Review: Exit Interview

 Exit Interview is Kristi Coulter's memoir of her 10 years at Amazon. The title of the Chinese translation of this book translates back into English as "I spent 10 years at Amazon and needed alcohol and a psycho-therapist." Clearly, the Chinese translation could save you a ton of time reading!

In all seriousness, the book traces her abandonment of a quiet Michigan career in a company where not much was happening, through her interview loop at Amazon, which led to her being the senior manager of the merchandising team. In 10 years, she'd managed to go from that to managing the Amazon Crossings (translation) imprint, to being part of the management training program to running the ill-fated Amazon Go's writing team.

The book has several themes, one is that the internal corporate culture of Amazon is just as dysfunctional (or functional) as any other tech corporation on the planet, but if you're coming from outside tech it feels like an alien culture, especially to someone who basically went to school in the humanities. The second, of course, is being a woman at Amazon is difficult. How difficult compared to other tech companies? You couldn't tell, because Amazon was the only tech company she ever worked for so she had no frame of reference. For instance, at one point she talked to her manager about getting a promotion to Director. His response, "When you change the world, you'll get a promotion." She took it as a denial or lack of support. In the unlikely event that a man would come to me for advice, I'd tell him to switch jobs. But of course, a job switch at that point would have cost her multiple millions in valuable stock, so she stuck around. That's the kind of career trade-off anyone at FANG has to do continuously, so it came off as unsurprising.

There's also a sense of total hostility towards Amazon whenever she has to meet or talk to people outside Amazon. For instance, in the publishing industry, Amazon is treated as the outsider who wants to eat everyone else's lunch. Her internal dialogue is, "We're just this tiny experimental outfit inside Amazon that can get shut down any time now, why are you treating us as a behemoth?" This strikes me as a little disingenuous, since Amazon clearly had a larger market cap than any single publisher and also owns the biggest bookstore on the planet:

Amazon Crossing recently became the world’s largest publisher of literature in translation. If you think that must mean we published hundreds of translated books, ha-ha, no. Fewer than 3 percent of books in English are translations from other languages, so we became the industry leader with a list of just twenty-nine. Naturally, people are mad about it. (page 208)

When I talk to tech people they always "forget to count that low." Many are always surprised that all it takes is to sell 10,000 copies of a book in a month to show up on the New York Times best seller list. 

Finally, the narrative has lots of gaps. There's no description of any single event that drove her to alcoholism. That's probably because she's beholden to an NDA or maybe even a non-disparagement agreement. But of course, there's no explanation. You have to treat this as "creative non-fiction" (which is a genre all in itself)

In any case, I enjoyed the book --- the author's voice is fun to read, but I can't help but take it all with a large dose of skepticism.

2026 Mallorca Trip Report

From April 4^th to April 12^th, I took my family to Mallorca for a fixed based cycling-oriented vacation. Joining us was the crew from last summer’s bike trip—Arturo, Mark, Stephan and Otto Ellner, who were also joined by the rest of the family, Rosie and Benjamin. At the last-minute, Joe Chung, who went to college with me decided to come, though a few later than the others.

Bowen's bike suffered a broken derailleur cable and a flat tire that was worn out and replaced during the trip. Joe Chung's rental suffered from an unreproducible intermittent failure in the power delivery. Because it was a fixed based tour, everyone did varying amounts of riding, but I got in 296 miles and 24,300' of climbing in 6 days.

This post contains all links to videos, photo albums, and the day by day trip report.

Videos

• Santa Magdalena
• Cap Formentor
• Port Andratx to Club del Sol
• Col de la Feminia
• Sa Calobra from Lluc
• Early Morning Cap Formentor

Trip Report

• April 3-4: Prologue
• April 5: Santa Magdalena
• April 6: Cap Formentor
• April 7: Port Andratx to Club del Sol
• April 8: Ermita de la Victoria
• April 9: Col de la Feminia
• April 10: Sa Calobra from Lluc
• April 11: Cap Formentor (again), and Cami de Boquer
• April 12-13: Epilogue
• Mallorca Recommendations

Equipment Reviews

• Ritchey Logic Wheels
• COROS HRM
• Airfly Headphone Adapter

Review: Lies My Teacher Told Me

 Lies My Teacher Told Me is about the way history is taught in American classrooms. In many ways it's also about the ways history is not taught in those same classrooms. In particular, the textbooks used in history classes come in for particularly (and well deserved) sharp criticism:

In 2005, for example, the Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.” Twenty-seven percent of Democrats also agreed. Such responses can only come from people who have neither had a conversation with a poor person nor imagined their economic and social reality—yet somehow imagine they know enough to hold an opinion. Educated people are more likely to venture such ill-informed opinions.24 Education does not have this impact in other areas of study. People who have taken more mathematics courses are more proficient at math than those who have not. (kindle loc 7496)

 The book starts with a provocative question: what was Helen Keller famous for, other than being blind and deaf but managed to teach herself how to read and write? I found myself unable to answer that question, and in fact, history books deliberately left out her achievements --- she was a socialist activist! Similarly, President Woodrow Wilson was an extremist socialist who re-introduced segregation to the White House, but that fact is never mentioned in the history books, where he was treated as a hero for attempting to start the league of nations.

The book then goes on to eviscerate various typical American founding myths, such as the idea the Christopher Columbus was uniquely smart to believe that the world was round --- that fact was in fact common knowledge. The book points out:

Columbus is not a hero in Mexico, even though Mexico is much more Spanish in culture than the United States and might be expected to take pride in this hero of Spanish history. Why not? Because Mexico is also much more Indian than the United States, and Mexicans perceive Columbus as white and European. “No sensible Indian person,” wrote George P. Horse Capture, “can celebrate the arrival of Columbus.”90 Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history. (kindle loc 1691)

This telling of history as the heroification of famous Americans, the author points out doesn't do justice to the heroes or to Americans. By not showing that Abraham Lincoln struggled with racism himself, there's also no appreciation that he did work hard (and ultimately sacrificed himself) to eliminate slavery. 

In 1863 Lincoln desegregated the White House staff, which initiated a desegregation of the federal government that lasted until Woodrow Wilson. Lincoln opened the White House to black callers, notably Frederick Douglass. He also continued to wrestle with his own racism, asking aides to investigate the feasibility of deporting (euphemistically termed colonizing) African Americans to Africa or Latin America...Saving the Union had never been Lincoln’s sole concern, as shown by his 1860 rejection of the eleventh-hour Crittenden Compromise, a constitutional amendment intended to preserve the Union by preserving slavery forever.32 Not one author explains the political context or the intended audience for the Greeley letter. Nor does a single textbook quote Lincoln’s encouragement that same summer to Unitarian ministers to “go home and try to bring the people to your views,” because “we shall need all the antislavery feeling in the country, and more.” If they did, students would understand that Lincoln’s response to the issue of slavery in America was hardly indifference. (kindle loc 4096-4121)

The book covers many more topics in great detail, including the nadir of anti-black racism, and how many history books written during that period could not make sense of the anti-slavery movement, and those templates carry over till today. As a result, we still have large numbers of educated Americans claiming that the civil war was about states rights, or that it was about economics, or continuing to spread the myth that black people actually enjoyed being enslaved and had a good life being slaves!

By pretending that the US had overcome racism and conveniently forgetting about the period between  Woodrow Wilson and the post-civil rights era, the author points out that it also glosses over what the country's greatest achievements were:

 Antiracism is one of America’s great gifts to the world. Its relevance extends far beyond race relations. Antiracism led to “a new birth of freedom” after the Civil War, and not only for African Americans. Twice, once in each century, the movement for black rights triggered the movement for women’s rights. Twice it reinvigorated our democratic spirit, which had been atrophying. Throughout the world, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, movements of oppressed people continue to use tactics and words borrowed from our abolitionist and civil rights movements. The clandestine early meetings of anticommunists in East Germany were marked by singing “We Shall Overcome.” Iranians used nonviolent methods borrowed from Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr., to overthrow their hated shah. On Ho Chi Minh’s desk in Hanoi on the day he died lay a biography of John Brown. Among the heroes whose ideas inspired the students in Tiananmen Square and whose words spilled from their lips was Abraham Lincoln.81 Yet we in America, whose antiracist idealists are admired around the globe, seem to have lost these men and women as heroes. Our textbooks need to present them in such a way that we might again value our own idealism. (kindle loc 4457)

I learned lots and lots in this book, highlighting passage after passage. I smile every time Professor Loewen proudly proclaims that teenagers write to him about using this book to heckle their history teachers from the back of the class. I will say that I learned more about American history from this book than from an entire semester at Berkeley taking an American history class to fulfill a social studies requirement.

Highly recommended. 

April 5: Santa Magdelena

To my surprise I actually slept a bit (just as I had slept a bit on the plane as well) and woke up only at 4:30am. By 5:30am, Boen was up and bouncing, so rather than have him annoy everyone else I took him downstairs to the lobby and asked if we could start assembling the bikes. The night receptionist felt sorry for me and told me that I could assemble the bikes indoors as it was cold, but that if anyone started trying to use the lobby, I had to give them room. I happily assented.

First to come together was Xiaoqin’s bike, because that was where all the tools were—her bike was by far the lightest, so her bike box had the capacity to store tools, an extra chain, and lubricant. After that, I assembled my bike, followed by Bowen’s, and then Boen’s which was the easiest—since it was too heavy to put into a Trico hard case without exceeding the 23kg weight limit, we opted to use the bike box in the garage left from when we had purchased the Lynskey GR300. Boen’s bike was so small that all we had to do was to remove the pedals, remove the handlebars from the stem, and the rear derailleur, and the front wheel, and everything fit into the box. We did not even have to lower the seatpost or remove it from the frame!

By the time I finished, the breakfast room was open. We parked the bikes at the bike shop and put the empty boxes back into the luggage storage area and ate a breakfast. After all that, a change to bike clothing and we were ready to ride! All this time Arturo and Mark had been texting us about their progress, but they in fact only got to the hotel just as we departed on our ride.

I’d never been in this part of Mallorca before, and had picked out a gentle ride with two out and back climbs. Bowen wanted to skip them but had refused to load the route onto his bike computer, so he ended up doing the first (and prettiest) out and back climb to the start of the Victoriax hike parking lot. The day was gorgeous and the mediterranean looked as blue and beautiful as the Pacific Ocean does in California. Once back in the town of Bonaire, the route took us on what I consider classical Spanish roads—narrow single track roads lined with stone walls with next to no traffic and occasional views of beautiful flower fields. The day was warm but not too hot and the occasional sea-breeze felt refreshing.

Sadly enough, we had to ride through Playa du Muro, the super-touristy resort strip. However, the silver lightning was that this gave Bowen a chance to buy new sunglasses for his ride. We then exited on a main road. Since the prevailing wind was from the West, this meant we were hitting a headwind. The going was tough since the wind was light. The best feature of Mallorca is that there are cyclists everywhere—every day is  like a century ride. No matter where you look and which direction you’re riding, there’s a paceline of cyclists going this way and that.

At one point a group of women passed us and we jumped on the paceline, being disappointed when a couple of kilometers down the road they veered off into another direction. Bowen had fallen off the pace, however, as we skirted around Sa Pablo and we stopped often to let him catch up.

We eventually made it to Santa Magdalena, the start of the second out and back climb. The scenery wasn’t uninspiring, but Xiaoqin decided that since we were there anyway we might as well climb it. Bowen, Boen, Stephan, and Otto waited while we did the 30 minute 3km, 200m climb. It was a very pleasant climb, gentle in grade like in most of Mallorca.

When we got to the top I realized we should have made everyone do the climb as there was a very highly rated cantina on top! Nothing to do but to descend and then find another restaurant. It was already 2:30pm, so the other restaurant we found was already fully booked and refused to seat us! Instead, we found a supermarket and had a supermarket lunch before starting to ride back.

This time, we had a tailwind instead of a headwind and it was very pleasant going. We’d gotten a text from Mark and Arturo that they had abandoned the ride past Playa du Mura, since the headwind had strengthened. Our ride back along a designated bike route was nice, and at one point when the route deviated from the GPS track I had laid down ages ago we decided to just use the bike route. In fact, I turned off route following and used my Edge’s 840 instead, which gave us a short cut to our hotel.

Arriving back at the hotel at 4:30pm, Boen and I took a quick dip into the unheated swimming pool and we decided we had better options than being cold in a hotel pool for the rest of the trip.

Over dinner, we marveled at how the food was better than Miralago’s. Going back to the hotel room, we went to bed early hoping that the jet lag would be kind to us again.

Prologue: April 3-4 San Francisco to Club Del Sol, Port de Pollenca

 
Packing our bikes the day before, we got onto the plane and arrived in Copenhagen before transiting to the Mallorca flight. Unlike other airlines, rather than make us take the bikes to oversized luggage, the airline took the bikes directly at the bag drop and told us it would be checked all the way to Palma. The flight was uneventful despite a late start, and the dreaded EES system while slow, was no big deal as we walked quickly to the passport control and were close to the beginning of the line. They took pictures and fingerprint and stamped our passports.

Arriving at Mallorca, the first thing we saw when we exited our gate was a picture of cyclists riding! That put me in a good mood right away. SAS did a good job on the bikes, which arrived at the same time we did in luggage claim.

As promised, the hotel’s taxi operator met us at the exit to the baggage claim, and led us straight to the shuttle which had a trailer just for our bike boxes. He helped me put all the boxes in the trailer, and we got in and he drove us all the way for 115 Euros.

For this trip, we’d elected to stay at Club Del Sol, which was exactly in between Port Pollenca and Alcudia. You get a 10% discount for booking fairly early, and we’d booked half pensions for the entire week. Stephan and his family had already arrived a few days ago, since they were based out of Germany. In fact, they’d already ridden the Cap Formentor, which was the lighthouse ride I’d missed the last time I was on the island in 2019.

We’d arrived too late to put together the bikes, plus Xiaoqin and Bowen were hungry so they went to dinner at the hotel’s buffet while I checked us in. The hotel’s bike shop was already closed, but we were allowed to store our bike boxes at the hotel’s luggage room. We went to bed, with me dreading the impending jet lag.

Review: Lone Wolf and Cub: The Gateless Barrier

 The Gateless Barrier is book two in the Lone Wolf and Cub series. This volume is just as violent and bloody as the previous book, and the adventures the father and son go through make it quite clear that the protagonist is not a hero. Each story can be independently read like the old style TV episodes, so there's no character development.

In one episode, Ogami Itto is asked to kill a Buddhist priest. He tries to do so and discovers that he can't, yet the priest gives him hints that he first has to understand Buddha nature in order to kill him. The guy actually goes and meditates in the mountains for days in order to understand Buddha nature and successfully assassinates the priest. There's of course a bunch of things wrong with this, especially since Buddhist teachings prohibit killing (many Buddhists are vegetarians). In any case, these stories demonstrate something of Itto's character, but ultimately the effects of all that killing never seems to affect him. In another story, he abandons his son in a cave after an avalanche has buried the entrance in favor of his mission, saying that if fate wills his son will live and he will come back to rescue Daigoro.

Definitely a man with dedication to his mission!

Review: Miracle Children

 Miracle Children is the story of T. M. Landry College Prep, a prep school for black children that became famous on social media to sending children to top Ivy League schools, including Harvard, Brown, and Cornell. It was then later discovered that the entire school was a sham, fabricating transcripts in place of classes, and teaching applicants to lie about their life experiences in order to make a more compelling application.

The book effectively reveals that the "Holistic admissions" process is a scam. There is simply no way for any school to effectively vet that what candidate submit as essays are the truth, nor do they actually care. In fact, these schools do not actually care about academic excellence or actually education:

“Princeton is a rich man’s college,” the university’s president Francis Landey Patton told the faculty when they complained about students’ behavior. “Rich men do not frequently come to college to study.” After Woodrow Wilson replaced Patton in 1902, vowing to raise academic standards, his wife quipped to The New York Evening Post that her husband was trying to destroy “the most agreeable and aristocratic country club in America by transforming it into an institution of learning.” But prep school students knew their success was ensured, regardless of how little they worked; in fact, in the early 1900s, more than half the boys admitted to Harvard and Yale and two-thirds of the boys admitted to Princeton had failed the entrance exams...Harvard capped its number of incoming freshmen, limiting the intake of students who passed the entrance test. Unable to take every academically qualified applicant, Harvard began to weigh non-academic qualities as part of the admissions process. It emphasized the importance of athleticism and good character to help maintain aristocratic, if not meritorious, classes. College interviews and feeder schools were all the more essential as admissions tools, as they helped officials weed out academically gifted but undesirable students. Wilbur Bender, the Harvard dean of admissions in the 1950s, argued for admitting students “with IQs well below others” because they became business executives, governors, and presidents, “our most distinguished and useful graduates.”(kindle loc 1109-1115)

What allowed Mike Landry to get away with all this for years was that Louisiana effectively allows private schools to be outside the jurisdiction of the department of education. This was because of segregation. By putting private schools outside of the jurisdiction of public supervision, these schools could discriminate as much as they liked, allowing parents to keep their white children from being forced to mingle with black children. However, that meant that Mike Landry's abuse of children or effective non-teaching of any kind of curriculum (later on, he focused on recruiting higher performing students rather than teaching the kids who joined at lower grades) could not be punished.

The elite college admissions offices are not setup to actually read applications very carefully:

In cases where the applicant attended a feeder school or one that admissions counselors have visited, the readers rely heavily on notes about those schools. “During my time inside admissions offices,” Selingo wrote, “I quickly discovered that the unit being evaluated was less often the applicant than the applicant’s high school.” Selingo cited a study by an admissions consulting firm that found that of 130,000 applicants to a brand-name college over a decade, just 18 percent of high schools were responsible for 75 percent of applications and 79 percent of acceptances. (kindle loc 2497)

What's even more damning was that after the fraud came out, the Ivy League schools closed ranks and refused to admit that they had done no vetting. They defended their admissions of students who had actively lied on their applications so the whole facade they had created about admitting "deserving" students had fallen apart.

 The Landrys “were selling to the colleges this perfect-package student, and to the parents, they were selling hope.” But colleges were also seeking out up-from-nothing tales, especially among minority candidates, and helping to create the conditions for a place like T.M. Landry to thrive. “The reality is the colleges weren’t interested in merely mortal children,” Stancil said. “They wanted miracle children.” The colleges involved defended the students they had accepted, continuing to support them even after the Times ran accounts of the Landrys’ abuse and fabrications. Wellesley said that the T.M. Landry graduates were “thriving and engaged.” George Washington University was confident that those who had been admitted “have the capability to succeed and graduate.” Harvard, Brown, Yale, and New York University also defended their students (kindle loc 2923)

After you've read this book, you'll wonder why elite schools in the US have the reputation they do. Recent surveys about how Americans are losing faith in the value of a college education start to make sense. 

Review: The Anthropocene Reviewed

 The Anthropocene Reviewed is a book full of random reviews written by John Green. I was, of course, uneasy about reading another piece of non-fiction by him, given my one experience with his non-fiction left me feeling dumber for having read it.

Fortunately, this book avoids all the weaknesses of Everything is Tuberculosis. For one, every essays is relatively short, no more than 3-5 pages, essentially a blog post or short podcast, which is a format that enables any competent writer to hide his lack of knowledge about any topic.

Secondly, since he picks essentially random things to write about, and frequently the title of the topic is only a jumping off point to either a different point that caught Green's attention or for Green to provide some sort of autobiography, the human interest side-stories that would annoy me in a longer piece of work doesn't annoy me here. I will note that in the middle of this book, I had to take a break to read another book as a palette cleanser --- even in this format, I can only cope with unadulterated non-fiction Green for 100 pages or so at a time.

I learned that he settled down in Indianapolis, but that Kurt Vonnegut was also from there. He did note that Vonnegut moved away as soon as he could and never returned:

Indianapolis’s favorite literary son, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” Home ownership was all maintenance. There were always window treatments to install and light bulbs to change. The water heater kept breaking. And most of all, there was the lawn. God, I hated mowing the lawn. The lawn and the mini-malls of 86th and Ditch became the two poles of my resentment. I couldn’t wait for Sarah to get a job somewhere else. (kindle loc 2163)

There was one particularly poignant story in which he discusses being on call as a trainee chaplain when he's asked to  serve when a badly burnt little boy of 3 came in. He described the story as one of the contributors to him quitting his career as a chaplain to become a writer, but then he finds out later that the boy survived.

The voice of the book is unaffected, at times sensitive, and at times very contemporary bro-like. Green seems to be an interesting character. I'm afraid to watch his youtube videos or podcasts for fear that I won't like him very much if I see or hear him instead of reading him.

In any case, I had fun reading the book. The star rating (1-5 stars) is kinda used weirdly. I give them book 3.5 stars.

Review: The Elements of Marie Curie

 The Elements of Marie Curie is a biography of the famous two time Nobel prize winner. It's a thorough, event by event description of her life. What's clear to me is that she overcame a lot of obstacles and prejudices to become who she was, but the price was her health. Of course, nobody studying radiation at that time didn't know it was dangerous. In fact, one of the first applications was in medicine, using both X-rays and for radiation therapy.

What I didn't like about the book was the lack of information about how Curie approached the deaths of her lab employees --- by the time they started dying she should have realized that radition was dangerous. We never get any insight in the book about what she thought of it. Similarly, while we see how she crossed paths with many famous scientists, the book is very light on the details of what they discussed.

What Curie did during world war one was well documented in this book, but very little about the second world war. I kept reading in the hopes of getting more out of the book than I eventually did but got to the end with precious little additional insight.

Re-read: The Magician's Land

The Magician's Land is the third and final book of The Magicians trilogy. Following directly from The Magician King, the book starts with Quentin drawn into a heist. The heist, of course, goes horribly wrong, and in the mean time, in Fillory, the earthborn royalty discovers that Fillory is dying.

By the time everything weaves together, we get a reveal from Rupert Chatwin, and Quentin successfully resurrects Alice (I'd forgotten about this from the first read --- and the scene is faithfully replicated in the TV show as well), and discovers the secret to rejuvenating Fillory.

The writing style is just as bad as ever for the series, but for a change the plot doesn't suck, and a large part of the book is actually coherent, being in Rupert Chatwin's voice instead of Lev Grossman's omniscient 3rd party.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit more than the other two. I don't think the series will ever become a classic fantasy series, but it's quirky enough to deserve your time.

Review: The Haywire Heart

 One of my colleagues died in 2024, supposedly during a bike ride. The guy was fit, frequently passing me as though I was standing still, and the family (understandably) didn't disclose many details about what happened other than it was a sudden cardiac event.

I ran across an Outside article about Leonard Zinn getting into trouble because of years of endurance training. This was more fully documented by a book, The Haywire Heart. The book fully acknowledges that there can be no final medical study on whether excessive endurance training will cause you to die or get really poor medical outcomes. That's because you can't do a randomized blinded trial! On the other hand, intuitively we all understand that overdosing on any kind of medicine (and exercise is frequently listed as a medicine) can (and does) kill you.

The book starts with a description of what the heart does, and how both the muscular and electrical systems work. It's amazing how much the heart does, even in  sedentary person:

the heart produces as much energy in a single day as a 100-kg boulder does while falling from a building 383 feet tall (or as much energy as it would take to lift that boulder up to that height). That would leave a big dent in the sidewalk; 15 states in America don’t even have a building tall enough to do this experiment! The mechanical efficiency of the heart is less than 10 percent,9 so the heart will demand over 10 times as much energy (in Calories) as it produces, or in this case, 10 × 115,000 J = 1,150,000 joules in a day, or 1.15 × 106 J × 0.239 cal/J × 10-3 Cal/cal = 275 Calories. In other words, your resting heart requires about one Clif Bar per day in order to keep ticking. (page 43)

 The book has scattered throughout articles about various athletes who've succumbed to over-exercise syndrome. Some of these (including Dave Scott, multiple ironman winner) you might have heard of. The book describes how hard it is for athletes to get appropriate attention and medical care from doctors:

Most doctors don’t know the sensation of being in a road race, criterium, or time trial. They’ve never been in the gutter because of a crosswind, saying to themselves, Ten more pedal strokes, just do it for 10 more pedal strokes. Hold that wheel! Don’t let go! Most doctors don’t know the effort it takes to bridge across to a breakaway. When normal people feel the sensation that a curtain is closing in on their peripheral vision, they turn the tension down on the exercise bike or reduce the speed of the treadmill. They pull the plug on the pain. They are normal. Competitive athletes are not....at a European heart meeting where a doctor presented a case including an ECG that showed a heart rate of 32 beats per minute. The presenter withheld the fact that the ECG belonged to an athlete. He then asked the audience which treatment they would recommend. The audience response system, an automated way to ask the audience questions and compile the most common answers, revealed that a significant number of attendees recommended a pacemaker. Before the first presenter could clarify things, a fiery senior presenter stepped to the microphone and chastised the audience. He was visibly angry. He used the example of five-time Tour de France champion Miguel Indurain, who famously boasted a resting heart rate of 28 bpm. (page 144, 146)

 The book acknowledges the complete lack of data and studies. For instance:

research paper from Denmark garnered significant attention in the lay press because it boldly concluded there was a U-shaped association of running and death rate.62 That is, light and moderate joggers had lower death rates than sedentary controls, but strenuous joggers had death rates similar to the sedentary controls. This paper, with its common-sense conclusions, suffered from a severe statistical problem: The group of vigorous runners included only 36 of more than 1,000 runners in the study. Although the authors reported that vigorous runners had nearly twofold higher death rates, the confidential intervals were wide, ranging from a 50 percent lower death rate all the way up to an eightfold higher death rate. You simply cannot draw any conclusions from this sort of data. (page 111)

What's interesting is that the book doesn't recommend running out and getting tested immediately! That's because there's a huge risk of over-treatment! The book has a horror story in which someone got an MRI and that turned into a series of tests culminating in a completely unnecessary procedure that did permanent damage to that person's heart!

OK. What are you supposed to do? Well, you're supposed to listen to your body. By the way, that's a dangerous advice when you're reading this book, because after reading all these horror stories I found myself more sensitive than usual and can easily believe that I would hallucinate issues even when there were none. I'm very grateful now that my Garmin connect frequently tells me that I'm too lazy to have sufficient "high aerobic" or "anaerobic" workouts! (On the other hand, my 23andMe results once told me I hada high chance of Atrial Fibrillation)

In any case, the book recommends a few supplements that haven't been shown to do any harm (CoQ10, magnesium). They also recommend backing off a bit on the ultra-high-intensity events and intervals that people who are training for hard races do. I think that probably makes sense --- I observed that last year's tour was particularly easy, and I ended the tour stronger than at the start because I was resting so much. That's probably a much healthier tour than a full on, push yourself to the limit every day day after day!

The book's worth reading, and then giving yourself some time off to avoid being a hypochondriac before taking its advice to heart. Fortunately, most people are unlikely to ever push themselves to hard for whom exercise overdose is even a potential problem.

Review: American Vampire Vol 1

 Boen's been on a Stephen King kick of late, reading various Stephen King novels like Christine, I saw that American Vampire Vol 1 was available as a Prime free loan, so I checked it out and read it. The narrative is split into two timestreams: one (written by Scott Snyder) set in the 1920s in Hollywood, as two young actresses who're hoping to make it big get dragged into a party for the Hollywood Big Wigs in hopes of landing a great role. Rather than going Harvey Weinstein on them, the big wig instead sucks their blood (hey, it's a vampire book, what did you expect).

The second timestream is set in the time of the Wild West. This narrative was written by Stephen King, and it's obvious that he's new to comic book writing. There's way too much dialog, and not enough time spent making you care about the characters.

The art is good, but the vampire schtick is kinda worn out. It's nothing that you haven't seen in Blade, for instance. I was hoping for more originality. I guess the vampire trope is so worn out that even Stephen King can't come up with a good new story, and is stuck retelling old stories.

Re-read: Lone Wolf and Cub - The Assassin's Road

 I remember reading and enjoying a few issues of Lone Wolf and Cub as a teenager, so I checked out the first volume, The Assassin's Road from Hoopla. A lot of the art and for instance, the stand-off sword-fight scenes look very familiar, because games like Ghost of Tsushima have adopted the art and the tropes and made them look great.

What I was unprepared for was a reminder that the Japanese do not hide behind a rating system for their comics. There's rape, seduction, lots of blood and gore (in black and white) and obviously, there's the incongruity of a Samurai assassin taking on murderous bounty jobs with a 5-year old in tow.

The whole volume (in which the origin story only appears right at the end of the volume) is full of situations where Itto Ogami (the titular Lone Wolf) through craft, guile, and just sheer amazing swordsmanship, dispatches his targets and then walks off into the sunset, baby cart in tow. There are lots of action lines, and the dynamism of the art leaves no question that this is an action comic.

It's enjoyable in small doses. I think I'll space out my reading of the series.

Review: Apple in China

 I make no bones about my dislike of Apple and everything it stands for. To me, Apple represents the worst of American culture:

• Disposable, throwaway products that cannot be easily repaired (or even just replace the battery)
• Form over function, to the point where Steve Jobs told its users "you're holding the phone wrong", when it was clearly a badly designed antenna system
• User-hostile product design that's designed to make you spend more money on its ecosystem (e.g., taking away the headphone jack, or removing the SIM card slot so you have no choice but to go through Apple to even purchase a cell phone plan)

Apple in China, despite it's subtitle about Apple being the greatest company, is no sycophantic tract talking about how great Apple is. It is a systematic, well-researched history of how Apple "outsourced" its manufacturing to an entire supply chain in China, and in doing so, massively sped up the acquisition of advanced technology in China. The word "outsource" is in quotes as follows:

Apple had essentially cracked the code on how to manufacture the world’s best products without doing any of the manufacturing itself. It wasn’t really “outsourcing” in the normal sense—that would imply it was sending blueprints to companies capable of taking the orders and executing. Instead, Apple was routinely sending its top engineers, designers, procurement specialists, and lawyers from the United States into hundreds of factories across the country, where they’d import machinery, train armies of workers, coordinate the delivery of intermediate goods, and scrutinize suppliers to ensure compliance. Apple’s influence was enormous, but no senior executives lived in China or understood the politics, nor had Apple appointed anyone to oversee the business or manage government affairs. (kindle loc 97)

In fact, as the book discusses, despite American politicians' lamentations about how America has forgotten how to do manufacturing, it's quite clear that all throughout the book, Apple has not forgotten how to do manufacturing, and is in fact, at the cutting edge of advanced manufacturing. What it has done is to deliberately design its products and supply chain to take advantage of the resources available in China in order to scale its advanced manufacturing:

Apple wasn’t, by any stretch, the largest computer maker working in Taiwan, but its penchant for complex designs and intolerance for defects was unique and over-the-top, necessitating a form of intellectual investment shared by none of its rivals. Apple veterans from the time can’t stress enough that nobody else was embedding dozens of engineers into Taiwanese suppliers, then consistently pushing the envelope on what was possible. “Apple is single-handedly responsible for bringing quality into Southeast Asia,” says Robert Brunner, the director of the ID studio from 1990 to 1997. “If you look at the capability they brought up in that region, from a manufacturing standpoint, it’s solely on their presence and their demands on these organizations that caused them to build that competency of being able to make quality things.” For the biggest computer makers at the time, design and R&D were such secondary considerations to logistics and efficiency that Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy once likened Dell to a grocery store: “They’re not in the PC business any more than Safeway is in the food manufacturing business.” (kindle loc 1083)

One of the most interesting examples is the use of end-of-line testing equipment. The book describes these pieces of equipment were originally designed for lab benches, and cost north of $100k each. Apple insisted on buying them in bulk and installing them at the end of factory lines in order to ensure quality. While you might expect that Apple expects its contract manufacturers to foot the bill for these machines, Apple went and bought them and had them flown into the factories and installed. This did a few things. First, these machines were exclusively used for Apple products. Secondly, it was a threat to its supply chain partners. If they ever stepped out of line, Apple would just pull its machines out and place them at alternate factories!

For Dell, ever focused on efficiency, China’s advantages were all about cost and scale—that is to say, they were about margin. But Apple looked at the armies of affordable, available labor and saw a different potential: unconstrained design. Or to put it differently: Western PC companies were shifting to China because of what was available; Apple shifted because of what was possible. Before the return of Jobs, Apple computers were manufactured in a fashion called poka-yoke, a Japanese term meaning “mistake-proofing.” The idea was that products should be designed for easy assembly. And a desire for more automation amplified the trend: From the sketching stage on forward, blueprints for hardware were constrained so machines could put them together without error. But what Apple was realizing was that thousands of laborers cheaply handcrafting Apple hardware on a conveyor-belt production line allowed its designs to be maddeningly intricate, complex, and automation-unfriendly. (kindle 1138)

The book is full of intricate details. For instance, it describes the initial design of the first polycarbonate iMac. What other biographies (usually written by sycophants like Walter Issacson) described as Jobs' genius in pushing his team to the limits and beyond is actually not true! The initial design by Jonathan Ives' group was essentially unmanufacturable! Despite months of Jobs' idiotic pushing, the physics just wouldn't yield. Eventually Jobs sent the design to a firm in Silicon Valley that he trusted, and they responded that the design was not manufacturer. Only then did Jobs believe Apple's manufacturing engineers, and Jonathan Ives went back and in cooperation with the manufacturing engineers came up with a design that was manufacturable at scale. To Apple's credit, the organization learned from these mistakes and from then on, product design would even go so far as to visit Taiwan and work with manufacturing to ensure that their designs could indeed be fabricated.

The shape is a pyramid, with Jony Ive’s Industrial Design team at the top. ID would conceive how a product would look and feel, with an exactitude that drove fear into the rest of the organization. Their creation goes to Product Design, whose role is to figure out the mechanical engineering and make the product functional. Then it moves to manufacturing engineers—a small team back then, and later a distinct unit called Manufacturing Design, or MD—who work with component makers and final assembly partners to actually build the product. Finally, the Operations team comes in. They work with vendors that their colleagues have already selected, and then optimize everything to help the product scale. But crucially, Ops also has a prerogative to find other component makers, other final assembly partners, to build resiliency, cut prices, and to instill competition. (kindle loc 1441)

The relationship with  Foxconn is similarly described in detail. Foxconn bent over backwards to get Apple's business, despite making no profits. This was a deliberate strategy to build up his own company's manufacturing expertise:

“His people used to hate us, because they used to make no money out of us,” says an Apple operations executive. “The Compaq guys”—the Foxconn team building for Compaq—“were making a fortune on bonuses, and no one wanted to come work on the Apple account because there were no bonuses.” But Gou answered to no one. He took a long-term view, knowing that if his team could please Apple, they could please any client. (kindle loc 1410)

 Gou even deployed a clever tactic to rotate his workers on Apple projects, to maximize the learning. “We trained all of them. Then one day we’d be like, ‘Where’d those engineers go?’ ” says Fadell. He’d learn that they’d gone to work on other projects, using their new skills in areas that were more lucrative. Then Apple would be forced to teach a new cohort of people, as if a new semester had started. (kindle loc 2007)

 Page after page, the book's details and research is impeccable and very much worth reading. There's a whole chapter about employee burnout at Apple through constant trips to China. Once in China, the work was non stop and relentless. Apparently, many employees ended up losing their families as a result of this work schedule. To my surprise, Apple's manufacturing engineers must have been extremely poorly paid. The book describes one instance where a wife called up a husband and loudly denounced his upcoming trip to China and threatening a divorce if he made the trip. The manager's solution? Offer the engineer a $10k bonus for taking the trip, buying off the spouse. Even in the mid 2000s, I cannot imagine a single Google engineer's wife considering a $10K bonus (after taxes it would have been $6k) suitable compensation for taking away her husband for months. One engineer was even told by his doctor to quit his job or die on it:

Apple came close to codifying the principle that pushing employees to burnout was acceptable. In a slide deck called Leadership Palette, Apple states: “Fighting for excellence is about resisting the gravitational pull of mediocrity. It involves being dead tired and still pushing yourself, and others, to get it right, every time.” One engineer says the reason he left Apple after more than a decade is that during a routine medical appointment, his doctor noted his high blood pressure and said, “Okay, I need you to do two things for me: lose weight and quit Apple.” The doctor explained that the stress would basically kill him. Some Apple engineers can even rattle off the names of people who died on the production line or upon their return from yet another trip to Asia. The engineers were often in their forties and fifties, and while it’s not possible to conclude that overwork was their cause of death, many believe it was. One longtime veteran recalls that, during the funeral for one of these people, the number of Apple employees who left the Sunday service to join conference calls was unbelievable...Jon Rubinstein, who worked for Steve Jobs on and off for sixteen years, called the long workweeks “shattering,” and it’s what led to his own departure later on. “A lot of people got sick at Apple,” he once said. “The list goes on and on of people who got terminally ill or really ill… and I worried that if I stayed, I’d end up damaging myself, and my health was, frankly, more important.” He added: “Steve used to always tell the groups, ‘This will be the high point of your life,’ and I was thinking, God, I hope not, right? Because that’s really a sad way to think.” (kindle loc 2112 - 2122)

There's even a story of the manager of the Apple store in Beijing voluntarily going to jail in order to defuse a nasty situation at the Apple store. If you remember all those stories  about fights breaking up in China's Apple stores about being given a chance to buy an iPhone? This book explains the background. It turns out all the people in those lines were scalpers who were paid to buy the phones and then those phones got distributed into the Chinese market. 

The book describes Apple's slow awakening into China's politics and how Xi Jinping's ascendence caught them by surprise. But rather than diversifying its supply chain, Apple instead doubled down on it, making itself even more vulnerable to China disruption than before. It took multiple supply chain failures before Apple started taking even small steps to do manufacturing outside China, and even then those steps are half-hearted and slow, mainly out of fear that if Apple moved quickly China would cut them off. I have friends who defend Apple by saying that other manufacturers are similarly vulnerable. This book completely debunks that. It turns out that Samsung makes more phones than Apple but is almost completely immune to a China supply chain disruption:

Samsung, the only company that sells more phones than Apple, is much less vulnerable. Samsung runs its own chip foundries, which are second only to TSMC, in Korea and Texas, and in 2023 the company pledged to invest $230 billion to build five new fabrication plants over the next two decades. Indeed, Samsung is likely to be the biggest winner in the event of an earthquake in Taiwan, be it political or natural. Disruption to supply chains in Taiwan would hinder Samsung’s ability to import certain components, but the impact would be far less than for Apple. (kindle loc 5383)

 Needless to say, the highlights and quotes I've provided in this book are a tiny fraction of the book filled with interesting, insightful stories and never before disclosed details. It definitely disrupts the usual story about manufacturing knowhow being shipped overseas, and it's a far better story than the usual books about China such as Breakneck.  This book makes those books look like the shallow, sophomoric and poorly researched books that they are. If the Financial Times reporting is all like this I should give up my subscription to other magazines and subscribe to FT instead!

I wouldn't be surprised if come November I nominate this book as the book of the year. That's how good it is. Highly recommended.

P.S. One thought I had after finishing this book is that you should be very optimistic about manufacturing in the USA. Apple (and other American companies) still know a lot about manufacturing. If the country ever got its political act together enough to want to do a big manufacturing drive, the fact that China did it so quickly meant that the USA can do so as well. Of course, that depends on Americans politically understanding the situation well enough to vote accordingly. That part of the equation I'm not very opitmistic about.

Review: Wonders of the Universe

 Wonders of the Universe is the companion book to Brian Cox's TV show of the same name. I read the book on Hoopla, so probably didn't get the best way of viewing the book. The pictures are tiny, and uninspiring, and if the TV show was well produced it probably looks way better than the crappy photos that show up in the book.

It is probably my least favorite Brian Cox book, probably because it covers topics already covered in his many other books, but without the deeper pedagogy displayed in those books. Like Cosmos, it covers a lot more history of science than it actually does the science, and so the science that it does present has to be simplified.

Don't get me wrong, the book's diagrams does teach you new stuff that wasn't in the previous books, but you have to look hard for it, and obviously reading the book on Hoopla doesn't give you the crisp photos that would be in the paper book. In addition, I really question the choice of photographs used in the book --- maybe the TV show would inspire awe, but in the book the photos just look drab and uninspiring. Better to leave the photos out if you're going to choose bad photos!

Re-read: The Magician King

 It's a strange feeling to re-read The Magician King after having seen a few seasons of The Magicians TV show. On the one hand, Lev Grossman is such a bad writer that the best episodes of the TV show are so much better written. By contrast to the TV show, the book's plot structure has our protagonists being driven by events, with no plans and no motivation, with events unfolding one after another as though in a dream.

On the other hand, a novel (even one in a trilogy of fantasy novels) doesn't have the constraints a TV show has, so characters can die a permanent death. In this book, half the plot is about Julia's career as a hedge Magician, working her way up the hierarchy of a series of safe houses. In the TV show, this was all done in parallel with the first couple of seasons, and obviously, the TV show wanted to keep Stella Maeve in the show, so Julia never got the final arc the book gave her.

Once again, the protagonists like Quentin and Eliot aren't very likeable, but the ending, with Quentin getting kicked out of Fillory had a finality that the TV show never achieved in the episodes I watched. (I haven't seen all the season so maybe his exit from the TV show is better) But the book did give Quentin moments of competence as befit the title of the novel, which to be honest the TV show didn't seem to ever do.

Obviously, I enjoyed the book enough to re-read it, so I have to give it a recommended tag.

Review: Why does E=MC^2? (And Why Should We Care?)

 I guess I'm on a Brian Cox kick, and this time, it's his 2009 book, Why does E=MC^2? I really enjoy the way he finds different ways of explaining similar things. This time, he explains relativity, but without recourse to any Penrose diagrams. He basically starts with 2 assumptions, one driven by experiment, which is the speed of light is measured to be the same no matter where you are, how fast you're going. The second is that causality applies, in other words no way can you ever see the effect prior to the cause.

From there, he uses the Pythagoras theorem, but applied to 4-dimensional space-time, and derives the basic equation. It's an impressive tour de force, and explained clearly and relatively cleanly, even down to the use of complex numbers. He then goes on to explore what mass is, then introduces the standard model of quantum mechanics, and proceeds to describe various relativistic effects.

This book was written before the conclusive discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN, but was clearly very confident about the outcome of the LHC experiments. I thought it was quite a lot of fun to read. Maybe I should start watching his TV shows as well.

Review: Human Universe

 Human Universe is based on Brian Cox's TV show.  Apparently, that's a show similar to Cosmos. I read it and enjoyed it quite a bit. First of all, unlike his other books that I've read, this is much more of a science history book than a technical book explaining physics. We start rather similarly to Cosmos, with an explanation of our view of the universe and how it went from us being the center of the universe to the solar-centered view of the solar system.

From there, we expand out to our understanding of where we are in the galaxy and where our galaxy is in the universe. As the scope increases, we get into deeper questions of cosmology, for instance what happened before the big bang. To my surprise, I actually learned new stuff here. Cox posits that inflation predated the Big Bang, and that the matter that we get were the residue after inflation had slowed down. He further posits that inflation might not have stopped in all parts of the (multi-)universe, and that parts of the universe might still have inflation happening. The speculation is then that the laws of physics that occur outside our visible universe might be different. We get an exposition of the Anthropic principle (both strong and weak versions of it). Cox does all this without reference to String theory, which I appreciate.

We also get an exposition of the Drake's Equation. (By the way, one of my pet peeves is that the Drake's equation doesn't factor in the probability that the planet has a strong enough magnetic field to keep its atmosphere from being blown away by its star --- the fact that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field is an indication that magnetic fields are not a given) There's speculation as to why there aren't any other aliens out there (Cox posits that the transition to multi-cellular life through the evolution of Eukaryotes took 3.5M years, which meant that it wasn't a given!).

I enjoyed the book and learned not a little. Recommended.

Review: The Quantum Universe

 The Quantum Universe is Brian Cox's introduction to quantum mechanics. Of all the books attempting to teach quantum mechanics that I've tried to read, this is the one that has the best pedagogy. Rather than follow the historical approach (introducing Heisenberg and Schrodinger's approaches first), Cox decides to use the Feynman approach right away. This allows for a geometric and diagrammatic approach to the subject that makes the initial approach relatively easy.

The approach rather than using equations with complex numbers and trigonometric functions like sine and cosine, takes advantage of the fact that you can represent complex numbers with a polar diagram. To make things easier for the layman, Cox describes these as "clocks", with magnitude represented by the size of the clock, and the hour hand (there are no minute hands in these clocks) representing the vector composed out of the real and imaginary parts. He then defines the rules for "adding" and "subtracting" clocks, and then defines how interference and cancellation of waves works. Out of all these mechanics he then gets to show how the famous double split experiment results are described correctly by this system.

From there, of course, the topic only gets harder. We extrapolate this system from photos to quarks, bosons, and Cox waves his hands and says these differ because the rules for the manipulation of clocks are different for each category. We get a walkthrough of how the standard model explains how an atom holds together, how the electrons in a hydrogen atom works, an explanation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and how the Higgs boson gives mass to the other particles.

Don't get me wrong. Quantum mechanics is hard. I found myself tired and falling asleep after spending an hour reading chapters of this book. I suspect the best way to approach this is to not try to read this book at bed time (though it did succeed in making me sleepy), but to do it during the day with pencil and paper handy and actually work through all the equations and diagrams he poses.

The book ends with deriving Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar's result that a neutron star cannot be more than 1.4 times the size of the sun. This is a tour de force, involving everything you've learned so far. I will admit I couldn't follow all of it, but nevertheless I enjoyed the book.

Review: Congratulations, By The Way

 Congratulations, By The Way was George Saunder's commencement speech at Syracuse University. It's mercifully short, and went viral, after which it got turned into a book.

The kindle formatting of the book is awful. It looks like a children's board book with just 4-6 sentences per page, completely disrupting the flow and feel of the speech. I for one, feel like he should have just posted the darn thing on a blog.

I don't object to the content --- of course you should be kind, and of course you should actually take some time to cultivate your kindness. But one thing you have to bear in mind is that fiction writers are essentially professional liars. As Charlie Stross once said: "Give me money and I'll tell you lies." So I suspect that he does regret the time he jumped into a river what monkeys have pooped in in Africa and gotten sick for days afterwards. I certainly would.

The book is also very vague on what kindness is. For instance, many people think it's kinder to lie to someone about how they look, or how smart they are, than to be honest and tell them that they suck. I actually think that a commitment to honesty, at least to the people you care about the most matters more and is kinder than the momentary feel of warmth. After all, if you make a habit out of lying to the people you love you eventually lose credibility and there is no kindness in that. (Then of course, I watch as my two sons tell each other lovingly that they're fat even when they both have BMIs well below the average, and maybe that kind of lying isn't that bad)

It's a quick read, you won't get much out of it, and it should have been a blog post.