Review: The Knowledge Gap

 If you're a parent of elementary school kids, you'll have encountered the metrics of measurement in an American school system, where kids are taught reading skills, such as identifying the topic of a sentence, and summarizing a paragraph. I remember being very impressed by this, since that was something I didn't remember doing until much later in my schooling.

Natalie Wexler's thesis in The Knowledge Gap is that this isn't a sign of a high functioning educational system but is a pointer to the lack of curriculum in the United States. The United States is unique among developed countries in that there's no national curriculum of study that the entire country follows. Instead, all the standards (in Common Core or others) are based on skills. This works in Math --- there's nothing in Math where knowledge doesn't equate to skill. But Wexler claims it fails in reading, because reading comprehension is tied completely to the knowledge you have. As an example, Wexler provides a paragraph describing a cricket match which would be incomprehensible to most Americans, since most Americans don't know what cricket is.

There's apparently a curriculum based approach called Core Knowledge, which isn't widely adopted. Chapter after chapter describes how controversial which knowledge to impart to children is -- lots of proposals get shot down or mired in politics, which is how we end up with the current situation, where many Americans don't know that the civil war was fought over slavery, or that the first 10 amendments to the constitution are called the bill of rights.

There's definitely a stigma attached to learning facts --- those of us growing up in Asia remember being told to memorize pointless facts, and history being reduced to memorizing dates that could be looked up with a quick web search or wikipedia. Nevertheless, Wexler makes a good point that if you're going to test reading comprehension, you might as well define a good curriculum so that the actual comprehension is important. There's also a ton of evidence that kids love it AND they do far better in test scores driven this way.

I didn't grow up in the American education system, but I too remember being disappointed by science classes in school getting most of my science education from popular media like Carl Sagan's Cosmos instead. That's unlikely to change unless parents demand it. I wonder if parents who grew up without this background, however, would even know to demand it!

I hope Wexler's criticism works and that we get a better knowledge-based curriculum in the United States. Apparently New York is starting to change. I wouldn't hold my breath though --- as a parent, though you can help out, since it's your job to impart knowledge as well!

The book gave me much to think about. Recommended.

Review: Yellowface

 Yellowface is R. F. Kuang's novel about white misappropriation of an Asian cultural work. It has no right to be so easy to read and fun, being about serious topics, but it is. The plot is about Juniper Song Hayward and her friend Athena Liu. Liu is a majorly successful writer (much like R. F. Kuang is), having sold novels not only to major publishing houses but also had a Netflix series deal in hand.

Liu dies a horrible death choking in front of Juniper eating pancakes, but not before she shows Juniper her latest, completed manuscript, a novel about Chinese laborers in Europe during World War 1. After the death, Juniper reads the manuscript, rewrites it and sells it, using her friend's idea and reigniting her otherwise lackluster literary career.

Juniper's a horrible person, of course, full of herself, and belittling her friends. She willingly publishes the novel using her middle name so the appropriate audiences would think that she was Asian, and manipulatively cuts off any possibility that she would be discovered as having stolen the work. Like most fiction authors she's neurotic and horribly addicted to twitter, and so turns every minor event into a major epic frenzy centered around herself (you must know people like that --- I do too!).

The book doesn't give you any insights about twitter culture, cancel culture, cultural misappropriation, or even about human nature that you don't already know. That's not its goal. Its goal is to entertain and perhaps poke fun at people like Juniper Hayward. That it succeeds at, in spades. If you've never read any other books surrounding New York's publishing culture, it'll also give you some insight about how cliquish it is. But there probably better ways of getting that info than this novel.

I read the book in a couple of days, and it was a nice change of pace from the usual heavy non-fiction I read. I'll look for other books by Kuang as they would make great airplane novels.

I learn it’s important to be anti-PRC (that’s the People’s Republic of China) but pro-China (I’m not terribly sure how that’s different). I learn what “little pinks” and “tankies” are and make sure I don’t inadvertently retweet support for either. I decry what’s happening in Xinjiang. I Stand with Hong Kong. I start gaining dozens more followers a day once I’ve started vocalizing on these matters, and when I notice that many of my followers are people of color or have things like #BLM and #FreePalestine in their bios, I know I’m on the right track. (kindle loc 949)

 Every so often someone in this industry develops a conscience and gives a nonwhite creator a chance, and then the whole carnival rallies around their book like it’s the only diverse work ever to exist. I’ve been on the other side. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been in the room when we pick our one spicy book of the season, when we decide who’s educated and articulate and attractive but marginalized enough to make good on our marketing budget. It’s sick, you know. But I suppose it’s nice to be the token. If the rules are broken, you might as well ride the diversity elevator all the way to the top. Wasn’t that your logic?” (kindle loc 4099)

Review: Heartstoppers Vol 1-4

 Heartstoppers is the story of a gay couple, Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson. Set in high school in England, the story starts with Charlie breaking up with his boyfriend for kissing a girl. Nick then recruits Charlie to play rugby (which is a much more macho sport than football --- no armor!), and in the process of the two becoming best friends Nick discovers his own sexuality.

The characters are great and well-drawn. Maybe it's all kind of odd because all the main characters are either gay or transexual or bisexual. What's interesting to me is that Alice Oseman focuses on everything that happens after the relationship starts --- all the relationships in the book start with no drama, no one is ever rejected. This seems very unrealistic to me, but you have to understand that the author is a young woman who's probably never been rejected before, and at some level the author's focus isn't on the start of a relationship but the maintenance of it.

The depiction of characters are great --- people genuinely care about each other, and the treatment of anorexia is unusual and realistic. The book's main message is that love doesn't cure mental illness --- you have to get help and get the support of everyone around you, teachers, parents, doctors, and yes, your boyfriend. I love how tolerant everyone is in the book as well --- even the homophobes eventually admit to being wrong.

The book is set in England, so there's talk of A levels, but I also love that the school trip is to Paris and they don't need anything more than a bus to go there. The school trips depicted in the book are also way more chill than American school trips, with the kids being given lots more freedom and autonomy to approach a museum the way they want to, rather than being herded like cats. That's par for the course --- by the teenage years, in most countries kids have much more autonomy than in the USA.

With the huge amount of tolerance for non-straight behavior in the book, it's not a surprise that right-wingers have banned Heartstoppers. That should be enough to get you to read the book, but the reason I would want my kids to read the book is because it's full of empathetic characters who care about each other, who learn to deal with each other's problems, and are resilient enough to cope with bullying and other negative events in their lives. And that's good enough reason to read the book.

Review: The Rare Metals War

 The Rare Metals War is another book about the high cost of renewal energy. It makes several statements - one is that the current method of mining was ceded to China because of environmental action in the West driving out mines in those countries. The argument is that China strategically also tried to kill mining companies in the west by dumping supplies and driving their competition out of business.

purifying a single tonne of rare earths requires using at least 200 cubic metres of water, which then becomes saturated with acids and heavy metals.23 Will this water go through a water-treatment plant before it is released into rivers, soils, and ground water? Very rarely. The Chinese could have opted for clean mining, but chose not to. From one end of the rare metals production line to the other, virtually nothing in China is done according to the most basic ecological and health standards. So as rare metals have become ubiquitous in green and digital technologies, the exceedingly toxic sludge they produce has been contaminating water, soil, the atmosphere, and the flames of blast furnaces — representing the four elements essential to life. The result is that producing rare metals has become one of the most polluting — and secretive — industries in China. (kindle loc 369)

In this way, the book echoes Dani Rodrik's  2007 book about why fundamentally trading with totalitarian government is very different from trading with a democratically elected government:

Think of labor and environmental standards, for example. Poor countries argue that they cannot afford to have the same stringent standards in these areas as the advanced countries... Democratic countries such as India and Brazil can legitimately argue that their practices are consistent with the wishes of their own citizens, and that therefore it is inappropriate for labor groups or NGOs in advacned countries to tell them what standard they should have... But non-democratic countries such as China, do not pass the same prima facie test. The assertion that labor rights and the environment are trampled for the benefit of commercial advantage cannot be as easily dismissed in those countries. Consequently, exports of nondemocratic countries deserve greater scrutiny when they entail costly dislocations or adverse distributional consequences in importing questions.

This is nothing new and hopefully not a controversial statement. What I think is controversial is that this state of affairs cannot change. To some extent the author asserts that it can and must change:

Reopening mines in the West is the best possible decision we can make for the environment. Relocating our dirty industries has helped keep Western consumers in the dark about the true environmental cost of our lifestyles, while giving other nation-states free rein to extract and process minerals in even worse conditions than would have applied had they still been mined in the West, without the slightest regard for the environment. The effects of returning mining operations to the West would be positive. We would instantly realise — to our horror — the true cost of our self-declared modern, connected, and green world. We can well imagine how having quarries ‘in our backyard’ would put an end to our indifference and denial, and drive our efforts to contain the resulting pollution. Because we would not want to live like the Chinese, we would pile pressure onto our governments to ban even the smallest release of cyanide, and to boycott companies operating without the full array of environmental accreditations. (kindle loc 2363)

However, the bulk of the book spends a lot more time on how polluting the situation is, possibly causing some to think that the pollution is required and not really something we can do much about. To some extent, I think there also needs to be an analysis of what the localization of the pollution is. Not every pollutant is a greenhouse gas, where emissions anywhere in the world is detrimental to everyone else. In many cases the pollutant is localized, destroying local water supplies and farming --- it's a tragedy, but I'm afraid the reality of the situation is that the public is unlikely to care very much if the local population (i.e., the Chinese) don't care and would rather have food on the table and die later of cancer than die earlier of starvation.  The author of the book doesn't go into these details and doesn't seem to have done much research about the topic.

I think Volt Rush is the better book, covering much the same topics.

Review: Fire and Hemlock

 Fire and Hemlock is Diana Wynne Jones' mash-up of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer. It's well-written and makes for compelling reading --- I bought it intending to read it on a trip and ended up finishing it (neglecting some library books) before the trip even started!

The plot revolves around Polly Whittacker, who gate-crashes a funeral at the age of 10, meeting Thomas Lynn (the big clue about the mash-up) and ending up in a world-creating pen-pal type relationship. They make up stories RPG-style, and Polly labels herself as an assistant hero.

The POV character, Polly is a great character --- sympathetic and determined. She decides to take her hero ambitions seriously and ends up playing soccer with the boys. She beats up the school bully, taking the inevitable punishments that come with all good deeds. But at the age of 19 she discovers she had two memories --- a memory of a life without Thomas Lynn and one with one. As she unravels the mystery the plot gets going and she takes an active part in trying to rescue her Thomas.

The kindle edition of the book comes with an essay that Diana Wynne Jones gave as a lecture --- it's about the multi-layered construction of the story, and also discusses the nature of heroism in ancient literature. The book's good reading, though I feel the ending was a bit rushed. But the explanation provided by Jones' essay/lecture gives you a good idea of what's going on.

The book's definitely worth reading. It makes me want to go back and re-read Thomas the Rhymer and Tam Lin.

Review: America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

 America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is the great courses lecture series about American history during the period from 1865-1920. In many ways, the period during that time correspond to ours --- dramatically rising inequality, systemic racism, and gradually increasing awareness of the problems of society, and the eternal struggle between the plutocrats and the liberals that battle for the benefits of society.

The lecturer is entertaining, interesting, and selects good topics to cover, while giving a lot of context to the rise of the civil rights movement, as well as the growing abuse of the robber barons. He reminds us that the progressive era ended with a return to power by the plutocrats after world war 1.

I thoroughly enjoyed the review of history and the reminder not to give up hope. The country has been through times that were much tougher and eventually the liberals still managed to eliminate child labor, give us the 5 day work week, and even won women the right to vote. All of those goals looked insurmountable during those times but eventually they happened, though not without violence and sacrifice.

Review: The John Varley Reader

 I'm a fan of earlier John Varley work (his Heinlein pastisches didn't work for me, so I stopped reading his novels after he pivoted to those), so when The John Varley Reader came down to $1.99 for the Kindle I bought it. The book is a collection of his short stories, including the award winning ones like Press Enter. A fair number of them are set in the 8 Worlds series, which is some of the best science fiction you'll ever read (I still love Steel Beach).

Even better than getting to read all these great short stories (including one that was supposed to show up in The Last Dangerous Visions, which never got published), is that each story includes an introduction from Varley, frequently providing context as well as autobiographical information about how he came to write it. I thoroughly enjoyed these vignettes into his past, as well as how extraordinary his writing process is. For instance, while other writers enjoy workshopping their stories, he didn't. He'd write them, revised them, and then send them off.

He even explains the difference between the 8 worlds series and the Anna Louisa Bach stories, so by the time you start a new story you understand which universe you're in, and what to expect. The stories spend a lot of time on gender (since in the 8 worlds you can change your gender on a whim), and understandably many of the themes focus on the role of women in society. But they're good stories first and foremost, not preachy or have obvious plots twisted just to make a point.

I enjoyed the collection and can recommend it.

Review: The Science of Storytelling

 The Science of Storytelling is a book about applied neuroscience. The idea behind the book is to use our knowledge of the past few decades of neuroscience research and apply it to stories and characters, allowing us to analyze successful stories or create new ones. 

Will Storr's thesis is that we are interested in stories because of the main characters in them --- our internal experience of the world is that the kind of people who read novels are well aware that the human experience of the world is governed by an internal model of who we are and how the world works (i.e., how we control the outcome of our environment), and that character-driven stories are about how the character recognizes the flaws or changes of his or her model and either overcomes those flaws (by having an epiphany) or fails to change and get swept away by the resultant events.

Because the story event has been designed to strike at the core of this character’s identity, the thing they need to change is precisely that which is hardest. The flawed models they’re required to shatter run so deep that it takes an act of almost supernatural strength and courage to finally change them for good. (kindle loc 2470)

Storr then applies this approach to many stories (including one of my favorites, The Remains of the Day), and shows how the main characters in them view the world, and the change or epiphany that governs the characters's realization of the flaw in the model, and the outcome.

The curse of belonging to a hyper-social species is that we’re surrounded by people who are trying to control us. Because everyone we meet is attempting to get along and get ahead, we’re subject to near-constant attempts at manipulation. Ours is an environment of soft lies and half smiles that seek to make us feel pleasant and render us pliable. In order to control what we think of them, people work hard to disguise their sins, failures and torments. Human sociality can be numbing. We can feel alienated without knowing why. It’s only in story that the mask truly breaks. To enter the flawed mind of another is to be reassured that it’s not only us. (kindle loc 2642)

 Despite none of the neuroscience in the book being new to me, the application of the character/plot/story model to neuroscience gives me a new tool to analyze novels, and Storr's examples are fun and interesting. The only flaw that I can find in the book is that this tool isn't useful for most of science fiction, for instance, where it's the setting/situation/setup that's interesting and not the characters, nor is it useful for many genres like mystery novels. The author does recognize this limitation, and has an appendix with exercises on the applicability of his theories to those genres, but clearly those don't apply to the examples that he chose to use throughout the book.

Nevetheless, the book was a lot of fun and worth reading.

Bicentennial Campground Bikepacking Trip

 I've had my eye on the Bicentennial Campground for the last few years, trying repeatedly to get a campground reservation and failing every time. I finally got one for the weekend of September 9th, but Bowen had some math contest and Boen had a soccer tournament. Kids don't appreciate that these hard to come by reservations may never happen again, but a sure way to turn your kids off cycling and camping and other outdoor activities is to force them into it so I didn't push. (And to be honest, I'm a lousy sales person anyway!)

Over labor day week we all caught COVID and only got better the week after labor day. While I was able to ride the kids to school, I had no motivation to ride hard or to train, and I was warned by people that over-exertion could be one factor that causes long COVID. But I wasn't going to miss on on that reservation, so I gave the other 2 spots on the campground to Stephan and Otto, who would drive over, while I would ride the easiest route to the campground. If it proved to be too challenging I was prepared to take the train home on Sunday.

Departing from home, I had my vintage 1993 North Face sleeping bag, my Nemo sleeping pad, the Big Agnes Fly Creek UL1 and a ground sheet for it (which I don't consider optional), and a Klymit camping pillow. I had tools on the left side of the saddlebag and food on the right side. I had a toothbrush/toothpaste kit, floss, two packets of Apple Cider, and 3 instant coffees. I eschewed bringing freeze-dried food or a stove to keep the load light, planning to buy a burrito in San Francisco on the way to the campground, and mooching off Stephan for breakfast. I held everything with a Carradice Camper Longflap and a bagman saddlebag support. The Carradice had to have the long flap unfurled in order to support the tent, and once in place the tent wouldn't fall off. However, if I'd tried to load anything more the tent would start slipping if I stood up so I gave up bringing my CPAP setup. I thought about bringing the Roadini instead, but I'd just had COVID and I wanted the lightest possible load for a tour I wasn't sure I was going to complete.

Upon setting off, I felt good enough that I rode over Arastedero road and Portola Valley road before climbing Mountain Home to get to Canada road. I stopped at the Pulgas Water Temple to get some Hetch Hetchy water into my bottles and to eat a couple of bars. Upon departing the Water Temple I rode on Skyline and followed another cyclist onto the Sawyer Camp trail. I was told that the trail had a closure that prevented me from using it all the way to San Francisco but I could get off and use the road and the 280 connector instead. Who did I meet but fellow Western Wheeler Rao Loka.

We took a selfie to commemorate the occasion and I headed off onto the road. It had been more than a few years since I rode this route and I made more than a couple of wrong turns before finding the Northern portion of Sawyer Camp trail to avoid riding too much on Skyline. The ride was much worse than I remembered, with a very dirty shoulder that's obviously not maintained and 2 major freeway intersections, once with Highway 1 and once with Highway 280. Both were challenging unloaded and are painful with camping gear.

Once in San Francisco proper I got into Great Highway which was closed to cars. I used my Fenix to navigate through Golden Gate Park to Gordo Taqueria in Clement. They didn't have my favorite Al Pastor but the service was fast and they didn't even so much as blink when I rolled my bike into the shop to place my order.

After I rearranged my saddlebag to give an entire side pocket to the burrito, I again used the navigation system to navigate to the Golden Gate bridge through the Presido, a gorgeous ride. You couldn't see the tips of the towers on the Golden Gate Bridge but the views were nice and I was tired of sun anyway.

The bridge was an obnoxious crossing as usual on a Saturday afternoon, full of tourists on rental bikes clogging up the narrow bikeway. I overtook as safely as I could, and then headed up  Conselman road despite the GPS telling me otherwise. It was a mistake as the wind and the fog made it a slightly unpleasant experience. On the other hand, I always enjoyed the descent, though it wasn't as impressive as when the Western Wheelers do it in Spring when you get gorgeous views.

Arriving at the campground I rode my bike down to it and being a little tired, slowly pitched my tent. I did it so slowly that by the time I finished Stephan and Otto had arrived.

The view from site #3 at the campground was nothing short of amazing. But we had site #2. It would turn out that site #3 never showed up --- at $25/night people would book these incredibly hard to get campgrounds and abandon their reservations when their plans changed. The obvious solution is to charge a lot ($100/night), but then people would complain about how unfair that would be to poor people. So instead, it takes 3 years to get a reservation and many people who would love to camp in these amazing places just might never be able to get a reservation.

After the tent was pitched Stephan suggested visiting the Point Bonitas Lighthouse trail, which I'd never been. We arrived after the trail was closed, but the location was nothing short of gorgeous.

Stephan discovered that he'd forgotten matches. So we made  a trip to Sausalito to buy them. We then made dinner and after I'd helped eat some (in addition to the Burrito, which I'd already finished while Stephan and Otto were pitching their tent), I walked up the hill and made some sunset pictures from the nearby gun batteries.

When Stephan and Otto were done with dinner we decided to go exploring in the car. The sun was long since down so I suggested we visit Fort Baker to see the golden gate bridge as everywhere else was fogged in. It was a nice view.

We went to bed early as I was quite tired. I promised myself that I'd ride the tunnel road the next day and if I had no vim I'd ride to the train station and take the train home instead of my ambitious plan to ride Purissima Creek home.

I got up at 6:15am and started taking down the tent while the coffee was being made. I was motivated to get an early start in case I decided to take the ultra-long way home.

I helped Stephan and Otto eat their home made yogurt and granola, and also gave Otto my snickerdoodle cookies. I was full and ready to leave at 7:30am, and to my surprise rode my loaded bike up the trail back to the road with vim!

I made it easily through tunnel road and onto the entrance to the bike path to discover it was too early and so it was closed. I had to take the bridge over to the other side. After that, Garmin navigated me through the presidio again and back onto the Great Highway. I dreaded the climb out of San Francisco along a bad road, but two things changed. First, I was fresher, and secondly, Garmin knowing I wanted to be in Pacifica got me off Highwy 35 very early and along a bike route into Pacifica! The bike route rolled along residential streets before descending into Pacifica along a road unknown to me previously, eschewing traffic and was in general a stress free experience.

Once in Pacifica, I rode along bike paths under cloudy skies, and happily rolled along, discovering bike paths I didn't know existed until I got to the climb out of Pacifica onto devil's slide. This was a narrow piece of road and I had to be assertive to keep cars from trying to squeeze past me. Fortunately, it's fairly short and once I got to Devil's slide it was pretty enough and memories of me mountain biking in the area came back to me.

Once past the bike path on Devil's slide I was descending and traffic was light enough that I could let fast traffic past me and then pedal like crazy to try to keep up with traffic until I got to half moon Bay, where the sun finally came out, forcing me to stop and take off my arm and leg warmers as well as put on sunscreen.

In downtown Half Moon Bay I stopped for a smoke salmon bagel that was excellent if costly, and then turned off navigation on my watch as I was running low on battery. It had been more than 10 years since I climbed Higgins Purisima road, but I was heartened to see road closure signs. That meant low or no traffic! 

The climb was steep and slow with a loaded bike but I had plenty of food left so didn't hesitate to eat the remains of my caffeinated Clif Bloks. The road climbs to over 700 feet before descending back to 400 feet at Purissima Redwoods Park, where I ignored all the closure signs and rode into the park to begin climbing Purissima Redwoods trail, a hike I'd done with the kids before that looked rideable on a bike.

I passed a woman hiking and she said: "Hey, I saw you earlier riding on the road! I'm glad you made it!" I rode up the gentle fire road and to my surprise there were not wet sections that were slippery. Despite my load I could tackle every steep pitch with aplomb, though I did stop a couple of times to rest and give my back a break. On an unloaded bike this ride would have been a piece of cake. A woman walking the other way told me that I was incredibly strong to be able to do this on a bicycle. I didn't feel strong but every encouragement helps so I told her I had began the day in Marin County.

At the end of the climb, I ran into two rangers who told me that the alternative to Tunitas Creek would have two steep pitches that I probably would have to walk on my bike. From there, I descended Kings Mountain Road slower than usual and then rode home via the shortest, fastest route, meeting up with Shelley on the way.

What a great trip. I'm so glad that COVID while it sucked, didn't take away this trip!

Review: That Will Never Work

 That Will Never Work is Marc Randolph's telling of the founding of Netflix from inception to the IPO. While the press has always credulously repeated Reed Hasting's narrative about the late fees from returning a late video, I never bought it, because I remember Netflix from the days when it had a rental service. I did not remember the days when it actually sold DVDs from a website, since I was not that early an adopter of DVDs.

My view of tech startups has always been from the point of view of the technology --- here's an innovation where something that didn't used to be possible is now technically possible and that creates a product. Randolph's approach comes from that of a marketing person, which is a completely different approach. What he wanted was to build a company, so he just kept coming up with ideas until he found one that he thought was feasible, and then with $1.9M in seed funding from Reed, went on to build a company.

I thoroughly enjoyed the iteration of ideas reflected in Randolph's account. I also remember all the free coupons bundled with DVD players in the 1990s, and the inside account of how Randolph managed to get those coupons bundled with DVD players is a good one --- this is not stuff that many tech founders could do, but Randolph did it.

There are several key moments in the book, such as the one where Hastings gave Randolph his performance review and essentially asked him to not only give over the CEO job, but also to give over a chunk of his equity in the company. I was amazed that Randolph did it instead of deciding to just sell the company, but obviously it was the right decision in retrospect. The creation of the subscription service is also another highlight.

Randolph quit shortly after the Netflix IPO (after working on the Redbox concept with another early employee), so we never get to see the iterations of the streaming service. Randolph was also never involved with engineering after Hastings took over, so we don't get any technical insights (though many of those were disclosed in a Netflix talk at Google that I arranged in 2003). To be honest though, most of the innovations at Netflix in those early years revolved around the movement of DVD envelopes, and Randolph does go into detail about some of those, including the design of the mailers and the development of a small storefront system for redelivering returned DVDs to the next customers with a sub 48 hour turnaround.

Randolph makes a big deal out of Netflix's culture and credit Patty McCord's "unlimited vacation" policy. To be honest I still think that's the biggest ripoff introduced in work culture. But until Americans wise up and institute sane vacation policies for everyone in the country (an unlikely event) I suppose it is here to stay.

The book is short, well written, easy to read, and a real page turner. Recommended.

Review: American Prometheus

 American Prometheus is the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and apparently the inspiration for the upcoming Christopher Nolan movie. I picked up having recently read the story of the Atomic Bomb and the Hydrogen Bomb, and I expected to already know most of the highlights. But since those other books didn't cover Oppenheimer in detail, I decided it would be worth it to get a good understanding of how Oppenheimer lead the effort on the atomic bomb.

In some sense, I was disappointed, because the book didn't cover much of his success as an administrator. Part of it is because the authors aren't particularly interested in engineering management (the Manhattan project was effectively a huge engineering project). What it did cover in detail was Oppenheimer's political activities in Berkeley and his dalliance with communism, but of course, that was because American Capitalism in the 1920s and 30s were so bleak:

By 1935, it was not at all unusual for Americans who were concerned with economic justice—including many New Deal liberals—to identify with the Communist movement. Many laborers, as well as writers, journalists and teachers, supported the most radical features of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. And even if most intellectuals didn’t actually join the Communist Party, their hearts lay with a populist movement that promised a just world steeped in a culture of egalitarianism...There was a lot of talk and not much action, which frustrated Frank. “We tried to integrate the city swimming pool,” he said. “They just allowed blacks in Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then they drained the pool Thursday morning.” But despite their efforts, the pool remained segregated. (kindle loc 2621-2631)

When I got to the part where Oppenheimer took on faculty roles at both Caltech and Berkeley, I was finally intrigued. Oppenheimer took a very deliberate and targeted approach in his teaching:

Oppenheimer thought that no one could be expected to learn quantum mechanics from books alone; the verbal wrestling inherent in the process of explanation is what opens the door to understanding. He never gave the same lecture twice. “He was very keenly aware,” Weinberg recalled, “of the people in his class.” He could look into the faces of his audience and suddenly decide to change his entire approach because he had sensed what their particular difficulties were with the subject at hand. Once he gave an entire lecture on a problem he knew would pique the interest of just one student. Afterwards, that student rushed up to him and said he wanted permission to tackle the problem. Oppenheimer replied, “Good, that’s why I gave the seminar.” (kindle loc 3354)

He even laid traps for his students:

 One day when Weinberg was in Oppenheimer’s office, he began rummaging through papers stacked on the trestle table in the center of the room. Picking out one paper, he began reading the first paragraph, oblivious to Oppie’s irritated look. “This is an excellent proposal,” Weinberg exclaimed, “I’d sure as hell like to work on it.” To his astonishment, Oppenheimer replied curtly, “Put that down; put it back where you found it.” When Weinberg asked what he had done wrong, Oppenheimer said, “That was not for you to find.” A few weeks later, Weinberg heard that another student who was struggling to find a thesis topic had begun work on the proposal he had read that day. “[The student] was a very genial, decent man,” Weinberg recalled. “But, unlike a few of us who enjoyed the kind of challenge that Oppie threw out like sparks, he was often baffled and nonplussed and ill at ease. Nobody had the courage to tell him, ‘Look, you’re out of your depth.’ ” Weinberg now realized that Oppie had planted this thesis problem for this very student. It was a distinctly easy problem, “But it was perfect for him,” Weinberg said, “and it got him his Ph.D. It would have been difficult for him to get it with Oppie if Oppie had treated him the way he treated me or Phil Morrison or Sid Dancoff.” Instead, Weinberg insisted years later, Oppie nurtured this student as a father would have treated a baby learning to walk. “He waited for him to discover that proposal accidentally, on his own terms, to pick it up and to express his interest, to find his way to it. . . . He needed special treatment, and by God, Oppie was going to give it to him. It showed a great deal of love, sympathy and human understanding.” The student in question, Weinberg reported, went on to do distinguished work as an applied physicist. (kindle loc 3364)

I certainly don't remember any of my professors at grad school being so kind-hearted! There's a good explanation right there was to why he was held in such high regard amongst physicists even though he never won the Nobel prize --- his social skills were outstanding. In one story, he listened to a conflict between two groups, and at the end of the listening session summarized the problems as discussed in such a way that the solution was obvious to both groups. That required both technical and social acumen, as well as a willingness to listen. Some of the best engineering managers I've ever worked with have this talent. The book explains:

He rarely gave orders, and instead managed to communicate his desires, as the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled, “very easily and naturally, with just his eyes, his two hands, and a half-lighted pipe.” Bethe remembered that Oppie “never dictated what should be done. He brought out the best in all of us, like a good host with his guests.” Robert Wilson felt similarly: “In his presence, I became more intelligent, more vocal, more intense, more prescient, more poetic myself. Although normally a slow reader, when he handed me a letter I would glance at it and hand it back prepared to discuss the nuances of it minutely.” He also admitted that in retrospect there was a certain amount of “self-delusion” in these feelings. “Once out of his presence the bright things that had been said were difficult to reconstruct or remember. No matter, the tone had been established. I would know how to invent what it was that had to be done.” (kindle loc 4205)

Of course, the movie isn't going to be about being a great engineering manager. Most likely it will cover his political destruction in the hands of Lewis Strauss, leaving him never the same again. Even then, the book didn't stop telling me things I didn't know, such as that he spent many of his last years at St. John, the island in the Caribbean that's part of the US Virgin Islands, owning a boat and sailing it often (he was an able sailor), and that his brother, Frank Oppenheimer, was the founder of the San Francisco Exploratorium, one of the first participatory science museums in the world. (Frank suffered even more for his dalliance with communism than his brother did, derailing a promising career in academic physics and having to become a cattle rancher for a while)

Needless to say, the book's well worth reading. Recommended!

Review: North Face Wawona 6 person tent

 My ancient Kelty Eureka tent dates from 1995, and it's had patches all over from various accidents, and the tent poles were no longer capped correctly so tended to snag. We used it quite a bit and there wasn open question as to whether it was still waterproof, though most likely more waterproof than the Mountainsmith Upland 6 that I'd bought and returned for being completely wet during an unusual downpour.

The Wawona 6 is insanely expensive, only affordable when severely discounted (I managed to get it for $251 including shipping and taxes), and when I unpacked it and set it up for the first time during the Haypress Trip I was impressed. The poles were color coded and easily snapped together by the kids, and went into the sleeves with minimal snags. The basic 5 pole tent set up in a jiffy even for first time use and had no obvious places of frustration.

The rainfly + vestibule, however, is a little tricker --- the back of the rainfly isn't easily well marked, so you'll put it on wrong the first time. How far to push out the vestibule and stake it down really demands 2 adults --- the two kids were of no help and in the end we ended up setting it up just a bit wrong --- the vestibule looked right, but in reality if we had to we wouldn't have been able to zip up both doors without restaking the vestibule. The tent probably should also have come with more stakes given the price.

In use, the tent is roomy, and could definitely fit 6 adults but is comfortable with 4 people if you don't like stowing your gear outside. There are lots of accessory/storage pockets inside, though the center lantern hanging is too high up for a kid to reach (a first world problem!). I'm particularly impressed by the way the entrance of the tent has a negative slope. It really ensures that you can sleep at the entrance with the door of the tent leaning away your face --- an ideal position for preventing condensation from waking you up or for water falling into your face if it were to rain in the night.

Tents are long lasting equipment --- unless you use them a lot (or even if in my case you do use them quite a bit) they go for decades especially in California conditions. This one is a keeper. Probably the last car camping tent that I'll own. Recommended.

Review: Delicious - The Evolution of Flavor and How It Made Us Human

 I did not expect to be impressed by Delicious, with its grandiose subtitle and opening chapter that bragged about how well traveled their families were while researching the book. But I quickly discovered that the book was full of interesting tidbits of information that I didn't know, such as why MSG tastes so good:

The taste of umami is a taste that rewards us for finding nitrogen. Umami taste, triggered by glutamic acid, leads us toward our necessary amino acids. But umami taste is not triggered by glutamic acid alone. Subsequent studies by other Japanese researchers would show that in addition to glutamic acid, inosinate and guanylate, two ribonucleotides, can also trigger umami taste. These two ribonucleotides are not found in the dashi’s kombu, but instead in the fish flakes. When inosinate or guanylate and glutamic acid are experienced together, they produce a kind of super umami. Glutamic acid and inosinate are experienced together in dashi. Dashi is rich with super umami, a flavor that is both deeply pleasing and indicative of the presence of nitrogen. (kindle loc 367)

The authors further tell us that cats have no sweet taste receptors:

 an animal that only eats other animals will tend to have in its diet about the right concentration of nitrogen and phosphorus. It also ends up with enough energy, in the form of fat and sugars in its prey’s cells, to carry out its daily activity. Cats with sweet taste receptors are no more likely than those without to survive and flourish; if they spent too much time sipping nectar and too little time eating prey they might have even been less likely to survive. As a result, when the sweet taste receptor of an ancient cat broke, that cat survived nonetheless. It did more than survive, as Xia Li (at the time also a researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center) recently showed. It begat all modern species of cats. No modern cat species have functioning sweet taste receptors.[15] Forests of sweet fruits and nectar are not delicious to cats, not even a little. If you give a cat a sugar cookie, well, it really doesn’t care. It does not experience any pleasure in the cookie’s sweetness; the cookie, to the cat, is not sweet. (kindle loc 501)

Other cool stuff in the book describes how humans decide whats tasty and what's not, and why certain animals are almost never eaten, while many others simply taste like chicken:

Muscle flavor derives from the mouthfeel of the muscle combined with the aromas from sulfur compounds in the protein. Unfamiliar meat often “tastes like chicken,” in part because the dominant flavors in chicken are these simple, somewhat bland, muscle flavors. “Tastes like chicken” really means “tastes like muscle.” Muscle flavor is easy to complement with sauces or herbs, or bread batter and oil, but it is relatively nondescript on its own. (kindle loc 1624)

 There's a description of why certain animals have pleasing flavors, and it comes down to the ineffectiveness in the animal's guts:

Animals with guts that are less effective at digesting food and breaking down toxins are more likely to have meat that bears the flavors of what they have eaten. The list of such animals, with less complete digestion, includes many more species. It includes species with hind guts (guts that occur after their stomach in the gastrointestinal assembly line), species with small foreguts (in which food stays too short a time to break down completely), and a variety of special cases. If animals from this second group of organisms eat foods with pleasing flavors, such as fruit and roots, their meat often strongly tastes of those flavors...Most of the preferred meats of the Mayangna and Miskito are from species whose meat bears the flavor of what they have eaten and that tend to eat foods with pleasing flavors. The Mayangna and Miskito rank the two peccary species they hunt, both of which feed heavily on roots, fruits, and seeds, as the tastiest of wild mammals. So too do hunters throughout the Americas. What is more, they prefer the peccary the most when it has been eating the bulbs of particular plants, peccary with a hint of allium, for instance, or wild hyacinth. Similarly, the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania find warthogs, distant relatives of peccaries, to be delicious.19 If the warthogs have been eating the roots of wild ginger (which they often do), the roots lend a spiciness to their meat. (kindle loc 1668-1684)

You might have heard of the theory that the mega-fauna of North America were driven to extinction by human beings' hunting and consumption of their meat. Apparently those mammoths were pretty darn yummy. What you probably didn't hear about (and I certainly didn't even think about it), is the evidence left behind by such extinction --- there were fruits that had evolved to be dispersed by those mega-fauna, and the authors describe how to identify them:

 Each of these undispersed fruits had its own aroma, taste, and shape, its precise and unique biochemistry of attraction. Some, like mangos and avocados, had enormous seeds at their centers, hard to bite and often toxic. Others, like papayas, had many tiny, soft (and sometimes slippery) seeds. Some had fatty pulp, others had sweet pulp, still others had fleshy and somewhat bland pulp. In short, the fruits varied. And yet nearly all were big, indehiscent (they didn’t break open and release their seeds on their own), and aromatic. These fruits seemed to imply big, missing dispersers. Tellingly, the fruits looked to Janzen liked the sorts of fruits eaten in Africa by elephants and other large mammals. (kindle loc 1949)

This is great stuff. There's the question as to how these fruits could have survived even after the mega-fauna had been hunted to extinction, and the authors describes how monkeys would throw some of these fruits down onto the ground and waited until they softened and became fermented before eating them. It's also likely that humans did the same thing, and there's an entire chapter on human discovery of fermentation. It's also likely, of course, that the fruits that weren't tasty to humans also didn't survive once the mammoths were gone.

There's a chapter on spicy food, where the authors describe papers that test one of the theories I ever had, which was that spicy food evolved in hot places as a way to keep food free of pathogens. Unfortunately there's no definitive study taht proverd this:

We would expect spice use to be common where conditions are hot and wet and pathogens grow quickly. This prediction is easy enough to make, but harder to test well. Sherman and a student, Jennifer Billing, tried one approach. They compiled recipes from around the world and then compared the mean number of spices in different recipes. What they found is that the hotter a region is, the more kinds of spices are found in the average recipe, as they had predicted (figure 6.3). However, there are other reasons this pattern might be expected. For example, it is possible that more kinds of plants with the potential to be used as spices can grow in warm, wet places. In theory, it should be possible to statistically distinguish these two explanations, but no studies have done so, as of yet. (kindle loc 2301)

As you can see from the quotations this book far exceeded my expectations and I enjoyed reading it far more than I thought I would. There's more descriptions of fermented cheeses, alcohols, and what drives people to work on those foods when there are easier ways of getting those calories into your body. All in all I can highly recommend this book. Just be careful not to over  eat while reading! 

Re-read: Ender's Game

 After our spate of Gaiman novels I decided to go for more classic science fiction as a change of pace. Ender's Game was my pick for the next book to read to Boen at night. I remember the book being very exciting and a lot of fun, but on this re-read, what I realized was that the book doesn't actually spend as much time in the battle room as I remembered! Instead, there's actually a ton of time spent on the Giant's Drink virtual reality game, and on the social interaction aspect of the kids.

There's also a good deal of time spent considering the population growth problem (which at the time of the book's writing look insoluble), which contrasts very much with the (over-hyped) hand-wringing over the coming reduction of human populations. Similarly, the book is stuck in the 1970s where the eastern European bloc was seen as the counter-point to the American hegemony. Who says fiction doesn't get outdated?

Nevertheless, the writing is compelling enough to hold Boen's attention, and the story and conceit is just as compelling as ever. Theories of childhood development have changed quite a bit since the book was written, but on the other hand, agree with Orson Scott Card's stance that people regularly under-estimate how much kids can do, especially when properly motivated.

The impact of the ending of the book feels much more diminished now than it did when I first read the book --- I guess knowing that Card turned this into a nearly 10 book series now makes you feel like this is a setup for a bunch of sequels. I remember reading some of the sequels and they weren't nearly as good or exciting as Ender's Game was, so I'm probably going to stop reading this to Boen after this one book.

Regardless, it's still a great book, and I plan to watch the movie with Boen after this reading. Recommended.

New Resmed AirMini Camping Setup

 I've been traveling with the Pilot-24 medical grade certified battery for camping and sailing with my ResMed Air Mini. The battery is fine, but if you ever tried to use the USB output for say, charging your phone you realized it was kinda lame. I came across an online article about using a standard Anker USB power bank with the Resmed Air Mini. The price is right, especially if you don't mind buying used Like New from Amazon, which cuts 30% off the list price.

I got the powerbank and used it on the Haypress trip. The converter cable has an annoying blue light, easily rectified either with tape or by flipping it blue light down. The power bank reports back more than 75% full after the first night, and I charged my phone from 32% to 72% in less than 30 minutes, and got home and discovered that it took another 30Watts to charge back up to full. Anker specifies a 45W charger with this battery but I discovered that it never charged any faster than 30W no matter how empty it was. This is good enough  for sailing. The whole setup is only 10g lighter than my previous setup, but the thing is the AirMini wall-wart is dedicated to only running the AirMini while any powerful USB-C charger can be used for multiple purposes, so net net the whole thing is a win. It's also much cheaper than the Pilot-24, even accounting for the fact that the Pilot-24 can be paid for using FSA money.

Recommended.

Haypress Trip #2

 Last year's Haypress trip was abandoned because I got sick and there was forecast for rain, so I handed over everything to Mickey and Stephan. Haypress Campground is one of the few campgrounds where I can regularly get a reservation. This year, I grabbed two sites one Friday morning and got Stephan and Kevin to bring their kids.

We got in early, with me making 3 trips to the car and setting up our brand new North Face Wawona tent. The others eventually showed up with the stove and we got in some apple cider and mint tea before heading off on our designated adventure of the day, the Miwok/Coastal Loop with a side trip to Pirate's Cove.

On our last Haypress trip, we'd explored the area while Boen had fallen asleep in the tent. This time, I knew the correct approach was to climb the Miwok trail. The climb is steep but would be more or less manageable with a bit of walking here and there.

Up on the ridge the views of the Bay became spectacular.

Stephan deployed his towline to tow Otto up the hill --- I'd stopped using my towline as Bowen and Boen are now strong enough to ride wherever I can go, and I knew that I'd already spent a few matches towing the trailer back and forth 3 times.

Once past the summit, however, it was a thrilling descent all the way down to the coastal trail intersection with Pirate's Cove. At the pirate's cove intersection, we locked all the bikes together and hiked down the trail to the beach. The benefit of camping at Haypress is that you can go to the beach after all the tourists have gone home, and you get the place to yourself.

Once back to the bikes the descent back to the campground should have been easy, but I'd forgotten that the reason I thought Miwok was a better approach was that the climb up was slippery and full of loose gravel, and Boen crashed trying to keep up with his brother. Bowen had definitely gotten so good at descending since Whistler that on his skinny commuting tires he was confident and fast.

We made dinner at camp and slept well in our nicely ventilated tent --- Calvin no longer fit in his parents' tent and so slept over in our 6 person tent on a borrowed sleeping mat from Stephan --- the perils of growing up!

I got up at 6am to an almost cloudless sky but quickly the fog set in and created nasty condensation on the tent, so I had to pack it up wet. The ride back out to the car was gorgeous, and thanks to all the food we'd eaten and the help of our friends I only made 2 trips!

Review: The People's Hospital

 I found The People's Hospital through An Arm and A Leg podcast. The podcast is incredibly informative about how massively painful the US healthcare "system" is, and how beaten down most people are --- even the heroes of the podcast are people who cannot conceive of the idea that the US healthcare system could be any better, or that there are alternative healthcare systems that provide much better value for money, much better overall health outcomes, and that other countries do it much better.

The book is written by Ricardo Nulla, faculty member at Ben Trau hospital in Houston. Nulla clearly loves the hospital, and explains the challenges of serving the uninsured and under-insured in Texas:

The rate of mothers’ dying shortly after childbirth was also rising. In Texas, it had nearly doubled from 2011 to 2012, for reasons public health experts and statisticians couldn’t explain. The spike in maternal deaths loomed so large that Texas lawmakers added it to an emergency legislative agenda. The numbers looked bad. Only during war or catastrophes had there ever been such a spike. Was there a connection between the uninsured rate and the rate of maternal death? Nobody knew. What experts did know was that African American mothers bore the highest risk. So much of our healthcare system is mired in discrepancies. While the rate of new mothers dying in Texas was increasing, Ebonie’s home state of California was bucking that trend. When the Affordable Care Act was signed into law, California expanded Medicaid to cover more than twelve million Californians, making it the largest public insurer of the poor and near-poor in the country. Right in the middle of a pregnancy, Ebonie had left the country’s safest state for expectant mothers—where the mortality rate looked more like that of France or Germany—for one of its most dangerous. Her new home state, Texas, had the same maternal mortality rate as Mongolia. (kindle loc 520)

I was at a kids' soccer game, and one of the other parents came from Canada. He told me that his dad liked the US system better, because it made him feel like a customer. Nulla, of course, would disagree, as would I. I personally think that it's much harder to trust a US medical doctor whenever he recommends something, because the likelihood that he's increasing his revenue through an unnecessary procedure is much higher than the doctors in a system where his income isn't tied to "fee for service":

 “Medical-industrial complex” paints the picture of a firing squad, except the squad is disorganized, each of the gunmen—the insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, and Big Pharma—aiming not only for us but also for the other gunmen. The promise of profit means each of these players is clawing and charging the others: insurance denies claims, hospitals inflate bills for insurance, Big Pharma ups drug prices to scrounge from insurance’s profits. Let’s call it “Medicine Inc.,” then, this amalgam of healthcare suppliers in America, for its level of sheer conscience-less competition. It’s not a perfect term, and it’s not meant to disparage business or capitalism. Perhaps Medicine Inc. wouldn’t be so bad if we were the customers, but we aren’t. We might pay for our care, as a customer would, through insurance premiums and co-pays, but our bodies are the merchandise. (kindle loc 551)

The book follows 3 sample patients, all of whom have been failed by the healthcare system because they didn't have insurance, or bought less insurance that they thought they heard. For instance, I had no idea that the Bronze level of Obamacare didn't cover transplants!  Ben Traub doesn't do transplants either, since it's incredibly expensive, and Ben Traub is actually covered by local property taxes in Houston. Nulla argues:

Healthcare was simply too expensive. Health insurance was too expensive. The reason universal coverage in America is still being debated isn’t because most Americans oppose it in principle (though a few do). It’s because Americans fear the costs. We are already paying so much for our own care; how much can we pay for someone else’s care, too? Some people think that to solve the problem of healthcare in America, we will have to spend an inordinate amount in overhauling what we have. But in fact, healthcare in America already has too much money. The excessive profits made by middlemen and corporations keep prices high. We don’t need to spend more, we need to spend better. To cover more people, we have to decrease healthcare costs across all of America. Perhaps in this regard, Ben Taub presents a model. It offers universal coverage to residents of Harris County and yet it manages to keep costs so low that it was listed by the New York Times as the second-least-expensive hospital in the United States. (Kindle loc 3339)

Ben Traub's costs indeed rival those of what a good universal healthcare system would cover in the rest of the developed world. It's doctors do not operate on the "fee for service" model, and can therefore consider the patients' interest before the doctors':

In 2016, a group of researchers decided to survey the healthcare team members of a for-profit hospital in the United States to figure out if they could identify a “customer.” Doctors, nurses, administrators, patients, patient family members, and anyone working at a hospital—including support staff and therapists—were asked, “Who is and is not a customer for the hospital, and what leads to customer satisfaction?” The results, which appeared in the Journal of Healthcare Management, showed that neither patients nor doctors saw patients as a hospital’s customers. Nearly everyone in the study thought that the hospital’s customer was the doctor... One of my colleagues who splits time between Ben Taub and private hospitals explained it to me like this: “The private system is set up to be overused.” Working at nonprofit and for-profit hospitals introduced temptations he hadn’t experienced at Ben Taub. He could call a colleague in during a surgery when he didn’t really need an extra set of hands (and, likewise, expect to be called by that colleague). He felt incentivized to act lazily at times, letting other doctors perform the medicine he could handle well himself. (kindle loc 3399-3417)

You might think that doctors prefer the American system because it lets them charge more, make bank, and drive expensive Ferraris. Instead, Nulla argues that it actually leads to burnout:

 more than half of American doctors reported bureaucratic tasks as the top burnout factor. Only Portuguese doctors complained so much about bureaucracy. The survey showed similar levels of doctor burnout in all countries, including in France, Germany, and Spain, but for different reasons. American doctors craved more control and autonomy than their counterparts. Notably, UK doctors reported the lowest burnout and depression rate in this survey. These doctors, who, by and large, worked for the National Health Service, complained of government regulations more than doctors from other countries, but they didn’t identify these regulations as factors for causing burnout as much as US doctors did bureaucracy....Opening more medical schools and allowing more foreign medical graduates to work in the United States only places a Band-Aid on a larger problem: most doctors simply don’t like practicing the American style of medicine anymore. In a 2018 opinion piece published by Stat, a Harvard plastic surgeon and a military psychiatrist argued that the problem went beyond tired and downcast workers. “We believe that burnout is itself a symptom of something larger: our broken health care system,” they wrote. “The increasingly complex web of providers’ highly conflicted allegiances—to patients, to self, and to employers—and its attendant moral injury may be driving the healthcare ecosystem to a tipping point.” (kindle loc 3845-3859)

 Yet of course, the American Medical Association advocates against universal healthcare systems and obviously also fights to keep the number of doctors low to keep doctor pay high.

The book's not a depressing read --- Nulla's case studies are instructive and tell you how to work the system. It's got plenty of insights though I wish Nulla had personal experience in other developed country hospitals to see if those are better. It doesn't advocate anything --- Nulla, like many Americans has a "learned helplessness" about the system, but he goes a long way towards explaining why doctors themselves would fare better in a system like Ben Traub. My guess is it'll take more American suffering before Americans decide to vote for change. Needless to say I recommend this book and encourage everyone to read it.

Review: Volt Rush

 Volt Rush is a book about the resources behind lithium ion batteries. That's lithium, cobalt, and nickle, along with the energy required to refine them for ore. It's worth reading as it covers much of what's needed to extract those materials from the earth, and what the environmental and human costs are.

For instance, cobalt is largely supplied from Congo using child labor:

In 2014 Unicef estimated that some 40,000 children worked in the cobalt mines in the Congo, a year when mobile phone sales topped 1.9 billion. As late as 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that children were present or working at about one in four artisanal mining sites. One study based on surveys in the former Katanga province estimated that about twenty-three percent of the children worked in cobalt mining... A decade after Huayou took a gamble on the Congo over ninety percent of the minerals from around Kolwezi were shipped to China.15 No one cared where the cobalt came from, how it was mined, or whether children were involved. As a result, consumers across the world were all indirectly complicit in the practice of child labour. The only thing that mattered was making the phones, and their supply chains, cheap. Designed in California, Made in China. But don’t mention the Congo. It would take the electric car and the work of a global NGO to properly shake the world out of its slumber.(kindle loc 1859-1982)

Even after the car manufacturers got involved, it still seemed like there's little effort to hold the miners accountable for child labor. Similarly, nickle is produced in Indonesia, with immense environmental consequences:

‘Nobody ever imagined that a Chinese investment in Indonesia could have been so disruptive,’ one Western stainless-steel producer told me. ‘They have created the same capacity as the whole of Europe in a country where there is no consumption.’ The company’s stainless-steel production would destroy European industry, he said, even though it produced five times more carbon dioxide from its use of coal-fired power. ‘They are destroying the environment,’ he told me. Tsingshan went from having less than five percent of global stainless-steel production in 2009 to twenty-five percent, becoming so big that even Beijing threatened its Indonesian exports of stainless steel with tariffs in March 2019. Tsingshan had become the cheapest producer of stainless steel in the world...Key to its success was the access to coal-fired power and cheap supplies of nickel. One of the company’s partners in Indonesia told me they paid six cents per kilowatt hour for electricity, compared to ten to twelve cents per kWh in China. Because domestic miners could no longer export their nickel, Tsingshan was in a powerful position to dictate prices to local miners, since it was the biggest buyer in town. The industrial park consumed around 20 million tonnes of nickel a year. Tsingshan paid around $38 a tonne for the local nickel ore, compared to the roughly $65 a tonne that Chinese producers at home paid for material from the Philippines.22 As the scholar Alvin Camba put it, the industrial park had created an oligopsony, where numerous miners competed to sell to a few buyers. As a result, the mining companies had less money to spend on environmental protection....As they watched Chinese companies rush to build projects in Indonesia, Tesla and the world’s largest EV battery producers became worried. The reliance on coal-fired power meant nickel for batteries produced in Indonesia could be up to five times as carbon intensive as that mined in Australia or Canada, in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. The sheer amount of energy needed to separate the nickel from the ore also meant that even if renewables were used, the number of solar panels required would mean a large land footprint – which could contribute to deforestation, which mining had already exacerbated. Mining nickel in Indonesia required stripping large areas of the upland forest to access the ore near the surface. ‘These nickel mines have very large footprints,’ Steven Brown, who had previously worked in mining in Indonesia, told me. Erosion and heavy tropical rainfall led to run-off into the sea, impacting downstream communities. In addition, many nickel mines also produced a toxic pollutant, called hexavalent chromium, which could damage human health, he said. (kindle loc 2464-2491)

 It's interesting to note that all the companies involved in doing the environmental degradation are Chinese. Many of them are directly backed by state-sponsored loans specifically to encourage the growth of battery manufacturing and electric cars in China.

There is one bright spot, which is that Europe finally woke up and made heavy investments of its own. The European experience clearly shows that you can catch up rapidly if you have the willingness to put money in:

In 2020, Europe’s sales of electric cars surpassed China’s for the first time. It marked a significant shift in the centre of the global EV market. For years China had been the leader. Yet in 2019 European investment in electric transport – at €60 billion – was more than three times higher than China, which invested €17.1 billion, according to Brussels-based non-profit Transport and Environment. Just a year earlier Chinese investment was seven times what Europe was investing in the sector. Europe’s rapid growth sparked concerns in China that Beijing was not doing enough to support the electric vehicle market. In a speech in late 2019 CATL’s chairman Robin Zeng called on China to introduce stricter policies similar to Europe’s mandatory carbon emissions limits. ‘If in the coming few years there is still this trend, if there’s no investment there won’t be production, and it will be very hard for us to continue to stay in the first echelon,’ Zeng said.10 Šefčovič was happy: he claimed that by 2025 the EU would be self-sufficient for battery cells. Of the 272 battery Gigafactories in the pipeline globally, twenty-seven were now in Europe, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. It was an acknowledgement that reaping the jobs and economic growth from batteries and reducing reliance on China would require government support. (kindle loc 3383)

Missing in all this of course are the Americans, though Biden's Inflation Reduction Act did start to put money into battery manufacturing and incentives to source production in the USA. It's probably not too late, but there are already political moves to try to claw that back. Ultimately, what I learned from the book is that you cannot leave green tech to China --- it takes Western Democracies to institute environmentally conscious manufacturing and carbon emissions limits. Otherwise the effort to electrify transportation will very likely be at least partially offset by the increased pollution from a country with a history of ignoring environmental protection.

That makes this book well worth reading. Recommended.

Review: Scosche Rhythm+2.0

 The Polar OH1+ I've had for a few years is starting to have its battery die too quickly, so I looked up the price. It's still an astonishing $85, while the direct competitor, the Scosche Rhythm R+2.0 is now $30 or less. I bought one as a backup and it showed up with a charger, the device itself and the strap.

The strap is an improvement on the Polar OH1+. While the Polar would frequently flip over by accident or by rolling a sleeve over the device, this never happens to the Scosche. My first couple of months with the Schosche, I thought that the monitor was unreliable because my HR would spike up to 170+->200 even when I wasn't working hard. By trial and error I eventually discovered that the accuracy goes up dramatically when you put it in its preferred place, on the inside of the elbow. Once I had it there those spikes went away, making it far more accurate than the OH1+.

Battery life is good, and the LED is kinda dim which makes it harder to see that I've turned it on or off correctly. For $30, this is way cheaper than even the traditional "bra-like" HRM, so clearly this is the one to get. I've been using it with no discomfort and it's more than good enough for my purposes.