Review: The Intelligent Brain

I'm of two minds about Great Courses' The Intelligent Brain.On the one hand, the first 10 lectures of this 18 part series is great, giving me a view and insight into intelligence research which I'd not had exposure to before. For instance, I'd always thought of IQ testing as being like the SATs: it's effectively a test of how good you are at taking IQ tests. What Professor Haier provided is insight into how an IQ test is composed, and what it actually means.

Effectively, an IQ test is a battery of tests that seeks to define the boundary of various mental abilities. Each subsection of tests seeks to test one facet, but all subsets have a positive correlation to what researchers call g, which is general intelligence. This highlights several things:

• Since it's impossible to test for g directly, we can only glimpse at it via factor analysis.
• IQ score aren't an absolute, but are only relative to the rest of the population. An IQ score doesn't quantify anything.
• IQ scores are fairly stable in adult life.
• When it comes to IQ, you really find out that life isn't fair. People with higher IQ are healthier, have better jobs, make more money, are happier, and live longer.
• The Multiple Intelligences stuff has no empirical evidence to support it. And that doesn't bother Howard Gardner!
• IQ has a highly heritable component. In fact, the research studies in existence indicate that identical twins have IQs that converge over time, rather than diverging as you might expect!
• Different brains work differently, and what gives one person high IQ could be a completely different subset of abilities that work differently from another individual who has similarly high IQ. Men and women, for instance, demonstrate different brain areas that are correlated with high IQ, so a man and a woman with the same IQ score still could have brains that work differently.

This is all great stuff, and the lectures on Race and Gender differences are full of data and are potentially very controversial, but Professor Haier does a great job of just stating the facts, and then separating that from his personal opinion. The problem is, the amount of research is very very small, since nobody wants to risk doing research on such controversial topics, and there's a severe lack of funding on intelligence research. (Though apparently China has a huge team dedicated to doing intelligence research at the genetics level, so that might change once there's an arms race)

The lack of funding shows in particular with some of the studies cited: in many cases, the sample size is pathetically small (33-66 people is very very subject to poor sample bias). In one case, he cites a study he did on video games that apparently didn't even have a control group! Fortunately, the results I listed above a drawn from wide-ranging IQ test and studies that have huge samples and population (in one case the entire country of Ireland!), which means that those results are pretty reliable.

As such, I can recommend the series, especially the first 12 lectures or so. And it's hardly Professor Haier's fault that the state of the field is abysmal. Perhaps we can hope for an IQ arms race that will lead to more funding and progress in this field.  Though unfortunately watching the presidential primaries this year makes me fear that we're descending into Idiocracy instead.

Review: Dark Intelligence

Dark Intelligence is Neal Asher's new Polity novel, set after the Polity/Prador wars of the "Gridlinked" novels. True to form, it's not really science fiction, but really an action-thriller, with lots of big explosions, planet-busting weapons, and planetary AIs.

One of the big problems with post-singularity work is that stories that are interesting to people fundamentally have to be about people, and a post-singularity AI isn't human enough to be either comprehensible or easy to identify with. The conceit then, is that either humans are AI pets, deployed only as a front to other species as an interface (as in the Iain Banks' Culture novels) or that for some unfathomable reasons, human type brains can occasionally be so smart and interesting that they are of value to an AI.

Dark Intelligence starts with the latter premise, with Thorvald Spear awakening after the war, and immediately deciding that he needs to go after a rogue AI that had committed all sorts of atrocities during the war. Of course, that justifies him in performing all sorts of atrocities as well, and we learn that Spear isn't just any old unreliable narrator, but that he himself might be some form of construct.

With this plot, we get a romp through the Polity/Prador neutral zone, an exploration of the crab people, and some drone intelligences, but mostly a lot of exposition and high action sequences. It's fun, but one is left thinking: "Did you need a novel to do all this? It could easily have been a short story." The characters are simple and not really developed, though the plot is. And of course, the rogue AI that's at the core of the story only gets viewed from external sources, so we get a very incomplete picture.

The cover of the novel bills itself as the first part of a trilogy, but I'm not sure I'll bother continuing. Read it only if you've enjoyed past Asher novels.

Review: Scientific Secrets for Raising Kids Who Thrive

Invariably, whenever I read or review a book on parenting, the comparison is to John Medina's Brain Rules for Baby, and the comparison highlights how bad parenting literature usually is. Scientific Secrets for Raising Kids Who Thrive is the only exception to this I've encountered for years, and I think it's a must-audit.

Professor Vishton is a faculty member at the College of William and Mary, and not only is he a great lecturer, his presentation is outstanding. The scientific approach part of the title is not a joke: for every assertion he makes, not only does he tell you the results, he provides the details behind the experiments, the methods scientists used to distinguish correlation from causation, and detailed analysis of "why" the assertion is true.

All this would be worthless if the results weren't actionable or interesting, but they are. Here's a sampling of various issues I've not encountered in other parenting resources:

• The Montessori method has actually been shown to be more effective at teaching math, language, and executive function (and hence social skills) than traditional methods. The approach can be scaled up to older kids and not just pre-school. The control in this case was a school in a school district in Milwaukee where kids had to win a lottery to enter the school. This random selection process allowed researchers to isolate the study to the teaching method.
• The primary factor identifying success in Math is whether kids understand fractions by age 10. This is a strong result, indicating that if your child doesn't understand fractions by then you need to take aggressive remedial approaches.
• On a related point Math is one of the few skills where an early advantage sustains itself: in other words, a child who's advanced in math at kindergarten keeps that advantage over time, whereas a child who walks or runs early doesn't necessarily sustain that advantage over time.
• The more parents help with a child's homework, the less successful the child does in tests in school. A parent's role should be limited to providing a space to study, keeping distractions to a minimum, and letting the child figure things out by himself.
• Learning is extremely contextual, so much so that providing different study areas actually helps. One reason why homework is useful is that they encourage students to study in a different location than the school.
• 3 sessions of 20 minutes of study is more effective than 1 60 minute session. If you can't do 3 separate periods of 20 minutes, rotate subjects at 20 minute intervals.
• Unstructured play time is important, and is correlated with increased creativity and social skills. The benefit of this is lost if the parent even provides a suggestion as to what to do, so it's important to let the child direct this play time, even at the cost of letting him be bored for a time.
• If you want kids to be pro-social, it's important to avoid using incentives to encourage pro-social behavior. Using extrinsic incentives undermines the child's natural instinct to be helpful for its own sake, and ends up backfiring.

Unlike any other parenting book (even Medina's), Vishton covers the effects of a second language, why it was originally thought that bilingualism was a bad thing, and why the recent shift in understanding. He also addresses Amy Chua's Tiger Parenting approach, and explains why the authoritative approach is better than the authoritarian approach, and the costs of the Tiger parenting approach on the child. (This lecture, along with the above notes on unstructured play time, helped me understand why I encountered so many high achieving students who had trouble making simple decisions, but in keeping with this review, that's just my personal observation/anecdote, and hence unscientific)

Needless to say, this audio book from The Great Courses wins my highly recommended rating. If you can't be bothered with any other parenting resource, listen to this audio book (there's also a video version, but it's unnecessary, though nice to have for the section on Montessori math). I say this despite being an avid reader and therefore prejudiced against acquiring information via any other method. This one is just too good to pass up.

Review: The Rosie Effect

The Rosie Project was a delightful novel, so much so that I immediately placed a hold on the sequel, The Rosie Effect at the library. The reviews for the second novel weren't nearly as great as the reviews for the original, and some even told me to avoid reading it as it was dreary.

This is inevitable, as the first novel ended with a marriage, and in all stories, that's always attached with a "and they lived happily ever after." That's a fantasy, of course, as in real life, as Yishan Wong notes that even successful marriages involve a lot of conflicts.

Since The Rosie Effect is about post-marriage and a baby, it's reflective of these conflicts, though of course from the point of view of Don Tillman. In characteristic fashion, Tillman explores and investigates the idea of having a baby, and this gets him into hot water in more ways than one. Since the novel is written from his point of view, he's bewildered by society's (and his wife's) negative reactions to his attempts to explore this space, and muddles through as best as he can.

There are scenes that look like they were written to be in a sitcom, with a setup and then an unexpected delivery. They're funny, and of course in the end we realize that the man with Asperger's is a far better person than most of the normals in the novel.

The minuses is that to get these situations to happen, lots of setup is required and we get some very unlikely events as a result.

This is not as good a read as the original, but it's not unreadable, and had enough fun moments to justify my continued reading to the end of the book. While I hesitate to attach a "recommended" tag to this novel, it's nevertheless not as bad as some of the reviews would have you believe. Of course, whether a merely "OK" novel is worth your time is a different story.

Review: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

One chapter in Peopleware that always resonates in my mind is the chapter on "Spanish Theory Management":

Some years ago I was swapping war stories with the manager of a large project in southern California. He began to relate the effect that his project and its crazy hours had had on his staff. There were two divorces that he could trace directly to the overtime his people were putting in, and one of his worker's kids had gotten into some kind of trouble with drugs, probably because his father had been too busy for parenting during the past years. Finally, there had been the nervous breakdown of the test team leader. As he continued through these horrors, I began to realize that in his own strange way, the man was bragging. You might suspect that with another divorce or two and a suicide, the project would have been a complete success, at least in his eyes.

Elon Musk is a biography of the man, and if you weren't aware of the era that both books were written in, you might well suspect that Elon Musk was the manager Tom DeMarco was referring to. Consider this: in this book alone, he scolded an employee for attending the birth of his child instead of attending a work event. He repeatedly set impossible schedules, and then push employees past the breaking point and then discards them:

“Elon’s worst trait by far, in my opinion, is a complete lack of loyalty or human connection,” said one former employee. “Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter without a second thought. Maybe it was calculated to keep the rest of the workforce on their toes and scared; maybe he was just able to detach from human connection to a remarkable degree. What was clear is that people who worked for him were like ammunition: used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded.”  (Loc. 4911-15)

At one point, he even fires his administrator who'd been with him for more than 10 years:

Brown often felt like an extension of Musk—the one being who crossed over into all of his worlds. For more than a decade, she gave up her life for Musk, traipsing back and forth between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley every week, while working late into the night and on weekends. Brown went to Musk and asked that she be compensated on par with SpaceX’s top executives, since she was handling so much of Musk’s scheduling across two companies, doing public relations work and often making business decisions. Musk replied that Brown should take a couple of weeks off, and he would take on her duties and gauge how hard they were. When Brown returned, Musk let her know that he didn’t need her anymore, and he asked Shotwell’s assistant to begin scheduling his meetings. Brown, still loyal and hurt, didn’t want to discuss any of this with me. Musk said that she had become too comfortable speaking on his behalf and that, frankly, she needed a life. (Loc 4926-32)

There's also a section where Jeff Bezos poaches one of SpaceX's employees by doubling his salary. Characteristically, Musk, rather than consider whether he underpaid that employee, thinks that Bezos and the employee betrayed him.

Keep in mind that I'm sympathetic to Elon Musk's goals and background. Not only was Musk a huge science nerd and programmer, he also played D&D in his youth, and of course, if electric cars replace the internal combustion engine, the world would be a much better place. I also enjoyed the section on Musk bringing startup-style mentality to the aerospace, which apparently needs a huge kick in the pants and massive cost-cutting.

What's unfortunate about this book is that Ashlee Vance treats Musk's approach to engineering, scheduling, and design as being par for the course: that abusing employees, creating impossible schedules through optimistic CEO-level views on how long something ought to take was the only way for Elon Musk to achieve his goals and get his results.

Imagine an alternate world in which Musk was a better leader: it could be that instead of having a large number of rocket failures and massive amounts of drama, his rockets could have had fewer test cycles, and finished in approximately the same amount of time. Of course, maybe launching something without drama and having it work properly the first time wouldn't merit a book.

In any case, it's worth reading the book, as it does provide a behind the scenes look at Tesla and SpaceX that's entertaining and interesting. But you do have to read between the lines to see a few interesting underlying principles:

• Certain non-tech related fields like Space/Aerospace and Cars are ripe for disruption by Silicon Valley startups. In particular, fields that have fossilized and gotten used to fat margins and inefficiency workflows are vulnerable to attacks from Silicon Valley.
• Ironically, part of this attack is due to the ease of exploitation of the underlying workforce: nobody who's actually a good mechanical or aerospace engineer enjoys working under the bureaucracy of the entrenched businesses. You can therefore lure such people to work for you at below market pay and work them hard for an extended period because you offer effectively more responsibility and freedom of action than the bureaucracy. When those people burn out, replace them with more fresh graduates. This is known as the EA model of HR management.
• If you succeed, you'll get lauded in the business press, and then have books written about you.

This is obviously excessively cynical, and as noted above, I do agree with Elon Musk's goals, and think that in the coming battle between Silicon Valley and Detroit, there's no question Detroit is going to lose. But it's still sad to see obnoxious business practices praised and lauded as though there aren't better alternatives.

Nevertheless, read the book, and see if you agree with me. Recommended.

Review: Nalgene ATB Bottle

The last couple of months of mountain biking has been great. I've gone from being terrified to being able to do 2-3 foot drops and jumps. My gear, however, has gotten dirtier and dirtier: despite the "drought", it's been a relatively wet California winter, and I've done enough stream crossings and puddle crossings to soak my shoes right through multiple times.

As previously mentioned, the usual mountain biking solution of using a hydration pack just doesn't work for me at all. I hate having anything on my back for a bike ride, and philosophically, I've always thought that it's crazy to carry something on your body when it can be carried on the bike.

The Nalgene ATB bottle comes with a cap that closes over the drinking nozzle. You'll probably be surprised to find out that I've done extensive searches but this is the only water bottle that seems designed to keep your drinking nozzle free from dirt, mud, and horse poop. None of the other bottles that are similarly protected will fit into a standard water bottle cage.

What's more important, the cap is easily flipped open and drunk from while riding, and then closed back up. I was using that feature one day when I pushed the cap in the wrong direction, and pop, off went the cap and it disappeared from the trail without a trace!

I can't complain about Nalgene's customer support though! I sent them an e-mail, and a new cap is now on its way. While I think that some sort of retaining cord should be designed into this bottle, the fact that it's the only one available that fits my need means pretty much that I'll keep using it, and be more careful about the cap next time.

Recommended!

Review: The Time of Contempt

As mentioned in yesterday's review of The Witcher 3, the video game in this case is much better than the source material. I picked up The Time of Contempt in order to see if the second novel (as opposed to the first two books, which were mostly short stories) was any better, but unfortunately the answer is no.

Andrej Sapkowski loves run on sentences. Whether this is an artifact of Polish and a resultant translation I do not know. What's wacko about the book is that Sapkowski chooses to emphasizes relatively unimportant scene. A scene about Dandelion crossing a river could take 3 pages long with no effect whatsoever on the plot. Alternatively, a scene between Geralt and Yennefer would be reported at once remove, from the perspective of Dandelion and Ciri spying on them from a place where they couldn't even hear the conversation. It all makes for a very disjointed approach, and a story where payoffs are very few.

I'd recommend skipping the books past the first two, and I won't bother reading any further books in the series.

Review: Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (PS4)

In recent years, I'd pretty much given up on CRPGs as a genre. They pose multiple problems from my point of view:

• The typical CRPG "grinding" mechanic is onerous and leads frequently to player abuse. It's one thing for a game to boast 50 hours of game play or whatever leads to good advertising copy, but if it's 50 hours of "rinse & repeat", I consider that player abuse. (I consider A Song of Ice and Fire "reader abuse" for similar reasons)
• The length of time it takes to complete a CRPG is excessive. Now, if you're 9 years old and only have money for 1-2 games a year, that's a feature. But if you're a busy parent, or have hobbies other than sitting down in front of a computer or console, CRPGs frequently over-stay their welcome. And if you end up rushing through the story because you just want to be done, then frequently those CRPGs don't have much more than the 15 hours of real game play.
• The amount of work required to master the mechanics and min-max your character frequently takes you out of immersion from the game world, and you find yourself doing quests to level up. Alternatively, if the game scales the challenges to your level, you find yourself running to stand still, and discover that no matter how powerful you get you're never going to be high enough level that the final challenge is doable if you don't have the reflexes of the above-mentioned 9 year old.

I say this despite being (as far as I know) still the record holder for the longest running D&D game at Google. In a moment of weakness, however, I found a copy of Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for sale over the holidays and picked it up. One of the main reasons for playing games mostly on the console is that if you're unsatisfied or dislike them, you can easily re-sell them, and if you're good at shopping for sales, you might even discover that you can buy games, play them, and then sell them used for more than the price you paid!

Little did I know that once I started the game it would push all other games on the PS4 aside, and become the only game I wanted to play for the entire period of the main story. The game deals with the issues I listed above through a number of techniques:

• The game's an action RPG. What this means is that while the game mechanics are there, you almost never have to min-max your character: how you manuever and fight during the action sequences also has a dramatic effect on your character's effectiveness. It also helps that the game doesn't let you create characters from scratch: you pretty have to play Geralt of Rivia, and you get to decide which of his abilities to emphasize, but there's no excessive freedom. I played through the first act of the game in pretty sub-optimal configuration, and only got serious about maxing out capabilities in the second act. This meant that my early game was challenging: there were more than a few fights where I had to load and reload the game after dying in order to get past an encounter. Those made me wish I'd bought the game on my PC, where an SSD would have rendered loading times moot or irrelevant, but the reality was that my PC is 7 years old and I probably wouldn't be getting more than 20fps on the PC on medium settings (which would look horrid at 1440p) anyway.
• There's no grind. Every quest in the early game is meaningful, and even when the game throws you 3-4 main story quests at you, and you tackle them in a random order, they come together and weave tightly into a narrative which converges to your goal. This is beautiful story-telling with great game play at work. In fact, the quality of the stories and side quests (none of which are the usual "fetch an item for me" quests which litter other CRPGs) so enthralled me that I did every secondary quest I could get my hands on during the first part of the game, only abandoning that in the city of Novigrad when I'd "over-levelled" to the point where certain side quests would net me very little XP. Even then, I finished nearly every secondary quest that wouldn't get me killed repeatedly before heading off into the islands.
• The time component is huge, with How Long to Beat estimating 44.5 hours to complete the game, which seems about right. There was one occasion in the third act when I thought I'd built up to the climax, and instead realized I had several more hours to go before the actual climax. But I didn't mind: the story's good, the game play's a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the characters and the choices.

The game's so full of denouements that they're scattered all throughout the third act of the game rather than being clumped together at the end. I thought that was very well done, providing resolution as to the fate of various characters Geralt had interacted with earlier in the game.

Overall, the game feels very much like one that a DM would layout without regards for character levels: it feels very organic, and even in the early game you can end up at a location where monsters would wipe the floor with you.

What about objections from the previous games? The first witcher game was notorious for giving you in-game rewards for sleeping with various women. That's been done away with: the romances and relationships in this game feel a lot more mature, and yes, there's a love triangle, but the consequences are much more real than in the first game. I wouldn't let the first witcher game's approach deter you from trying this game. While there are indeed sex scenes, and I could imagine that someone might try to get their version of Geralt laid as frequently as possible, the game does a great job of only delivering those only because of actions you directly chose: you could easily play a very Puritan/Victorian version of Geralt.

What's most important is that the RPG part of the game isn't neglected. Yes, it's a computer, so your responses are distilled down into conversation trees and dialog choice selection. But this is where the game being a "Geralt-simulator" makes is stronger: you're never given a dialog selection that breaks character for Geralt, and your dialog/decision choices shape the ending in ways you would not expect, but are despite that, very reasonable and have you thinking that of course, that's how it would work. Do yourself a favor and don't read any spoiler/walkthroughs. The choices you make have an impact on the ending and it's better to go through at least your first playthrough blind and then read about the choices you can make (or watch them on youtube) later.

Rather than opt for a "good-vs-evil" approach to game play, the story is actually interesting. My Geralt, for instance, was always stuck in a situation where he had to decide who was telling the truth and who was lying. Early on, this was fairly easy: you could pursue the truth and eventually collar the person who was lying. As the game progressed, however, the nuances of the story became more complex, until by the time I got to Crookback Bog, I was no longer able to tell who was lying, and in fact, made a poor decision at one point because for whatever reason, I thought that the witches were the world's version of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Having re-read some of the books recently, I realize that this is entirely within the world's setting: the books' short stories loved to make some allusion to commonly known fairy tales and then put a twist into it, either by running the logic of the fairy tale to its conclusion, or by making the nature of the beast different from the stories. I was very impressed that the writers for the game managed to invoke a similar bent in the story. Certainly by the end of the game, my version of Geralt had gotten fooled and cheated by many of the other characters, and had become very distrustful of pretty much everyone except for Ciri, the adopted-daughter who's a McGuffin for the main storyline.

The game's cutscenes are incredible. In fact, some of the most beautiful moments in the game occur during the cut scenes, and I loved the scenes between Geralt and Ciri or Geralt and Yennefer. These are as beautifully rendered as any movie. What blew my mind was that I could hear the PS4's fan spin up to speed during those scenes, and then realized that these scenes are rendered in-engine (so that the character's clothing, etc reflected your choices and load-out of the moment), complete with all the foilage, draw-distance, etc. If you're the type to take perverse pleasure in using every iota of CPU/GPU power on your machines, this game will not disappoint.

The game is not without flaws: on the PS4, loading times are long, about 45 seconds if you die, and fast travel costs a similar amount of time. (The game's rock solid though: suspend/resume has saved me a ton of time, and the game crashed only once) The early levels are very challenging, and the potion/bomb crafting system is wonky: I'd frequently find myself with no idea how to find a component needed to craft an item, or find schematics for a high level item that required a lower level item that I didn't have schematics for. The game doesn't do a great job of telling you which quests aren't going to be doable past a certain point, so I'd sometimes choose to proceed along a story only to be immediately notified that "Such a Quest has failed!". Fortunately, the game does a good job of auto-saving, so I'd be able to load up the game and then play that quest before going on with the main story, but if I hadn't been alert enough to see those messages (which appear for only a fraction of a second!), I might have gotten very disappointed at the ending/resolution of those storylines. At least every cut-scene is skippable, so if you never have to sit through long expositions more than once.

All in all, the game is excellent, and deserves its Game of the Year accolades. In fact, having read a few Witcher books, I'd say that the game's much better than its source material (Andrezej Sapkowski's a terrible writer --- he loves run-on sentences and spends a lot of time on minor scenes, while frequently summarizing important scenes when you'd rather have detail).

Sometimes while playing a game on the PS4, I'd think: "Well, this is nice and pretty, but it's not fundamentally any different from what the PS3 could do." I never thought that of The Witcher 3. It makes full use of the power available on modern consoles and PCs, and it delivers a stunning experience. So much so that I'm tempted to pick up the DLC for the game, something I hardly ever consider.

Highly Recommended.

Review: Blood of Elves

Blood of Elves is the third book in the witcher series, but the first novel. The previous 2 books were essentially series of short stories. This novel, however, cannot possibly stand alone, so it looks like the author went from writing short stories to launching an epic fantasy series.

Things to like: the sequence where series learns magic from Yennefer is a delight. Intimate, small scale, yet detailed and evocative. It's quiet, without the silliness often found in Harry Potter or modern notions of schooling and how it should work. The training of Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea is better, but not nearly as intimate.

Things to dislike: the politics feels cut and pasted together, and the world doesn't seem real. (This is in contrast to the computer RPG, which feels much more real than any other virtual world depicted) Geralt doesn't seem to do very much.

I'd pass on this but since it does provide excellent background for the computer RPG, you'll enjoy it if you're enjoying the RPG.

Review: Sword of Destiny

I was playing The Witcher 3 on the PS4, It's an exceedingly good RPG (and I'd actually avoided RPGs in recent years as they tend to be massive time sucks --- a holiday sale caught me and for a change I'm really glad I broke my rule about RPGs!), and has sucked up all the play time on the PS4 as a result. But in one of the side quests, I ran across a seeming anachronism, and found myself wondering if it was there in the source material.

Since the material's drawn from the novels, I went and re-read The Last Wish, and then went on to Sword of Destiny. Sword of Destiny wasn't available in English until recently, as since it was touted as the missing book between The Last Wish and Blood of Elves, I'd elected to stop reading the series as a silent protest to the publisher for doing something stupid. It's a collection of novellas, and does provide background as to many of the characters in the game.

And yes, the book does exhibit some of the anachronisms displayed in the game, so the source material is indeed faithfully reflected in the game. The world depicted in the novels is perhaps similar to the ones depicted in Tolkein, except with a heavy dose of cynicism. That's not a bad thing, as the author (translated from Polish) clearly can't write in the high language of Tolkein, but has a good voice for depicting battles, and has world-weary attitude in his characters that makes a fun contrast.

Is it as good as Tolkein? No. But it does provide a good contrast, and provides a fun read in short spurts. Recommended.

Review: Wormhole

Wormhole is the last book of the Rho Agenda trilogy. Like the Saturday morning cartoons it's modeled after, it's a novel with 3 teen heroes who try to save the world. The storyline's simple and straightforward, but at this point with 2 books worth of escalation, the heroes are practically demi-gods, and unfortunately, this means that there's never any sense of credible threats to what they can do, even after they've been captured. In fact, the novel even goes as far as to acknowledge that in the thoughts of one of the supporting characters.

The ending is predictable, setting up for a sequel series. It does its best to not damage or eliminate any of the threats, and leaves as many doors as possible, despite some of the options available being more intriguing than the route the author took.

Set your expectations accordingly, and you'll enjoy this book as a little romp through Saturday morning fantasy land. Otherwise, I'd give it a pass.

Review: Focus - The Hidden Driver of Excellence

Focus is, ironically enough, a singularly unfocused book. I checked it out of the library because I thought it would cover the mechanical aspects of how focus works on the brain. Instead, it's a rambling treatise covering (via second hand), various topics from concentration to head-start, to systems thinking, leadership, and global climate change.

Goleman cherry picks examples to illustrates his points, ignoring all the nasty little details that pretty much contradicts what he says. This is particularly annoying, especially when he loves to name drop big companies like Apple and Google. He swallows the information he's given from both of those companies with zero skepticism whatsoever, claiming therefore, that Apple invented the GUI. This is English major style journalism at its worst.

Not recommended. I listened to this as an audio book, and kept going in hopes of a pay off eventually, and the only pay off I got was when the book ended and I didn't have to listen to any more of this drivel.

New thoughts on gearing

For years, I resisted switching from 8-speeds to 9-speeds. I wasn't willing to upgrade until 9-speeds had become reliable (early 9-speed chains were nasty: Lisa and I not only broke a chain on a shift, but tore off pieces of the aluminum chain ring as well). With the arrival of the triplet, however, I was forced to switch to 10-speeds. Not that more speeds ever did much for me as a tourist: unlike a racer, I didn't need little jumps between gears, and friction shifting was more than adeqaute for me, even on 9-speed drive-trains.

Having recently gotten back into mountain biking, however, I'm seeing that I should have kept track of drive train evolution in the mountain bike business rather than looking at road offerings. Unlike road bikes (and like tandems and touring cyclists), mountain bikes frequently shift under load, have to put up with dirty conditions, and need strong wheels, so evolution there has direct applicability to those of us who don't race. Even better, mountain bikers regularly climb super steep stuff, and so need very low gears that only tourists tend to use.

The most significant change in the mountain bike drive train has been the introduction of 2x10 or 2x11 gearing. What's happened there is that with the introduction of wide range (11-36 or 10-42) cassettes, mountain bikes no longer need triple chain rings in order to have a good range of gears. Going from a triple to a double is huge! Your front derailleur no longer has to do as much work, you no longer risk chain suck (I've torn off more than one front derailleur due to chain suck).

The typical mountain bike would use a 22x34 or 24x38 front chain ring coupled with a 11-36 rear cassette. (10-42 cassettes exceed $100, and are typically paired with a single 30t chain ring). This grants you a lower gear than the traditional 24x34 touring drive train, while granting a 93 inch high gear, which is more than adequate when touring. Not only does losing the 3rd chain ring reduce shifting headaches, you also lose weight on the bike. You also gain the ability to use double chain ring indexed shifting (via STI, for instance) if you are so inclined. The double chain ring STI setups are much more reliable than the triple setups, and also don't have issues with trimming. The only downside I can think of is durability: smaller chain rings will wear faster. In practice, replacing chain rings every 3 years instead of every 5 is no big deal.

The 1x11 drive train, by contrast only grants a middling lower gear and has only an 81 inch high gear, which isn't adequate for touring. In fact, even for just mountain biking it probably isn't practical either, unless you're very strong or it's combined with a very light bike. I tried it during my Santa Cruz factory demo, and it was barely usable then, but it wouldn't be sufficient for any of the seriously painful climbs that I'd want to ride without making my knees hurt.

In short, if your existing touring bike drive train works, there's no need to switch, but when building a new touring bike or replacing a drive train, the new mountain bike drive trains are a much better fit than the road components traditionally used on touring bikes. As 10-42 cassettes drop in price, the new double chain ring mountain bike setups offer the same wide range gearing as the older triple setups, with lower weight and more reliability. There's no reason to ever consider a triple chain ring setup for road touring again.

Review: Pirate Hunters

I picked up Pirate Hunters as an audio book because it was listed as one of the "best of the year" on Audible. I wish I'd read the book prior to a recent visit to the Dominican Republic, as it would have added color to an otherwise lackluster trip.

The book revolves around around two divers, John Chatterton and John Mattera, who got a charter from Tracy Bowden to hunter for the Golden Fleece, a ship captained by Joseph Bannister, a pirate from the golden age of piracy. Both men are famous divers and poured much of their own money into the search.

The book covers not only the search for the Golden Fleece, but also the backgrounds of the men involved, as well as providing details on who Joseph Bannister was, why he was important (he stole the Golden Fleece twice, and fought off 2 British navy ships in Samana Bay in the Dominican Republic). Against this backdrop, there's also the threat of UNESCO potentially succeeding in convincing the Dominican Republic's government to ban treasure hunting and recall the lease rights Bowden has.

The story of the search for the Golden Fleece is great. If you're an avid diver (I'm not), the story of searching for a lost pirate ship is pretty cool, as well as the technology involved. What's even better if you're an avid consumer of fantasy literature, the hunt is a lot like the stories in those fantasy novels, except better: Mattera spends a lot of time flying to obscure libraries and the Spanish national archives, digging through old documents in an effort to nail down where the Golden Fleece actually is. When he actually finds it in a surprising location (hidden in plain view), the narrative hits a climax.

Unfortunately, a ton of the book is filler: there's an unusually vivid and viscereal description of shipboard surgery which felt unnecessary and bloody.

Ultimately, the fate of the Golden Fleece has become embroiled in lawsuits. It turns out that treasure hunters aren't very true to their word, and the dispute puts a very sour note at the end of the book. What's worse, the author, Robert Kurson, makes it very clear that every time Mattera and Chatterton told Bowden to authorize a search in the correct location, Bowden obstinately refused to listen to them and told them to go back to searching in the wrong place.

Nevertheless, this was an enjoyable book, and I'd recommend it. I heard it as an audio book, but I think that this is one of those books that's particularly bad as an audio book: when dealing with names, period literature, and location, while the audio production is undoubtedly accurate and easy to listen to, the fact that you can't glean the spelling of the place names easily from the audio edition means that further research and reading is made especially difficult. Pass on the audio book edition and read the text yourself.

Review: My Beloved World

My Beloved World is Sonia Sotomayor's memoir. Sotomayor was the first Hispanic (and 3rd woman) ever to be appointed to the Supreme Court, and while I was aware of the politics behind her appointment, I couldn't pass up the chance to read a memoir on her career and path.

I always knew that Supreme Court justices had to be pretty well-qualified, and of course as a minority and woman, that meant that she had to be better than any of the men to be selected. But the book's made me even more impressed. For instance, she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 8, and because her parents fought over who would give her shots, she just gave herself her insulin shots.

Born of Puerto Rico parents, she grew up in relative poverty (though I would note that her parents sent both their children to private school, at great sacrifice, whereas an Asian parent doing so would probably be castigated as being "tiger parents"), but despite those disadvantages, graduated with distinction from her school. She was one of the first affirmative action students at Princeton, and she candidly informs us about the jealousy she encountered when other students who had better results were told that they were less likely than she was to get into the Ivies.

She's just as candid when it comes to her first year at Princeton: she found herself under-prepared compared to her classmates when it came to writing, and had to make it up by working harder than anyone else while being subject to a work-study program. All that hard work paid off, however, when she graduated at the top of her class. Even then, being the first in your family to attend college puts you at a severe disadvantage when it comes to navigating the college system:

Felice now looked more embarrassed than ever as she tried to explain that Phi Beta Kappa was totally legitimate. More than legitimate, in fact: an honor of such prestige that she insisted I had to accept the membership even if she had to pay for it. (Loc. 2600-2602)

 But in many other ways, her background also led her to a career path that others of more privilege would have eschewed. For instance, she started off as an assistant DA, whereas the typical career path would be more likely a corporate counsel, or climbing the ladder at a private law firm. To her mind, the amount of money she made as even an assistant DA was so high that it didn't matter that it was the lowest paid of her options. Note that she didn't do this blind: she knew that judges were drawn from people who'd had a combination of public service and private success, so after she'd made her mark as a DA she went for a prestigious private firm and made partner there in a few short years as well.  But it also shows the importance of not getting used to a luxurious life-style when your sights are aimed in a direction of public service.

I was surprised by how little attention she paid to finances. Even as a partner in a private law firm she still had to get help to buy a home. Regardless, obviously the story turned out very well for her in the end.

In the end, I enjoyed her discussion on affirmative action, and her observations on the difference between someone getting in on affirmative action and the privileged entries as being huge, though bridgeable through hard work, good luck, and a willingness to ignore others' rudeness. She does acknowledge that in many such programs the failure rates are as high as 50%, but does point out (quite rightly) that while she might have gotten in on affirmative action, the rest of her achievements could not have been acquired without the huge amount of sacrifice and hard work. Her perspective on this alone makes the book well worth reading.

If you like to make fun of lawyers, she might also change your mind: her perspective is that the law is what structures human society, and is the way you affect human society at scale (as a technologist, I beg to differ, but I can see her point of view). Eliminating inequity, etc., is all achievable by law, and if you have a bleak view of her profession, you can also see how it can also be considered public service.

I also appreciated her candor about diabetes, and health issues. (She admits to being a nicotine addict, and it took her two tries to quit) The memoir also reads easily and doesn't plod. Recommended.

Review: Soldner-X 2: Final Prototype (PS Vita)

I doubt if my son will ever look fondly back at the side-scrolling shooter as a genre. I didn't think I looked back at that genre fondly, but then one look at Soldner-X 2, and I thought back upon R-type, Scrambler, etc, and of course had to pick it up during a sale for about $3.

The best thing about this genre of games is that even though they were considered high intensity games in that era, with modern hardware, this type of game fits easily on something like the PS Vita. The Vita can throw up as many sprites as the game designer can dream of, and still treat the game as though it was merely doing word-processing: the machine doesn't even overheat, and you can play the game through on one battery charge!

On an arcade machine, games like these are basically quarter-eaters, so designed to throw tons of sprites at you and then eat up your lives and force you to dump another quarter into it. On a portable console with infinite credits, and a well-set difficulty setting, you can feel like you're a great player without spending quarters. To make up for this, the game gives you ratings, A to F for each level, depending on your performance. In addition, you can pick up secret keys to unlock levels, or participate in the PvP challenges to climb the leaderboard.

The game is fast, running at 60fps, and frequently will overload your ability to keep track of objects on the screen. In fact, it's incredibly overwhelming. Nevertheless, the ship you pilot is maneuverable enough and the patterns easily detected, so it's not too bad.

I'd say I got my $3 worth. It's not Resogun, but it doesn't overstay its welcome, which makes it well worth the time spent. Recommended.

Little Boys Are So Sensitive

In most human cultures, the males of the species are supposed to be tough. But of course, little kids, including boys, just aren't that way. Bowen keeps reminding me of that day after day. Now, most of the time, he is a pretty tough guy. I once watched him ride into a pit and crash with the bike falling on top of him. He cried for 10 seconds and then got right back on his bike and kept going.

5 days after his hernia surgery, the doctor told him he could ride a bike again. He was still limping and walking funny, though he'd been off painkillers for a few days. Immediately that morning, he told me to pick him up from school by bike. That it came as a surprise to his classmates was apparent when I came to pick him up: once they saw me in my helmet and riding shoes, they collectively said, "bike again?"

Over the Christmas break we decided to show him Inside Out. Earlier in the year, he'd met Rosana "Rosie" Sullivan, who was one of the artists at Pixar. Rosie (Rosie actually worked on The Good Dinosaur, not Inside Out) made an impression on him, so when we asked if he wanted to see Rosie's movie, we weren't surprised when he said "yes!"

What surprised the heck out of me, however, was that 30 minutes into the movie, he said, "I'm too scared. I don't want to continue watching Rosie's movie." Note that this wasn't his first movie. He'd already watched all 3 Toy Story movies, Frozen, Kung Fu Panda, Nausicaa and Totoro. To my mind, Nausicaa has scenes that are more scary (or sad) than what's in Inside Out, but for whatever reason, the situations and events in Inside Out were real to him, whereas perhaps it was clear that Frozen and Totoro are fantasies. He was so scared that he couldn't sleep alone, and had to move into Xiaoqin and my bed at midnight so he could sleep.

The next day, he said, "When I'm older Rosie's movie won't be too scary for me. Maybe when I'm 46, I'll like to watch the movie." (Yes, I'm 46, and my son never fails to remind me how old I am)

In any case, I don't remember being so sensitive as a kid. I only ever got nightmares when I was taken to a real horror movie (goodness knows what my parents were thinking when they took us to one --- we all had nightmares for weeks). But maybe we're all that way as kids and you only get less sensitive after you get inducted into the horrors of a formal education system.

Review: Until Dawn (PS4)

Until Dawn is that rarest of games: under-hyped, under-promised, and over-delivered. Here are the following checkmarks against it:

• It belongs in the long reviled point-and-click adventure story, which telltale games has refined into a money-grabbing art-form, such that you can get one of those games in whatever popular media storyline at a very low cost ($10 at most) and get a shallow, unchallenging experience that's over in about 10 hours or so. Sony had the gall to ask $60 for Until Dawn. Over the holidays it got discounted to $20, but that's still twice the price of the typical game of this genre.
• It's a teen-slasher horror movie, which is as full of cliches as you can imagine. Known for stereotyped characters, gore-fests, and stupidity, you can't get dumber than this. I haven't bothered watching any of those movies in years, and couldn't get excited about watching another one of these.
• It's got QTE (Quick-Time Events) up the wazoo. That game mechanic is rightly reviled, and in most linear narrative games, simply just force a reload.

Well, if you own a PS4, you need to put this game on your "buy" or "rent" list. It's worth every minute of its 9-10 hour run-time, and it defiantly won me over despite my skepticism.

First of all, the game and story is anything but shallow. Just like Heavy Rain, it's a multi-branching storyline with multiple characters, where even if one character dies the game continues and the story changes as a result. The game therefore does away with save/restore features. As a result, all the decisions you make are binding, and many have ramifications much further on down. For instance, your decision might affect the relationship between the two characters, which could in turn lead to a character's death much later on. The game illustrates this through a "butterfly effect" screen, which shows the cause and effect between those decisions.

The cast is huge, and the game switches between multiple viewpoints, giving you multiple player characters. It does the trick of cutting away from a scene during high tension to switch you to another perspective elsewhere, which gives the game a very cinematic experience. What's great, however, is that since you're driving a character, you do get a chance to change the characters, making them vengeful or forgiving and playing them however you like. The characters also do develop during the course of the game, which is unusual.

What's really outstanding, however is the plot. You are given clues as you go along and you can deduce what's going to happen from the plot. But even if you don't succeed in guessing, as the game progresses and plot points are revealed, the clues are updated so you're clued-in, even if you failed to put the pieces together or find all the clues. At the very least, I enjoyed the plot and didn't find it very cliched.

The QTEs are fair, as was surprisingly the rest of the game. In places where I got characters killed I can look back and see that I was provided appropriate clues and just failed to acted on them. In any case, at the end of the game you're allowed to go back and replay sections of it to see if you can change the outcome. But even if you don't, you'll feel that you had a great experience. In particular, the twitch portions of the game frequently give you a chance to recover even if you made a mistake, and so just serve to ratchet up the tension rather than just giving you dumb hoops to leap through.

Technically, the game is outstanding, with great lighting, cinematography, and voice acting (though a few characters were over-acted).

This is what interactive fiction should be like, and even if you dislike the genre (which I did), you should give this a play. Needless to say, the game comes highly recommended.

Review: Being Human: Life Lessons from the Frontiers of Science

Being Human is quite unlike any audio course/audio book I've heard. Rather than a deep dive into a scientific topic, it's a mish-mash, eclectic selection of topics that have drawn Robert Sapolsky's interest over the years.

What a trip it is. From considerations as to why diabetes is far more prevalent from immigrant populations to the Western world to cultural concerns over human remains, to why we grow averse to novelty in middle age, the topics are interesting, unique, and Sapolsky always approaches these thoughts with a scientist's mind.

Each lecture is short: about 30 minutes each, and each has some interesting actionable components to it that you can take to improve your life. In particular, the last lecture, "Sushi and Middle Age" explains why Elite Scientists Hold Back Science: if you wish not to ossify and become stale in your thinking, you need to change the domain of your research every so often. This goes double if you've achieved some prominence!

My one complaint about this course is Prof. Sapolsky's voice: he has a particularly sibilant S, so in sentences with a lot of that consonant, it can feel like your phone/car stereo/CD player/MP3 player, you might sometimes think that you've suddenly reverted back to the days of cassette tapes.

But the essays? They're great. Well worth the listen. Recommended.

A Return to Mountain Biking

I gave up mountain biking for several years. Part of it was my move to Munich (and subsequent move back) drove me to simplify the bike load and reduce me to one single bike and one tandem.The other thing was that I really enjoyed doing road cycling a lot more: there's nothing like being able to ride out your front door and being able to roll for 4-7 hours and come back without getting into a car.

But I could feel myself getting stale. While I could still easily ride unpaved fire roads and my road bike still had more off-road miles than most mountain bikes, I had reached a plateau, not being able to pick off the more technical sections of dirt Alpine, for instance. Between that and the grin on my face from the Santa Cruz factory demo, I decided to look into getting a mountain bike.

When I first bought my MB-3 in 1994, Pardo's advice was, "Mountain Biking is the process of throwing your bike off a cliff very slowly, with you on it, so there's no point getting a bike that's too good." With that in mind, I set my budget low, and went to see what I could get. Disappointingly enough, most bikes in the sub-thousand dollar range weighed in the same as my 1993 Bridgestone MB-3. Apparently all the weight savings from aluminum frames, etc., had gone into bigger wheels, disc brakes, and suspension.

The one brand that stood out for value was Airborne Bicycles. Their $830 Seeker had components that looked to be very well thought out, and weighed in around 28 pounds (the same as my 1993 Bridgestone). I tried to buy one from the catory, but they were out of stock, and didn't expect to have any back until Spring. If I lived anywhere but California, that would be acceptable. But I live in Silicon Valley, and even in winter (maybe even especially in winter), mountain biking here is still good. In winter, sometimes the temperature drops enough that road biking is annoying, while mountain biking with its lower speeds is a good substitute.

I looked on eBay, and found a Seeker my size that was in decent condition for about $200 less than what I would have paid for new (which after tax would have been around $900), and proceeded to buy it. The bike came with the deraileur hanger bent during shipping, courtesy of Fedex ground, but it was a relatively cheap fix. As a precaution, I sent e-mail to Airborne Bicycles asking to buy a spare deraileur hanger, and they sent me a new one --- for free, despite my not being the original owner of the bike. This is customer service well beyond what I expect from a cut-rate mail order shop, so I think I can whole-heartedly recommend Airborne's bikes.

The first ride I took it was up Charcoal road (which isn't a paved road at all, but is single track for much of it).
The ride confirmed my worst fears: I was woefully out of mountain biking shape. Stuff that I used to just ride over or through with aplomb I now felt nervous about, even occasionally just giving up and walking my bike. Nevertheless, stream crossings, acing a difficult section on the trail and climbing hard put a big smile on my face. The bike was clearly capable of far more than I was capable of. What blew my mind was how fast the descents were: bigger wheels and a capable front fork suspension definitely make descending fast dirt paths a quick and satisfying experience. The disc brakes were more of a mixed bag: they always stopped me even after a stream crossing, which wasn't always the case with rim brakes, but like any other disc brakes I'd ever encountered, the rotor would warp, though not badly enough to make any annoying noises, just enough to annoy me whenever I looked at it closely. I have no idea whether it's because the bike has the lowest end hydraulic brakes available, or whether it doesn't matter what I get, those brake rotors are just going to warp no matter what. What I'm rediscovering is that mountain biking requires much more anaerobic capacity than road biking (especially road touring) does. There are many sections where you just need a big spurt of power to get over the obstacle, but when combined with the necessary technical handling skills required I would just fall over at a critical section. As they say, "If you ain't hiking, you ain't mountain biking." For my next ride, I decided that I'd drive to the start instead of biking over. El Corte Madera State Park is a mountain biker's haven, and I remember several technical sections that featured multiple steep drops that scared me back when I was on an MB-3.  With some experience under me and equipment that was technically advanced by about 20 years, the technical stuff was actually comparatively easier than I remembered. What I was surprised by was that the park had been renovated in several places, and there were now trails that I didn't recognize any more. And once again, the climbs did me in, which I don't remember being that difficult when I was riding the MB-3 oh so many years ago. What's really cool about doing this in late fall/early winter is that you run into practically nobody on the trails. No trail conflict, no shouting "10 behind me", just the rustle of the leaves under your tires and perhaps the sound of your heart pounding in your ears. One thing that I quickly realized was that what works for other mountain bikers definitely won't work for me: riding with my Geiger-rig backpack placed too much of a load on my shoulders and back for long rides, and made me feel slow and heavy. Unfortunately, water bottles tend to get their nozzles filled with mud on off-road rides (or worse, horse poo if you ride on trails shared with equestrains). I'll experiment with some capped water bottles to see how that goes. It's going to take a while to get good at this, but whatever else I can say about it, it's definitely going to banish any staleness I'd been starting to feel on the bike.