain. Finally, after a few rides I had to true the rear wheel --- the tension still isn't high enough but with the assurance of having washers inside the rim I just basically added tension. With time the wheel should settle out.

Now for the good news. The wheels are light! The first time I bunny hopped the wheel I felt like I'd gained an extra inch! Now I'm used to the wheel but they still feel light. I'm not any faster than with my older wheels with more spokes, but that was never the point. Light wheels are just more fun. The other interesting things is that the rims are wider, so my 700x25 GP5000 tires actually measure 28mm on the rear wheel! On the front wheel, my 28mm GP5000s measure 28mm, so the rear rim must be wider than the front. That means that you can size your tires one size down from what you'd normally run and get reduced weight.

I was going to wait longer to write a full review after abusing the wheels a bit, but after my recent ride in the snow I realized that I've abused these wheels far more than most people will do so in their lifetime. I wouldn't recommend them for the novice with no ability to true wheels up, but for any one else these wheels are cheaper than anything you can build yourself, and come with everything you would want --- spare spokes and nipples, etc. And for the price they can't be beat!