June 13: Secada Loop

Last year, Western Wheeler member Cindy Asrir on her trip to Italy as part of her choir sent back pictures of the Secada Loop from Selva Gardena That was so pretty and I was determined to make it a part of this year trip. The problem, of course, is that public transit in the Dolomites would not make the trip feasible without a private car. I explored the idea of renting a car from Cortina but the car rental companies had weird rules about when we could return the cars, so in the end I gave up and organized a private taxi ride at an outrageous price. I would later justify it to myself by saying that compared to the backroads $1000/person/night prices with 6 people I was getting away with a bargain at substantially less than 1/6th the price.

The taxi showed up at precisely the time they promised and we piled into it for the long ride th Selva Gardena, where Bowen and I had been in 2019. The ride was long because Passo Falzerago was closed, so the driver had to take the long way around via Bruneck, etc. , backtracking in 2 hours what took us 2 days of riding to do.

Arriving at the cable car, we paid the exorbitant (but still less than the backroads price) fee for the 6 of us and rode it to the top. At 2000m, the weather was still warm enough for me to feel hot, which made me glad that Misurina was at 1770m instead of the much lower 1200m that Selva Gardena was at.

The Secada Loop was just as famous as Tre Cime di Laverado but didn’t feel as crowded. The hike immediately takes you to the best views. To me this was a stunning view, but Arturo said it reminded him of some landscapes in the Sierra, so it didn’t feel as exotic to him as the hike we had done the day before. “Of course, it’s much more accessible --- in the Sierras getting to those places would take a couple of days of backpacking!”

What I liked most about the hike was how diverse it was. You would go from these dramatic views of these spikey peaks overrun with tourists, and then descend down to the Naitonal Park, and once you got to the National Park trails the crowds would mysteriously fade way. Bowen complained that there was a stone in his shoe that wouldn’t go away. But after several attempts to get of it in vain, we made him take off his socks and indeed it was a blister! Fortunately, we were close to a mountain hut/restaurant, and Arturo quickly chatted with some British hikers who happened to have compeed! He liberated one from them and applied it to Bowen’s foot with instant relief.

WIth that behind us, we kept on hiking through the quiet phase of the trail, which had impressive flowers. When we neared the cable cars again, it became rather obvious as the number of hikers increased along with the services ---- mountain huts, water fountains, and even marked trails. I would later consider this hike the best of the trip.

All this time, our taxi service company continually sent me a text via Whatsapp asking of our status so that we could get a pickup without waiting too long at the end of the hike. When we finished we hike down, but instead of waiting for our driver we found and ice cream shop and started walking towards it. To my surprise, the walk involved a tunnel, an escalator, and a moving walkway that dumped us out in the middle of town. This was amazing. I shared our location to the taxi service and he showed up just as we finished our ice cream, but not before I bought a box of compeed at Italian prices at the pharmacy next to the ice cream shop. Once having bought the insurance, we would discover that we didn’t need it for the rest of the trip!

The ride back to Miralago was uneventful. The driver asked if we wanted to visit Lago de Braes, but we decided we were tired and had another full day ahead of us. That night, Stephan joined us at Miralago for dinner, and we debated various possibilities for the next day. What won was Xiaoqin’s suggestion for a hike that started from the cable car near the Tre Croci summit.  While the cable car was served by a bus, we realized that it was close enough and easy enough to ride to the start by bike instead. This would give everyone a chance to shake out their bike and see if there were any problems prior to the big ride of the Giau the day after.

Review: Specialized Men's SL Pro Short Finger Gloves and Supacaz Supa G Short Glove

 Specialized had a sale, and I grabbed the Men's SL Pro Short Finger Gloves for $20, and a pair of Supacaz Supa G Short Gloves for the same amount. Both are unpadded, intended for hot summer days where padding would add more discomfort than it would take away. You are not advised to use these gloves on rough surfaces like gravel rides or bad pavement where you needed extra padding.

I cannot feel any material differences between the fabric used for these gloves. What makes the SL Pro gloves superior is the pull tabs built into the gloves that let you pull the gloves off your hands without flipping the gloves inside out.

During this year's tours, I switched to these gloves after leaving Misurina, and had them on until after Landeck, where I had stupidly stowed them into Boen's feedbag and then forgot I had them there. I thought those gloves were lost and switched to the Specialized Grail padded gloves. To my surprise, the lack of padding didn't lead to any discomfort, and despite gravel or rough surfaces I never felt I wanted more padding. When I switched back to padded gloves I discovered that the padding didn't help me as much as I thought they did.

Give these a try on your next hot summer ride. I think you'll enjoy them.

June 12: Tre Cime di Laverado

 

We had breakfast, which gave us false hope and a relief of the bacherlor’s cooking the night before by being decent, with service that was fast enough that we could make it out to the bus stop for our hike of the day. When the bus arrived, we were surprised at the crowd and worried that we might not have seats, but the bus squeezed us all aboard and as far as I can remember not more than a handful of people had to stand.

The road up to the hike itself is an experience. It climbed a solid 12-15% grade to the lake we’d been to the day before before settling down and weaving around the mountain side of the National Park. With each corner, the views would improve, gaining us more and more visibility. There was a noticeable haze in the air. “That’s from the wild fires in Canada, going all the way across the Atlantic,” Arturo told us.

When we got off the bus we could see that this was a major attraction --- the parking lot was full (and there were lots of signs at the bottom of the road telling people that a permit was required to park at the top and that those permits were all sold out!), and the crowds were incredible even though we were on the first bus of the day! “The bus only started running last week!” remarked Mark Brody.

Well, nobody goes to Europe expecting a wilderness experience for their hikes, so we braced ourselves and walked along the designated trail. “This is like nothing I’ve seen before,” said Arturo. Coming from him this was unusual, as Arturo was an avid hiker and much better traveled than I was. The landscape of the Dolomites is unusual above the treeline, with lots of rocks, but not made out of granite like the Sierra and the rest of the Alps, giving it the unique shapes --- mountains shoointg uptowards the sky in spikes as the harder wearing rocks stand distinct from the surrounding areas which were subject to normal rates of wear.

The circumnavigation of the three peaks took us to various world war 1 monuments and gun emplacements. Arturo knew a lot of the history, and gave us a running exposition. While the crowds did eventually thin out, the hike was so easy that never did it thin to the point where you didn’t have to wait to take a photo without other people in it. Nevertheless, I was glad to finally do this hike, years after Lukas Panitz recommended it to me in 2021.

I had thought that we might want to hike back down instead of taking the bus back, but by the time we were done, we were all strangely tired, and with Bowen limping we decided to take the bus back.

I will stop bragging about how bad the meal at Miralago was now. The after dinner walk around the lake was great, and with rain coming we hoped the haze from the Canadian fires would be washed away.

Arturo went to talk to the various campground on Stephan’s behalf. Despite our advice to the contrary, his father had decided to rent an RV for the trip. I had warned that the roads we chose were unlikely to have fun driving on the RV, but he was not confident of his ability to get the Misurina on an ebikes, and obviously the RV was much cheaper to stay in than the hotels we were staying, and they wouldn’t be subject to Miralago food.

The closest campground wouldn’t take reservations but told Arturo that if they made it to them by 9:00am the next morning there would be space. We would be gone by the time they arrived, since we had previous plans. Stephan had done a lot of hiking in the Dolomites so he did not feel obligated to join us for our hikes.

Index Page: 2025 Tour of the Dolomites, Slovenia, Austria, and Engadin Alps

 From June 9th to July 4th, Xiaoqin, Bowen, Boen and myself execute a cycle tour starting in the Dolomites and visiting Slovenia, Austria, the Stelvio, and then the Engadin Alps. This was Bowen's first tour riding on his single bike, a Rivendell Roadini. This was Xiaoqin's first tour on her Ritchey Logic Road bike. Joining us for the first 2 and a half weeks or so were Arturo Crespo, Mark Brody, Stephan Ellner, his son Otto, his father Otto Sr.. Joining us for just a few days was Ben Kochie. This was Stephan and Otto's first tour on their Co-Motion Periscope tandem. We totaled 732 miles (1178km) and 57005' (17375m) of climbing on the bike, and 70 miles (112km) and 10466'  (3190m) of climbing on foot. We had one flat tire, one bent chainring prior to the start, and just a couple of days of riding in the rain. Bowen's Garmin Edge 830 died due to screen delamination during the trip. We lost a water bottle, Stephan broke a pair of cycling shoes and his Pixel 6a (which was cracked at the start of the tour) also died during the tour.

This is the index page and collection for our photos, some videos, and day by day trip reports.

Pictures:

• Na Family Photos

Videos (courtesy of Xiaoqin):

• June 11 (Misurina Approach)
• June 14 (Misurina to Son Forca chairlift)
• June 15 (Misurina to Passo Giau)
• June 16 (Selva di Cadore to Barcis)
• June 17 (Barcis to Rifugio Pian dei Ciclaimani)
• June 18 Rifugio Pian dei Ciclamani to Bohinsjka Bela
• June 20 Bohinsjka Bela to Untervellach 
• June 23 Grossglockner 
• June 24 Krimml to Mayrhofen
• June 26 Mayrhofen to Jenbach, Landeck to Pfunds
• June 27 Pfunds to Trafoi
• June 28 Trafoi to Santa Maria Val Mustair
• June 30 Livigno to Maudalin
• July 1 Albulapass
• July 2 Bergun to Lenzerheide

Day by day trip reports:

• June 8-9: Prologue
• June 10: Sterzing to Bruneck
• June 11: Toblach to Misurina
• June 12: Tre Cime Laverado
• June 13: Secada Loop
• June 14: Son Forca
• June 15: Misurina to Selva di Cardore
• June 16: Selva di Cadore to Barcis
• June 17: Barcis to Rifugio Plan dei Ciclamani
• June 18: Rifugio Plan dei Ciclamani to Bohinjska Bela
• June 19: Lake Bled
• June 20: Bohinjska Bela to Untervellach
• June 21: Untervellach to Nikolsdorf
• June 22: Nikolsdorf to Heiligenblut am Grossglockner
• June 23: Heiligenblut am Grossglockner to Krimml
• June 24: Krimml to Mayrhofen
• June 25: Mayrhofen Rest Day
• June 26: Mayrhofen to Pfunds
• June 27: Pfunds to Trafoi
• June 28: Trafoi to Livigno
• June 29: Pontresina Panaromic Hike (rest day)
• June 30: Livigno to Madulain
• July 1: Madulain to Bergun
• July 2: Bergun to Lenzerheide
• July 3: Lenzerheide to Lustenau
• July 4: Lustenau to Lindau
• July 5-6: Epilogue

Equipment Reviews

• Specialized SL Pro Gloves
• Ritchey Classic Zeta Wheels
• 4monster stowable backpack
• Sim Card for Europe
• Garbaruk 11-50 cassette
• Waxing Chains
• Hileen Nosepads for Oakley Glasses

Review: Spent by Alison Bechdel

 Alison Bechdel is famous for her rule about how to evaluate women characters in movies. I didn't have first hand experience of her work, so I picked up Spent from the library. It turns out that this book is part of a series, and you really have a hard time reading it without  having read the other books in the series. You can pick it up from context, but with such a large cast of characters I found it really hard to care about most of them. Actually, I found it impossible to care about any of them.

First of all, the book is sort of an autobiography --- the main character is Alison Bechdel, a successful cartoonist whose books got turned into a TV show. She has to struggle with her trump supporting sister who in reaction is writing a book of her own, her partner who's a goat farmer of sorts, and various characters that move in and out of her house.

The book depicts left wing liberal angst to an extreme. I find it hard to believe people actually talk or behave like this in real life (and I consider myself extremely left wing, or at least, anti-right wing). Do people really conflate Marxism with polyamory and all sorts of other things? Is this meant to be funny? If it is, I'm afraid the humor is entirely lost on me. Similarly, there's a lot of angst about money (despite having a lot of success), but given what the characters spend money on it's hard to reconcile that with the plotlines.

The art is OK. Nothing special. The worst thing about the hardback is that it's hard to keep it open to read! The kindle version is probably the one to get just to avoid that problem, but I was too cheap to buy the book and just read it from the library. Good thing I did. I'd be unhappy if I spent any of my hard earned money on a book with effectively no plot and no interesting characters.

June 11th: Toblach to Misurina

 

Waking up at 4:00am because of jet-lagged, I worked through the options and decided that with Bowen’s injury, I shouldn’t opt for the visit to Lago de Braes and that we should just take the dirt route to Misurina from Toblach. We were so jet-lagged that we made the 8:00am train from Toblach, while Arturo and Mark were still having breakfast. We’d had breakfast by buying from the bakery across the street from the apartment the moment it opened at 6:00am!

The train ride to Toblach from Bruneck was free for us, since we had guest cards from the apartment we’d checked into. We had to buy tickets for our bikes, however! The train ride was smooth --- infact, I wouldn’t have to take apart the tandem for the rest of the trip.

Getting off the train, we visited the cultural center that was obvious from the train station. From there, we followed cyclists to the bike path where we were immediately confronted with a barrier notifying us that the bike path was closed. We followed the road that I’d designated on the GPS and refound the bike path to the Toblachersee, where we had had lunch during the 2021 bike tour. Nothing was opened yet so there was no one to photo bomb us as we took pictures of our first views of the Dolomites.

We tried the road for a while instead of the bike path but it was incredibly busy for a Wednesday morning and soon we decided that the dirt bike path was the lesser of two evils. In the uphill direction and with a short ride that day, the slow speed of the bike path was less objectional than in the downhill direction. Indeed, the views were dramatic as mountain after mountain unfolded before as as the bike path weaved in and out of the trees revealing one peak after another until we reached the designated view point for the peaks we would circumnavigate tomorrow, Tre Cime di Laverado!

Past that, the dirt path headed straight for the dirt road to Cortina d’Ampezzo where our progress was impeded for a few minutes by a herd of cows providing the soundtrack for the European Mountains --- cowbells!

Rather than follow the annoying tunnel bike path to Cortina, we turned left on the paved road towards Misurina. It was our first climb of the trip, and though short, it was warm enough that I was glad I wasn’t doing it in the full heat of day. Boen and I attacked the hill with vigor, even passing a couple of unloaded single cyclists, though of course plenty of ebikes would pass us. At the top of the climb the road levelled out and we waited at the corner where the turnoff to Quinz was. The lake was as beautiful as I remembered, though in our 4 nights there we would never see it fully reflective as  mirror as the morning I’d seen it in 2014.

Mark and Arturo had caught up to Bowen and Xiaoqin, and when they arrived we took a group picture before settling down to lunch at Quinz, where the menu was the same as the year before when Boen, Arturo and I had dinner the previous year before heading to Murano.

We ate our lunch and then proceeded to Hotel Miralago. I had wanted to stay at Quinz, but they had not replied to my e-mail, and when I called them the answering machine was in Italian. Arturo’s Spanish would probably have let him get through, but when I asked him to make the attempt he was on a a trip and he’d forgotten all about it, while Miralago was the cheapest of all the other hotels who’d bothered to respond to my inquiries. Miralago’ rooms were great, but while the breakfast was decent, the dinner set a benchmark for how badly food could be prepared at a highly rated hotel/restaurant for the entire trip. There was no way you could tell from the Google reviews, of course, as the aggregate points for Miralago was the same as for Quinz, but Quinz had clearly superior food. The smart thing to do would have been to just get bed and breakfast at Miralago and just make reservations for 4 nights of dinners at Quinz, but obviously that was only in retrospect. Arturo also made the observation that the staff at Miralago didn’t appear to care about giving guests a good experience. He theorized that the rooms had recently been renovated to a high level, and the owners of the hotel were skimping everywhere else in an effort to recoup the cost. The lady who dealt with breakfast, however, clearly worked hard and cared, and might have been single-handedly redeeming the hotel’s reputation on Google. In any case, for the rest of the trip, no matter how bad the food was, the comparison was always, “It’s still better than Miralago.”

Having checked in and played on the Zipline playground, we proceeded to walk around Lake Misurina, one of the prettiest lakes in the mountains of Europe, and a walk I never got sick of despite our 4 days there. No one swam in the lake, however. There was a lot of work going on in the cable cars though they wouldn’t open for hiking traffic in the time we were there.

On the other side of the main road from Quinz was the supermarket (open every day of the year!) and an outdoor shop. Arturo had regretted his earlier decision to leave his walking shoes in Munich and proceeded to rectify that by buying a pair of shoes and a backpack. Bargaining with the owner he got such a good price that it was the owner who paid Arturo to take the backpack off his hands!

With his new shoes equipped, Xiaoqin then led us on a hike up to the second lake that’s on the road to the next day’s hike. This second lake was also impressive and the hiking took enough of the day that by the time we got back to Miralago it was time to take showers and do laundry. Bowen’s wound kept oozing. From experience I knew this was no big deal and only to be expected from moist wound care, but because of the amount of discharge he was going through my supply of Tergaderm quickly, so I texted Stephan who had landed in Munich and asked him to procure additional supplies while he was in a big city.

That evening, Miralago demonstrated what their half pension was like. Bad salad with no dressing and two hot dogs, each sliced in half and barely grilled. The desserts were decent, but only because we suspected they were procured rather than made in the kitchen. We did not know the horror that would be served the next evening --- baked beans served cold out of a can.

Review: Our Moon

Our Moon was a random pick – filling up the kindle prior to a flight. The author weaves between actual exposition of the scientific facts and theories about the moon and its creation (and subsequence exploration by humans), and wildly wacko stuff that seems irrelevant, such as native Americans being offended by the moon landings (seriously? Why should I care? Why should anyone hold back progress for people with pre-scientific cultural taboos)

I learned a ton of interesting facts, such as the current theory that the moon was the result of a collision between two proto-earths, and the various differences in calendaring systems that all have to struggle with reconciling the differences between the lunar orbit and the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

But to extract all that I had to wade through tons and tons of irrelevant material. This book could have used a much better editor.

June 10th: Sterzing to Bruneck

When I first planned this trip, I thought that it would have been easy to get a train trip from Munich to Innsbruck and then catch the local train to Fortezza and Toblach. However, the local train line between Bruneck and Fortezza was under renovation and so we’d have to ride! That forced me to put in for a night in Bruneck. Then I figured out that the FlixBus was cheaper for a connection than the train. However, Arturo couldn’t get a bike position on the bus, and Stephan pointed out to me that the FlixBus explicitly denied tandems! So I broke down, cancelled the FlixBus (which gave me a credit for future use), and scheduled a taxi to Innsbruck.

Once the taxi arrived, we had to struggle a bit to put 3 bikes + the tandem into it. I ended up decoupling the tandem to get everything to fit, which annoyed me since I’d explicitly told the company we had a tandem. To save time,I talked to the driver and got him to agree to drop us off at Sterzing instead of Innsbruck. The poor guy looked confused and reminded me that Sterzing was in Italy, not Austria and I told him that’s correct, that’s what we wanted, and fortunately he’d agreed!

Mark Brody had already ridden to Sterzing the night before and agreed to meet with us. The driver dropped us off near downtown. Xiaoqin had found a sandwich shop with great reviews, and I reassembled the tandem, just past Mark met us. We had lunch and ice cream together before riding down the bike path towards Bruneck.

From Sterzing to Bruneck is the Alto Aldige bike path which is mostly downhill until Fortezza, whereupon we would have to climb 2000’ to Bruneck. I was familiar with the bike path --- it’s scenic in this direction and much less strenuous than in the other direction, which had multiple double digit grades which were a bear to deal with on the tandem.

Unfortnately, with the downhill and jet-lag, Bowen had a momentary lapse and crashed on a gravel patch around a corner. A local saw us and took him into her house to clean and scrub the wound as well as bandage it. I’d packed some Tergaderm and anti-biotic  cream and would apply it later in the evening after we got to the hotel, but poor Bowen would start the tour limping around for a week or so until his knee got better.

After Fortezza we found the car rest stop where we’d had Weiss Wurst last year during our century, and had some ice cream before negotiating the tricky part of the bike path that had gotten me lost no less than twice in the other direction. From this direction the bike path was much easier to follow, and we made it to Bruneck around 5:00pm. Mark had found a deal for a hotel but it was high up on a ski resort so we parted ways.

Arriving at Bruneck, we found the apartment which had no restaurant attached but we were hungry enough that even though the pizzeria we went to was mediocre we still ate everything. Doing laundry and cleaning Bowen’s wounds took enough time that we were quickly asleep after that.

June 7-9: Prologue

We’d packed Xiaoqin ‘s Ritchey Road Logic, Bowen’s Rivendell Roadini, and the Co-Motion Periscope tandem into 4 different bike boxes, one borrowed from our bike club since I couldn’t find another Trico Ironcase at a price I wanted to pay. Fitting them all into the Honda Odyssey as well as the carryon lugguage, we’d drafted Steve Wang into driving us to the airport, where we checked in the boxes with minimal harassment from the United agents.

Arriving in Munich on a warm Spring day, we found the Airport Hilton, where we assembled the bikes, the singles first, then the tandem. There were no hitches with the singles except for my ham-fistedness, which had caused me to rip the brake cable off the Rivendell’s front brake. Fortunately, I’d packed extra cable ends and a pair of pliers so everything got fixed up, On the tandem, I assembled everything only to discover that the drivetrain would derail on every pedal-stroke. Remembering what had happened in 2024, I carefully observed the chainring and found the one tooth that had gotten bent in transit. Taking out the pliers, I bent it back and the problem went away. I was still disturbed and decided I would carry the spare chainring just in case.

Having finished assembly, we checked in  It was still too early for regular check-in and of course the Hilton charged us for an early checkin. In addition, they charged us for storing the bike boxes for a month while we headed out for our tour. This was a far cry from my 2018 tour where the Hilton happily stored bike boxes for 3 weeks,

After a quick meal, we headed out for a test ride. I’d laid out a route to the English Garden in Munich but once we headed out we realized that this was too ambitious. In the afternoon heat, Xiaoqin and Boen were both falling asleep. We headed out for about 40 minutes before giving up and turning around. Xiaoqin took a nap while Boen, Bowen and I fought jet-lag nap by taking a swim in the swimming pool. Last time Bowen and I were here the swimming pool was under renovation and we couldn’t use it. This time it was a great pool and we were no longer sleepy after a vigorous swim and hot tub.

Arturo’s flight arrived on time at 5:30pm, after we’d bought dinner and eaten it in the room, so I went down and helped him assemble his bike. His bike box as it was were in two pieces, one for his wheels, and the other for his disassembled frame and fork. With two people, the assembly actually went relatively fast, but when he asked me for my opinion, I told him that the Trico ironcase or the B+W Bike Box II which didn’t require fork disassembly was a better choice given that he frequently had status on his flights and had a 70kg weight limit.

By 8:00pm, I was dead and took a melatonin pill before going to sleep. I’d asked for an airport pickup at 7:30am, but of course, the German taxi service I’d picked had their own ideas about what schedule to follow and texted me that they would only show up at 8:00am the next morning. I went to sleep but slept badly, waking up at 2:00am and struggling to go back to sleep.

Re-read: Aurora Rising

Many years ago I first read Aurora Rising under a different title, and I thought it was a police procedural. Re-reading years later, I will revise my opinion: this is as much of a science fiction adventure as anything Alaistair Reynolds has ever written.  The setting is the Glitterband, a cluster of 10,000+ habitats all running a common polling algorithm for democracy. Each little habitat gets to choose how they live, with some choosing tyranny (without limits), while others proud of their diligence about policy.

When a threat arises (from a rogue AI), Prefect Dreyfus starts chasing down leads and discovers ties to the past, including those of his deputies as well as his previous actions during a previous crisis.

The characters are great, though some of the technology seems deliberately set in some weird steampunk. (Search engines are called Search Turbines, and when they can crash in ways that actually destroy the hardware they’re running on). Encryption of privileged information is done via biochemistry, with an injection or some form of medicine that over time enables you to read the documents that were Encrypted.

I love how the reveals work --- you see the current situation and then only later discover how it came about. I enjoyed the gradual introduction of the previous crisis, as well as the ultimate solution.

Alastair Reynolds is always worth reading, and in this, re-reading. Recommended!

Review: 7.5 Lessons About the Brain

7.5 Lessons about Your Brain is a delightfully short collection of essays about the human brain. Each essay is short enough to read in about 15-20 minutes, but they build on each other, so you're best off reading them in order.

The main point of the book is that your brain's job isn't actually thinking. (That's why thinking is so hard!) It's primary job is to manage resources, and in order to do so it has to be able to predict the future. The essays cover how memory works (nothing's actually stored, more like experiences are recreated), how infants learn, and how the human brain's ability to do abstraction can allows the construction of social reality.

What's interesting is that unlike many others, the author believes that you do have choices and free will, but doesn't specify how and why. There's a great section about how the old myths about the reptile brain and the neo-cortex is wrong, and that:

"Sometimes we're responsible for things not because they're our fault, but because we're the only ones who can change them." (Page 81).

It's rare to read a book so well written that a few short pages can cover so much. Recommended!

Review: Moral Ambition

 Moral Ambition is Ruger Bregman's book trying to convince people to stop taking high paying but soul sucking jobs in favor of jobs that matter. I enjoyed Utopia for Realists so I picked it up. 

The book starts with the story of Thomas Clarkson, who while doing research in college about the ethics of owning slaves came to the conclusion that slavery was such a scourge that he could do nothing but devote his life to abolishing it. He eventually linked up with the Quakers and obviously the movement was successful in getting the British Empire to stop the slave trade.

The book then goes through other case studies indicating that while most people have a strong moral sense, many people require someone to ask them to do the right thing instead of doing nothing by default. This need for activation leads to clusters of people doing the right thing, but a small well organized group can be much more effective if they're willing to work very hard. 

That sounds very much like a startup, so Bregman introduces us to a school in London that incubates and trains non profit entrepreneurs. We see various examples like how Bill Gates essentially funded the malaria vaccine, while a single entrepreneur singlehandedly funded the distribution of several million mosquito nets.

My critique of the book is my usual critiques of do-gooders. The biggest lever you can have is to win the government of the superpower in the world. Unfortunately, it looks a lot as though progressives keep failing to do that, and many of the gains they hope to achieve may actually be rolled back as a result of not focusing on such gains.

Bergman is not naive. He notes that many groups that are fanatically devoted to a cause may not even have sufficient introspection to realize that their cause is not a good one. Another problem for many progressive institutions is the demand for moral purity and refusal to compromise, which essentially means that they're very hard to work with and tend to get nothing done since the purity contests prevent effectiveness.

The book is short and a fast read. I'm not sure I agree with all of it but it deserves a reading. Maybe it'll inspire you to take up an important cause. 

Review: The Goal

 The Goal has "required reading for Amazon employees" all over the cover, and was assigned reading for work. It's basically a business process book written in the form of a novel, which I find strange and quite distracting, but since I was getting paid to read it I plowed through and read it anyway.

The POV character is a plant manager for a manufacturer of widgets (it's never even discussed what the widgets are, what they do, and who the customers are --- it's quite clear that this is a business book for managers who should be able to manage anything and don't care about the technical details). The plant is in trouble, always late for delivering goods for customers, and is in danger of being shut down.

The POV character recalls a physics instructor who's become a big name business consultant, and calls him for help. The consultant then guides the POV character through what's obviously Toyota's JIT manufacturing system, identifying the bottlenecks in the production process and then re-orienting the plant in favor of maximizing throughput on the bottlenecks regardless of other artificial metrics such as efficiency on non-bottlenecked machines and processes. Various problems are overcome, some of which are buffering the bottlenecked processes, reducing batch sizes, and thereby reducing latency from order to delivery, which then enables more sales to be made.

Then the author takes everything one more level up in abstraction and designates a process for this type of analysis: (1) identify the goal (2) identify the bottlenecks (3) re-orient everything around the bottlenecks (4) increase capacity around the bottlenecks (5) re-evaluate.

In between all this, the POV character has to overcome his wife leaving him because he spends so much time at work, and goes through epiphany after epiphany over how his egghead acquaintance who's a management consult is so useful.

Maybe the kind of people who don't read real novels but love lean manufacturing think this is a great book. Me, I think the book could have been much better if it had been a history of Toyota's development of the lean manufacturing (JIT) system.

Re-read: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

 I recently watched the movie adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with Xiaoqin, and I thought it to be a very compelling movie which followed the book quite closely.  I'd picked up the entire trilogy while it was on sale, so it was time to re-read it to see what it was like.

To begin with, it's clear that Stieg Larsson an avid reader. Lots of books get mentioned as part of the casual description of scenes in the novel, and some of them are even English novels. The movie and the book match nearly exactly, with the movie able to make the mystery of the swap between Cecilia Vanger and Anita Vanger much more of a visual clue than the book was. The final search for Harriet Vanger was much more described in the book than in the movie, which treated it as an off-camera coda than the book did.

What books manage to do better than movies is to let you get into the heads of the characters, and here Larsson does a great job of depicting Liz Salander's thought processes as well as Blomkvist's. What I really enjoyed is that Blomkvist is a male protagonist who's explicitly not a sexist asshole, unlike many of the male characters in the book.

This book deserved to be a best-seller for its time. It still withstands a reread and I will go on to read the rest of the series or maybe even watch the movies, given how closely the movies followed this first book.

Review: The Nvidia Way

 The Nvidia Way is another book about Jensen Huang and Nvidia. It was recommended to me after I read The Thinking Machine, and I found it a much better book. Rather than trying to be a biography of Jensen Huang, this book focused more on his management style and how Nvidia is run.

The interesting thing about a very flat structure is that the CEO has to work very hard. To the point where he would be responding to emails all weekend every weekend. Of course, one side effect of this was that his staff would wait to send status reports on Sunday night so that when his responses came it'd be during the work week so they could do it on work time rather than personal time.

The other comment that kept coming up all through the text were employees commenting on how free of politics NVidia was. The key point here was that NVidia would reassign employees on the basis of priority rather than allow managers to maintain fiefdoms. This effectively made all the managers learn to work with each other and cooperate rather than pick political fights.

Another key point is the lack of planning:

he would get rid of the practice of long-term strategic planning, which would force the company to stick to a particular path even if there were reasons to deviate from it. “Strategy is not words. Strategy is action,” he said. “We don’t do a periodic planning system. The reason for that is because the world is a living, breathing thing. We just plan continuously. There’s no five-year plan.” (kindle loc 2650)

Of course they have plans. No chip manufacturer (even one that does outsourcing) have to have plans, but the willingness to adapt and change those plans within a quarter is key. Another key point that comes across is that NVidia had no magic tricks or short cuts. 60 hour weeks were the norm and people regularly put in 80 hour weeks. That's demanding and probably the culture selects out people who aren't willing to put in that level of commitment.

I particularly enjoyed the way Icahn described how executives get selected for incompetence:

Icahn observed that competent executives often get sidelined in favor of more likeable but less capable ones because of behavioral incentives inside companies. The personalities who ascend the corporate ranks resemble college fraternity presidents. They become friendly with the board of directors and are not threatening to the current CEO. They’re not prodigies, but they’re affable, always available for a drink when you are feeling down. As Icahn put it, these figures (they are mostly men) are “not the smartest, not the brightest, not the best, but likeable and sort of reliable.”  (kindle loc 2804)

To the extent that NVidia avoided promoting that kind of person, it all comes down to Jensen Huang. As far as I can tell from reading this book, however, Huang does not have a designated successor or a grooming program for future CEOs at NVidia. It will be interesting to see how long NVidia can sustain it's advantage going forward, since as the book frequently points out, Huang is the longest running CEO of a major tech company in the business, outlasting Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and many other luminaries.

In any case, I was surprised that I found this book interesting even though I'd just recently finished reading an NVidia book. Recommended.

 

Yosemite Memorial Day Half Dome Trip

 I somehow got it into my head that we should do a backpacking trip in Yosemite for the upcoming memorial day weekend. I tried to get wilderness permits on Saturday but failed --- everything was snatched up when I hit refresh. But I tried again on Sunday, and saw that there were 6 spots available at Little Yosemite Valley which guaranteed a Half Dome permit, so I grabbed them. What many people don't realize is that a wilderness comes with a guaranteed entry into Yosemite National Park the day before, as well as use of the Backpacker's Campground in the valley proper, so even with a 2 day permit starting on Sunday, we got full access to Yosemite for the entire 3 day weekend.

• Photos

Hotels in the area were expensive as heck because of memorial day, so we opted to just drive in on Saturday morning. Traffic was free flowing and we made it to Yosemite's Big Oak Flat at 11:00am. We showed the Wilderness Permit and Boen's Every Kid Outdoors Pass, we got into the park for free. I noticed that at least 2 cars in line ahead of us were turned away because of the park's new reservation policy, where reservations were needed to enter the park between 6am and 2pm.

Driving into the park, we still had difficulty parking near the visitor center, but eventually found a spot and walked to get the wilderness permit, where we opted to pay $10/person for the half dome permit. We also paid for the backpacker's campground $8/person. With the money we saved from not staying in the hotel, we bought lunch in Yosemite village. I'd forgotten how mediocre the food was and how slow the service was. That's probably the main reason you should bring your own food.

After lunch, we drove to North Pines campground, where there was a 15 minute parking spot so we could drag all our camping equipment into the backpacker's campground. Since we drove the minivan, we could bring both car camping equipment and backpacking equipment, allowing us comfort for our night in Yosemite Valley. When the tent, sleeping pads and sleeping bags were all setup, we drove out to do the newly renovated Bridal Veil falls trail. The falls are nothing short of stunning with the volume of water so high that we got spray even while far away.

It was a short hike, but for returning to the car instead of doubling back Xiaoqin found some trails that looked promising. We didn't realize that much of the trail was still under water because of the high water level, so we had to do several stream crossings as part of the hike. Returning to the car, we drove to our parking spot next to the Curry Village, where we would leave our van overnight.

We needed to walk to the village for dinner anyway, so we hiked to the lower Yosemite Falls along the way, admiring the beautiful trails and views of both upper and lower falls. Dinner was relatively fast at the Yosemite Falls Lodge's food court, and then we took the bus back to the Curry Village, where we took showers before bed.

Getting up the next morning, I realized I'd left our ham and cheese in the fridge at home, so we had to pay a morning visit to the village store for both breakfast and lunch supplies. The store didn't open until 8:00am, but by the time we'd packed everything up and driven over there it was already 7:30am. The alternate breakfast places were all jammed with people so we just made instant noodles and waited for the store to open.

We drove to the special Happy Isles parking lot reserved for people with wilderness permits. (they don't actually check, as far as I can tell) There we repacked our backpacks and put all food in the bear locker. We filled our water bottles, and then Boen had to poo. He ran off before I was ready, but we were reunited when he was done with the bathroom.

We walked up the same Mist trail we had done last Fall, and the Vernal falls now sounded like a jet engine. We refilled our bottles at the Vernal Falls viewpoint, and then proceeded up the steps where we got thoroughly doused by the spray from the falls. Looking behind us we could see rainbow halos, and we got thoroughly soaked. The price of the baptism was the crowds, where we frequently had to stop because the narrow steps could only allow one party at a time through the critical sections.

Past the top of Vernal Falls, the crowd thinned considerably and we stopped for lunch just prior to the bridge. Unlike the Vernal Falls, the Nevada falls trail doesn't go directly under the falls, but even then, we could still occasionally feel the cooling mist from the falls, which was how big they were.

At the top of the Nevada Falls, at the intersection with the John Muir trail, we met the ranger who issued us the permits the day before! He told us that the trail went up a bit more after that and that at Little Yosemite Valley we'd done half the elevation gain for Half Dome. He was right of course, and we arrived at Little Yosemite Valley around 1pm. We were pretty tired. By the time we pitched the tents, fetched water to refill water bottles, and loaded all the food into the bear canister it was 3:00pm. With nothing better to do, we decided to do half dome on Sunday instead of waiting till Monday morning. Boen resisted but it turned out that he didn't understand that if we did Half Dome today we didn't have to do it tomorrow.

The hike up to Half Dome is 3.5 miles, but it's a challenging 3.5 miles because while the approach itself was a challenging 1000', the final subdome was a series of steps, which combined with the cables would go up another 1000'. And of course we were tired from carrying camping equipment to Little Yosemite Valley. When we got to the sub-dome, Xiaoqin picked up a pair of gloves rather than using her biking gloves. The steps were difficult, but Bowen upon seeing the cables said: "That looks scary!" The views from subdome were gorgeous, where we could see snow-covered peaks all around us.

At the bottom of the cables, Bowen and Boen hesitated, but then decided to commit. Once they were committed they made great speed. Xiaoqin followed, and I brought up the rear. I was surprised by how slippery the granite was --- on previous visits I don't remember my soles ever slipping on the rock, and I had relatively new shoes! I then remembered that it had possibly rained the day before, and also the cables had only come up on Friday, so that explained why there wasn't a pile of gloves at the bottom of the cables. What did make everything easier, however, was that there was next to no traffic on the cables as a result of the new permit-based system.

At the top, it was windy, but the kids found snow and ice! It was already 6:15pm, so we quickly took a few pictures and then went back down. I anticipated the descent to be more scary than the climb, but it was also easier and a lot faster. This was where gloves were useful, as you could do a bunch of mini rappels and that made the descent go a lot faster than in the uphill direction.

Descending the steps were even harder than climbing them, since the eccentric motion at the end of a 9 mile hike felt like an insult to the joints. But we met another hiker going down (he said he did half-dome without a permit), and made it to our campsite before it got so dark that I needed to break out my headlamp.

We made dinner, brushed our teeth, and then went to sleep quickly, exhausted by our efforts.

The next morning, we woke up at 6:00am to the sound of birds singing, made our hot breakfast, packed up our camping equipment and hiked back down to the John Muir trail, opting for the longer but less knee cracking descent to the valley. Even here the effects of being here in Spring made for a different experience than last fall. Not only was the top of Nevada falls much louder and faster, the weeping wall didn't just weep, it rained! We made much slower time than we expected because every corner had something to see.

It being so early the traffic was very light, and there was none of the traffic jams we saw the previous day on the Mist trail. We arrived back at the car by 12:30pm, and then had a 1 hour drive to lunch and another 4 hour drive home because of the increased traffic.