April 3rd: The Wreck of the Rhone & Cistern Point

We woke up in the morning and immediately got to work loading up the dinghy with dive tanks. Tony was not very clear as to how we were going to dive today, and had mentioned that we might want to refill our dive tanks ourselves since he might show up and use our own boat to take us diving. Shauna had failed to get DAN's dive insurance the night before, and so she wanted to make that happen as well.

At 8:00am, folks were already ashore but the dive shop was not opened, so I called the shop and the employee said she was on the way. Horizon also called me to say that they had not received the WiFi unit, so I ended up on the phone making calls to Tony's wife and Horizon to ensure that everything would come together.

It took until nearly 10:00am for Tony to show up, but when he did, it was on the sailing catamaran/dive boat, the Braveheart. The Braveheart was a luxury dive catamaran that made The Escape looked like a toy (though at charter rates of $19500/week for 8 people, it had better be). It had two compressors on board, a big dive platform, a water maker, and ample room: even the heads had transparent bottoms so you could look down at the fish while taking a shower.

From Escape Catamaran 2012

The wreck of the Rhone is a world class dive, and even though this was my second time, I still enjoyed it thoroughly. It's an old wreck, so it's encrusted with wildlife, and lots of pretty things to see. It was so good that after snorkeling above us for a bit, XiaoQin decided to try diving one more time.

From BVI 2012

During the surface interval, a false alarm led us to believe there would be whales for us to see, and we all got into the dinghy to look for it, but it didn't happen. So we were taken to Salt Island to have a look at the salt pond instead. It was warm once out of the water, but it was interesting to look at the island. The best thing about the Braveheart is that with 2 tenders, surface intervals will never be boring.

From BVI 2012

The second dive was even more fun, since we were all pretty good about using relatively little air, it was agreed that we could do the Rhone and the Rhone Reef.

From BVI 2012

I'd forgotten how pretty it was, and XiaoQin had a great time as well. We even saw a shark but I didn't have my camera ready for it so it went. I did, however, get a decent video of a turtle swimming.

From BVI 2012

We found a specimen of a Lion fish, an invasive species in the Caribbean, and our guide speared it, bringing it back to the Braveheart for a decapitation.

From BVI 2012

Soon enough, the dive was over, and we were delivered back to Escape with 2 fresh tanks replacing tanks that were previously known to be low but which we had not bothered to refill because they weren't low enough to justify the money.

We then proceeded to dive Cistern Point, which turned out to be more interesting as a dive than a snorkel. Once the coral was up close, we could see plenty of life in the area. Arturo even found a souvenir: a ring with a cork tied to it via a ribbon.

From BVI 2012

The nice thing about shallow dives is that they are quite long. We got 60 minutes out of our tanks. Unfortunately, John hurt himself while getting into a dinghy, rendering his hand out of action.

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Independent Cycle Touring in Europe: Reprise

I was asked to reprise last year's very popular, Independent Cycle Touring in Europe talk at the Bicycle Outfitter on April 19th at 7:15pm.

All are welcome! As usual, I'll have books available for sale and to sign.

Review: The Mathematics of Life

When I told my crew that I was reading The Mathematics of Life on the cruise they said, "Come on, you're on vacation!" Well, I'm a science junkie and the Mathematics of Life is quite a great read if you're one.

For one thing, biology has historically not needed a lot of math, and the author knows that. We start with a discussion of fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio and how it relates to natural phenomena like flower petals, leaf growth patterns, etc.

Then he goes into genetics and we now have a full explanation of the human genome project and how it makes use of the computational power we now have. The breath of the book is amazing. We cover astrobiology, including coverage of the rare earth hypothesis and how likely it is that we'll find life on other planets.

The book is slow going. At time, it feels like the author pontificates instead of just disclosing the latest research and thinking. On the other hand, there's no one chapter I can point to and say: "this should be cut out. It has nothing to do with mathematics and life." I felt like I learned something in every chapter, and as a science geek that's says quite a lot.

Recommended.

AirBnB's delightful offices

I'd been a big fan of AirBnB ever since I met one of their founders at the Sunfire offices, but I had never visited the office, so when XiaoQin and I were in San Francisco today for an unrelated matter, I asked if we could pay them a visit and was pleased that it was OK.

The exterior of the building is non-descript, but the interior is gorgeous. The lobby is the giant cereal box of Obama Os from way back during the startup phase when they were timing the launch with political conventions.

From BayArea

The meeting rooms inside are styled after some of their apartment BnB listings.

From BayArea

It is standard now for Silicon Valley startups to have their own kitchen and chef, and AirBnB's kitchen was open, in full view of everyone, and most importantly, the food was very tasty:

From BayArea

In a nice touch, even the bathrooms are deliberately non-corporate, styled after a comfortable home's bathroom, albeit a little bigger. In a tip towards environmental consciousness, they don't offer paper towels, but instead reusable cloth towels that are laundered.

From BayArea

There were large numbers of bicycles in the hallways, as 80% of the employees bike to work. It's very popular in Silicon Valley to say that all Silicon Valley companies are similar. I think people who say that are full of it, as every Silicon Valley startup I've worked at has been very different with its own unique culture. The ones with the strongest cultures tend to be very successful, and if what we saw today is characteristic of AirBnB, I'll be surprised if they do not have a bright future ahead of them.

April 2nd: The Bight (Norman Island) to Manchioneel Bay (Cooper Island)

From Screen Captures

I got up at 6am only to find that Arturo was also up, along with Shauna. This would set the pattern for the entire trip: the 3 of us were morning people and well suited to getting the boat moving and underway. The morning's motoring was a short distance, less than a nautical mile to get to the Indians, where the mooring buoys would be in high demand (no anchoring allowed because of the coral), but no overnight moorings were permitted.

From BVI 2012

I last tried diving the Indians the last time I was here, but I had a very confused dive master who got lost during the dive and so we never saw any of the swim-throughs that were listed in the book. This time, I suggested that we snorkel around the area to sort through navigation issues. Arturo agreed, but Amy and John were impatient to get underwater and so jumped in straight away with scuba gear. Since Arturo had many more dives than I did, it was naturally assumed that he would lead the dive.

From BVI 2012

Snorkeling in the morning is amazingly great, since the water is still calm and the crystal clear water granted us clear views of the coral near us. We snorkeled for a half hour before donning wet suits and diving in. Arturo after his initial snorkel, said I must have had an idiot for a dive master last time because the navigation would be straightforward.

From BVI 2012

Through to his word, we did the entire dive with no problems, and had no issues finding the divethroughs. The dive was very shallow which meant that we had a nice long dive, without any panic whatsoever about running out of air. Or we would have, had we not noticed that Tony's equipment leaked like a sieve.

From BVI 2012

The dive took so long that by the time we were all sorted out it was 11:00am. Given that Cooper Island's mooring balls were known to fill up some times at 2:00pm, I decided to be extra conservative and start sailing there right away, eschewing a second dive. I reasoned that there were plenty of dive opportunities around Cooper Island anyway.

From BVI 2012

Indeed, by the time we got to Cooper Island's Manchioneel Bay it was quite clear that there was a race going on. There were about 3 mooring buoys left, and there were about 3 sail boats coming in. We watched as one boat after another beat us to the mooring buoys (their skippers much more willing to push their engines than I was), and we headed for the last mooring buoy only to find that it was red. Fortunately, one more buoy at the edge of the bay was open. We took it without drama, and settled down to enjoy the afternoon, still quite disbelieving of the fact that we had a mooring buoy race at 1:30pm!

The others wanted to dive the wreck of the Maria L, but I wasn't terribly interested, having seen the pictures of the wreck from the book, and elected to snorkel Cistern point with XiaoQin instead. We did the snorkel, which was pretty but none too special as it looked like the coral was too far to get a close look without scuba tanks.

We got back to the boat and found the folks were driving back with the dinghy as they could not find the location of the dive site. Shauna and Amy had decided to go ashore with the dinghy. Fortunately, I had pre-programmed the dive sites into my GPS, and handing it to Arturo, was confident that they would be able to do find it this time, especially now that we realized that we had had South and North confused.

There was still plenty of time to swim around, so we swam to the beaches that were marked private as seen from shore. Throughout the BVIs, the beaches up to the high tide line are always public, so you can safely ignore any signs about the privacy of beaches. Indeed, as we got there, two women were dropped off by a dinghy from another yacht and started collecting shells.

From BVI 2012

We had a crisis with the wifi unit. It wasn't working the previous night, and John and Arturo suspected that others were hopping onto our router. They had performed a hard reset, which rendered it useless. A call to the office revealed that (1) the network was simply down last night, and (2) the reset wiped the password for logging on from the unit, and (3) they couldn't give us the password over the phone because the same password was used for all the units. So we had to return the unit back to Horizon and then they'd find a way to get it back to us. A chase boat would cost $150, and there was no easy way to get the unit back to Horizon without sailing back to Nanny Cay, something I was loath to do. While I was at it, Horizon talked us into debugging and fixing the shower sump in the starboard head, which was not draining the shower of water.

The folks came back from their dive and said the coincidentally, Tony was diving at the same site! I called Tony and asked if he could get the unit delivered to Horizon and he agreed, so Arturo jumped back into the dinghy and drove back to the site.

Dursk came early, disappearing behind the clouds and robbing us of a sunset. Nevertheless, having solved all the problems to day, I could not complain and looked forward to diving the wreck of the Rhone again the next day.
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April 1st: Nanny Cay Marina (Tortola) to The Bight (Norman Island)

From Screen Captures

The order of business was to get to Nanny Cay Marina bright and early this morning so we could take possession of the boat. Since many charters start on Sunday, I anticipated a mad rush for limited mooring buoys, and so got us a taxi at 7:45am. The taxi driver, however, showed up quite a bit earlier than expected and so we ended up at Nanny Cay Marina by 8:10am. While waiting for the office to open, we walked around and found the Escape in the state of being cleaned up.

From BVI 2012

Checking in with the office, we picked up the WiFi unit we ordered, and then got a chart briefing from a very casual staff member. I was quite familiar with the area, but attended the briefing anyway mostly so my crew had an idea of what's going on and why the itinerary was set the way it was. In addition, listening to other skipper's questions gave me ideas for what to do later on in the trip.

An hour after the briefing, our boat was ready and we started moving stuff in in earnest. We discovered that the two bow cabins actually had 2 beds, the forward most one intended to be for a small person, such as a child. This was great, as Arturo and Cindy could now share a cabin and keep the salon free. The boat seemed like it was in fairly good condition, and the air condition felt good. Equipment and provisions started trickling in: Tony showed up with all our dive gear, and Cindy's order for provisions showed up in boxes, one after another. The crew was kept busy stowing away stuff, while Arturo and I walked around the boat with the check list, counting off one item after another.

Despite our being entirely ready by 12:30pm, we did not get a captain from Horizon charters until 1:00pm to start our boat briefing on the various ship's systems. The briefing was very thorough, but it wasn't until 2:00pm before we were driven out of the slip, with our captain getting off at the fuel dock and then I found myself in command of the Escape and driving out of the marina into the Sir Francis Drake Channel.

From BVI 2012

The day was the last day of a multi-day series of regattas, but we quickly motor'd away from the center of activity and then raised our sails for The Bight on Norman Island. Given how late we were getting away from Nanny Cay, I made the executive decision to skip any diving for the day and just find a mooring Buoy.

From BVI 2012

Arriving at the Bight near 3:00pm, we dropped our sails and bee-lined for one of just a handful of mooring buoys left: it was undesirable because it was close to the Willy T, a floating restaurant known for boisterous parties. We tied up one line to the pennant, and I immediately heard a splash as John jumped into the water to tie the backup line to the buoy itself. He was so eager to get in the water he did not want to wait for us to get out the dinghy!

We piled into the dinghy and headed for a snorkel destination: The Caves on Norman Island. This set of 3-4 caves past treasure point shows off everything great about the BVI. The clear waters show off the caves exceedingly well, even in the dark, and while they look intimidating, seem almost custom designed by Walt Disney for a safe and fun snorkel while giving you the experience of exploring water-filled caves by flash light.

From BVI 2012

From BVI 2012

"OK," Arturo conceded, "This is way better than the underwater trail on St. John." We swam around enjoying the water until those of us who weren't wearing wet suits started getting cold. Then one by one we got back into the dinghy and motor'd back to Escape for a lovely dinner made by Shauna, who was declaring herself the official cook on the trip. We made plans to wake up bright and early to snag a mooring Buoy at the Indians the next morning. Arturo found a couple of candidate second dives, and XiaoQin and I went to bed wearing ear plugs so we could sleep through the Willy T's party. Surprisingly enough, no one on the crew wanted to visit the Willy T's, preferring to turn in early for a bright and early start the next day.

From BVI 2012

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March 29-31st: Prologue

XiaoQin and I flew on Jet Blue from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale, then to San Juan, where a 20 minute flight took us to St. Thomas. We arrived at 3:00pm, which was cutting it close to make it to the ferry, so spent the night at the Island View Guest House instead. Set on a hill side, it granted us a beautiful view of Charlotte Amalie and the surroundings.

From BVI 2012

The next day, we caught the first ferry and then taxi'd over to the Serendipity House, where we took a rest before getting picked up at 1:00pm by Tony, the owner of UBS Dive Center, where we tried out dive gear, which we would be renting.

From BVI 2012

Tony had a set back: his boat's twin engines had caught on fire a few nights before, melting bits of the hull along with it, so he wasn't going to be able to give us dive instruction as promised. He foisted us over to Paradise Watersports instead. Unfortunately, the attitude of the instructor didn't go over well with XiaoQin, so she bailed on the instruction.

From BVI 2012

We spent the next day swimming and relaxing on the beach instead, and Arturo Crespo and Cindy Zhou joined us.

Arturo had just spent 2 days at St. John's Virgin Islands National Park, and declared it to be excellent. "The BVI had better be spectacular to top that!" Arturo is well-traveled and a man for all seasons, but I felt surprisingly un-intimidated. My last visit to the British Virgin Islands had haunted me since, and I kept trying to make this trip happen. Having moor'd at Cinnamon Bay and spent a morning there, I deliberately started our charter in Tortola to avoid crossing borders so we could spend the most time in what I considered the fun parts of the virgin islands.
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Escape BVI 2012

From April 1st to April 8th, 2012, Arturo Crespo (first mate), Cindy Zhou (purser), Shauna Eggers (chef), John Feiler, Amy Platt and Steve Moran joined XiaoQin (admiral) and I (skipper) for a cruise around the British Virgin Islands upon the Horizon Charter Catamaran Escape, a Leopard 40.

This is the index for the trip, which will include a day by day report with embedded photos.

You can Download the GPS Tracks for Escape

BVI 2012

Trip Report

• Prologue: March 29-31st
  
• Day 1: April 1st: Nanny Cay Marina to The Bight
  
• Day 2: The Bight to Manchioneel Bay
  
• Day 3: The Wreck of the Rhone and Cistern Point
• Day 4: Manchioneel Bay to Leverick Bay
• Day 5: Leverick Bay to Deadman's Bay
• Day 6: Deadman's Bay to Kelly's Cove
• Day 7: Kelly's Cove to White Bay
• Day 8: White Bay to Nanny Cay Marina
• Epilogue: April 8th & 9th
  
• Conclusions and Thoughts

Review: Which Comes First - Cardio or Weights?

I was led to read Which Comes First: Cardio or Weights? by Scott Hess' comment on one my posts on Google+. Overall, this is a collection of columns from one of the Canadian Running magazines, but it's surprisingly diverse in its topics. Since the column was apparently in question and answer format, it's easy for even a casual reader and dive in and read just small chunks at a time. It's a sufficiently short book that I finished it in a 2 hour flight.

The opening question is indicative of the type of topics discussed. The answer, it turns out is that whether you start with Cardio or Weights depends heavily on what you want to achieve: your body can either improve the circulatory system or strength, but not both, so which one you start an exercise session with determines whether or not you build strength or aerobic fitness. This is a counter-intuitive result, and therefore worthy of attention.

Running is given extra attention, as is weight lifting. You'll get interesting answers as to whether you're lifting heavy enough weights, or whether your cardio workouts are intense enough. What's good about the book is when it steers into areas that I always wanted to know but never bothered to find good answers to because Google searches would only turn up advocate's results. For instance, I've long suspected that Yoga doesn't actually do anything good for your body compared to actually doing cardio or weight lifting, and this book confirms that with references to literature.

Where the book covers topics I had previously read about elsewhere, it doesn't contradict well known existing literature. For instance, it points out that your spouse is the biggest influence on your exercise habits. It also shows that if you want to stay young, "vigorous aerobic exercise makes your DNA look several decades younger than it is. And that's bad news for the sedentary groups." In recent years, it's been fashionable to dismiss exercise as useless for losing weight, but the reality has been that exercise is important for reasons more than losing weight:

Only the diet-plus-exercise group had significant improvements in insulin sensitivity, LDL chloresterol, and distolic blood pressure---crucial risk factors for heart disease and diabetes, but changes you can't measure by looking in the mirror or stepping on a scale... (Pg. 157)

In addition, the author takes on the typical prescriptions for exercise as being too little to even maintain your weight and not gain weight: "Managed to avoid significant weight gain throughout the study, and these women averaged a full hour of moderate exercise every day. Anything less was unusuccessful. That's a lot of execise---unless you compare it to the daily lives of our ancestors who didn't spend most of the day sitting at desks or in cars." (Pg. 160)

Overall, this is a good book, and given how short and easy to read it was, well worth your time. Recommended.

Sleep Apnea: The Noisy Killer

My previous post on Fitness had people asking me about Sleep Apnea.

Sleep Apnea occurs because our throats are a design compromise. In order for you to be able to speak well and articulate well, your throat should be as flexible as possible. However, in order for you to breath well, your throat should be as stiff as possible. Natural selection ended up with a compromise: your throat muscles hold your throat stiffly when you are awake, which means that the throat can be flexible enough so you can speak well. Unfortunately, when you're asleep, the muscles will relax, allowing the throat to collapse, which would cause an interruption of airflow. This is known as an apnea event if the interruption of airflow lasts longer than 5 seconds. A normal adult human would have less than 5 apnea events an hour. (In other words, if you have less than 4 events an hour, you don't have Sleep Apnea) Other than the throat collapsing, it's possible that your brain simply forgets to breath. That's called central sleep apnea, as opposed to obstructive sleep apnea.

The problem with being Asian is that Asians have smaller throats and smaller jaws. This leads to a higher probability that the muscles relaxing would cause a complete interruption of airflow. One doctor I spoke with told me that if you're Asian, it's not a question as to whether you'll have sleep apnea, it's a question as to when you'll get it. Women tend to have milder symptoms than men, and often don't develop serious symptoms until their 40s.

How do you know whether you're at risk? The big warning sign for me was my snoring. Snoring is basically your body pushing air through your throat in order to get air, vibrating the soft tissues and therefore making noise. My snoring was so loud that friends the next building over could hear my snoring when we were at Lucia. Otherwise, I was completely asymptomatic. Other people who've spoken to me about sleep apnea said they suffered the following symptoms:

• Hazy and dazy in the morning.
  
• Difficult to wake up or get up.
  
• Lack of energy, lethargic, difficult to stay alert.
  
• Grumpiness, especially in the morning.
  
• Unusually rapid aging
  

Note that I had none of those symptoms when I was diagnosed, something my doctor said was common among Asians, especially fit ones. That's why I was not diagnosed for so long. It took a full on sleep study to discover that I really had 50-60 apneas an hour. (By the way, if your spouse is a snorer, you're should track these symptoms) The standard therapy for obstructive sleep apnea is CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure). Essentially, you wear a mask that pumps air into your throat to keep it open all night. Modern machines have algorithms that back off the pressure when you breath out so you don't feel like you've been pumped up like a balloon in the morning. You might also opt for surgery, but it's not for the faint of heart: they essentially break your jaw, move it, and stitch it back together, leaving you sucking food through a straw for a bit. I checked with one of the renowned surgeons in the area and he looked at my chart and said, "You respond really well to CPAP, you should try it before considering surgery." Now, if I had been symptomatic before, I'd have been super motivated to use CPAP. The overweight, obese, symptomatic people I've spoken to love their CPAP from day one, because for them, it feels like the fog in their mind was cleared away. For me, it actually seemed to make my sleep worse, and I woke up often with blisters on my nose where the mask chafed against my face, so I ignored it for almost a year. My doctor, however, got very concerned and called in the help of a sleep psychologist, who persuaded me to be more active about using CPAP therapy like this:

"Sleep apnea is like boxing. If you take a couple of hits in the face, it's no big deal. You'll recover and won't even notice. However, if you keep taking hits every day, it's all going to add up and you'll become slurry in speech and be unable to think well. Think about Mohammad Ali when he got old. In addition, it increases your risk of stroke, heart disease, etc."

That struck home, because my father had a stroke for no apparent reason in his early 50s. Ok, after that I became very motivated to use my machine. My sleep psychologist also helped a bit with finding the proper mask. Unfortunately, all the sleep studies seem to be done on Caucasians, so there're very few masks that will properly fit an Asian face, and custom masks just aren't done. And yes, I use the machine even when cycle touring, because I actually do spend a significant amount of my life doing this (or did before I had a baby). Now, if you have kids and you were diagnosed with sleep apnea, then you might be able to correct your kids' facial structure as they are growing so they don't end up with sleep apnea. It turns out that you need to start fairly young (at 1.5 years when you first take them to see a dentist is when you have to start thinking about it). Apparently it's like having braces, but for your jaw instead of just your teeth. The process can increase the airway area so collapse doesn't completely stop airflow. Which means that if you suspect you have apnea and have kids (or plan on having them), you really want to get yourself checked out. So that's as much as I know about sleep apnea. If you want to know more, let me know and I'll try to answer questions. And by the way, sleep apnea is one of those pre-existing conditions that cause you not to be able to get health insurance in California. Since about 10% of middle aged men have sleep apnea, that's a lot of people who would need Obamacare or some sort of group health plan in order to be covered.

PSA: United is now a suitable airline for flying with bicycles

I used to fly United Airlines with my bike all the time. But in 2008, United and Lufthansa jointly raised bike carriage fees to $250 each way. What that meant for me was that I stopped flying United on my bike tours. I wrote a letter in 2009 to United that it cost them 4 $1000+ plane tickets to Japan to continue this policy, but to no avail.

Well, this year, United merged with Continental airlines, which means that they've revised their bike carriage policy to be fairer to cyclists. Bikes now count as one piece of baggage as long as they fit in under 50 pounds and under the linear inches rule.

I've flown United often with bicycles, and they were not the best, but far from the worst. They frequently also had the lowest fare, so I'm glad to have them back in the "good for bicyclist" column on the airline.

These frequent changes in baggage policy is one reason why Independent Cycle Touring doesn't list specific airlines that are bike friendly or not. That information properly belongs to the internet and my blog.

Kudos to Arturo Crespo for telling me about the United merger and the impact thereof.

Fitness: Optimal Experience

A few years ago, a friend of mine told me that she was really really out of shape. "I'm so out of shape that I get out of breath just going up one flight of stairs." Like many Asians in their mid-twenties, this person was skinny, looked great, and obviously didn't have any trouble partying all night. So I put it out of mind. After all, I remember being too busy in college holding down two jobs while carrying a full time class load to bother with exercise.

I recently thought about this, because perhaps for the first time in years, I haven't recently been in optimal condition. Now, I'm well past my physical peak, where in 2005, I did 2 back to back 100 mile days in Italy, and then went on to do 3 more strenuous days of cycling in the Swiss Alps. I think at least once in your life every person should experience at least one period of peak conditioning, just to understand how it feels.

It feels like being Superman. During that period, I could wake up and ride 100 miles or 10000' of climbing, eat like a king, sleep like a log, and wake up the next morning ready to do it all over again. Every piece of your body works well, and I don't recall being even a little bit sick. The only possible problem was that I'd occasionally feel a little cold because I had too little body fat. And One of my tour companions would complain, because I had a pace that was far faster from all the conditioning that I did. Of course, I was suffering from low bone density during that period, so I was even faster since even my bones weren't contributing as much to my body weight. I felt alert all the time, waking up in a great mood and raring to go. My mind was sharp and I never missed details, such as when navigating across Italy with a paper map in the rain sans GPS. The effect of aerobic exercise on your brain is well documented --- John Medina spends an entire chapter of Brain Rules on its effectiveness.

Since then, while I've lost quite a bit of fitness, I've actually gotten healthier. I've been forced to work out in the gym, and add calcium to my diet. The interesting bit is that the shoulder muscle cramps I used to get in my mid-twenties (when I wasn't nearly as fit) have practically disappeared.

I recently read The Longevity Project, where the authors pointed out that to gain an optimal lifespan, you quickly hit diminishing returns when exercising, so the best use of your time is to be a couch potato and exercise 20 minutes 3 days a week. I think they're ignoring the quality of life difference when you're fit, not prone to aches and pains, and deal with the challenges of the day without pain. If you're Asian, it's more important than you think to be fit, because Asians have a genetic disposition to have Sleep Apnea. My sleep apnea went undiagnosed for years because my circulatory system kept my blood O2 level well above 98% even as my apnea was triggered 50-60 times an hour! Without it, I would have lost a lot of brain cells to my apnea.

I'll end with this quote:
“If exercise could be packaged in pill form, it would immediately become the number one anti-aging medicine, as well as the world’s most prescribed pill.”

-Dr. Robert Butler, International Longevity Center at Manhattan’s Mt. Sinai Hospital

Review: Career Warfare

I was lamenting to someone about the lack of a book on how to be a good office politician for engineers. That friend said, "There is one. It's called Career Warfare." With that, I was off to the library to pick up the book.

I'm glad I read the book, though I don't think it's actually very usable for engineers. It's clear to me that the kind of people who make CEO might be born, not made. For instance, D'Alessandro has this story from when he was 6 years old:

One winter day, Tony decided to revolt against my tyranny. He said, "I don't want to play with you any more. I'm going to play over here." And in the revolt, he cleaved off four kids into his own little gang.
I was very upset about these defections. But within a few days, Tony's gang wanted back into my gang. They said it wasn't any fun playing with Tony because there weren't enough kids.
Did I welcome them back? Absolutely not. They were out of the gang for the rest of the school year. I was 6 years old, but I froze them out without mercy. I already knew that banishment or death was the only reasonable punishment for traitors.

Clearly, A'Alessandro did not need a mentor to teach him about office politics: he arrived at the office to do battle, and most engineers having to deal with as consummate a politician as he is would probably fail.

Nevertheless, the book can benefit many engineers. The section on what managers want from you and what to expect from your managers in a quid pro quo is priceless. For instance, what does loyalty mean between manager and employee? What kind of bosses should you avoid working for? When should you be a whistle blower?

The book's filled with fantastic anecdotes, and worth reading just for those alone. I therefore recommend this book. Just don't expect that you'll be capable of applying those stories with the same amount of ruthlessness to your job.

Reread: Brain Rules for Baby

It probably wouldn't surprise you if I told you that I read 90% of all the books I review for this book out of the library. Most books aren't worth reading more than once, and more importantly, if I bought every book I read, I'd be spending a ton of money. However, Brain Rules for Baby is an exception. I read this book last year as the first parenting book, and since then I've read a lot of parenting books, most of which aren't reviewed simply because I could not bring myself to finish them! Parenting books are in general badly written, have little or no scientific backing, and never say something in 5 words when 5,000 words would do. I have no idea why they're so badly written, but there you go. When I saw that the Kindle edition of the book was now $8.10, I remembered the book so fondly I went and bought it for my Kindle.

In short, if you are a busy parent to be or a parent of a kid zero to five, Brain Rules for Baby is the only parenting book that's worth your time! Heck, if you're considering being a parent, do yourself a favor and read this book so you'll know what to expect.

On the second re-read, I nodded and laughed at the stuff he was telling me that would happen that indeed happened. Yes, marriages get strained with the introduction of the little guy. Yes, expect your wife to throw up during the first trimester. Expect sleep deprivation. Human babies were never meant to be brought up by just one couple, so expect to get help and take as much of it as you can. Expect to be charmed by the little one's first smile (Medina calls it the "Megawatt smile.") Expect to have to work extra hard to overcome the social isolation that could set in inevitably if you don't pay attention. I'm very grateful that at least for us, we've been very lucky and have the opportunity to eliminate many of the usual stressors associated with having a child, but I shudder to think what the typical American family goes through.

In re-reading this book, I keep finding little nuggets of information. For instance, kids learn to lie at 3, and they tell a lie every 90 minutes by the time they're 4. I enjoy reading the segments about empathy and how to teach kids to read emotions. (I'm an incredibly un-empathetic person, so this is going to take serious work)

In any case, there are many parents I believe who should read this book, and every parent-to-be or parent-wanna-be should read this book. As usual, the people who most need to read this book won't, but hey, there's nothing YOU can do about that. Heck, even if you never want to be a parent you should read this book. It's just that good. Highly recommended I really should have named it the book of the year last year.

Review: The Best American Science Writing 2008

I checked out The Best American Science Writing 2008 from the library to see how science stories aged, after thoroughly enjoying the 2011 edition.

The prognosis is not good. I'm not sure how much of it is that Sylvia Nasar has poor taste in science stories, and how much of it is that 4 years is a lot of time in science. For one thing, the collection has several themes, the first of which is about doctors getting paid by big Pharma to push drugs. Maybe one article on this theme should make the cut, but 4?! That's ridiculous.

Another theme was genetic engineering and genes. One of them was about 23 and Me, which was young and new back when it came out. But now it feels like old hat. Though one reminder about how slowly technology actually progresses is that we still don't have $1,000 complete genome sequencing as a service.

Other stories seem more like human interest stories than true science stories, and I got bored enough to skip them. All in all, it truly could be that I lucked out and bought the best edition of the series when it was on sale. The 2008 one was a dud.

ASA Catamaran Certification

I signed up for the TradeWinds Catamaran sailing class last month. I had thought about learning how to sail Catamarans for a good long time, but the impetus to do so finally came when I finally organized a second BVI trip (upcoming), and could only find Catamarans to charter.

Normally, the class would take 2 days and be run for 4 certification candidates. However, this time, nobody signed up. Normally, Tradewinds would just cancel the class and ask students to come for the next month, but given that my BVI trip was upcoming at the end of the month, Matt at Tradewinds accomodated my need for certification by concentrating the 2-day class into a 1-day intensive training session. Since my crew needed training as well, Matt was happy to let Larry, Cindy, and Arturo tag along for the training so they too could learn the joy of sailing a Catamaran.

Catamarans sail, dock, and undock very differently from monohulls. In many circumstances, "different" usually means "worse", but I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that in this case, "different" means "better." Docking and undocking, for instance, is made a lot easier by having twin engines and twin propellers that essentially allow the boat to turn on a dime. The fact that the vessels are so long and wide means that you aren't likely to be able to dock in a slip, but because of the nature of the twin screws, docking and undocking become essentially a skipper/helms-driven affair, with the crew helping by essentially releasing or setting up lines as appropriate. There's no dashing about or coming off the beam of the boat to set lines forward and aft while the boat is in motion. As skipper, you have to nail the stern of the boat so crew can step off, but once that's done you can pivot the boat one way or another to get the boat aligned with the dock. If this sounds more demanding on the skipper's ability to stay calm and assess the wind and current correctly, you're right. But in many ways, it's also liberating as you no longer have to worry about crew jumping and landing wrong, slipping into the water, or other such antics. We spent plenty of time practicing in order to get this nailed down.

Once the boat is underway, sailing a Catamaran almost doesn't feel like "real" sailing, as you're missing the heeling sensation you get on a monhull. This is great: there's less scrambling, more relaxation, and appreciation of the views, and the prospect of taking a family with children out on the water suddenly seems doable. In particular, Dan Siefers' catamaran, "Caprice" has a self-setting jib, which meant that the crew could essentially watch as the skipper says, "Ready about", and "Hard a' Lee". That took a bit of getting used to. Jibing is surprisingly similar to a monohull.

And then there's the speed. We effortlessly sailed past monohulls carrying big sails without really even trying (I was being distracted trying to learn the material for the written exam).

Finally, when we got to the docks, I realized something: I wasn't fatigued! I had originally intended to spend the night at Tradewinds and then challenging the written test the next day, but decided that I had enough brain power left to challenge the written test right away, so I did that and emerged a certified 114 Catamaran sailor by the end of the day.

I would like to give a shout-out thanks to my crew, Larry, Cindy, and Arturo. Furthermore, Matt's willingness to help accomodate my need to get a catamaran certification by my trip deadline is commendable, and Dan was an excellent and patient instructor. Recommended. I should have gotten myself catamaran certified ages ago. (One thing I did learn today was that in the Mediterranean, the charter companies require that 2 members of the party have sailing certificates, not just one --- so if you've been thinking you could piggy back on my certification at some point, I'm afraid you're going to have to get one yourself as well or a Greek sail would be out of the question)

Review: Logitech C270 Webcam

We recently had to do a few video calls with people we were planning to exchange homes with. Rather than make do with the crappy 1.3MP camera that came on the Lenovo X201, I picked up a Logitech C270 at a Logitech scratch and dent sale.

I've had poor experiences with some Logitech webcams in the past, mainly from balky software that never seemed to install correctly. I was relieved to see that most of this has been resolved: the camera sits happily on top of the monitor, plugs into a USB port, and the logitech drivers seem to integrate nicely with Google chat and Skype.

The picture quality is great! By contrast, I could always tell when I was skyping with somebody who was only on an iPhone, or some other crappy laptop built-in webcam. The face follow feature seems to work, but I mostly turn it off because usually when we're skyping with another family, it's a multi-face affair. Perhaps if I was a Google Hangouts addict I would turn on the face follow feature.

Given the low price and the great picture quality, I'm pleased with it and can recommend it. Even voice seems to work well despite how far the camera is from my face when I talk.

Review: The Longevity Project

The Longevity Project is a statistical study of the so-called "Termites", about 1500 high-potential Californians chosen by Professor Terman to follow over their lifetimes. The authors draw conclusions based on personality and life-events versus longevity.

Based on the data, they conclude several items of interest:

• Conscientious people live the longest. A lot of it is because conscientious types actually follow doctors' orders and take their pills when they're supposed to and so on.
  
• Social types actually don't live longer, because the benefits of having a stronger social network is offset by picking up bad habits like smoking and drinking. That means engineers and scientists actually live longer than the sales types.
  
• Mild worriers actually live longer than the happy types, because they'll be proactive about health problems rather than ignoring them.
  
• Starting school early is predictive of a shorter life, while skipping grades has no effect on longevity. They speculate that the loss of unstructured play time is really harmful.
  
• Parental divorce takes 5 years off your life. In fact, it's better that one of your parents died than that they got a divorce. The exception is that life at home is so bad that all the damage has already been done.
  
• Maintaining or increasing your activity levels through midlife is predictive of a longer life. The authors note that if a you spent 2 years over your life time exercising and gain 2 years of longevity, you only broke even from all the exercise. So the best deal is if you mostly became a couch potato and only exercised just enough to get maximum benefits.
  
• Being married gave you the longest life, but only if you didn't get a divorce. Divorce is so traumatic that it reduces your life span. Even getting remarried later doesn't help as much. For women, it's better to stay single than to get a divorce and then remarry.
  
• Being a top dog and high achiever causes you to live longer.
  
• Religion makes you live longer, but mostly because of the social connections and having an active social life, rather than the prayer and meditation.
  

All in all, this is pretty impressive. Unfortunately, the authors fail to point out many of the obvious flaws in the study:

1. The study pretty much consists of middle class, white Californians. That homogeneous sample means that if you're Asian, Black, or other ethnicity, the results might or might not apply.
   
2. The study shows correlation. The authors do a great job of trying to tease out the underlying cause, and in some cases, they're quite believable, for instance, with respect to religion. For other parts of the study, correlation does not mean causation and you'd have a really tough time figuring things out.
   
3. The study was a longitudinal study covering many decades. However, during that time, technology and social norms evolved. It could very well be that conclusions based on people who were born at the beginning of the 20th century would not apply to people who are born now, or who were born in the middle of the 20th century. For instance, do the conclusions about marriage apply to gay marriage? Are no-fault divorces as devastating to the spouses? This study couldn't answer such questions.
   
4. Is 1500 people enough of a sample to truly draw such conclusions? The authors don't actually go into sufficient technical detail about their statistical methods to make me feel comfortable with their conclusions.
   

I'm happy to recommend this book as food for thought, but take their conclusions with several tablespoons of salt: I'm fairly sure they're not as cut and dried as the authors claim they are.

Review: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

While I don't usually pick up anthologies, when the Kindle had The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 as a gold box deal for $1.99, I figured I'd be willing to take the risk.

I started the book and was blown away by how good it is. If you're a fan of science writing for the lay man, you should really stop reading and buy it now, even at the full price at $7.99.

The big draws to this book are the big names like Atul Gawande, Stephen Hawking and Oliver Sacks. But in my reading of all the essays there's no a single dud in the entire book. Gawande's Letting Go is easily worth the price of admission all by itself, and if it encourages you to have a discussion with your family about what should go into the Advanced Health Directive, you'll be glad you read the book/article.

Other articles cover the nature of invasive species into the Americas (Asian Carp is a huge problem, believe it or not). There's one on fermentation and the new food movement. Others cover brain imagery, cancer treatments, and the existence of organic molecules in the universe. There's one about the shooting of songbirds in Europe. There's of course, the famous article about Gay Albatrosses. The last article will probably make you never want to visit SeaWorld again.

Every article was entertaining, and none of them was a waste of time. I felt like I learned something from every article. This could easily be one of the best books I've read this year. While you could plausibly hunt down every article and read it for free on the internet, many of them are long form and benefit from reading on the Kindle or in paperback format rather than on the web.

Highly Recommended. Buy it now!

Review: The City & The City

Unlike the other two China Mieville novels reviewed here, Perdido Street Station and The Scar, The City and The City is not set in the world of Bas-Lag. Instead, it's set in a contemporary world, somewhere in Europe. The story is about Inspector Borlu, who's assigned to investigate the murder of a young woman found in a park.

While ostensibly a detective novel, the novel is really about two cities, named Beszel and Ul Quoma. What's special about the cities are that they're super-imposed upon each other. Now, coming from his previous novels, I would expect there to be some fantastical explanation behind the super-imposition, but instead, half the mystery is figuring out the details of the super-imposition and how the two cities work, as well as the forces behind Breach, a power that operates to stop people from taking advantage of the super-imposition.

OK, so far so weird, which is good: Mieville is great at coming up with weird situations and then explaining all the details behind them. He works through all the implications of his own rules, involving the special training the cities have to give to visiting tourists so they do not accidentally Breach.

But then, the mystery gets into earnest and we get drawn behind the scenes to what's going on, and everything breaks down. Why? First of all, there's no reveal behind the nature of the super-imposition. We don't find out the history behind the two cities and their special relationship, nor do we ever see how it came to be. Furthermore, when the reveal shows up behind the nature of Breach and its enforcement, I at least, don't see how this could actually be a stable set up. It's quite clear to me that one city would have dominated the other through the course of human history, and we would have just one city and no Breach at the end. Even the resolution of the mystery makes no sense: the gains as depicted by the plot in the milieu could not possibly provide motivation for the characters involved!

If this was a first novel by an unknown author I might have been willing to brush all these problems away and say: "Great effort. Look for more stuff by him." But this is Mieville, and I feel cheated, as though he worked through all the mechanical parts of his plot device and setting, but didn't think through the implications of how historical forces would have acted to demolish this extremely unstable setup. While you might argue that "it's fantasy", I feel that the rigorous nature of the rules he's imposed on the setting as well as the nature of a mystery novel dictates that such logical inconsistencies not be overlooked.

I don't see how I could recommend this novel to anyone other than a die-hard Mieville fan, and of course, if you're one, you would have read it already.