Reread: Aristoi

 Aristoi is Walter Jon Williams' science fiction novel about a world in which nanotechnology, biotechnology, virtual reality, and the science of human potential maximization has reached its apex. I remember reading it back when it was published in the 1990s, and re-reading it now shows how good science fiction hasn't aged at all.

For instance, the power postures described in the book foreshadowed Amy Cuddy's "power poses" (which were later shown to be of dubious value), and the elite Aristoi ruling class's sense of ego also foreshadowed the ways our political elites behave today.

What's also interesting is how the Aristoi cultivate their different personalities in controlled schizophrenia, something I haven't seen explored anywhere else.

The plot revolves around an unknown Aristoi cultivating a group of planets/star systems and seeding them with barbaric civilizations (essential medieval recreations, including horrific diseases). Then a member of the Aristoi class is murdered and suddenly a conspiracy is suspected. Our protagonist, an Aristoi himself takes it upon himself to investigate, and the exploration of a medieval recreation from the perspective of someone who considers civilized is interesting in itself, as well as the final unveiling of the perpetrators and eventual resolution of the story.

What's interesting to me is that the book doesn't tie all the loose ends up neatly, indicating that a sequel could have been planned but was probably never executed. The story stands along very well, however, and is an enjoyable read. Recommended.

Stories are Weapons

 Stories are Weapons is that most unusual book - a nonfiction piece by a science fiction author. The thesis of the book is that Americans have been subject to psychological warfare techniques and propaganda for so long that they've become gaslit to the point where most Americans cannot tell the difference between reality and fiction. Judging by the polls for the upcoming election I'd definitely agree with the thesis!

There’s a pervasive anxiety in the United States—and, sometimes, a hope—that people will imitate what they find in the stories they consume. It’s why policymakers argue that kids playing violent games could become school shooters. It’s also why right-wing pundits worry that teens reading about trans characters in young adult books might become trans themselves. In the United States, we treat fiction as politics—and vice versa. As a result, it’s difficult for us to build a public sphere where we can come to a consensus about what’s true rather than which story we like best. This conundrum leads us back to where we began: storytelling. (kindle loc 213)

 The book covers the history of the US military's conception of psychological warfare and a biography of Paul Linebarger, also known as the science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith:

Linebarger felt that one of the OWI’s greatest accomplishments was the establishment of Voice of America, a radio station aimed at bringing a US perspective to the world. The OWI took over Voice of America in 1942, and programmed everything from popular music to carefully crafted bits of truth. Voice of America could be read as a real-life analog of the cranching wire from the Cordwainer Smith story “Scanners Live in Vain.” Using their wire antennas to tune in, people deprived of information and entertainment could briefly experience the freedom that comes from both. Eventually, Linebarger hoped, the joy of cranching with Voice of America might lead to the reform of closed regimes like the People’s Republic of China. Throughout the Cold War and beyond, adversaries could hear American voices whispering in their ears, almost as if they were sending telepathic messages about why democracy is good for the world. (kindle loc 516)

Then there's a full-on narrative about the Cambridge Analytica approach at Facebook. Some might have dismissed those as being ineffective, but what's interesting was that Cambridge Analytica was explicit about ways to turn people into racists and antisemetes:

 What they found, after years of running the F-Scale Test, was that certain people do have a measurable disposition that primes them to follow strongman leaders with racist and antisemitic tendencies. The three researchers collaborated with philosopher Theodor Adorno, who had fled Nazi Germany, to publish a book in 1950 called The Authoritarian Personality. In it, they broke down the psyches of latent fascists. People with “authoritarian personalities” were often cynical about humanity: they believed the strong would always rule the weak and that force was the only way to resolve conflicts. Authoritarians also had deep ethnocentric feelings that led to hatred of all manner of people unlike themselves: Jews, immigrants, homosexuals, political adversaries. They had a strong mistrust of science, which they associated with too much rapid social change. The higher a person scored on the F-Scale, the more likely they would fall for fascist propaganda. And yet, as Frenkel-Brunswik and her colleagues discovered, people with authoritarian leanings often didn’t realize it. UC Berkeley intellectual historian Martin Jay, who has studied Adorno’s work, told me that the book’s “basic intuition” is that “people have surface beliefs but if you dig down they have psychological limitations that take them away from those beliefs. There are differences between conscious and unconscious motives—which explains why people would betray their ideals.” A person might see herself as kindhearted, but clever anti-immigrant propaganda would get her thinking that “those people” are criminals who should be forced into detention camps. When triggered by rapid social changes, those unconscious beliefs could erupt into full-blown genocidal movements. (kindle loc 1105)

 The rest of the book covers how this sort of mass paropaganda allow a small number of influencers can create the illusion of mass agreement just by retweeting a meme or concept that might also come from someone else in their networks.

While Annalee Newitz gave me a good feel for the research in her coming to her conclusions about the current state of American mass delusion, she doesn't give good answers as to how we can inoculate people against misinformation or concerted groups trying to influence the outcome of elections. For instance, she mentions libraries as being particularly good places for people to do deep thinking:

“If somebody is trying to come to terms with being a human, there is an instinct to hide, but there’s also an instinct to explore. And in the library those two don’t contradict each other. Hiding in the stacks is a form of discovery.” She said she’s not against social media, but doesn’t feel that it’s as conducive to sharing ideas as browsing in the stacks...As physical spaces, libraries are models of what Gordon called structured communication. Often they contain at least one special-use room where people can hold public meetings, author readings, or after-school study sessions. But the rest of the library defaults to silence. They are places where we come to be alone with our thoughts, to learn from what other people have said without anyone else yelling in our ears about it. We need that silence. It’s a space to make our own decisions, to evaluate what we as individuals actually think rather than what influencers and operatives tell us is right. (kindle loc 2832-2851)

As a book nerd and the kind of person who loves to read, I agree with her. The problem is that we've had libraries for the entire time, and it hasn't helped the population break through the mass propaganda being deployed by Fox News, TikTok, or any number of right wing hosts. Even if it did work it would take generations for people to learn that the misinformation is out there, and we don't have generations until the next election.

Nevertheless, you should read the book. In the mean time the best thing to do is to avoid getting your news from social media altogether.

 

Review: Humble Pi

 Humble Pi claims to be a book about math mistakes. It's actually not a book about mistaken math theorems or anything fundamental like that. It's a book about engineering misapplications of math. So the start of the book actually covered lots of material from Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach. It's probably not a surprise that a written explanation of the same material done by a top professor in visual format is not very interesting and therefore if that was all the book was I wouldn't label it with a recommended tag.

Fortunately, Matt Parker goes beyond the classics and go into various additional failures, including the common misconception that daylight savings time creates extra heart attacks. It turns out that an analysis at the week level data demonstrates that the weeks that include a changeover time didn't actually have more heart attacks, just that the heart attacks were brought forward into earlier in the week:

It seems the clocks going forward and depriving people of sleep did cause extra heart attacks, but only in people who would have had a heart attack at some point anyway. The heart attack merely happened sooner. And likewise, the clocks going back gave people a rest and bought them a few more days until their heart turned on them. This could be relevant information for a hospital planning its staffing around when the clocks go forward, but it does not mean daylight saving time is net dangerous. (kindle loc 2706)

Then there's a bridge that was built between Germany and Switzerland, both countries being very well known as civil engineering powerhouses. Well, even those countries can occasionally make a mistake:

The ocean is not a neat, flat surface; it’s constantly sloshing around. And that’s before you get to the Earth’s uneven gravitational field, which alters sea heights. So a country needs to make a decision on its sea level. The UK uses the average height of the water in the English Channel as measured from the town of Newlyn in Cornwall once an hour between 1915 and 1921. Germany uses the height of water in the North Sea, which forms the German coastline. Switzerland is landlocked but, ultimately, it derives its sea level from the Mediterranean. The problem arose because the German and Swiss definitions of “sea level” differed by 27 centimeters and, without compensating for the difference, the bridge would not match in the middle. But that was not the math mistake. The engineers realized there would be a sea-level discrepancy, calculated the exact difference of 27 centimeters and then . . . subtracted it from the wrong side. When the two halves of the 225-meter bridge met in the middle, the German side was 54 centimeters higher than the Swiss side. (kindle loc 2988)

The book is surprisingly fun and I enjoyed it. It was definitely worth reading!

 

Review: Material World

 Material World is a book about mining and extraction. As opposed to the "ethereal world" we live in, these are the materials that build the phones, run the fiber optic cables, and obviously the gas in the cars many people drive. The 6 materials mentioned in the title are sand (silica, glass, concrete), salt (including other forms of chlorides), iron (steel), copper, oil, and lithium.

The book points out that given our emphasis on moving bits and bytes, you might think that we've become less dependent on mining and extraction. You couldn't be more wrong:

In 2019, the latest year of data at the time of writing, we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950. Consider that for a moment. In a single year we extracted more resources than humankind did in the vast majority of its history—from the earliest days of mining to the industrial revolution, world wars and all. Nor was 2019 a one-off. In fact, you could have said precisely the same thing about every year since 2012. And far from diminishing, our appetite for raw materials continues to grow, up by 2.8 per cent in 2019, with not a single category of mineral extraction, from sand and metals to oil and coal, falling. (kindle loc 953)

The scale of the most recent growth is breath-taking. For instance:

 In the time it takes you to read this page, more than 120,000 wheelbarrows’ worth of concrete will have been poured in China. In the three years between 2018 and 2020, China poured more concrete than the U.S. had in its entire existence, from 1865, when it opened its first plant producing Portland cement—that variety patented by Joseph Aspdin—via the construction of the Hoover Dam, the U.S. highway system, Manhattan and everything else through to the present day. (kindle loc 1167)

 I enjoyed the virtual visits to mine (including the salt mines that I've actually visited) as well as the section on steel. Here again, China plays a commanding role:

Tellingly, the site where these German buildings were relocated—Shagang’s flagship location on the Yangtze, just north of Shanghai—is now the world’s single biggest steelworks. Its 13 blast furnaces (to put this number into context, the most in any steelworks in America currently is four) turn out more than double the entire steel output of ThyssenKrupp, one of the great names in the industry. China has produced more steel in the past decade than the United States has since the beginning of the twentieth century. China’s ascent to the pinnacle of steel production is much the same as its story elsewhere in the Material World: near-total dominance. Shagang’s site is a city of steel—a production facility of a size unlike anything previously constructed elsewhere in the world (kindle loc 2881)

 The exploration of lithium is probably the least developed in the book. Nevertheless, it still taught me stuff I didn't know:

while most other carmakers have opted for big hulking square battery packs in their cars, most of Tesla’s cars still run on a tray of thousands of tiny laptop batteries—many of them made here in Gigafactory Nevada’s “dry room.” It is so named because the air is kept free of the moisture that could damage the fragile chemical compounds on the electrodes. Workers wear head-to-toe hazmat suits to prevent any stray speck of dust or microscopic droplets that could cause a battery to malfunction. The more cells you are turning out, the more likely you are to produce some dud ones, and since one dud battery will at best diminish an electric car’s range and at worst cause it to spontaneously combust, consistency and reliability are phenomenally important. Panasonic is even prouder of its record of never having to issue any major battery recalls than it is of the sheer number of cells it churns out on a daily basis. The way this manifests itself here on the factory floor in Nevada is in an almost obsessional level of discipline and fastidiousness. Stand in the Panasonic end of the gigafactory and it feels a little like you have been teleported to a high-tech Japanese plant, or for that matter a semiconductor fab in Taiwan. But much as a Taiwanese fab could not function without the silicon in its wafers, the clean, sterile environment of the battery assembly line is simply a waypoint in the journey of lithium from under the ground and into your life. The strange thing is that at the very other side of the factory, in the Tesla end, where the Panasonic cells are assembled into the battery packs that will sit at the bottom of people’s cars, the vibe is very different: more chaotic and messy, with batteries and packs lying around all over the place. Since the two ends of the factory are run by separate companies with wildly different histories and philosophies, the defining feature of this enormous building is actually something you can’t see from the outside: a solid wall that runs through the middle of it, keeping the two companies hermetically detached. Robot trolleys pass across from Panasonic territory to Tesla territory carrying trays of batteries, but no humans are allowed to cross this internal border. (kindle loc 5652)

The scale of all this extraction, refining, and production is nothing short of breath taking and well worth your time to read this book. Recommended.

 

 

Review: 23 Things They Don't Tell you about Capitalism

23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism is an indictment of free-market economics, as practiced by the Chicago school of economics and the various right-wing think tanks.

He points out several things. For instance, the Asian countries that grew miraculously fast did so without economists in charge. They mainly had engineers, politicians, and even school teachers directing their economies. It wasn't that they were ignorant of economics, but that they weren't professional economists.

The economic bureaucrats that have been most successful are usually not economists. During their ‘miracle’ years, economic policies in Japan and (to a lesser extent) Korea were run by lawyers. In Taiwan and China, economic policies have been run by engineers. This demonstrates that economic success does not need people well trained in economics – especially if it is of the free-market kind. Indeed, during the last three decades, the increasing influence of free-market economics has resulted in poorer economic performances all over the world, as I have shown throughout this book – lower economic growth, greater economic instability, increased inequality and finally culminating in the disaster of the 2008 global financial crisis. Insofar as we need economics, we need different kinds of economics from free-market economics. (pg. 242)

By contrast, the countries ran by professional economists such as Chile, and many African countries that were directed by professionals at the World Bank, did extremely badly and in many cases even had negative growth! And those were all countries ran by the folks who were big believer in free market economics.

He points out that Scholes-Merton, who won the Nobel prize for economics, founded/were on the board of LTCM, which blew up. That by itself could be a fluke, but they went on to start two more capital management companies and all of them blew up. He notes that effectively the winners of the Nobel prize for Economics don't actually understand economics and therefore shouldn't be running economies.

He points out that shareholders in big public companies shouldn't be the primary stakeholders/decision makers in the company. That's because shareholders have the least commitment to the company, easily exiting their commitment by selling shares. By contrast, employees, suppliers and occasionally even customers have a much harder time looking for a new job or a replacement vendor. GM, for instance ran itself for short-term profits all the way into bankruptcy, which basically means that the so-called profit motive and shareholder capitalism doesn't work either.

Shareholders may be the owners of corporations but, as the most mobile of the ‘stakeholders’, they often care the least about the long-term future of the company (unless they are so big that they cannot really sell their shares without seriously disrupting the business). Consequently, shareholders, especially but not exclusively the smaller ones, prefer corporate strategies that maximize short-term profits, usually at the cost of long-term investments, and maximize the dividends from those profits, which even further weakens the long-term prospects of the company by reducing the amount of retained profit that can be used for re-investment. Running the company for the shareholders often reduces its long-term growth potential. (page 11)

The book is replete with examples of market failures (e.g. pollution, over-fishing) and at the end of it all you will probably find yourself nodding in agreement that free market capitalism (at least in the most zealous form advocated by the Chicago school of economics) is a total disaster and will continue to be a disaster. Getting it out of policy and practice will be great for humanity as a whole.

I've read a lot of economics over the years and this is one of the few that taught me a lot that I didn't know, for instance, that the Grameen bank could only succeed due to huge subsidies:

has been revealed that the Grameen Bank could initially charge reasonable interest rates only because of the (hushed-up) subsidies it was getting from the Bangladeshi government and international donors. If they are not subsidized, microfinance institutions have to charge interest rates of typically 40–50 per cent for their loans, with rates as high as 80–100 per cent in countries such as Mexico. When, in the late 1990s, it came under pressure to give up the subsidies, the Grameen Bank had to relaunch itself (in 2001) and start charging interest rates of 40–50 per cent.  (pg 164)

I can heartily recommend this book. You should get a copy and read it.

 

Review: AirStreamZ Wind Noise Reducer

 I read somewhere that wind noise at 15mph is sufficiently loud to damage your ears. I remembered that a company called Cat EarsCat Ears made wind noise reducers that attach to your helmet straps in front of your ears. I was skeptical that they work but buying things from Amazon means that you can return them.

I bought them and attached them to my helmet and immediately could hear the difference. The ride becomes eerily quiet and you can definitely hear others talking. Downhill it makes an even bigger difference. There's no longer this roar in your ears. Yes, they do make the helmet straps hotter, and will pick up sweat, but to my mind it's a worthy trade off.

I liked them so much I bought them for Boen and Xiaoqin as well. Highly recommended. I should have started using them ages ago!

Review: Not the End of the World

 Not the End of the World is subtitled How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. It is a data-driven approach to the problems of sustainability and environmentalism by Hannah Richie, a disciple of Hans Rosing. I love it. The book starts off by defining sustainability as providing the best environment for the current generation without making things worse for the next generation. She points out that being a pessimist about our crisis doesn't help, and that one major driver of solving our environmental problems is wealth:

In rich countries carbon emissions, energy use, deforestation, fertiliser use, overfishing, plastic pollution, air pollution and water pollution are all falling, while these countries continue to get richer.vii The idea that these countries were more sustainable when they were poorer is simply not true. (kindle loc 640)

Yes, she addresses the claims that the rich countries have less pollution because they outsource the pollution to poorer countries.  She points out that the USA is an outlier in terms of per capita carbon emissions:

Living standards in Sweden are just as good as they are in the US, if not higher. Yet the average Swede emits just one-quarter of the emissions of the average American, and half as much as the average German. And some middle-income countries – such as China and South Africa – have now overtaken many richer countries across Europe in per capita emissions. And this is not just because rich countries have exported their emissions elsewhere. Sweden and France, with lots of nuclear power and hydropower, have very low-carbon electricity grids. They don’t have the massive transport emissions of the US. Living well does not need to come at a high cost for the climate. (kindle loc 1328)

 One of the things I like about the book is that she doesn't take an all or nothing approach to environmentalism. For instance, she points out that switching from an SUV to a regular car gives you much more emissions savings than going from a regular car to no car.  Similarly, switching from Beef to Chicken also gives you a green emissions savings without having to go completely vegetarian.

The book is full of such examples, pointing out how close we are to a truly sustainable future, despite it looking like we have a long way to go. She also points out that being an effective environmentalist doesn't mean you have to do everything the "natural" way:

For years I’ve battled with this personal dilemma: being an effective environmentalist has often made me feel like a fraud. My take on ‘cooking’ looks like an environmental disaster. I always use the microwave. I try to cook as quickly as possible. It nearly always comes from a packet. My avocados are shipped over from Mexico, and my bananas are from Angola. My food is rarely produced locally. If it is, I don’t check the label enough to notice. Ask people what a ‘sustainable meal’ looks like, and they’d describe the opposite of my eating habits. An ‘environmentally friendly meal’ is one that’s sourced from the local market, produced on an organic farm without nasty chemicals, and brought home in a paper bag, not a plastic wrapper. Forget the processed junk: it’s meat and vegetables, as fresh as they come. We should set aside time to cook them properly, in the oven. But I know that my way of eating is low-carbon. Microwaves are the most efficient way to cook, local food is often no better than food shipped from continents away, organic food often has a higher carbon footprint, and packaging is a tiny fraction of a food’s environmental footprint while often lengthening its shelf life. (kindle loc 4637)

 She acknowledges that our intuition on what sustainability is means we have a severe PR problem in the environmental crisis.  It's also quite clear that limiting warming to 2 degrees C is a stretch, but that just means each 0.1 C matters more and we really need to do what we can. One thing that she and I agree vehemently is that individual action is insufficient to bring about lasting change:

The reality is that we will not fix our environmental problems through individual behaviour change alone. This became obvious during the coronavirus pandemic. The world spent most of 2020 at home, at a huge cost to the quality of life for millions of people. Our lives were stripped back to the bare minimum. There were hardly any cars on the roads or planes in the sky. Shopping malls and entertainment venues were shut. Economies across the world tanked. There was a dramatic and almost-universal change in how all of us lived. What happened to global CO2 emissions? They fell by around 5%. That’s a hard pill to swallow. We want to believe in ‘people power’ – that if we all just pull together and act a bit more responsibly then we’ll get there. Unfortunately, to make real and lasting progress we need large-scale systemic and technological change. We need to change political and economic incentives. (kindle loc 4663)

If you are tired of doom and gloom environmentalism and the degrowth movement, this book is for you. It's definitely well worth your time to read it.

 

Review: Maxforce Fleet Ant Bait Gel

 We had an ant problem and none of the cheap ant bait traps on Amazon worked. Xiaoqin did some research and found recommendations for Maxforce Fleet Ant Bait Gel. At $40/pop this stuff isn't cheap but neither is pest control so we ordered it and tried it.

The dispenser is a syringe. We would apply it to a post it note and then plant the post-it note along the ant paths. We did this in several places in the house, using 2 out of 4 syringes in the box over 5 days.

Within a week the ants were gone. Just like that! It's so nice when your problem can be solved by buying things. Recommended.

Re-Read: The Curse of Chalion

 I seem to be on a re-read kick recently, and The Curse of Chalion floated to the top of the list. Lois McMaster Bujold's take on fantasy creates a world in which the gods themselves might not be able to act except through a saint, someone who voluntarily gives their body over to a god/goddess in order to actually act on the world.

The setup through the character of Cazaril is great, where we start the story in the middle and only near the end of the book do we realize that his path down this sainthood was setup ages ago. There's a section where he negotiates (on behalf of his princess) for a political marriage. The groom's father, known as a wily negotiator, tries to bribe him with all sorts of personal property and real estate. Cazaril's reply: "I've got a tumor and I expect to die soon. What you're offering is for someone who's going to live for a long time." It's a poignant moment and Bujold follows it through to the logical implications.

The writing is transparent, the plot sound, and the many clues and reveals each worthy of the reader's time. It's thoroughly enjoyable and well worth (re)reading.

New Road Bike for Xiaoqin

 After riding the Roadini 50cm I built earlier this year, Xiaoqin decided that a road bike would be something she would enjoy.

I started down the path of acquiring another Roadini, but Rivendell wasn't going to have any until September, and used Roadinis were either too highly priced, or spec'd with weird components that don't reflect Bay Area cycling requirements (most bicycles are spec'd with too high a high gear and insufficiently low low gears, and many builds seem to be for big heavy guys rather than lightweight women).

The reality is that while the Rivendell ethic of having easily adjustable stems is ideal for building a bike for a growing kid, for an adult once the fitting is done, there's little need for adjustability. I wasn't willing to buy an off-the-shelf bike, however --- again, most of the frames aren't designed for Bay Area needs and Xiaoqin's been riding off pavement on the same paths I'd take my road bikes on. I also didn't want a bike with disc brakes, since I don't really know how to maintain them. Again, most stock production bikes don't come with gears sufficiently low enough to enable a beginner to enjoy climbing hills in the Bay Area. I consider a 40x50 low gear the bare minimum for riding Bay Area hills, and the standard 36x34 or even 34x34 drivetrain would pray for bankruptcy for many of the local rides, and that's even ignoring the fact that I enjoy riding my road bike off road.

The Ritchey Road Logic came immediately to mind. It's compatible with dual pivot calipers, comes with a carbon fork (but that's designed for the off pavement work a Bay Area cyclist would want), is made with steel with external routing for easy maintenance, and can clear 30mm tires. I was nervous about cutting the steer tube on the carbon fork, but a quick message to Terry Shaw pointed me to Wade Hall of Spokesman Cycles for a fitting, so I ordered the frame, parts, and arranged for a fitting.

Under Wade's directions, I built the frame up with wheels, derailleur, cranks, chain, and brakes but no cables attached. We then showed up at the fitting with a selection of saddles, handlebars, brake levers, and pedals for him to assess. "Oh, you have the S900 brake levers --- I'd ordered those for my own bike and mine will arrive today." He approved of my selection of the brake levers at least.

The fitting took about 3 hours and was involved, first starting with measuring the sit bones, then checking on the flexibility and various physiological components of the cyclist. Then the bike was put on the trainer with frame, fork, and headset installed but uncut, and with an adjustable stem. The process is iterative, with Wade first adjusting the fore-aft and the seat height, and then adjusting the stem, and then switching over the handlebars (the Beacon bars don't come narrower than 40cm, and he'd measured her shoulders at 36cm, so wanted 38cm bars for her), and then finally the seat, and then readjusting everything. At the end of the session Xiaoqin looked more comfortable and posturally correct than many cyclists who'd ridden road bikes for years. He installed footbeds for her and you could actually see her stance change immediately!

At this point, Wade cut the steer tube, installed the correct stem, spacers, handlebars and star nut. The recommended saddle was installed onto a seatpost, and the seatpost cut to save weight. The whole affair was not cheap but the most expensive way to spend money on bicycling is to buy a bike and not ride it. The entire build for the bike looked like this:

• Ritchey Road Logic (Rim Brake) 51cm
• Neugent EZMount TwoX Wheels
• Shimano CUES 11-50 cassette
• Shimano GRX 810-1 crankset, 170mm
• Shimano U8000 rear derailleur
• Tektro Medium Reach Calipers
• Salsa Guide  Seatpost 27.2mm (cut)
• Specialized Power Arc Pro Elaston Black 155 Saddle
• Specialized Hover Alloy Flare handlebars +15 rise, 38cm wide
• Specialized Comp Stem 17deg 9cm
• SRAM S900 brake levers
• Microshift SRAM 11s bar-end shifter
• Shimano BC-9000 brake cable set
• Shimano R9100 Optislick cables
• SRAM PC-1110 chain
• Michelin Power Cup Competition 700x28 tires, tube type
• Michelin Airstop tubes
• Cinelli Cork tape

Total weight came to 8400g with heavy pedals. On the bike she's fast on the flats (enough that I have a hard time catching or over-taking her), and the bike has low enough gears to climb 9% grades on her first serious ride on it. It's a great bike. We're both excited. Even just riding it around to test ride while building the bike I could feel how light it is.

Re-read: A Deepness in the Sky

 To commemorate the late Vernor Vinge, I decided to read A Fire Upon the Deep to Boen. Not remembering how long a book that was, I placed a hold on A Deepness in the Sky at the library. It arrived long before we were finished with the previous book, so I started reading it since progress was slow on the former.

I keep forgetting how many layers A Deepness in the Sky had. You had the spider-like aliens, which are very different from the earth-inspired spiders in Adrian Tchaikovsky's novels. You had the huge differences between the Qeng Ho and the Emergent cultures, both technologically speaking as well as in attitude, and you had the hero protagonist of this novel, Pham Nuwen, who also featured strongly in A Fire Upon The Deep.

The interaction between all the characters demonstrate depth, development and growth, as does the realization of the spider civilization. What's even more important is that on this reading of the novel, I realized that the eventual victory of the more sympathetic side is never described, only alluded to. Not only that, even the mechanism of that victory is only hinted at. That's because the main point of the book is the development and growth of the main characters.

This is a long book, with a lot going on, and a lot of fantastic ideas that less writers would have developed into individual novels by themselves. Thoroughly enjoyable and worth re-reading. Recommended.

Review: Sofirn BS01 Bike Light

 I'd been looking for a USB-C rechargeable headlight that didn't suck. When Sofirn offered the BS01 Bike Light for $33 shipped, I bought it just in case it was good. The light comes with a garmin-style quarter turn mount that would fit on any handlebar. The light is pretty bright and claims a 3.5H running time in High (350 lumen) and 14 hours on low (130 lumen). Do not believe the marketing in terms of how bright these lights are, as independent testing usually show that all these numbers are highly inflated. In flash mode I have yet to run it down. The light has a high cut-off so it doesn't blind incoming pedestrains/drivers, though there's nothing that indicates it conforms to the StVZO bike light standard. There's a claim of a 2000 lumen turbo mode but that's just marketing and you should ignore it.

The weight of the unit is a disappointingly high 193g, but the unit also acts as a battery bank! I tested it and to my surprise it's not just a battery bank, it's a USB-PD rapid charger bank (according to my Pixel 8 Pro). That dual use means that it justifies my using it on a bike tour.

I've been using this on the tandem in the evenings and night and been satisfied. Recommended.

Review: The Lost Cause

 The Lost Cause is Cory Doctorow's extrapolation into the future of our vastly polarized society: the Magas vs the next generation of climate activists, the NIMBYs vs the builders, the libertarian sea-steaders vs the impoverished refugees. It all takes place in the city of Burbank, where the protagonist, Brooks lives in a Maga-sympathetic grandfather after he was orphaned due to his parents fighting a climate-related crisis in Canada and perishing in that attempt.

After Brooks' grandfather dies of natural causes, he does what every kid his age tries to do, which is to tear it down and build a high density apartment building to help the housing crisis and house refugees. The whole thing then becomes a thinly veiled exposition of the world Doctorow has extrapolated from our own time, with Magas trying every trick in the book to prevent refugees from destroying their perfect suburban Burbank (including injunction against buildings, starting wildfires, etc), and Brooks and his friends trying to outmaneuver them.

It's perfectly good juvenile fiction, and written at a time when California's sky had turned orange and we wondered whether we were too optimistic when we thought we were turning the planet into a hellscape. There's not much character development, and a lot of exposition about how prefab buildings could help solve the housing problems but not much on how society would ever reconcile its differences other than by waiting for the old guys to die out.

Review: The History of Video Games

 The History of Video Games was $0.25 on Kindle format, and at that price I decided to buy it and read it. This is an astonishingly shallow history of the video game industry, covering a lot of material but in very cursory detail. For instance, the list of famous people is really short, and coverage of how the Sony Playstation came to a few paragraphs, much shorter than even the wikipedia article!

There's a list of top ten games for every decade, but the author admits that the selection was pretty subjective.

I suppose this book would be a good starting off point for googling and searching deeper on any topic that interested you, but I'm not sure it's very useful otherwise. For a quarter it's not a bad read, but it felt like a weekend project of a book rather than something someone poured their heart and soul into.

Re-read: The Sword of Destiny

 I read The Sword of Destiny to Boen after reading The Last Wish to him.  Once again, I'm struck by how bad a writer Sapkowski is. His characters never use a sentence to make a point when they can use twenty. Dandelion was super whiny.

The plot and allusions to fairy tales and the references to the Law of Surprise was superlative, however. Sapkowski manages to introduce the concept in a way to make you accept it unquestioningly. This draws you into his fantasy world in ways no mere exposition can. The reference in the title of the book is with his relationship with Ciri, his adopted daughter (who will turn out to be a key MacGuffin in the video game).

Here, Sapowski breaks convention and never tells us what motivates Geralt. Did he want a child surprise in the hopes of continuing the lineage of witchers? Yet he never refers to his experience of becoming a Witcher as being pleasant, nor does he seem to delight in his life. Yet when given the chance to claim his child surprise he denies this destiny, which leads to several horrifying events (which may or may not be linked to Geralt's denial of the claim) and ends up with his being united with Ciri as a result.

We also see the seams in Sapkowski's world building, since despite various claims in The Last Wish that sorceresses cannot be fertile, we discover that Geralt was indeed beget of one. The whole thing is never explained.

I'd say that the only reason to read the books is that it adds depth to the video games, but the truth is this is one place where the video game is actually better than the book (or the Netflix TV show). I'd pass on it unless you became a big fan of the video game.

Review: A Brief History of Intelligence

 A Brief History of Intelligence is a surprisingly good book, given that its title purported to also be about AI. Rather than being even a little bit about AI, the book is actually an evolutionary approach to 

intelligence, and it covers its topic really well, even innovatively. The approach is to discuss the rise of human-like intelligence by following the taxonomy and evolutionary history, and the approach is particularly good.

For instance, the rise of brains is tied to an organism's ability to steer and move:

The first brain and the bilaterian body share the same initial evolutionary purpose: They enable animals to navigate by steering. (kindle loc 1046)

Surprisingly, he notes modern ailments of depression can be observed even in relatively primitive intelligences such as a nematode:

 If a nematode is exposed to thirty minutes of a negative stimulus (such as dangerous heat, freezing cold, or toxic chemicals), at first it will exhibit the hallmarks of the acute stress response—it will try to escape, and stress hormones will pause bodily functions. But after just two minutes of no relief from this inescapable stressor, nematodes do something surprising: they give up. The worm stops moving; it stops trying to escape and just lies there. This surprising behavior is, in fact, quite clever: spending energy escaping is worth the cost only if the stimulus is in fact escapable. Otherwise, the worm is more likely to survive if it conserves energy by waiting. Evolution embedded an ancient biochemical failsafe to ensure that an organism did not waste energy trying to escape something that was inescapable; this failsafe was the early seed of chronic stress and depression. (kindle loc 1046)

Then there's the rise of reinforcement learning, and the problem of temporal credit assignment when it comes to learning. When something succeeds, how do you know which of the things you did in the past was what gave rise to the success! It turns out that reinforcement learning, where you co-evolve both an actor and a critic, is what allows temporal credit assignment to make learning possible in animals:

 Dopamine is not a signal for reward but for reinforcement. As Sutton found, reinforcement and reward must be decoupled for reinforcement learning to work. To solve the temporal credit assignment problem, brains must reinforce behaviors based on changes in predicted future rewards, not actual rewards. This is why animals get addicted to dopamine-releasing behaviors despite it not being pleasurable, and this is why dopamine responses quickly shift their activations to the moments when animals predict upcoming reward and away from rewards themselves. (kindle loc 1619)

 Then the author (Max Bennett) explores how memory evolved as part of being able to simulate the world as a brain develop, and why human memory is so famously unreliable. In effect, when you're remembering something, you're projecting into the past and recreating the environment you remember you were in. The problem is that you're using generative algorithms to re-create those memories, and the same hallucinations you might have encountered in AI systems are also responsible for creating those false memories. Your memories of the past and your ability to project into the future and create plans are both sides of the same coin, and in many ways equally unreliable!

Once you have a memory system and a way to simulate the world, then you're able to spatially map the world and gain useful data. In an open ended environment (Benett points to a paper using Montezuma's Revenge as an example), it turns out that you need to evolve a new instinct in order to solve extremely complicated problems:

 The approach is to make AI systems explicitly curious, to reward them for exploring new places and doing new things, to make surprise itself reinforcing. The greater the novelty, the larger the compulsion to explore it. When AI systems playing Montezuma’s Revenge were given this intrinsic motivation to explore new things, they behaved very differently—indeed, more like a human player. They became motivated to explore areas, go to new rooms, and expand throughout the map. But instead of exploring through random actions, they explored deliberately; they specifically wanted to go to new places and to do new things...The importance of curiosity in reinforcement learning algorithms suggests that a brain designed to learn through reinforcement, such as the brain of early vertebrates, should also exhibit curiosity. And indeed, evidence suggests that it was early vertebrates who first became curious. Curiosity is seen across all vertebrates, from fish to mice to monkeys to human infants. In vertebrates, surprise itself triggers the release of dopamine, even if there is no “real” reward. And yet, most invertebrates do not exhibit curiosity; only the most advanced invertebrates, such as insects and cephalopods, show curiosity, a trick that evolved independently and wasn’t present in early bilaterians. (kindle loc 2058-2065)

One interesting thing is that the way learning works is that both actor and critic reinforce each other, but must ultimately be guided by real senses and real world results. When you no longer get real input, the entire system is capable of hallucinating:

 People whose eyes stop sending signals to their neocortex, whether due to optic-nerve damage or retinal damage, often get something called Charles Bonnet syndrome. You would think that when someone’s eyes are disconnected from their brain, they would no longer see. But the opposite happens—for several months after going blind, people start seeing a lot. They begin to hallucinate. This phenomenon is consistent with a generative model: cutting off sensory input to the neocortex makes it unstable. It gets stuck in a drifting generative process in which visual scenes are simulated without being constrained to actual sensory input—thus you hallucinate. (kindle loc 2545)

 Similarly, this explains also the presence of activities such as dreaming. The evolution of imagination is also important, and points to the fact that both generation and recognition occupy the same circuits in brains and cannot be done simultaneously:

The most obvious feature of imagination is that you cannot imagine things and recognize things simultaneously. You cannot read a book and imagine yourself having breakfast at the same time—the process of imagining is inherently at odds with the process of experiencing actual sensory data. In fact, you can tell when someone is imagining something by looking at that person’s pupils—when people are imagining things, their pupils dilate as their brains stop processing actual visual data. People become pseudo-blind. As in a generative model, generation and recognition cannot be performed simultaneously. (kindle loc 2569)

 The book goes on to explain autism and human social behavior and language. There's too much going on there in order to quickly summarize in a review, but essentially, one more layer of the cortex can be devoted to monitoring the brain itself. This might not seem to be useful, but is in fact, what's necessary in highly social primate groups in order to develop theory of mind to maintain social status. This need then gives rise to consciousness and self-awareness (you need all that to simulate the perspective of other brains), and the need to do so also gives rise to language.

The book contains lots of interesting ideas and is well worth reading. I highly recommend it!

Re-read: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteneance

 I last read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteneance in 2013, and this might turn out to be a book I should re-read every 10 years or so, as the meaning of the book keeps changing for me over the decades. On this re-read, I found myself rediscovering how much the book influenced me. For instance, on this time around, I highlighted the argument about a degreeless, gradeless college:

he would come back to our degreeless and gradeless school, but with a difference. He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He’d be a free man. He wouldn’t need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors assigned him were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He’d be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they’d better come up with it. Motivation of this sort, once it catches hold, is a ferocious force, and in the gradeless, degreeless institution where our student would find himself, he wouldn’t stop with rote engineering information. Physics and mathematics were going to come within his sphere of interest because he’d see he needed them. Metallurgy and electrical engineering would come up for attention. And, in the process of intellectual maturing that these abstract studies gave him, he would be likely to branch out into other theoretical areas that weren’t directly related to machines but had become a part of a newer larger goal. This larger goal wouldn’t be the imitation of education in Universities today, glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on. It would be the real thing. (pg 189)

I realized now that I was that student in college. I was the guy working two jobs while going to school full time, and I was intentional about learning, as opposed to being there for the degree. I had another student once asking me why I was working so hard on a class I was taking Pass/Fail (where grades didn't count). My reply at the time is that I'm taking the class because I was actually interested in the topic, and taking it pass fail so that I really could concentrated on learning instead of grades. That answer completely mystified the other student. I did get pissed when classes were moving slower and covering less material than I'd hoped. It also led to a total lack of empathy with other students --- when your parents are paying for college you might have a different attitude from the guy living on ramen and trying to scrape by. And by the way, this is why I got so pissed at Republicans claiming that those of us on Pell grants and financial aid were there looking for a handout and less deserving than those who were living on what us poverty-line types called "F&M scholarships" --- father and mother scholarships.

Recently, Vermont was telling me about asking one of the other engineers to slow down, and pay more attention to detail and care rather than rushing through trying to close jira tickets as quickly as possible. This book has such a strong echo with Vermont's exhortations:

Impatience is best handled by allowing an indefinite time for the job, particularly new jobs that require unfamiliar techniques; by doubling the allotted time when circumstances force time planning; and by scaling down the scope of what you want to do. Overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up. This requires value flexibility, and the value shift is usually accompanied by some loss of gumption, but it’s a sacrifice that must be made. It’s nothing like the loss of gumption that will occur if a Big Mistake caused by impatience occurs.

It’s the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn’t separate from the rest of your existence. If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together. (pg. 309, 316)

This is such a great book. All engineering managers should have to read this book, and probably should recommend it to their direct reports. And if you need motivation to become a better mechanic:

A person who knows how to fix motorcycles—with Quality—is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn’t. And they aren’t going to see him as some kind of object either. (pg. 349)

I bought this book 11 years ago. It's still worth reading, and I get new stuff out of it every time I read it. You can't get more highly recommended than that. 

Kirby Cove Campground Trip

Whenever I visit recreation.gov, I always find that there's one campground that looks super-appealing, and that's Kirby Cove Campground. Of course, every time I tried to book it, it was booked up, especially since those of us who are working stiffs with kids in school can't afford to do anything other than a weekend trip. Then during the New Year's Eve Wildcat Campground trip, Daniel told me the secret trick to booking the site.  Armed with that secret trick, it took me only 2 weeks to book campsite #1 at Kirby Cove for the first weekend of April.

Booking that far out is always risky, but fortunately, the rain that was supposed to land on both Thursday and Friday got revised out to only Thursday night, so we were assured of dry weather during the weekend. Both kids and Xiaoqin had caught some sort of viral infection but we decided to do the trip anyway, given how hard it had been to book it.

When you book 2 nights at the campground, surprisingly few people will come for both nights. Each campsite can hold 10 people, so we invited friends, including Stephan, his dad, and his son Otto and some neighbors for Friday, and Mickey and Kevin's families for Saturday. I had a full weekend of hikes planned as well.

Arriving at 4:00pm at the campground we followed the instructions to unlock the gate and drove down to the campground, stunned by how nice it was. Campsite #1 was amazing, with 2 tent pads with views of the golden gate, and its own private swing! We pitched a tent and then went out to eat --- in retrospect we should have bought take out just to enjoy how nice the campground was! It was windy when we arrived, but the campground itself was sheltered so putting up the tent was much easier than expected.

Stephan and Allan's family showed up much later but they were no less impressed. The cold made sleep difficult, but the view in the morning was more than worth ti.

Breakfast with a view of the golden gate is amazing. 

We then convoyed up to Trojan point to start the classic hike on Matt Davis trail and then return on Steep Ravine.

The views and greenery was amazing, with flowers starting to bloom. The forest flowers were by far the highlight, since they'd gotten so much water that the growth was verdant.

We visited Stintson beach and had lunch there, and with some difficulty peeled the kids away from the beach for the hike back up to the Pantoll Ranger Station.

Steep Ravine was nothing short of amazing, with the creek sounding like jet engines roaring, and the stream demonstrating multiple cascades, including some which we hadn't seen before because the recent rains had been so heavy.

We finished the hike in great spirits, returning to the campground to find Kevin already there. We got a chance to explore the beach, including the tunnel, the caves, and then Mickey showed up with a portable grill and made burgers for everyone!

Saturday at Kirby Cove was much different than Sunday, with lots of day trippers and visitors who would walk down the dirt road for access and take pictures, sit on the beach, or just explore.

When dinner was over we'd sit and watch the sunset and watched the city lights turned on slowly. It was magical.

On Sunday morning, we packed everything up slowly after breakfast and then went for my second day's plan. I was going to go for a bigger hike but most people looked pretty tired so opted to start everyone at the morning sun trailhead.

The SCA trail + morning sun combination is the easiest hike with most scenery for the buck you can get in the Bay Area. The views are stunning, and best of all, the non-enthusiastic hikers can treat it as a one way hike to the parking area while those who can't get enough can double back and fetch the car and pick them up.

Wildflowers were blooming and we stopped to take photos so often people asked us why it was taking us so long to walk back to the car!

When the hike and pick up was over, all the other families were done but it was just 12:30pm which was perfect timing for visiting Point Bonitas Lighthouse while it was still open, something I've never achieved because of the narrow 3 hour opening window. So we went down to Sausalito and bought take out Mexican food and then drove through the tunnel again to the lighthouse parking area and ate lunch.

The lighthouse access tunnel was great, and nicely sheltered from the prevailing wind, which was blowing much harder than I expected given what we experienced in the morning. Despite all the signs telling us that access was restricted to 49 people at the lighthouse at a time, it must have been a light traffic day because the rangers and docent who were tasked with counting people never stopped anyone from crossing the suspension bridge and exploring the lighthouse. I noted that there's a guided tour available at sunset for people who want to see the lighthouse turn on.

At the end of the trip I asked Boen if he thought Wildcat Campground was better or Kirby Cove and he said: "Kirby Cove, no contest!" The campground is restricted to 3 nights a year a person so I guess we'll have to return next year if he likes it so much!

Review: Bryton Gardia R300 Radar

 I use my Garmin radars so much that the batteries on them that their batteries start wearing out after about 3-5 years of use. When the batteries wear out you can call Garmin and they'll give you a 20% discount on a replacement unit (there's no way to replace the battery in them). In February, there was an Amazon lightning sale on the Bryton Gardia R300 Radar where the price was $85 pre-tax, so I bought one at that price to test.

The biggest feature of the Bryton is that it charges using USB-C. That means one less cable tip to have to carry while touring. It also purportedly has better battery life. Pairing with my Garmin Edge 840 was no problem, but the ANT+ light profile doesn't really work --- the light will not turn on or off properly, nor can you set the light mode to flashing or solid from the Edge.

In use, the radar works fine --- I haven't found any false negatives or false positives that wouldn't have happened to the Garmin unit. What does happen is that on occasion the Bryton will disconnect from the head unit and immediately reconnect. That's not a big deal --- the reconnection was so fast that it wouldn't make me concerned about the safety. The fact that the head unit can't control the light mode is a bigger deal to me. Obviously the Bryton also wouldn't get firmware updates via the head unit. You have to manually connect it to your phone and then use the phone app to update it.

At $85 this unit is a steal, with the lower price and USB-C charging more than offsetting the inconvenience of manually having to turn the light on and off.  I wouldn't pay full price for the unit, but even the discounted price of the Garmin is $160, which is still more than the $110 street price the unit typically sells for at Amazon.

Garmin's acquisition of the radar unit and subsequent launch and rollout has been very successful --- that Wahoo didn't support the radar for 2 years caused me to switch head units back to Garmin. That they are only now getting serious competition for the radar light itself means that Garmin has had the time to refine and improve the unit and capture majority market share. If you don't already have a radar unit I would have no hesitation in recommending the Bryton.

Reread: Among Others

 After reflecting upon Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, I went back and re-read Among Others. Most books are worth reading once, but Among Others strikes me as being particularly brilliant (or "brill") upon a second reading. Written as a diary, the book narrates Morwenna Phelps' experience as an alienated mid-teen in a boarding school after surviving an adventure in which she loses a twin, runs away from home, and meets her father for the first time.

Like many nerdy kids, her primary refuge was in books. The book references come early and often, and the nice thing about the kindle edition of the book is that you get direct links to various books in the kindle store. One of the books referenced didn't have a link and I looked it up and to my horror discovered it was Zelazny's The Dream Master, which was selling used for $77.34, and not to be found at the library anywhere.

The book has many elements of an autobiography. Having met Jo Walton, she walks with a limp and of course, her repertoire of science fiction novels and knowledge is unparalleled. But anyone who grew up loving books and science fiction will enjoy the depiction of a reader's first discovery of Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside.

Reading this book made me remember how ephemeral meetings and friendships were in the 1980s and 1990s. People would move and change phone numbers and you'd never see them again. There were no smartphones or location sharing apps, so if someone was late or couldn't make it you wouldn't know if it was because they were in an accident or if they decided to stand you up. And if you wrote someone a letter and they lost your address or just never wrote back you had no idea why.

Most of all, the book is about the need for a social connection. Even the nerdiest of book lovers (like Morwenna Phelps) feels the need to discuss the books they read with like-minded individuals, and back in those days there was no internet (and nowadays maybe there's no internet either, as many online forums have turned into toxic waste dumps). The book reminded me of meeting a classmate for the last time when the semester was over. She saw the book I was reading (Lord of Light) and exclaimed, "You're reading the classics!" We chatted about the books we'd read in class, our lives after graduation, exchanged addresses, and despite exchanging a letter or two, never saw each other again.

Among Others deserves both its Hugo and Nebular awards. I should buy my own copy instead of checking it out from the library every time!

“You’re so lucky,” Wim said, surprisingly. “Lucky? Why?” I blinked. I am not in the habit of thinking I am lucky, even when my leg isn’t strapped to a rack. “Having a rich father who reads SF. Mine thinks it’s childish. He was okay with it when I was twelve, but he thinks reading at all is sissy and reading kid stuff is babyish. He roars at me whenever he catches me reading. My mother reads what she calls nice romances, sometimes, Catherine Cookson and that sort of thing, but only when he isn’t in the house. She doesn’t understand at all. There are no books in our house. I’d give anything for parents who read.” (kindle loc 3501)